Planet With, despite having a name that sounds strangely incomplete, had an excellent premiere. This is the latest brainchild of Satoshi Mizukami, author of several well-liked manga such as Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer. And this is als an anime original project around four years in the making, although it does have a tie-in manga. The premier is as exciting, funny, and poignant as it is utterly bizarre, and while I don’t know where the plot is going, I have some ideas regarding where the show might be taking itself thematically. To make sure we’re all on the same page, I’m going to briefly summarise the plot of the episode before making comments on it. I wouldn’t normally do this as it would pointlessly elongate the length of the article, but with this show in particular, I feel it’s important to be extra sure that we’re all on the same page first. I strongly encourage you to go watch the episode first before reading this article any further.
The plot centres on Souya, a young boy whose memories only extend as far back as two weeks, when he joined as a transfer student at a new school. His earliest memory is waking up in an apartment with a cute cat maid named Ginko and a giant, disturbing, anthropomorphic blue cat that they call Sensei. Souya’s class rep is interested in befriending Souya because she remembers not being able to make friends once, but Souya’s memory loss seems to have made him pretty oblivious to his surroundings, making him mainly focused on eating meat and just getting through the day. To him, not having memories of his past makes him happy, especially as he realises that his parents may very well have died in an accident, and that remembering his parents or their death could be painful.
On the same day, giant teddy bears with human limbs and ears appear all across the world, their fuzzy cotton being somehow able to completely repel all military attacks. Instead of attacking people, however, they send out a wave which puts a military pilot attacking the bear under an illusion, during which time he remembers his family and seems to regret not being with them. Feeling content, he chooses to abandon the battlefield. Attacks against the bear have failed but a group of 7 superheroes appear, who are able to summon what appear to be cat or bear themed mechs out of thin air, and they make it their mission to kill the bear. To kill it, one of the heroes enters the bear to destroy its ‘core’ during which time he is given a flashback to his youth, where his mother died in a house fire. He was inspired to become a firefighter as a result, and in his illusion he is able to have a last conversation with his mother where she forgives him for not being able to save her, and praises him for growing up so strong and doing a good job. The firefighter is extremely happy to be able to get some closure after what very well could have been decade long guilt, but his team mates insist that he destroy the core. To do so, he destroys the illusion, having to make the choice to part with his mother once more.
After destroying the one bear invading Japan, the rest of the bears across the world also explode. The heroes have done a good job, but in the meantime, Ginko has informed Souya that he needs to escape the shelter his school led him to, and join up with Sensei the cat in order to take down not the bears, but the superheroes. Souya is confused, but he decides to leave at Ginko’s insistence.
Once he’s escaped, Souya and Sensei (Ginko hiding a short distance away) meets with the firefighter at night, who is emotionally drained, and whose magic mech suffered some damage in the fight. Souya is wearing a weird face face mask, and asks the firefighter for the source of his power, merely following Ginko’s orders with no real understanding of what he’s doing. The firefighter is immediately confused, and decides to transform. Sensei swallows Souya whole, and this process magically turns Sensei into a smaller cat-themed mech. Souya can operate the mech with his mind, and spurred on with Ginko’s promise of meat he is able to fairly easily defeat the firefighter and take a vial of dust that the firefighter had hanging around his neck. Soon after touching this vial, a memory is triggered in Souya that the audience only catches glimpses of, meaning we don’t know what exactly he remembered. Either way, Souya goes from the goofy boy wondering if he’s being manipulated by Ginko, to immediately getting so furious that he declares he’s going to beat the crap out of every last one of the heroes. Cut to credits and a post credit scene with a scary looking ominous business man.
Planet With sells itself to the audience by being a confusing genre-inversion that tries to keep the audience in the dark as to what’s going on, whilst keeping them interested and anchored by working within standard, easily recognisable tropes mixed in with some subtly strong character work. I personally found the comedy as well as Souya’s interactions with Takemagahara a little weak, but they were at the very least endearing even if they weren’t as entertaining or poignant as other scenes. And I personally found the illusions created by the bear to be incredibly poignant scenes. They hit right when you least expect it, because they both happen right in the middle of action scenes and stretch on for longer than you might expect whilst still remaining engaging. While the pacing as the episode as a whole was pretty fast paced, these scenes lingered just long enough to leave a real impact, without feeling like the studio was trying to rush through them. As a result during the firefighter's illusion I was tearing up a little despite knowing next to nothing about the guy, simply through the direction, writing, and thematic relevance alone. I felt like I was a little too lenient on anime such as Caligula simply because I found its themes engaging, but Planet With really does have the artistic quality to back up its ideas.
The central question one has to ask after finishing the episode is what, precisely, those ideas even are. Many would claim that we have to wait and see to see what the show will bring, a notion I can completely agree with. Others would say that the episode was complete nonsense. But if you will, I’m willing to make some speculations based on the first episode alone.
The key to understanding the series, I feel, lies with the bears that ‘attacked’ the Earth. Specifically, what their objective is, if they even have one, and why the superheroes feel that they need to be defeated at all costs. Understand that, and we might come to understand the implications behind just what it means when Souya says he’s going to beat the crap out of the Superheroes. Not that Souya wanting to defeat the superheroes inherently means he’s siding with the bears, mind- in fact, his actions going forward seem like they’re more motivated by a hatred of the heroes rather than as a defence of the bears.
The bears seemed to give at least two people personalised illusions which allowed them to gain some closure in their lives. In the case of the firefghter, the illusion was able to trick him into thinking that his mother was alive and right there in front of him, almost like she had come back from the grave to praise him for his efforts and forgive his guilt. The pastel pink and white colour pallet of the scene seems to frame it as a sort of heaven or an idyllic memory. This illusion, to me, feels like it hones in on a very specific step of Joseph Cambell’s Monomith, or Hero’s Journey. This step is the ‘Woman as temptress’ the part where a person or physical desire threatens to mislead the hero away from his destiny. This idea of an illusion fooling you, and leading you away from your objective is a trope seen time and time again in anime, with examples I could give likely constituting spoilers for those shows. The idea behind this trope is that the illusion is something inherently evil, something malicious trying to underline your efforts by pacifying you. In Planet With, the bear’s illusions certainly do seem to pacify those affected by it, but are they really malicious in intent? After all, these illusions are convincing enough that they’re able to genuinely affect a pilot, who decides to leave the field even after the illusion has faded. The suggestion here is that the illusion had a real, tangible effect on him, not just a fleeting one. If the illusions are genuinely able to help people sort through their emotional regrets, perhaps they’re actually doing a wonderful thing?
There’s something that seems awfully repressive about the attitude of the heroes in Planet With. The illusion is fake, therefore it is something that inherently needs to be destroyed. Ignore what it’s telling you, it literally doesn’t matter. Fiction as a whole is obsessed with the idea of truth, that artifice is inherently disgusting. Ironically, however, fiction also tends to be some of the most effective and convincing works of artifice that the human race has to offer. As some of us may be able to attest to, fiction is one of the things we use to cope with everyday reality and our emotional troubles. And not just cope, but even surpass those troubles and grow stronger as a result of the fiction, the illusions whispering sweet nothings of encouragement into your subconscious. The Firefighter, however, forces himself to destroy the illusion and confront reality before he’s really had a chance to work through the regrets the illusion is helping him with. While his conversation with his mother seemed to be over, it is nonetheless interrupted. If you notice, the illusion let the pilot go of its own volition, meaning that meant the pilot was calm enough for him to be prepared to make the decision to fly away. The firefighter, however, is still crying as he shatters the illusion, still thinking about it minutes or potentially hours after the fight had taken place. He may have gotten some closure out of the brief time he spent with his mother, but it’s also possible he cut himself off before he was ready. He prioritizes his mission over his own emotions. Being able to do this is seen as a typically noble, heroic trait, and the rational ‘objective’ choice. But is neglecting your own emotions really a healthy thing to do to yourself? And more to the point, considering the bears seem to exist to help you through your complicated feelings, wouldn’t destroying them mean that your objective, which you are neglecting your own emotions to achieve, is to neglect your own emotions?
Then take Souya. He has literally no memories, and thus no regrets to speak of. But he, too, is still unwilling to confront his past. He knows that in extreme likelihood, his parents are dead, and considers himself happier not knowing. Like the firefighter, he would rather ignore his regrets rather than confront them. At the end of the episode, however, we see that Souya has been forced to confront something about himself- forced to confront something about his past so horrifying that now he feels the only option to him is revenge. Defeating the firefighter marks a shift where he goes from thinking like the Heroes, thinking that he needs to neglect his feelings on the past and focus on the present, to a state where the events of the past are what matter to him most. And if he hates the heroes that much, that just seems to further prove that the heroes may have made sacrifices for what they consider to be the greater good, sacrifices that they try not to think about in favour of their duties in the present.
In my eyes it’s no mistake that Mizukami chose to codify these conflicting approaches towards how one thinks of the past as being traditionally heroic and traditionally villainous. Or, more to the point, as being traditionally mature and traditionally childish. Souya is still a young kid, an idiot, which is reflected in his language, his design, his attitude, his simplistic motivations, and even in the small size of his mech relative to that of the heroes. To much of the modern world, part of growing older means putting yourself aside and thinking about others besides yourself. But none of us are born adults, we are all born as children who are just as vulnerable to trauma as anyone else. And that child inevitably shapes the adults we become, and we carry that child inside us no matter how much we try to bury it. Perhaps allowing ourselves the opportunity to spoil our inner child with its selfish wishes is what we need to appease it, to help us finally make peace with the traumas it was dealt, and to work through our emotions honestly instead of repressing them. If an illusion, a safe space, can help some people do that, then that sounds pretty rad to me.
Or, I could be totally off-base. While that’s still a good message, there’s every indication that not everything is as it seems in Planet With. Souya’s memories might be fake implants that Ginko and Sensei are using to manipulate him against the heroes for some nefarious end, the bears might be trying to enslave humanity rather than help them. The bears may not even appear at all after this first episode. They did all supposedly explode, after all. Scenes in the ending also show Souya standing in front of a futuristic chrome city, suggesting some degree of time travel might be involved. Then, of course, there’s also Takemagehara and whatever her deal is. All we know for sure is that we’re going to see Souya fight with the other heroes, and I’m sure that they’re all going to be colourful characters in their own right. And even then, there’s every possibility Souya may give up fighting them if plot developments swing him in another direction, such as towards the extremely evil looking business man.
There’s so much to think about with this show. So much so that I was able to write a heartfelt essay about themes based on plot points that might be great big red herrings. Definitely keep an eye on this one guys.
