If ever there was a work that I thought had so much potential but just didn’t know how to pull it together, Coppelion is one of those vying for the top spot. It’s based on the manga by Tomonori Inoue which began back in 2008 and wrapped up in 2016 with twenty-six volumes, three years after the anime came out in the fall of 2013. The manga had plenty of material for the anime to work with and if it was successful it’d be the kind of thing they could easily go back for more since it’s been mapped out well and has a clear direction. But the show was one that leaned more into being about promoting the manga and not much else and, in turn, to me at least made it clear that the original work wasn’t able to capitalize on its concept. That doesn’t mean it was a bad thing or that the story didn’t work but more that it just wasn’t able to really hit its stride for me. This is unfortunate because as a setup and concept, it works well and GoHands, the animation studio behind it, certainly captured some of the feel of the manga in a unique way.
The series works from the premise that in 2016, an accident outside of Tokyo hit and the city ends up being evacuated as it gets overrun with radiation. That radiation has largely sat stable in that location for the next twenty years, making it so that people cannot survive in it unprotected. Some very high concentration zones are even too dangerous for those in hazmat suits. It’s an interesting idea overall and there’s certainly merit in it. Still, there are so many unanswered basic questions about how this particular place in the world would work that it leaves you grasping for something to latch onto in this regard. While it may not be central to the story it’s important for those watching to understand the mindset and understanding that the characters have of their world. What we get is a very localized show, without the kind of big top-down view of it all that we need in order to place it all into proper context, so it ends up just being a character-driven piece with what they have to do within the city.
We’re introduced to a group of three girls who are part of Coppelion, a “class” of genetically engineered people from birth who are resistant to the radiation in the city. The trio that we follow are part of a rescue team that’s designed to go into the old capital in order to rescue those who stayed behind for various reasons and have survived through some creative means. There’s a decent number of people that are in there living in different hiding areas and eke out an existence with some of the usual reasons you can imagine. It’s not given a lot of depth or detail, but we get a decent idea of why for those we deal with and it makes a certain amount of sense. For the girls, the “class president” with Ibari at age seventeen and the two sixteen-year-olds with Taeko and Aoi, we get the standard kind of trio that each has their own abilities and some genetic pushes that have been given to them as part of their overall engineering to survive in this environment while being overseen by the “Vice Principal” as part of the military.
The layout of the series here is fairly interesting as it goes on as we get the first five or so episodes doing smaller and almost individual stories as we get to know the layout of the premise, the characters, and the organization itself. Once it gets past that though, the second half of the series is one long storyline that deals with several smaller issues along the way. This one is a bit more interesting because it has the time to work the story and the characters as we get a remnant of the military that stayed in the city all these years with their own plan and are using some surprising waste barrels in interesting ways that surprise the team as they figure it all out. The main thrust within it is that the girls are trying to help a small group of survivors out, one of whom is pregnant and they want the child to be born outside of the radiation, but it delves into a few other things as well. While the first stories are kind of small and straightforward, this one goes larger with the military and their wing bomber that they have, the equipment and general tone of their designs as well as the big train escape sequence towards the end combined with a giant killer robot machine. It sounds crazy, but it works well enough as there’s seemingly almost always continued forward energy here.
What also helps is that the main trio gets a little help along the way. Initially, you could easily believe that Coppelion is made up of just high school girls, and with it being anime nobody would blame you, but we do see them getting help from Haruto as part of a different unit that’s not tasked with rescue but other more military style orientations. His arrival provides a different feeling since he’s more clinical about things but backs up his abilities very easily, which makes him a rather fun asset. But we also get some chaos into the mix as when the big operations start moving forward in the second half, some other members from Coppelion show up in the form of the Ozu Twins. What we learn is that when all of these kids were being engineered, they worked off of genetics from existing people, so they’re essentially duplicates but advanced in some ways. What they didn’t know with the Twins original genetic source is that the actress was secretly a psychotic serial killer. That begs the question of why they’re given any free reign at all, which is one of the problems with the show outside of the science of it all. It’s hard to imagine them being sent in knowing what’s known about them. But with one that’s got enhanced strength and the other that feels nothing because she shoots electricity, it makes for some engaging fights across the terrain.
The series obviously doesn’t have a true ending since it had a lot of material that wasn’t adapted and the manga ended three years after the fact, so there’s no real closure here of any true sense. What we do get are some decent short stories in the first half and a larger, more sprawling story in the second half that expands things in some fun ways but keeps you from being fully invested in. This is good as, in the end, it’s a show that you certainly have to turn off your brain for in regards to the why and how of it all. There’s something about it that definitely scratches that post-apocalyptic itch as someone who grew up in the 1980s but isn’t able to truly capitalize on. The animation is certainly going to be mixed for a lot since GoHands is, well, GoHands, but I think it works for this series with the run-down and radiation-heavy location and what they all have to deal with. I had hoped for more with this series and perhaps a second season could have gotten it over the hump, but what we get are just the opening chapters here which have some potholes to deal with. It’s solid and it certainly makes you want to check out the manga more since it at least looks like it got to tell the tale it wanted to.
