Kamitsubaki City Under Construction – Episodes 0-1

Content warning: gore, supernatural disasters evoking nuclear bomb imagery

What’s it about? Seven years ago, Kafu lost her parents to a strange cataclysmic event known as the Blackout. The city has since repaired, but is increasingly plagued by monsters called tesseractors born from human regret and despair. When Kafu discovers that her habit of singing to herself is actually a hidden power that can be used to defeat these creatures, she joins the fight.

Given the tonal variation that can occur between Episode 0s and Episode 1s, we opted to wait until both the prologue and premiere of Kamitsubaki City Under Construction were out before reviewing. The possibilities were endless, really: on one end of the spectrum there are shows like Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury where Episode 0 is an intriguing prequel that focuses on different characters and sets up the status quo from a distance; on the other end is something like Alice Gear Aegis Expansion which front-loads its goofy fan service episode before starting the actual plot in Episode 1. Kamitsubaki skews more towards the former than the latter, but is unfortunately nowhere near as impactful.

Cards on the table, this show is a lot to take in. It’s certainly visually stunning, with effective use of 3D animation and some capital-C Cool design elements. The otherworldly neon colors and off-kilter movement of the tesseractors give them a great, uncanny energy. It’s neat to see the contrast between the high-tech city and the submerged, nature-reclaimed ruins at its outskirts. I wish I could say this was in service of strong worldbuilding and visual storytelling, but… well, I don’t want to accuse this show entirely of being style over substance, but it’s tempting. Combine all these striking, vibrant visuals with the shedload of characters, and these episodes unfortunately throw so much information and stimulus at you that it’s hard to get a grip on what all this means or why it matters.

I can always put up with frantic action and overloaded worldbuilding if I have a personal element to hang onto: a character to act as an emotional anchor. Unfortunately, these premiere episodes didn’t deliver, at least not for me. Despite Kafu’s life being so obviously, objectively sad, the storytelling strangely doesn’t do much to make me feel for her. This is at least partly the pacing’s fault, as it moves so quickly that the weight of its tragedies just doesn’t have time to sink in—nor do we get time to sit with Kafu and gauge how all this impacts her.

While I feel like the whole ‘Episode 0’ thing is intended to make space for a prologue about Kafu’s backstory, the narrative leaps from one status quo to the next and doesn’t let any of the events really resonate. The opening is grim, following a young Kafu as she runs home under the eerie, alien green light of the Blackout only to find her parents reduced to smoldering silhouettes on the kitchen floor. Kafu’s horror gets the spotlight, and the story lingers for a few moments on her life afterwards, giving some time to Kafu’s relationship with her new guardian, the determined and optimistic Erika. It’s a little window into a simple, but nice, character dynamic… which is then slammed shut as the story skips ahead seven years to the present day, and promptly kills Erika off to show how serious the tesseractors are as a threat.

Then the story skips forward again and suddenly Kafu is living and working with the other witchlings and monster hunters. It throws her into this edgy and intense monster-of-the-week format without giving her the space to grieve or the audience time to process the change in set-up. This poor girl gets orphaned twice in 20 minutes of screentime, and while this kind of story could be done effectively in a short space, I’m not convinced by the execution here. It leaves Erika’s death feeling like tragic backstory for tragic backstory’s sake rather than a meaningful moment that sets tone, or even a moment that impacts Kafu’s growth and character. Given that the story already begins with a massive tragedy, it feels like (quite literal) overkill.

Kamitsubaki is a multi-media project with a lot of different moving parts (including, fascinatingly, a rhythm game) so it’s possible that this is just a rushed adaptation of a more nuanced story from elsewhere in the franchise. In isolation, it feels… well, I don’t want to say callous, and yet I can’t help but bristle at the way this series invokes such a nuclear-bomb-like event without letting it have any emotional weight. It’s the apocalypse for aesthetic sake, and even though the aesthetic is neat, “rule of cool” is not going to win me over when I’m already annoyed at your lack of depth. And that’s just addressing the messiness of Kafu’s story, and not even getting to the “trauma turns you into a monster” premise of the tesseractors. I’m willing to bet there are many other, more effective attempts at similar set-up that don’t throw such a dizzying parade of flashy colors and unprocessed trauma at the audience.