ayuko Chigasaki is an earnest, shy, slightly desperate student teetering on the brink of financial ruin. By working at a restaurant and at the public bathhouse her family once owned, she manages to scrape together enough money to attend a pre-college cram school and keep herself—just barely—clothed and fed. But like so many put-upon anime protagonists, she's haplessly supporting a brash, insufferable leech of a companion. In this case, the offender is NieA Under 7, a skinny blond alien girl who lives in Mayuko's closet, clamors ceaselessly for gourmet food, collects junk from the local dump to build semi-functional UFOs on top of the bathhouse (knocking massive holes in the roof in the process), torments the bathhouse cat with unwanted affection and generally makes nonstop demands on everyone who lives there.
Apparently, 20 years ago, an alien mother ship crash-landed on Earth, within sight of Mayuko's bathhouse. The aliens who emerged were humanoid and came in two varieties—"unders" like NieA, who look like humans with pointed ears, and a higher-class breed with little wirelike antennas sticking out of their heads. Seven episodes into this 13-episode series, very little has been revealed about the aliens, except that humanity has gotten used to the alien presence, and no longer thinks much about them.
At least not in general. As the series begins, Mayuko meets a cheerful, effervescent girl named Chiaki who wants to befriend Mayuko and lure her into a more normal social life. Chiaki's also alien-crazy, and is absolutely thrilled to meet NieA, look at the distant mother ship and record her every thought and reaction on her Web site. Kotomi, the bathhouse's business manager, is less thrilled with NieA, though she tolerates the young alien in a generally motherly way. Kotomi's more concerned with the bathhouse's increasingly diminishing client base and poor finances; many of these episodes deal with plots to revitalize the bathhouse by bringing in fuel and flowers from the mother ship impact crater, or sponsoring a video-game marathon, or taking out a new rival bathhouse. Other episodes deal more mundanely with Mayuko and her shy solitude.
Not quite like anything else
NieA Under 7 comes from the same character designer, producer and animation team behind Serial Experiments Lain, but about the only thing it has in common with that stellar series is its uniqueness. Where Lain was a trippy, cutting-edge mind game, NieA is a more conventional series in most ways. The animation is illustrative rather than evocative. While it's clean, fresh and slightly stylized (particularly the fluffy, cartoony mother ship, which recalls the candy-like designs of Magic User's Club, another sentimental comedy/melodrama hybrid series about a culture of alien invaders in a Tokyo setting that's become blasé about their presence), it's nowhere near as experimental or ambitious as Lain's. And the episodic stories are mostly stop-and-start joke constructs, little adventures rather than pieces in a grand puzzle.
The unique thing about NieA is its variable tone, which veers between melancholy introspection and Urusei Yatsura-like hyperactivity, with lots of yelling, running and insult-flinging. The bandy-legged, thick-headed, shrilly childish NieA is a lot like Cowboy Bebop's Ed, right down to the little-boy body and the circular spots of color on her cheeks. Whenever she enters the picture, the volume seems to rise three notches, as most of the dialogue is delivered in a frustrated yell. Like many modern anime characters, she's so pointlessly obnoxious that the temptation to slap her almost overrules the temptation to keep watching.
But Mayuko's stories are more heartfelt, and so gentle as to be almost soporific. The last episode on these initial DVDs deals with her conflicting emotions over a dating party Chiaki wants her to attend; Mayuko wants to go, but feels awkward, shy and poorly dressed. This forlorn episode mixes oddly with episodes in which she howls imprecations and threats at the clueless, selfish NieA. The up-and-down nature of the whole project may alienate comedy fans as well as drama fans.
Still, NieA Under 7 posits an interesting world, fills it with characters that range from uniquely bizarre to believably human, offers up some slapstick comedy and some quiet mystery, and in general manages to make itself unlike anything else on the market. That alone makes it worth a look.
In the "just plain weird" category, one of the recurring characters is a giant-headed, turbaned Indian alien, who makes crude anatomical references, then gleefully writes down the responses and burbles over how much he's learning about humans. The episode in which he moons Mayuko, offering to become "butt-buddies" with her, just has to be seen to be believed.
— Tasha
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