ike so many modern serious anime series, RahXephon starts out in as confusing a manner as possible, as if hoping to ensure that baffled viewers will stick with the series just in order to decode the opening episode. The series begins aboard an aircraft carrier, where a purple-haired girl makes cryptic comments. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a teenage boy named Ayato contemplates his painting of a girl standing on a windswept cliff. As he leaves for school, a smirking woman spies on him and plants a bug in his bookbag, and black-suited men invade his house, talking vaguely about making contact.
Ayato hooks up with some classmates, but their trip is cut short when their subway train is violently derailed; Ayato emerges to get help, but is astonished to find a war going on outside. Oddly, he seems considerably less astonished when his painting comes to life in front of him, as he meets a windswept girl in a yellow summer dress standing amid the rubble, smiling at him. Instead, he forgets about his wounded friends and lounges around chatting with the girl, Mishima.
Meanwhile, the suited men commandeer a helicopter in order to find Ayato. People in military uniforms stand in a room with a pair of elaborately garbed, masked, singing women and dispatch a pair of weapons that look like crosses between mecha suits and stylized human dolls. Obscure references to singing are made, and undefined words like "Dolem" and "Ollin" are thrown around.
Eventually, Mishima suddenly disappears as the suited men attempt to kidnap Ayato at gunpoint. The smirking woman appears and attacks them, revealing to Ayato that they have blue blood. After a terse exchange with the woman, Ayato sees Mishima reappear within the blue-blooded men's would-be subway car and eludes his rescuer to follow the path his captors intended for him. Ayato and Mishima end up in a place called the "Shrine of Xephon," where a giant egg waits in an elaborately painted room. A strange singing begins, Ayato collapses in convulsions, and Mishima joins the chorus. The egg hatches, revealing yet another bizarre mecha-creature. And so RahXephon begins.
A slow-burn series that often seems familiar
Subsequent episodes of RahXephon do put some of the above confusion in context, but an irritating number of questions are left unanswered for no apparent reason. At one point, a military commander expresses frustration at Ayato's passivity and refusal to ask questions about the strange new world he finds himself in, or his mysterious relationship to the humanoid machine from the egg, the RahXephon. Viewers may share the commander's frustration; at times, as when the smirking woman, Haruka, offers Ayato an explanation of what's going on and he shrugs it off, saying he wouldn't understand, it seems like RahXephon's writers are making him unbelievably dense just so they can string out the mystery a little further. And between the first episode's subpar animation, annoyingly recondite storylines and immensely irritating minor characters, RahXephon doesn't initially inspire much confidence.
But as the series progresses throughout the five episodes on the initial DVD, the art improves and enough interesting revelations come to light to make the show worth sticking with. In particular, Ayato has been taught that only a few million people remain alive in the world, and that America and England have been destroyed. The reasons behind these stories have yet to be revealed, but the differences between Ayato's world and Haruka's are fascinating. In that sense, RahXephon strongly evokes Blue Gender, another series about a fish out of water unexpectedly trying to integrate with a war-torn society. But RahXephon is far more like the decade's most-emulated hit series, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Once again, an anime series pits a sullen boy linked to a biomechanical alien device against a series of mysterious alien foes as he struggles to come to terms with his family issues, his sense of isolation and abandonment and his relationships with the mercurial and unpredictable women he's forced to associate with.
Still, RahXephon puts an unusually twisty spin on the usual Evangelion knockoff—revelations like the fact that Ayato's mother has blue blood will keep viewers guessing for a while, as they try to determine who (if anyone) are really the good guys in this series. RahXephon is initially confusing, and slow to open up, but at least it's never obvious or simplistic.
One of these days, some enterprising company is going to market a video-game tie-in for anime titles like RahXephon that simply lets players smack the series' protagonists upside the head until they get some sense. It might not be as exciting as the usual video-game puzzle-solving and firefighting, but in some cases, it would be a lot more integrally satisfying.
— Tasha
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