ust before his death, Murao Mima left his granddaughter Tokiko a message. Her robot body will die soon without his maintenance, but she can become human and live a normal lifespan if she finds 30,000 true friends capable of crying for her. Tokiko--better known as "Key" ("kii," or "strange" in Japanese)--moves to Tokyo in search of enough fame to save her from death. As this series continues, she finds mostly mysteries.
For one thing, there's the strange matter of her stop-and-go emotions and her occasional powers, which cause a cult leader to batten onto her as the key to greater glory among his followers. Then there's the relentless pursuit of the murderous albino "D," who seems to see her as the key to the intermittent malfunctions that cause his supposedly mindless robot creations to grab murderously at his throat. And there's also the talent judge who takes a sudden interest in her at an audition, despite her inability to sing, dance or even show any emotion beyond bemusement.
But Key faces the cultists' worship, her roommate Sakura's wildly swinging moods and her own encroaching weakness with bland detachment. Nothing perturbs her--until she's faced with a dying child whom she's expected somehow to heal. As emotion, awareness and strange powers once again flare up uncontrollably in her, it becomes clear that the growing number of people obsessed with owning, manipulating or taking advantage of her have no more idea than the audience what she really is.
Through a stained-glass window darkly
As it reaches its halfway point in volumes three and four, Key: The Metal Idol shows no signs of slowing or wandering. Although writer/director Hiroaki Sato is more straightforward here than in previous episodes, he continues to toy with the same sorts of visual metaphors that made the first Key episodes so fascinating.
Sato distorts linear time--in one razor-edged fight scene the combatants move too fast to track one second, then so slowly that they're almost standing still. He distorts memory--images from the past waver in and out of focus, generally appearing as poor, staticky video playbacks, or as hacked-up "thought salad." Most of all, he distorts vision, playing teasing games with mobile points of view and shaping his characters through increasingly powerfully constructed dreams.
Even with stellar animation and an increasingly complex and satisfying storyline, this much high-brow goofery could easily come across as pretentious or confusing in the hands of anything less than a master. But Sato, along with animation director Keiichi Ishikura, pulls it off and makes it look easy. It's perfectly simple to follow the plot--in this case, a deepening mystery rife with critical revelations about D's robot lackeys, his obsessive boss, and their ambitious stolen experiments with human life in an extractable gel form. Anno's ambitious symbolism enhances the plot rather than obscuring it, and his daring makes every new step in the tale into a potent kick in the stomach.
