Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No. 16: Why is "Zegapain" interesting from episode 6?　The Dissimilarity Effect of Voice-overs

Makoto Shinkai's self-produced anime "She and Her Cat" has been remade as an animated TV series. The lead voice actors are Kana Hanazawa and Shintaro Asanuma. The first work in which the two, who were still rookies, competed was the robot anime "Zegapain" ("ZEGA").

At the time of the broadcast, Hanazawa's first performance was described as "a good stick (sounds like a stick performance, but that's the good part). Ten years have passed since then. Let's take a look back at the charm of "ZEGA," still called a hidden masterpiece.

The difficult setting in which "everything in daily life is an illusion created by data

First, let's review the basic setting of "Zegapain," which consists of 26 episodes.

Sogol Kyou is a high school student living in Maihama City, Chiba Prefecture, who is led by a mysterious transfer student, Misaki Shizuno, to fight in a devastated city on a giant robot weapon called "Zegapain. Kyou believes that the uninhabited city where "Zegapain" exists is a fictional world in a video game.

However, it is revealed that Maihama City, where Kyou spends his high school years, is actually a virtual city recreated in the "Maihama Server," and that both Kyou and his childhood friend Ryoko Kaminagi are nothing more than "phantom bodies," data personality memory bodies. It becomes clear that both Kyou and his childhood friend Kaminagi Ryoko are nothing more than data personality memories called "phantom bodies. In the real world, the human race has been destroyed by the mysterious enemy "Garzuorum," and only a few "phantoms" are fighting a battle that Garzuorum cannot win, using physically existing weapons such as Zegapain. In other words, familiar daily life is nothing more than a virtual reality reproduced in a small server. If the server is destroyed by the enemy, Kyou's virtual daily life will be lost forever, data and all.

Because it takes several episodes for viewers to understand this perverse world setting, the series is often referred to by fans as "the sixth episode of ZEGA," or "hold out until the sixth episode. The sixth episode is the last episode of "ZEGA. In the sixth episode, the word "phantom" is finally made explicit, and Kyou accepts with a saddened face that his existence is nothing but data. Let us now explore why the sixth episode of "Zega" is so interesting.

Displacing Pictures and Dialogue to Step Inside a Character's Inner World

Episode 6, "Phantom," begins with a scene in which Zegapain, with Kyou and Shizuno on board, is defeated against the warriors of Garzuorum. At the end of the scene, Kyou sees Shizuno's body and his arm disappear in particle form, and he faints from shock.

Waking up in his apartment in the Maihama server, Kyou goes out into the streets of Maihama at night in an attempt to regain a sense of reality. However, a female AI appears to support Kyou and his team in their battle, and says, "Everything is a figment. Not only the town, but also the people," she explains Kyou's current situation. However, Kyou is not convinced. This is part A.

Part B begins the next morning, when Kyou leaves the apartment and heads to school.

A wide-angle lens is used to show the apartment mailbox covered with duct tape and a note left for Kyou by his mother, which reads, "I will be late tonight. The female AIs' explanations of last night's events are superimposed on this image through voice-over (off-screen dialogue). The fact that there are many vacant rooms in the apartment building is proof that there were many people who fought in the "real world," just like Kyou does now, and the reason her mother leaves only a note and does not appear before Kyou is because she does not need to be seen in the server to lead her life. Kyō's monologue overlaps with the usual classroom scene: "Ghosts, illusions, and made-up things ......." In other words, the pictures show the "daily life" that Kyou sees, while the dialogue emphasizes that the "daily life" that we can see is only data. --The intentional displacement of the pictures and dialogues is intended to make the viewer feel uneasy.

That evening, Kyou goes for a walk with his childhood friend Ryoko. Ryoko buys some candy at a convenience store, but the clerk is not there, so she puts some coins on the cash register. The AI's voice from last night overlaps the scene with a voice-over. You are invisible because you don't need it. To those who need it, both the clerk and the customer are present. The line is echoed because it is Kyou's recollection. And the cut where Ryoko places coins on the cash register has an odd perspective, as if distorted by a fisheye lens.

In theatrical terms, the term "iatrogenic effect" is used to refer to a direction that makes viewers feel uncomfortable in a familiar scene. In Part B of Episode 6, the series of dissimilarity effects gives a real sense of the difficult world setting of the "phantom daily life in the server," which had been presented in a small way up to that point. That is why the sixth episode of "ZEGA" is so interesting.

Use of voice-over and live dialogue

The climax of episode 6 ends with a conversation between Kyou and Shizuno, who is trying to confirm that everyday life is "neither an illusion, a fiction, nor a ghost. Shizuno stands in front of Kyou and says angrily, "We are the memories of the extinct human race living in a phantom city inside a machine! he says angrily. Because the previous explanations had been given in a stupefied voice-over, Shizuno's final line adds an unusual sense of urgency to the story.

Because everything, both real and illusionary, had to be depicted evenly on the celluloid, "Zegapain" was a difficult task. We hope you will take the time to enjoy this production, which was created with the utmost care and sophistication.

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)
(C) Sunrise Project ZEGA