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Wonder egg priority / ワンダーエッグ・プライオリティ

Finally Wonder egg priority, widely — and I think rightly — heralded as one of the animes of the season. Contrary to many, however, I wasn't all that convinced about the series from the start.

With its melancholic soundtrack and its entrancing mix of painted images and photographs, Wonder egg priority's intro may well be one of the most wondrous openings I know of in any anime — only Neon Genesis Evangelion and some the openings of Bakemonogatari can compare.

The story is both simple and complex. A fourteen-year-oldfourteen-year-old girl, Ai Ohto, is cruelly bullied at school, as with her eyes in two different colours she doesn't fit into the narrow mould of her schoolmates' expectations (Ai's first name, アイ, is also in the originally spelled out in Katakana, making it actually a transcription of “eye”). When her only friend, Koito Nagase, commits suicide, her live finally collapses, and she refuses to go back to school.

During one of her lonely nightly walks she encounters a miraculous bug which leads her to the eponymous wonder egg, an object in the shape of a normal egg, which, once cracked, transports her into a parallel world, “egg world”.

In “egg world” she encounters the ghosts of other girls who have committed suicide and are now trapped in between the worlds. A voice instructs her to help them. This way Ai could also resurrect her friend Koito.

Already in the first episode Ai encounters Saijô, who had been another victim of bullying. After encountering a series of smaller evil spirits, Ai initially refuses to help, but ultimately steps up to the challenge and finally defeats the egg world version of Saijô's tormentor. She then encounters in the egg world the two characters behind the voice, Acca and Ura-Acca, as well as another teenage girl, Neiru, who has also lost her sister to suicide and also hopes to bring her back. Acca and Ura-Acca encourage both girls to take new wonder eggs to save more ghosts.

In the subsequent episodes Ai and Neiru encounter two more teenage girls with very different social backgrounds and character traits, but confronted with similar traumas — all have lost a girl close to them to suicide and feel a sense of personal responsibility for their loss. At first the four girls view each other at best indifferently, if not actually with hostility. It's only step by step that they become friends. For me the visualisation of their tentative steps towards their fragile friendships are among the best parts of the story.

After a few episodes I feared that the anime had lost its creative spark, as the overall pattern started to get repetitive, with each episode addressing a different antagonist and with their personifications getting increasingly obvious. Fortunately, director Shin Wakabayashi ultimately avoids this trap, on the one side by focusing more also on the interactions between the four girls and their specific situations. On the other side, she breaks the tone by finally looking at the foundations of the egg world itself and the roles of Acca and Ura-Acca. It would be possible to explain here more without hopelessly spoil the show. For here let it be enough to reveal that a monster lurks under the already sombre shadows of egg world — and that like in Shelley's classic the real evil may very well not be the monster, but Frankenstein, its creator.

The egg world and its denizens are painted in strong, bright colours, as are the enemies — the aesthetics of the antagonists reminds me of the oeuvre of Niki de Saint Phalle. This often seemingly clashes with the often horrific stories — the antagonists are the embodiment of the horrors that the victims, that the four girls encounter in the egg world, had to go through. We see personifications of sexual harassment, rape, bullying, betrayal, nefarious beauty ideals, hatred, and more. The contrast between the bright surface and the underlying message makes the situation even more disconcerting.

One big caveat — one last episode is still promised for June, and it might still revolutionise everything. I certainly hope that it will wrap up many of the open threads especially of the “Frankenstein” plot.

Official Website

Wonder egg priority opening

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly: Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus(eBook)

Niki de Saint Phalle

Giardino dei Tarocchi di Niki de Saint Phalle

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