After over twenty years as an anime fan (the English-dubbed, black-and-white Astroboy being my first exposure to the genre), it's interesting to reflect on that fact that the same series has occupied my "all-time favorite" slot for nearly fifteen years. What's even more surprising is that it isn't one of the more well-known or critically recognized series: it's Infinite Ryvius, aka Mugen no Rivaiasu (無限のリヴァイアス), a Sunrise anime series from the very end of the 20th century - 1999, to be precise.
In a nutshell, it's William Golding's Lord of the Flies in space. (Maybe it should be ". . . in SPACE!") Yet as true as that categorization may be, the series is far from a mere genre-swapped derivative: I'd read and appreciated Golding's classic several years before Ryvius came along, but I never experienced the same catharsis from Golding's book that I felt from Ryvius. And that amped up effect isn't the sole product of its sci-fi milieu - though when I'm in the audience, it rarely hurts.
As with so many of the stories that I'll be featuring in the CASCYL series, Ryvius's strength comes from its characters. (This is a trend that should probably be expected, given my own penchant for character-centered storytelling.) And as seen in the picture above, its cast of characters is vast. While the largest growth arcs are reserved for the main cast, even side characters are affected just enough by the events of the series to hint at their unseen depths. The extreme circumstances force virtually every character to his or her breaking point at various moments in the series; but what compels the viewer to continue watching is how those characters react to those breaking points, and how those decisions then come to influence the overarching storyline.
Like Joss Whedon's Serenity, Ryvius plays to its medium's strengths. An expansively ensemble cast that could easily overwhelm a novel only strengthens the series's verisimilitude. Animation allows for designs and effects that would prove challenging to reproduce in real world contexts (though advancements in CG effects have so blurred that line as to present more of a budgetary rather than practical hurdle for live action these days).
The bottle society formed by the crew of the Ryvius provides the same microcosm study of human culture and societies that Golding's island did. But the extra depths of characterization make the dynamics at work behind the social constructs all the more understandable - and, in that way, both more beautiful and more terrifying.
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