Tsui no Sora

“I believed in reincarnation until 5 minutes ago.” “Then what happened?” “I died.” - Johnny Hart What would you think of a story that begins on a school roof, with a girl standing beyond the fence on the verge of suicide, and suddenly she starts to discuss death and reincarnat- oops, "metempsychosis", with a young boy voiced by some 40-years old guy, and then to resolve their argument they have a rape intercourse in a different dimension? If your face is now twisted in some confused or disgusted expession then you have a clear idea on how people react after watching this “anime”. Tsui no Sora, commonly translated as Endsky, is a weird show, butnot weird in the sense that eyes weep blood in a pool or black tentacled ball float in the sky. They probably couldn't afford these scenes so they were cut off from this OVA. Originally an eroge from SCA-JI's KeroQ company, Tsui no Sora came out in 1999 as one of the most controversial and bizarre titles produced at the time. It fell right under the newborn genre called “Denpa”, which refers to when ordinary settings are suddenly turned upside down for mysterious reasons and cause people to act odd, victims of the spreading madness. Tsui no Sora fits perfectly under this description, though the “ordinary” and the “strange” have never really any established border throughout the whole episode. In all likelihood, it is the production studio behind the adaptation that is to blame for it, among many other problems. As some readers may know, there are some canonical ways to adapt a visual novel into an anime. The first method is to cover all the major points in the story and, if there are many branching endings with the same value, choose one and conclude the series while sticking to it. The second is to do the bare minimum in order to gain as much as possible from loyal fans, without giving much care toward the actual result. The last one is not having the will and money to do any of the aforementioned, and produce a few hentai DVDs that can promptly be used as paperweight or frisbees. Such was the fate for titles like Kara no Shoujo, YU-NO, MajiKoi and, object of this review, Tsui no Sora. Despite these ominous results, those who tried to squeeze the story into 23 or so minutes (13 without the ero scenes!) should be praised for their attempt to preserve some of the story's main themes. The result is something that is literally unforgettable. From the very beginning, the viewer is presented with an ordinary love comedy between a common wimp and his childhood friend which is (unbelievable but true) a tsundere. But this joyful routine is interrupted by an unfortunate chain of events, which involve rapes, lesbian fantasies, more deep reflections about metempsychosis, and a confession that sounds more like a prostitute advertising her body than a girl expressing her love. Also, it seems like normal people may recover from the trauma of a close friend's death just by eating a hamburger; maybe this is a reference to how real life is more complicated than we make it, and that every bad event just doesn't mean anything if you have someone to rely on (and to scrounge a meal from, for that matter). By the end, everything will finally come together, and with a little help from some ghosts we'll understand how raping girls is actually fundamental in having mystical delusions about metempsychosis. What would Plato think about this? So, are people actually able to reincarnate? Watch this and find out yourself; if per chance you find an answer, then you probably understood this better than the studio that produced it. Story aside, what makes Tsui no Sora truly unforgettable is its technical feats: the art and animation are revolutionary, something totally different from every other production. In fact, it's an incredibly audacious and daring move to use both MSPaint and Power Point toward making an anime. No one had ever thought of this, and the sheer originality of this choice provides for some of the most incredible animation ever seen (in the literal meaning that it's hard to accept them as reality). For those of you who were lucky enough to watch the uncensored version, wait patiently until 2:10. You will certainly feel the urge to screen that single frame and set it as your desktop indefinitely. Last but not least, a great cameo from an american show! They hired the guys who worked on South Park to make the backgrounds, and their work clearly oozes emotion from every monochromatic, two-dimensional building. The sound is also top-notch; what a magnificent idea to hire random passersby as voice actors in order to give the whole anime a very authentic feeling. As a result, we have the bad guy which is basically a short adult who got a plastic surgery to look like a teenager and a protagonist that suffers from a cold in the middle of spring... or summer. It's not very clear what season the anime is set in. Aside from that, we also have the pleasure of feeling the implicit connotations of every sound effect. For example, they illustrate that raping is a bad thing by replacing the sound of ejaculation (which actually has no sound) with some random ripping, as if the guy held onto some paper and ripped it the moment he came. Long story short, Tsui no Sora is, for various reasons, something that you will unlikely forget. Luckily, you also won't wake up screaming in the middle of the night, but the side effects of watching this will affect your mind so much that everything else will appear like a piece of fine art in comparison.