Break of Dawn

By Shelley Pallis.

In the year 2049, Tokyo teen Yuma is suitably blasé about all the technology that is supposed to help his life, particularly the irritating Nanako, a robot personal assistant who often seems like little more than a device for remote parental nagging. Yuma is particularly annoyed because there should be more to Nanako than that – she is, after all, based on the sort of technology that put satellites in orbit, so it winds him up that she does little more than poke him out of bed in the mornings. But Nanako has been infected with a special sort of malware, an alien intelligence that uses her to contact Yuma and to ask him for help in returning to space. Suddenly, Yuma is propelled into an unexpected adventure, and a race against time.

Break of Dawn is based on a manga by Tetsuya Imai that started running in Afternoon magazine in 2011, effectively offering readers a glimpse of the way their grandchildren might live. In doing so, it offered a cosy glimpse of the future year of 2038, with the world still muddling along, kids still enjoying urban adventures, and today’s cutting-edge technology gently assigned to the scrap-heap. This 2022 anime version punts the setting another eleven years later, to 2049, seemingly designed to include a sense of timeliness – the comet SH3-Arville, a vital plot point, supposedly returns once every 27 years, which makes its next due date 27 years from now.

Creator Imai has always been close to the anime industry, having been in his college anime society in his early twenties, and finding early success with Hacks, a 2008 manga story about a group of teenage girls who want to become animators, and his 2012 Alice & Zoroku was turned into an anime series. So, it should come as no surprise that his Break of Dawn (literally “Our Dawn” in Japanese) should get the anime remake treatment – the only surprise is that it has taken so long to make it to the screen.

The film was produced by Zero-G, an anime studio which itself has a history stretching back thirty years. It was first founded by director Hiroshi Negishi as ‘Zero-G Room’ in 1991 in order to make the knockabout sci-fi anime KO Century Beast Warriors. It went on to work on Saber Marionettes, merging in 2001 with the copyright management company Radix, going through half a dozen further name-changes, mergers and splits in the noughties before finally emerging from the decade in 2011 under its current name. It has worked on a huge number of anime shows, but its most recent achievements have included Battery and Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It.

Director Tomoyuki Kurokawa has a long track record in TV anime sci-fi, including the racing series IGPX, various iterations of .hack, Dragon Dentist and the acclaimed PSYCHO-PASS series. Here, however, he has to temper his futuristic world-building to fit an original manga that was far more concerned with allegory than prediction. He also has an impressively long time-scale to work on, with a film that clocks in at just under two hours.

Imai’s original manga’s future is distractingly parochial – schoolboys still have chunky textbooks in their rooms, Japanese houses still look the same; kids still walk to a school to learn stuff (but they have iPads now); the Japanese news is still a patronising ‘wide show’ on a wide-screen television. The only noticeable difference is the presence of Yuma’s personal Autobot, Nanako, a free-floating A.I. whose job it is to get in the way and do his laundry. It is all, in fact, quite dissonantly mundane, an “everyday” anime that looks almost exactly like every one of our days. It risks jarring the viewer out of enjoying the film, and into a consideration of what Japan might actually be like in 27 years’ time. What happened to womenomics? Nanako ‘helps’ Mum with the washing, but Mum is still doing it.

Rewilding? The aging population? What happened to the energy crisis? Where is the climate change? Winding back 27 years from own present to 1995, we lived in a world fearful of the Millennium Bug; Mumbai was still called Bombay; there were no DVDs, MP3s, or blockchains. It was still ten years before Facebook, for God’s sake. A lot can change in 27 years, and one wonders if screenwriter Dai Sato has really considered it, particularly when an entire scene revolves around Yuma being annoyed that he has ‘missed’ a news item, and then elated that his Autobot has ‘recorded’ it for him.

The film’s sense of the year 2049 is hidden away in far subtler indicators, including the fact that Yuma’s family is having to move house because their entire neighbourhood is being demolished. And in a lovely moment of parental chiding, Yuma’s mother points out to him that he is super-nerdy and enthusiastic about robots when they are exploring space, but dismissive and belittling of them when they are in his bedroom. It’s a rare moment in the film that confronts the audience with the sense of wonder we might expect to find in daily life. Winding back another 27 years before 1995, for example, we didn’t have men on the Moon, non-stick frying pans, cellphones or personal computers – all of us live lives today that the sci-fi writers of the 1960s struggled to envisage, and still we moan about it.

The space programme, of course, famously led to a bunch of spin-offs that enriched or otherwise changed our daily lives, and this becomes another plot point in Break of Dawn, when Yuma reveals that the base technology for all modern society’s A.I. was developed for SH3 the automated space observatory launched in 2019, and which, as the name denotes, discovered the comet SH3-Arville. But that’s all a sideshow to the real story – the revelation that, through Nanako, that Yuma and his friends have established contact with February Dawn, an ancient, alien space probe that requires their help in getting off-world.

Attendees from previous Scotland Loves Anime might think that elements of this story recall elements of the festival favourites like Penguin Highway and Sing a Bit of Harmony, and indeed there is a hefty crossover in a story of an artificial mind seeking to make contact with human meat-sacks. Artificial intelligence is a subject of great interest to modern SF writers, and Imai’s story combines considerations of it from two angles – how might A.I. develop in our world, and how might an encounter with an alien A.I. manifest itself?

The film also contains a subtle reverie on yesterday’s tomorrows, most notably in the district where Yuma lives. He has grown up on the Asagaya estate, a famous block of dormitory housing in Tokyo, conceived in the 1950s as a set of ideal homes of the future, containing new-fangled developments like private baths, and largely snapped up by corporate residence offices in the late twentieth century. Designed by modernist architect Kunio Maekawa, Asagaya was intended as a form of utopian housing, with open spaces and adult-friendly playgrounds, designed to be visible from the kitchens of nearby terraced houses, so parents could keep a watch on free-range children. But like all new trends, Asagaya’s time was past by the late 1990s, when the buildings began to fall apart. By the early 2000s, the area was the focus of an urban renewal programme, which would have placed demolitions and rezonings right around the time that Tetsuya Imai was writing his story. In 2016, four years after the original manga of Break of Dawn finished its run, the area was renamed Proud City Asagaya. Set in such a context, we might think of Break of Dawn as an artist’s imagining of what happens when today’s breathless, excitable blueprints and new projects are themselves old news scheduled for demolition.

Break of Dawn is screening at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.