Eve no Jikan first impressions: are friends electric?
Anyone who’s heard me go on about this in recent months will know how I’ve been dying to get my myopic, bloodshot orbs on Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s latest effort, Eve no Jikan (Time of Eve) and how I’ve been trying to drag fellow bloggers onto the EnJ fanboy bandwagon purely from watching the trailer. Not knowing what to expect from the director of Mizu no Kotoba and Pale Cocoon, apart from expecting Good Things, I nigh on jumped out of my seat at the sight of the first episode. I actually watched this twice in twenty-four hours, and noticed extra little details on the second time around: it’s only fifteen minutes in length, but what a fifteen minutes it is.
The premise is that of a near-future world in which robots have become commonplace in everyday life; they’ve made a difference to industry, agriculture and, in the case of humanlike androids, even homes. While Pale Cocoon was intevitably very cold and dystopian, the world of EnJ is a more recognisable and brighter place - the mannerisms of the characters and quirky background music make it a much warmer and jovial affair and show androids integrated into a society very similar to our own.
I know the idea of robots living side-by-side with humans is one of the oldest and most commonly-covered areas of sci-fi, and this in turn limits what new concepts EnJ is able to explore: it even quotes Isaac Asimov’s first rule of robotics in setting out the androids’ place in society. The first episode introduces Rikuo, an average teenager (aren’t they all?) whose family own a ‘female’ android who acts as a maidservant, running errands and helping out with household tasks. Rikuo clearly has trouble treating the android as a machine instead of a living person but when compared with how some people seem to behave towards to their mechanical assistants he’s more sympathetic than most; an issue that comes up immediately in this ep is how androids are viewed very differently from humans, even though superficially they look the same.
