(13 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of a doujinshi manga by Yoshitoshi ABe (Serial Experiment Lain, Haibane Renmei). It seems a lot of the Lain staff worked on this to cool off.
Characters
Mayuko, our protagonist, is a teenager who can barely make ends meet. She lives in the attic of a bath-house she works a bit at to pay the rent. She’ll spend much time and effort looking for discounted food. And that’s why she’s more than a bit annoyed by the antics of…
NieA, the freeloading alien who lives in her closet. (Aside from the pointy ears, she’s mostly humanoid.) She’s one of the many aliens whose mothership crashed on Earth some years ago ; most of which are now living in ghettos. Obviously they have no clue of how to get home, although NieA is technically proficient enough to scrounge together a working small flying saucer out of scraps… It’s just too bad it needs to be connected to a ground line for power.
Chiaki, a classmate of Mayuko’s. Now, the latter’s not big on socializing (even having a drink is a luxury she can’t afford), but Chiaki is persistent enough not to care. She’s an UFO nerd who’s delighted to learn about NieA.
Production Values
Despite being subtitled “domestic poor @nimation”, this looks great ; tons of little details in the animation and the background that makes everyone look like real people. Yes, even the aliens.
Overall Impression
This is a great little show. It’s clearly a blatant metaphor for “immigrants are just people, too !”, but there’s nothing wrong with carrying a strong positive message. Especially when the series is built on fun characters whose hijinks have great comedic timing.
This is every bit as good as I was hoping for given its pedigree, and I’m definitely planning on watching it in full soon.
