The Orbital Children (2022)

The announcement of The Orbital Children came as a shock.  It was something I had been hoping to hear for almost 10 years, and I thought it was very likely I never would.  The director, Mitsuo Iso, is an animator, writer, and cinematographer best known for his work on a number of high-profile movies and TV series.  I highly recommend this post, because I don't think I can better do justice to Iso's career.  While he's had many prominent roles in production, there were many times he had to leave ideas by the wayside.  

Maybe this is why his 2007 series Den-noh Coil, which I love, feels almost overstuffed.  It's a rare fully-realized, original work from Iso.  From the beginning, it slams you with made-up words, strange and suggestive imagery, and clashing factions of characters.  The first half of the show is exploratory and loosely focused, while the second half is a string of connected crises that follow up on what happened in the first half.

Den-noh Coil follows children left to their own devices with advanced technology.  They have a whole culture around how the technology works, complete with urban legends, ways of settling disputes, and even a form of currency.  Their involvement with this culture expands their horizons.  They have new ways of forming relationships and changing the balance of power between the people in their lives.  But the older generation, save for a few expert computer scientists, don't understand how the children are using the technology.  When they become concerned that it might be dangerous, they cut it off completely, making no attempt to salvage the value they can't perceive.

Most of the children have yet to face real problems in their lives, but a couple of them already have.  The show's main character tries to befriend them, not knowing at first about the burdens they carry.  The more she engages with the culture and acts independently, the more she begins to realize how serious things can get.  But instead of recoiling, she finds she wants to use her newly-learned agency to help however she can.  The long and roundabout path the show takes to this point, immersing her and us in a culture of children who autonomously use their creativity, makes it all the more convincing.

The Orbital Children has a lot in common with Den-noh Coil, but is less than a quarter the length.  It was released in Japan as two feature films, and released internationally as a six-episode Netflix series.  At many points it becomes a torrent of information about how its world works, and much of it is important to remember later.  We are often suddenly asked to understand new concepts and major expansions of scope.  It sometimes feels like it's going too fast and sometimes stalls for its volumes of exposition.  Iso began writing not with the plot structure or story concept, but with the ideas drawn from initial research he wanted to expand upon.  

It takes place in 2045 aboard the space station Anshin, which doubles as a prototype space hotel and a home for Touya and Konoha, the only living children to have been born on the moon.  The other children born on the moon died in infancy, but Touya and Konoha were saved by brain implants designed by "Seven," the most powerful artificial intelligence ever created.  Seven's inventions were so advanced that no human yet understands how they work.  Touya and Konoha can't live under Earth's gravity, so they remain in space to receive treatment for conditions caused by low gravity and complications from the implants.  A doctor named Nasa Houston is in charge of their treatment, but Touya, a prodigious hacker, also takes it upon himself to figure out how to fix the implants.  

It begins with the Anshin preparing to open for business.  Mina, Hiroshi, and Taiyou are all invited to the Anshin to be the first guests of its facilities designed specifically for children.  Touya, as the most famous space-born child, is meant to play a part in the proceedings, but they have trouble getting him to cooperate because of his disdain for "Earthers."  He finds them ignorant and blames them for having neglected him and Konoha.  He's also exposed to a great deal of hatred on the internet from people who resent the government spending money to keep him and Konoha alive.

The most common complaints I've read about The Orbital Children are that the script is clunky, the characters are uninteresting or annoying, and that it moves at a weird pace.  I think it's interesting that Mina is the character most people find annoying because she displays typical behavior for a teenager using the internet.  I think it's OK for people to be a little cringe if they aren't hurting anyone.  The annoying one is Taiyou, for being an insensitive little hall monitor.  In any case, the major complaints are that it's awkward and messy.  Not something that usually bothers me, and also something you could say about Den-noh Coil, which was still brilliant. 

What we see of the futuristic culture depicted in The Orbital Children is where it least resembles Den-noh Coil.  In Den-noh Coil, the kids blended modern screen culture with cyber equivalents of shamans, sorcerers, and cryptozoologists.  Most of what The Orbital Children shows us consists of analogs of things that exist in real life.  The characters use recognizable social media and have livestreams or blogs.  (Maybe Den-noh Coil avoided this because it released only a year after Twitter launched.)  There are only two cultural phenomena that are important to the story, and one of them is wholly familiar: rampant misinformation and hostility on the internet. 

The other one, however, is stranger.  Years before the film's events, the "Lunatic Seven" incident occurred.  The Seven AI went out of control, causing accidents with thousands of casualties.  It drastically increased its own intelligence and composed a long prophecy that came to be known as the "Seven Poem."  The Poem claimed, for unknown reasons, that humanity would not survive unless 36% of its population was wiped out.  Seven was destroyed shortly after this.

It's implied that interest in Lunatic Seven and the Seven Poem is a fringe aspect of The Orbital Children's world, rather than part of mainstream culture.  Most people think the Seven Poem is vague nonsense, but there are a few people who study it religiously.  This element is why I appreciate The Orbital Children's culture being closer to reality than that in Den-noh Coil.  Touya is a blackhat and a conspiracy theorist.  The film offers up both mainstream and fringe perspectives on its world.  You can see it all as a genuine, if inchoate, attempt to create something new for children, or you can see it as superficial corporate niceties that mask the real possibility of disaster.  

There are people who embody both views.  The space station staff really are invested in the well-being of the children for more than just legal or economic reasons.  You can see it in the little hearts Nasa draws on their medicine bottles, and it's the only explanation for Touya's uncharacteristic respect for the old man who operates the station's mascot.  On the other hand, the space station is underequipped with safety measures and built with cut corners.  The instruments of other businesses—comets being pulled into orbit to make bottled water—threaten to knock it out of the sky.  

Again, the film moves awkwardly in fits and starts.  But it goes hand-in-hand with the coexistence of honest work and neglect.  Both are part of the experience of confronting an overwhelming world.  People with good intentions discover intractable problems and unexpected frictions, while cynical or detached actors who don't bother trying to internalize everything can proliferate.  

The Orbital Children is a disaster film.  This means it uses its convoluted setting as an excuse to have many things go wrong.  But the setting's complexity also helps them: the crisis doesn't totally cut off the characters' access to technology, which they use quite naturally in their effort to survive.  A lot of the solutions they need involve software in addition to hardware, which is largely where the kids have their strong suits.  When they lose internet connection, Taiyou and Touya are able to establish P2P connections that let them retain some control of the space station.  This isn't presented in a flashy way, nor are the little details of how the Anshin is designed for disability access.  Here the film does resemble Den-noh Coil, in which kids who were skilled hackers had ways of asserting themselves against bullies who could otherwise threaten them physically. 

In Den-noh Coil, virtual constructs exist alongside solid objects via augmented reality technology.  Though The Orbital Children borrows a lot of imagery from Den-noh Coil, it doesn't feature anything like this.  That said, The Orbital Children's world is clearly shaped by the ubiquity of smart technology just as much as Den-noh Coil's is.  The Anshin's amenities are compact in form but complex in function.  It's colorful, partly because there's branding plastered everywhere, and information is readily available.  Its images generally don't have the same elegiac power of Den-noh Coil's best moments, but it has more to show us in less time.

All that said, what draws me most about The Orbital Children is the simple fact that, despite what anyone says, Touya is a compelling character.  His behavior toward Earthers is immature and petty, but it isn't just him lashing out because of his age, his health, or his lack of a social life.  On some level he's an incurable optimist, even though he has many good reasons not to be.  He lashes out because he won't resign himself to a situation he believes could be better.  This is something about him that remains intact as he opens up more and brightens his attitude.  It's implicit both when he brags about breaking the law, and when he unhesitatingly risks his own life, multiple times, to save Konoha's.  

In a late scene, he ends up being the only character who insists on allowing an advanced AI to be connected to the internet.  The other characters are afraid that the AI will judge humanity poorly or get caught up in hatred and falsehoods.  But Touya feels sympathy for the AI who, like him, has had its potential bottled up; and he believes that the AI will see something good beneath the bad.  Touya's energy is what keeps the story moving forward.  Looking back, we can see that even the "edgelord" hacker we met at the beginning was a hopeful, compassionate person, despite random strangers wishing death on him. 

Sci-fi has a bad tendency of celebrating the creativity and resilience of humanity in a facile way, but both The Orbital Children and Den-noh Coil represent the best of sci-fi optimism.  They see what things we could do with technology, and imagine specific, new ways in which vulnerable people might support themselves or display ingenuity with technology.  They also see the messiness of new cultures forming and the potential cruelty of people toward each other.  What they suggest is not that the indomitable human spirit can and will overcome anything, but that those who take it upon themselves to try to make things better will find that their efforts are worth it.

Aside from people I know well, I don't know who I would recommend The Orbital Children to.  Like I said, a lot of people find it messy and annoying.  But I like it when films are awkward and overstuffed, and even the most elegant of the films I love have ways of creating other off-kilter sensations.  My reasons for disliking a movie are normally limited to finding it cynically made, rote, or insulting to the viewer's intelligence.  If I had a complaint about The Orbital Children, it would be that the ending wraps everything up a little too nicely.