Higashi no Eden of the East Movie 1: The King of Eden

During the summer 2009 there was an anime whose title was as genius as promising: “Higashi no Eden”. I really couldn’t wait for the episodes to be subbed. Sadly this anime was just way to short. After the series finished, one movie was announced as a sequel to the anime. I think the producers realized that they couldn’t wrap up the story in 1.5 hours so they announced a second movie.

Content:
After Takisawa saved Japan from being attacked by missiles, he became a hero known as the “Air King”. The photo on which he stood on this old-school carousel aiming for the missiles appeared all over the internet and it became a symbol for revolution. But Takisawa somehow disappeared and left a message for Saki before erasing his memories telling her that they’d meet at the point where they journey began.

Long story short: Saki gets some tickets and flies straight to New York as the place Takizawa meant is in front of a river from where you can see the ground-zero. Remember the scene from the anime where they both took a photo of the Care-Less-Monday’s ground-zero in Tokyo? He said that if a man and a woman are separated from each other, they’d meet there. And as fate would have it, Takizawa is really at the meeting point although he erased his memories……

to his point and not further. I don’t wanna spoil this whole movie ;-P

Art:
The animation-style has some very strong and weak points. The first thing I noticed are the cars which were all created with computers. I know that the characters aren’t drawn either but the cars really look like some low-budged moving cubes with wheels. But I can ensure you that this is the only weak spot when it comes to the design.

The entire time, the characters and the backgrounds are on a very high animation level. You’ll never see something not moving fluently. There are scenes with weird camera angles which I’ve never seen before. Here’s an example of an Selecao holing a glass of whiskey or something:

Even though you can see his face, since the glass mirrors it, the background is still visible ‘cause you can also see through the liquor. Just awesome, right?

Overall:
Finally I got my long-awaited sequel and yeah, it’s pretty bad-ass although the dramaturgy really fails. The start is made quite well but then you wait for the climax and before you know it, the movie is over. It’s just setting up the events for the next movie. So the bar is raised very high for the sequel movie as I’m expecting some awesome stuff going on with a real awesome finale. The bad-ass aspects are the comedy elements, the drawing style and these lovable characters. The parts where you should close your eyes are involving cars.

Summing it up, the movie gets an 8/10 and you have to watch the TV-anime series first to really understand what’s going on. Otherwise you’d be lost.