Kokkoku: Moment by Moment

I caught this 12-episode anime series on Amazon Prime Video and it's a real gem! Time shifting storylines are a popular trope on many anime and manga stories but Kokkoku offers something a bit more original.

In a nutshell, a magic stone allows people to travel to another dimension and explore the same world they live in but with time stopped still. There are just two stones in existence: one belongs to the Yukawa family who have been using it mainly as a vehicle for tourism and exploration, the other stone belongs to a secretive religious cult called the Genuine Love Society.

Now normally you’d get a good side and a bad side both vying for control of such powers but in Kokkoku the lines are blurred somewhat and what makes this series stand out in my opinion is the very strong character development.

Kokkoku also shows how crazy things can get whenever you try to work together with your own family members ie it’s terrible and everyone wants to be the boss, most notably the father Takafumi who harbours delusions of grandeur.

The three strongest characters include main hero Juri (who manages to unlock a really awesome super power), Juri’s grand dad who provides much of the funny one liners and is a level head, and then there is the quieter and more brooding presence of Shoko Majima who at first may or may not be a bad person.

I like how the artists have crafted the time-stopped still world around them. Lots of cool details are shown like how difficult it is to eat or drink when matter itself has altered. And yes, the show also shows what naughty people can get up to when they have free access to humans that are alive but stuck in time. Thankfully nothing as gratuitous as shown in Inuyashiki.

The final episode shows a very painful depiction of what it is like to go slowly mad when you are alone but then the writers drop something into the plot that seems very random and I’m still wondering if it is a clever idea or a last minute thing that they needed to do to wrap up the story. Anyway you’ll find out yourself when you see it.

Overall a refreshing look at time travel, family bickering, cool supernatural powers and good guys turning bad and bad guys turning good...well some of them anyway.

7.5/10


.