Silent Mobius
First, let me start by saying that I’ll probably be a bit more merciful than some of the reviews that I’ve read concerning the series. Having been raised in the era of animation that was heavily sanitized for U.S. audiences, anything that provided a measure of realism that did not involve an after-show was enough to pique my interest. I could go on ad infinitum regarding the amount of animation that was rife with sanitation in the eighties and nineties. But I digress.
Enter Silent Mobius, an anime that I was slightly familiar with via the films released in 1991 and 1992, somewhat because all I could recall were the protagonists and the antagonist Lucifer Hawk. Because nostalgia is a drug that never gets old, I decided to hunt down the OVA. To my recent surprise, I discovered a twenty-six-episode series, my topic for this writing.
Silent Mobius follows the AMP (Attacked Mystification Police) division of the Tokyo Police as they battle the mysterious beings known as Lucifer Hawks. The AMP is comprised of an all-female police force in a new Tokyo built over the remains of the old city.
Silent Mobius is a twenty-six-episode series and a pair of OVA’s based on a twelve-volume manga by the same name written and illustrated by Kia Asamiya (pen name). Bandai Entertainment licensed the series and movies. Kia Asamiya was heavily influenced by Western Sci-fi and comics, including Batman, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, the latter of which he is accused of borrowing heavily.
As a fun fact, he created a manga adaptation of the Phantom Menace, which I’m sure is better than the Star Wars movie known as The Phantom Menace. That movie is dead to me except for Darth Maul. Besides Silent Mobius, Kia Asamiya is the creator of the popular manga Martian Successor Nadesico.
The events of Silent Mobius take place in 2023 in a post-crisis Tokyo in which much of the area of Japan is uninhabitable. Citizens live in a revitalized Tokyo built over the remains of the old. Outlying cities also exist, some of which are hostile to the police. Perhaps, rightly so. The police and the AMP are controlled and monetized by four significant corporations that influence Neo-Tokyo.
The AMP (manga) is comprised initially of three protagonists. Rally Cheyenne, the AMP founder, Lebia, the AMP’s second in command, and Kiddy, a cybernetically enhanced human, formerly a detective with the police. In this series, the three are also joined by Mana, the section chief of the AMP, Nami a Shinto Priestess, Lum Cheng from Hong Kong, and lastly Katsumi Liqueur, who is this series central figure. Additional characters also populate the series, including two romantic interests (Roy, Robert), Rosa Cheyenne, the antagonist sister of Rally, and Maximillon Ganossa.
Maximilian Ganossa was once the student of Gigelf, the father of Katsumi. Gigielf, along with the Sorcerer’s Guild, sought to open a gate and the world of Nemesis. The goal was to remove some of Earth’s polluted air and water with clean air and water from Nemesis.
The project known as Project Gaia was a plan to save the Earth. Ganossa, with his own goals, interfered with Project Gaia and unleashed Lucifer Hawk upon Tokyo. The events of the Silent Mobius series start in 2023, and the final episode concludes in the year 2030. Project Gaia was set in motion in the year 1999.
We meet the AMP officers in 2023. Each lady in this series is tied directly or indirectly to the Lucifer Hawk and their world known as Nemesis. The term Lucifer Hawk is used throughout the series to describe beings of varying physical appearance and intelligence. The low-class beings feed on humans and cannot generally speak, while the higher “category” Lucifer Hawks can possess speech, near-omnipotent cognitive ability, and power. Higher class Lucifer Hawks are referred to as Nemesis and resemble humans.
Katsumi Liqueur comes to Tokyo at the behest of Rally Cheyenne. Katsumi was in search of information regarding her mother and father, information hidden from her. She learns that she is the daughter of Gigelf Liqueur, who is responsible for bringing the Lucifer Hawk to earth. She is the tie that binds the series together as Rally seeks to protect her, Roy, a Tokyo Police Officer, cultivates a romance with her. The antagonist Maximilian Ganossa seeks to bring her back to Nemesis.
I love the unfolding of Silent Mobius. While it moves slowly at times, it provides enough substance to understand what is occurring throughout the series. It gives enough subplots to bring out its themes. The world of Silent Mobius could be classified and scientific magic. The AMP wields both modern weapons, and several members who are spiritually adept use magical weapons and incantations to fight against the Lucifer Hawk.
Silent Mobius is like falling dominos. The plot builds up, the dominos fall and crescendo to an exciting end—the animation, music, and sound effects not so much. First, I love the intro animation and music. Though hand-drawn with some digital elements, it does an excellent job of highlighting the AMP and Lucifer Hawk conflict.
Accompanied by a superb intro, I admittedly looked forward to the next episode. The outro’s varied, and after about episode twenty, it changed to something a bit forgettable. Annoying. There is mild scene reuse common in the era, and some of the fight scenes were less than stellar.
A lingering issue with the anime was the inability to distinguish between some of the dream states and psychic events in Silent Mobius. This, coupled with what I will call progression annoyance, had me backtracking through episodes to figure what happened. To its credit, if you miss a scene Silent Mobius does a satisfactory job of filling you in on the details you may have missed. This is done expeditiously and not in the annoying DBZ way!
While not a great series in terms of execution, Silent Mobius is a good series when graded on its subject matter. Its subject matter delves into mental health issues such as childhood trauma and abandonment. It has a moral aspect in that love drives humans to excellence while hate leads to suffering. Hatred is overcome by human sacrifice and love.
Its cyberpunk roots are explored in some of the dystopian of New Tokyo and corporate greed and corruption. If this anime is blamed for being a Blade Runner ripoff, both stand accused of asking the same age-old question of what it means to be human? There are anime that make a more coherent presentation than Silent Mobius. But for an anime completed while its manga was unconcluded, it gets the job done.
