What a view | Netflix Japanese anime Spriggan is a fun take on global environmental breakdown
- A schoolboy must stop dangerous technology falling into the wrong hands in order to save the earth in this gloomy yet thoroughly enjoyable 90s-style anime
- Meanwhile, BBC First’s Van der Valk continues with a second season, filled with sex traffickers, slippery lawyers, serial killers and dodgy Dutch accents
A handy guide to a failing planet, Japanese anime series Spriggan (Netflix) gives a sneak preview of what we can expect towards the end of our miserable tenure on Earth.
Disgruntled forests fighting off intruders after decades of deforestation, placid Mount Fuji erupting in fury, a Biblical legend giving rise to a power generator big enough to blast us back to the Big Bang, zombies staggering around like drunks … roll up, roll up.
Following the graphic novel of the same name of the late 1980s and the movie of the late 90s (my, how much we’ve learned in the meantime), Spriggan, despite its doom-and-disaster tone and quasi-religious invocations of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord, preachers, serpents and other supernatural frighteners, is a fun watch.
All-action hero Yu Ominae is a schoolboy with a secret: he is a Class-S special agent of ARCAM, a shadowy organisation whose job it is to keep certain ancient, powerful artefacts out of the clutches of evil forces (often the United States Army) that would use them for world domination.
Noah’s Ark, which is actually some kind of unstable, whopping nuclear junction box ready to burst out of Mount Ararat, is an example.