Warning: This bark deals with a show containing distressing depictions of sexual violence and body horror. There will be such pictures below the fold.

The warning above is for me. I need to be in a Mood to deal with that. It was on my radar for years before the day was right.

Malice@Doll, a doll with pink hair, looks entirely made of plastic

It’s the sexual violence, generally, i do not want to deal with, but it’s the body horror that made me sick.

I’m not certain why, sometimes, i engage with the stuff anyway. My understanding is that it’s pretty common for survivors to seek out violent experiences exploring their trauma from a different angle, but i never really felt that way.

With her newfound humanity, Malice@Doll still looks quite plastic

Part of the reason i wanted to watch this, of course, is my own interest for storytelling with 3D anime characters: to explore aesthetic possibilities that avoid the Poser Porn or the VRchat vibe. But i did not have to watch past the introduction just to find references for my own work.

And hey, i can Alt-F4 anytime, so if the Mood was today, i do not have to explain it.

The dolls, granted humanity, look like grotesque flesh and gore

Nor can i explain the story: this hour-long nightmare was written by Chiaki J. Konaka (Serial Experiments Lain, The Big O, Mononoke, Texhnolyze, etc), which should already tell you many answers won’t be found within the work itself.

The repairer robot looks like a creepy snail doctor

Immediately, you’ll notice the aesthetics. Grimy early 2000’s CGI, reminiscent of PlayStation 1 cutscenes. Yet its inspiration is not the slick animation of Parasite Eve: with its fixed angles, and stop-motion animation on the threes, it aims to be more akin to a puppet show; indeed, the creators mentioned Czech animation as an inspiration, such as the puppet shows of Jan Švankmajer or Jiří Trnka.

'I want to smash your nice body' says the Leukocyte, a murderous metal robot looking like a spider

Its aesthetic is exactly what it sets out to be: the uncanny low-poly plastic dolls do not look dated in their glorious 480p, they look the only way they could possibly look.

'Until now I would pretend to be in pain'... says the bloodied, blindfolded doll.

In the nightmare, humanity, long extinct, is a vampiric disease. Following its own nightmare logic, it weaves a detailed universe, but refuses to explain much of it. Much like a dream, after you wake up, its internal coherence falls apart, and it becomes impossible to offer a suitable synopsis, only an interpretation.

The stoic Joe@Admin in a surreal gallery of animal parts

Mine isn’t that humanity is the disease: sexuality is.