Netflix has quickly become one of the go-to streaming platforms for original anime series, possessing a vast library of movies and critically acclaimed series. Like Aggretsuko, Castlevania, and Shinichirō Watanabe's Carole and Tuesday. Its latest, which debuted at the end of May, is Eden, a short, four-episode series from Yasuhiro Irie, who directed Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, about two robots living in a post-humanity future who accidentally find a small child and decide to raise her far away from their human-hating overlords.
One of the biggest problems with Netflix’s latest slew of anime comes from its the length. From Yasuke’s five episode stint to Pacific Rim’s seven chapters, there’s just not enough time to flesh out the world and tell the story trying to be told. There’s a reason most network anime range from 13 to 24 chapters and that much is especially apparent with Netflix’s latest project, Eden.
The concept of the last or only human is a classic science fiction set-up, one we most often see in the post-apocalyptic genre, which often sees a human wandering a dystopian landscape, in search for meaning and connection in a grim reality. In Eden, Netflix’s new Japanese-language original anime, we get a clever twist on the old convention: Here, humans disappeared 1,000 years prior, and Earth is populated by a few settlements of robots. These robots spend their days growing apples, an act driven by their initial creation by and for humans. When a pair of apple-harvesting robots, A37 and E92, find a human baby, Sara, they go against the rules of Eden-3, where they live, to follow their nature: to protect and care for this tiny human, even when everything they have ever been told about humanity has been framed in our species’ capacity for destruction.
The world we jump into takes place 5000 years in the future. Humanity has all but disappeared from the planet. Lush vegetation is everywhere and robots live in harmony, picking apples and going about their endless days on a repeated, programmed loop.
Eden's first episode begins by outlining the robotic code of ethics, thematically similar to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: Basically, developers can't create robots that would harm humans, robots must be able to maintain themselves and cooperate, and a robot that can't fulfill these requirements must cease to function. One thousand years after humans left Earth a desolate wasteland and disappeared, robots have reclaimed the planet, building a lush paradise around their stronghold, a giant mirrored building they call Eden. The structure is managed by security robots, agricultural robots that harvest apples and such for seemingly no apparent reason, and overseen by a frightening robot overlord who wears a cape and calls himself Zero.
The first episode follows worker robots A37 and E92 (voiced by Rosario Dawson and David Tennant in the English dub), who stumble across a cryogenic pod containing a female human toddler. As soon as she speaks to them, the robots' language centers are activated and they can reply back and talk to each other. They decide to hide her from Eden's security force, as human-hating Zero (Neil Patrick Harris) believes all humans are violent and destructive and the world is better off without them.
The girl, whose name is Sara (Ruby Rose Turner), grows up amongst a motley coterie of robot rejects who "don't fit in" to Eden's rigid societal structure. When Sara receives a distress signal coming from deep inside Eden's stronghold, she knows she has to make a dangerous journey into anti-human territory in order to save who she believes to be the only other human on the planet.
When it comes to plot, Eden is not trying to do anything incredibly complex or new. Eden is reminiscent of The Mandalorian—not only in theme and subject matter, but in its relationship between content and form. Both are familiar, straight-forward fantasy tales about rambunctious kids being raised by unlikely parents elevated in their execution. Because of its narrative simplicity, Eden is perhaps particularly well-suited for teen and older kid viewers, or as a multi-generational watch. (And the English-language dub cast is great, featuring Ruby Rose, David Tennant, Rosario Dawson, and Neil Patrick Harris, among others.) While Sara is ostensibly the protagonist of this plot, as we follow her into young adulthood over the course of the four-episode series, Eden is as much a musing on parenthood as it is a coming-of-age tale, giving parents in particular an emotional entry point.
The first season is short, its four episodes all less than a half-hour long, and can be watched in an afternoon. The animation, which is done in a flatly colored yet three-dimensional digital style similar to The Dragon Prince and Blood of Zeus, is the prettiest take on that style I've seen—the tendency for the computer-animated movements to look jerky and unnatural is helped by the fact that most of the characters in the show are machines. The soft meditation on whether humans would be worthy of a world machines have built for us feels familiar, as it always does in human-vs.-robot storytelling, yet is given new life by the unexpectedly twisty way this show unfolds. By the final episode, Eden has built a world begging to be explored.
