Mugen no Ryvius is, in a few words, The lord of the flies with different characters and set on a spaceship. A few hundred kids find themselves trapped in a space station, where they were studying to become astronauts, after what appears as a terrorist attack has killed most of the teachers. The station is going to blow up in a few hours and the few adults still alive sacrifice themselves to buy the students some time. The students manage to save themselves moving inside a strange spaceship nobody knows anything about, the Ryvius, and escaping with it.

It's the beginning of an aimless eight months long trip across the solar system, during which almost everything imaginable happens. As in The lord of the flies, once a community has been stripped of its social structure only the moral sense of every single person is left and all those different morals clash against each other, often violently. The creators of this anime manage to keep control of the many characters and the many threads of the plot admirably, guiding the whole tangled mess to a beautiful ending.

Animation

Infinite Ryvius was created by Sunrise in 1999, so the animation obviously isn't on par with that anime that came out of the production house the day before yesterday. Even so, everything from the character design to the spaceships is visually appealing and satisfying. Inconsistencies are nowhere to be found, no episode is drawn any better or any worse than the others. This consistency -- which admittedly isn't unheard of, but still quite rare although it's to be expected from Sunrise -- create a strong foundation over which the anime as a whole stands firmly. It gives credibility and power to everything else, letting the focus stay on the story and the character development while still being beautiful and appealing. Too often the animation is overdone, stealing the focus away from the most important parts.

Scenes of great beauty and great emotive power are scattered all over the show, including the very last images. Action is relatively rare but unforgettable - more or less what we would expect from Macross' creators.

Sound

The soundtrack is nothing to write home about, but it still does its job efficiently, although not in a spectacular way. I found the choice of the OP and ED particularly intelligent and appropriate, but some hip-hop tracks sometimes are strongly focused on for no good reason and they almost ruin the mood several times.

The Japanese dubbers are, as always, mostly very good; unfortunately the ones dubbing two of the main characters simply can't weep or cry in a convincing way - a couple of times they actually ruin the whole scene. I admit, though, that it happens so rarely that the experience as a whole doesn't suffer from it significantly.

Story

The story is quite simple, it's a trip in a hostile environment in conditions of complete separation from the rest of humanity. Some people are interested in the destruction of the Ryvius, as it is made clear almost immediately, so during the anime we get some insight on the confrontation between a couple of factions on Earth, each one with its own agenda. This adds to the story an additional layer of complexity, which is meaningful and well managed by the anime creators, but the focus of Mugen no Ryvius are the characters and everything else is peripheral. For this reason, the story appears simply as a sequence of battles with quiet parts between them and most of the screentime is used to develop the characters.

Every main character -- and most of the secondary ones, actually -- has a personal story unfolding on the Ryvius, its roots usually being some specific event that happened before the beginning of the anime, outside of the spaceship. The main characters are many -- about 15 -- and their stories soon become all tangled together in a complex plot that overlaps the story, but the whole thing has the one and only purpose to support the character development and isn't interesting in and of itself.

Characters

Although there's a protagonist, the anime repeatedly moves the focus from a character to another giving both a general view of the situation the Ryvius' inhabitants are in and delving into the details of each person's feelings and motivations.

Considering the big number of main characters in this anime, the sheer amount of character development is in itself a major achievement. Some become the exact opposite of their former selves, some others' characteristics are inflated and strengthened to an extreme. One could say it's the same kind of character development we see in Evangelion, an anime that certainly had some influence on this -- and many other -- anime, but Ryvius's execution is somewhat more subtle, less surreal and way more realistic.

Even though between two episodes weeks or months can go by in a flash, the character development is gradual, with every little step of it justified by the events taking place around the main characters.

Several minor characters evolve to some extent, but their evolution lacks continuity, happening instead in bigger steps; the viewer is usually able to fill in with his own imagination, though.

The focus of all this is a confrontation between different morals and different ways of coping with and perceiving reality as a whole and the people around us. A big bunch of kids trying to organize themselves into some semblance of society -- and failing all the time -- to survive a few more days until the next planet and the next chance of being saved is a great way to understand the function of society and the consequences its sudden dissolution would have.

It goes more or less like this: the anime starts from the almost total absence of the concept of private property, everyone working together for the common good; several intermediate states of instability follow each other, meritocracy to tyranny to oligarchy; something similiar to money and an economy are eventually born, to disastrous effects. Then it starts going downhill :) There's a lot I could talk about, but a review isn't the right place. I simply wish to invite anyone who will watch this show to pay attention to this part.

The choice of including some comedy in the form of a couple of funny characters has been a very intelligent one; those characters loose the tension, often almost palpable. The girl who searches for, and sometimes even runs after, missing pieces of her dino outfit, of all things, and the guy who seemingly can't find anything to wear except a pillow are exhilarating, maybe in virtue of the contrast with the usually gloomy mood.

Personal judgement

Ryvius left a mark. Even if its roots in literature are evident, inside the now vast world of anime it's a beacon in the darkness, an example of originality and intelligence rarely met. As I keep writing reviews, I ask myself how many more times I'll be able to say the same for other anime.

Overall

Ryvius is a must-see for any fan of good sci-fi who, like me, is pained by the sight of a whole genre watered down by unsightly, high-budgeted, dim-witted crap that focuses on photon cannons and spaceships. The focus of good sci-fi has always been mankind, no matter the author - from Ray Bradbury to Kim Stanley Robinson, they all talk about humankind. Ryvius follows the steps of the great authors of the genre it belongs to.

Even if the characters populating the Ryvius are more then enough, Mugen no Ryvius is, overall and as a whole, way over the artistic level of most anime ever produced and should be part of everyone's collection.