Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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Consider the train. Trains connect places, and therefore people. They shorten distances, enabling the average person to travel far and wide with relatively little of the immense pain that travel was in pre-industrial times. Nonetheless, trains aren’t cars. You can’t pick where you’re going to go; if it’s not somewhere on the line, you’re never going to get there. In this way, trains are both freeing and restrictive. They will get you where you want to go, but only if where you want to go is along a predetermined path. You know, like college.

I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that this dichotomy was the genesis of Train to The End of The World (more snappily known as just Shuumatsu Train in some corners), or at least a small part of that genesis. Shuumatsu Train kicks the spring season off¹, notably, as an original production. So we’re all on the same page, equally travelling blind to wherever this railcar happens to take us, which is an inarguable positive for something that’s as out-there as this series is already shaping up to be. It comes to us from EMT Squared, who have been around for a while, and in fact, they also made Fluffy Paradise, the first anime I covered here on Magic Planet Anime last season, but are certainly not a household name. More immediately interesting to your average anime viewer may be the resume of director Mizushima Tsutomu, an industry lifer with a truly odd body of work. What sweeping statements can you make about the guy who directed Squid Girl, ANOTHER, Witchcraft Works, most of Girls und Panzer, Shirobako, and Joshiraku, among other things? If nothing else, you can’t pigeonhole the man. For reasons like its eclectic staff, and also its rather bizarre first key visual, it was hard to know what to expect from Shuumatsu Train. In a way, that’s exciting; some of last season’s best anime were originals (I am here thinking mainly of super robot pastiche / self-effacing yaoibait comedy Brave Bang Bravern! and superpowered delinquent punch-up Bucchigiri?!), so it would be great to see things continue in that direction.

However, the main question Shuumatsu Train wants to answer, as it begins, is “what would happen if a spam pop-up ad could abduct you in real life?” This is just one part of what I can wholeheartedly call one of the absolute goddamn weirdest pre-OP introductory scenes I’ve ever seen. A girl enters a train station, en route to it’s-not-really-important, and is promptly met with cheers, because she’s the 77,777th person to enter the train station that day. This, of course, means that she is immediately snatched up by a mobile owl statue and deposited at the top of a building. There, a black-and-silver-haired huckster named Pontaro Poison implores her to push a huge shiny button labeled “7G.” 7G, as you can surely intuit, is the successor to 6G, the successor to 5G, the communication standard. 7G, the huckster explains, allows us to “instantly broadcast” our thoughts and “make visions real.” After some chiding, the girl presses the button, an the world promptly dissolves into a surreal hell of abstract buildings, psychedelic colors, and warped faces. Cut to opening credits!

When we return from the admittedly very nice title sequence, two years have passed and the world has fallen into an incredible state of disrepair, and in the city of Agano, almost everyone has turned into animals. If Shuumatsu Train makes a mistake in its opening episode, it might be that the entire rest of it takes place here, in a setting that is certainly weird but doesn’t measure up to the sheer WTF factor of those first couple of minutes. It’s actually a bit tempting to say that the series overexplains itself a bit, because, courtesy of our narrator and main character Shizuru [Anzai Chika], we get a clean rundown of what actually happened. As one might guess, the present state of the world was indeed caused by the launch of this mysterious 7G Network. Here, it happens that folks from the area turn into animals at the age of 21 and 3 months. The town’s populace thus consists of a few relatively ordinary high school girls and a whole bunch of talking animals, at least a few of whom are struggling to hang on to the mental faculties they still have, and one of them, a sun bear, briefly leaps at one of the girls in a short but fairly uncomfortable scene.

It should be noted that this is said to be a state of affairs unique to Agano. Other regions have different, and, it’s implied, more overtly dangerous problems to deal with. Also, one guy has inexplicably remained physically human but can only run around making choo-choo noises, keep him in mind.

Now, it might be tempting to claim that Shuumatsu Train has scuttled its own mysteries right out of the gate here. But given how this information is presented to us, it doesn’t seem like the series is terribly bent on building up that sort of mystery. As becomes clear over its first episode, Shuumatsu Train is an adventure series first and foremost. Despite its bizarre premise, the series makes legible gestures toward themes of growing up in an indifferent world that is spiraling into chaos, a core that resonates not in spite of being buried under layers of surreality, but because of those layers.

For example; Shizuru and her friends, Reimi [Erisa Kuon], Akira [Kino Hina], and Nadeshiko [Waki Azumi], each take a different approach to coping with the strange state of the world they live in, exemplified by the goods they ask for from a caravan of armored trucks that visits the town once a month (apparently the last remaining of what was once several such caravans). This is most obvious with Reimi, who Akira not-entirely-incorrectly accuses of being an escapist, who dresses herself in gyaru fashion and wants cute manga and anime magazines to peruse. Akira, meanwhile, is cynical and often makes rude remarks, coming off as more than a little self-important. Accordingly, the book she asks for is an occult treatise by Japanese writer Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (I can’t quite figure out if it’s a real occult treatise or not. I’ll confess to not having been familiar with the man before now). Nadeshiko, meanwhile, seems adrift and aimless, and can’t even recall why she wanted the item she receives from the delivery company, a potted sweet myrtle plant, in the first place.²

Shizuru, meanwhile, has spent the past two years searching for her missing friend Youka [Touyama Nao]. If you’d hazard a guess that Youka is probably the girl from the pre-credits scene, you’d be completely correct, and nothing so innocuous as a random scrap of newspaper used as package stuffing for Nadeshiko’s plant gives Shizuru her first lead as to where Youka might be in years. The newspaper contains a photo on its front page, and Youka is in that photo. The problem? The photo was taken in Ikebukuro, far enough away that one would need to take a fairly lengthy train ride to get there. Running to show Youka’s grandmother, now an elderly guinea pig, this photo of her only granddaughter, Shizuru narrates; the distance between train stops has gotten much, much larger since the world went haywire.

Nonetheless, Shizuru is determined, because the last time she and Youka spoke, they had the kind of friendship-obliterating argument that can haunt you for the rest of your life. Her determination only grows when she discovers an unused train resting on the tracks while having her dog sniff out a cap lost by Zenjirou [Okitsu Kazuyuki], the aforementioned train noises guy. (He manages to just barely strain the word “cap” out, the only time in the whole episode he actually talks in this form.) By putting the conductor’s cap on his head, Zenjirou temporarily reverts to a youthful, vigorous appearance, during which time he mostly rages at “Pontaro,” from which we can conclude he’s a colleague of the huckster from the opening. Or a former colleague, given how angry he seems to be at the guy. And how Pontaro gave him a lobotomy. Such things have a way of destroying friendships.

With a lead on her friend’s location and her mind made up, and now possessing the means and approximate knowledge of how to operate this metal chariot, she promptly drops out of “school” (a tiny class consisting of herself and her friends, taught by an iguana), and attempts to make for Ikebukuro solo. Of course, her friends, for all their differences, won’t stand for that, and they all end up following her as the train’s sign flips over with its destination. Suddenly, the show’s English title makes a perfect sense; Ikebukuro is not the physical edge of the planet, but it is certainly the end of the world in another sense.

I’ve said a lot about Shuumatsu Train here, but honestly there’s also a ton I didn’t mention. The visuals are largely good, although the directing is a bit strange in a way that’s difficult to precisely place my finger on. More pertinently, they’re packed with subtle details that aren’t directly pointed out. When the caravan arrives, the handler who distributes the packages to the girls has an eyepatch, and the heavily-armored trucks are covered in bloody handprints, some of which are quite clearly not human.

There are also many bits and bobs crammed into the worldbuilding; the fact that the 7G Network delivers something that may or may not be electricity, but not enough of it to reconstruct life as it was before the disaster, exemplified by the fact that the Internet and traditional phone networks can no longer be powered, but the low-power, short-distance PHS System, a delightfully obscure piece of real-world communication tech, still works. Sharpening the already-present theme of coming of age in defiance of a world going to hell, there’s a detail early on where Shizuru gets a lecture from her iguana teacher about how she can’t just fill out all of her “plans for the future” worksheets with “I Want To Look For Her,” a heartbreaking bit of miniature characterization that only hurts more as the episode goes on.

Also, the show’s character comedy is mostly pretty funny; Reimi and Akira are introduced having a conversation that feels ripped from a manzai routine. As the series goes on, and likely gets heavier, bright spots like that will become more and more essential.

All of this to say; this is clearly a show with a ton of ideas, and while it’s always a gamble as to whether or not any given work will actually stick the landing, just having so much to chew on from the first episode alone is a great sign. Wherever this train is going, I’m confident the ride will be worthwhile.

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^{1: Technically, the season started yesterday with the premiere of Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. But I didn’t cover that! So we’re not counting it. 🙂}

^{2: There is almost certainly some layer of additional symbolism here with the choice of this plant specifically, as Akira directly calls attention to it before being cut off. A quick sojourn to Wikipedia tells me that there are two plants known by this common name, one of which is psychoactive and the other of which is used in chemotherapy, among other things. I think this particular shrub is the latter. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but the fact that the show made me want to go look this up is a good thing in of itself.}

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