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canmom · 1 year

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NieR Automata Anime ep 4-5

Continuing commentary from [part 1] and [part 2-3].

The NieR Automata anime continues to be... really good actually! A really good companion piece to the game, and even if you encountered it in isolation you’d probably get quite a bit out of it. I am increasingly relieved I didn’t judge it solely on the first episode.

As before the focus on this commentary will be looking at how they adapted the game, how it relates to the broader NieR context, references (e.g. books being read by the characters), and also the cool stuff the anime does to take advantage of the new medium.

Episode 4

Episode 4 covers the Amusement Park area and the machine lifeform Simone, aka ボーヴォワール (Beauvoir) in Japanese.

This episode was delayed, with the rushed production of the anime as a whole unable to cope with a COVID outbreak. Given that it’s kind of crazy what an impressive action sequence they deliver.

The episode opens with Machine Lifeforms watching a play. In the game, if you return to the Amusement Park some time after defeating Simone, you can watch a group of machine lifeforms perform a play called ‘Romeos and Juliets’ which has to be seen, seriously...

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In the anime, we open with a less absolutely destructive play, although a machine lifeform still gets stabbed. We see a machine couple with painted-on eyelashes holding each other... and behind them we see a crucified android.

...followed by a rapid montage of her and other androids decaying.

The setup is pretty clear: this is a horror one!

At the Resistance Camp, 2B and 9S are receiving their orders from Lily and Jackass. This serves as exposition that normal androids only drink water...

...and YoRHa androids don’t. (Because their Black Boxes come from Machine Lifeforms, but we don’t know that yet!)

They do a great job of distinguishing the body language of Lily (cool, reserved) and Jackass (excitable, broad motions) which wasn’t really possible in the game. Poking and prodding 9S, wiggling like a worm...

The YoRHa recap the previous episode, and Jackass speculates that with the machine lifeforms evolving this way, peace might yet be possible. As we’ll see, 9S’s genocidal streak is really emphasised in the anime; here, he refuses to accept anything other than total annihilation of the machines and foreshadows his ‘I’m going to kill every last one of them’ break from route C...

The Japanese is actually quite plain: すべてを、破壊するまだです。It is perfectly valid to translate to “every last one of them” and it fits the dramatic finality of 9S’s line, but you could also just put “all of them”.

Next up we have a scene of the Commander in the bunker. This calls back to the YoRHa stage play, where the Commander pleads to send reinforcement to the YoRHa test squad, and is flatly denied.

Visually, the “Council of Humanity” is here represented by a moon with a segment taken out, resembling an eyeball. It’s a cool visual!

And in closeups, we see a circuit board pattern, which kind of foreshadows that the Council of Humanity is not human at all...

The Council declares that Adam, Eve and other unique machine lifeforms are all part of the plan, and to continue to use the Resistance as decoys.

YoRHa’s plan is completely nuts honestly. Not surprisingly since it was concocted by a traumatised android shortly before he blew up, but seriously. The primary aim of YoRHa is propaganda, to motivate the resistance to fight harder to overcome the machines on behalf of a phantom humanity - but they treat that same resistance as worthless and disposable constantly so who’s even supposed to spread the legend of YoRHa? They sacrifice endless units to goofy experiments to try to find the most efficient personality types, even though they’re planning to sacrifice the whole army in the end. They spend a huge amount of resources on attempting to squash security leaks among the androids, such as the Executioner type units, but their base security is completely useless against the machines.

But that’s the point, right? YoRHa is irrational bc the huge forces that we are caught up in are just as irrational. And thinking of this as a purely rational military operation, rather than something happening for religious reasons, is a mistake.

After this, we lead into the main plot of the episode, with 2B and 9S on their way to investigate the Amusement Park region. Before that, however, they see a supply launch to the moon; further foreshadowing.

Later, 9S will discover that the shipments to the moon contain only water, indicating that the moon is only populated by androids and there are no real humans. So the beginning of this episode has all been setup.

We get a message from from the crucified android. “Ah, what a beautiful stage...” - setup to the dichotomy of beauty and death that is going to be the theme explored in the rest of this episode.

Like in the game, the route to the Amusement Park from the City Ruins passes through a sewer. We get a brief montage of painted scenes from the game, including the rabbit boss...

...and the rollercoaster...

But we’re not going to dwell very long in the Amusement Park before going straight to the stage.

A Beautiful Song begins in a music box version, and we see the machine lifeforms from the play earlier professing love. Pod 153 explains the concept of the theatre to a dismissive 9S; then the players explode and Simone enters.

The outset of the fight is fairly close to the game, although there’s some small differences.

Like with the Engels fight, Simone is a 3D model, while 2B and 9S are 2D animated into a 3D scene with 2D effects animation. The CGI still doesn’t look great, but broadly it’s executed much better here. There’s some seriously impressive mobile camerawork.

In the game, you don’t get much of a sense of what Simone’s deal is in your first playthrough as 2B, but then as 9S you get visions of her motivation. She wants another machine, named after Jean-Paul Sartre and goes to increasing lengths to ‘become beautiful’ - returning to a constant refrain of ‘he won’t look my way’. (In real life, Sartre and de Beauvoir had a polyamorous relationship; Sartre was the one jealous. I gotta actually read de Beauvoir to get a better sense of what NieR is riffing on, if it is).

In the anime, the emphasis is less on Sartre, although we do see him...

The flayed, still-living androids on posts come in to open what will be a parade of ero-guro imagery...

Things really get going with dat psychosexual imagery, though, once 9S hacks into de Beauvoir. As we’ve seen, the anime presents hacking as a kind of full-immersion VR where 9S dives into the memories of the hacking target. Inside de Beauvoir, he first finds a huge space full of images of feminised machine lifeforms, the plates shattering as he walks past...

The hacking space is indicated by letterboxing a cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio.

He finds a mirror and then is confronted by an array of photos of the same machine in a red dress and various kinds of makeup. The floor transforms into a huge made up face.

9S shatters it with his sword. Outside the hacking dimension, 2B is holding him in a pietà pose. Simone explodes her dress and goes into bitey girldick mode.

Back in hacking space, 9S finds himself in a misty swamp containing a giant statue of an indifferent Sartre. With a Dutch angle to make it look extra big.

A representation of Simone with smudged makeup shows up in a wedding dress.

9S stabs her, she turns to sludge, arms drag him underwater, and he finds himself arm-bondaged to a wall in a bedroom full of discarded dummy/doll parts.

Simone, here a generic Small Stubby, discards parts until giving up in frustration, with scribbles all over her face, and comes to 9S where she starts trying to rip off his arm.

Abruptly she is pulled into a giant metal mouth. (Check out those bendy smears!) A match cut identifies this mouth with the big girldick dentata menacing 2B.

In the hacking world, a huge grinding wheel appears inside the mouth, reminiscent of Marx. Simone now stumbles blindly around the fight arena, bouncing off the walls. 2B orders Pod 042 to let her hack, despite the risk of a B unit attempting hacking.

Given how coldly she has treated (this incarnation of!) 9S until now, this might underline that there’s more going on with her feelings about him. If the first episode didn’t massively tip its hand there lol. Anyway, she arrives just in the nick of time to save 9S from getting ground up.

...kinda Utena-like framing there maybe?

This prompts Simone to charge atop the spinning wheel, giving 9S an opening to throw his sword into her face. The effect of this is to explode the metal covering.

The inner structure of her head suggests that 9S has actually smashed the teeth as well and gone straight into her throat with his sword. Hmm. HMMMMMMMMM. Yeah ok.

This gives 2B and 9S an opening to destroy Simone’s core with the pod laser. We get a final shot of her catching the attention of Sartre at last...

We see Simone’s core disintegrate - further setup for the eventual reveal that YoRHa Black Boxes are built from Machine Cores.

After the battle, the two machines from the opening come in to see the play and give flowers to Simone, one of them referring to her as ‘mum’! Suggesting that maybe Simone and Sartre went further in their relationship and adopted some Stubbies as kids in this version? 9S tramples the roses to mercilessly cut them down.

The puppet show this time is pretty brief and the ‘ending’ is basically that the commander pushes the bunker crew too hard.

So, to comment on this episode: in the game, the Simone fight is extremely cool - bringing to mind the Intoner fights in Drakengard 3, but considerably better executed! - but ultimately you just defeat Simone the same way you would defeat any normal enemy. If you hack her as 9S, I don’t believe you get any special hacking zones.

Here, they’re going all Silent Hill with the sexual imagery. I’m still not entirely sure what I make of the whole Simone episode of NieR Automata. There’s definitely something of the transfeminine monster angle in the whole ‘massive bitey schlong’ thing, the “Buffalo Bill” pursuit of feminine beauty by destroying someone else’s body (in this case, the androids that Simone uses as adornment). They’re mixing together a whole lot of images here: we already had the stage itself, gibbeted corpses, Wagnerian opera, the usual YoRHa doll imagery; now we can add the big juicy mouth stuff and a bit of bondage too. The Machine Lifeforms are generally trying to explore different ways of being human, and Simone represents insecure vanity leading to an obsession with aesthetics that can never really be satisfied. But there’s a reason ‘unrequited feelings’ is such an enduring subject for stories.

In the game, when you defeat Simone, there isn’t much of an immediate followup. The final scene with 9S killing the two childlike machines is a good one for setting up the later developments, and also for creating more of a contrast between the affects of the two MCs. 9S is interesting because he has much more access than nearly anyone to the inner lives of the machines, but also he is one of the most insistent that the machines don’t have real subjectivity, and they’re playing that up here in the anime.

Episode 5

Now we get Adam and Eve for real! In this episode we get a couple of their rooftop scenes from the game. The anime has more room for character animation, to express Eve’s fidgety boredom.

We see a lot of books in this episode. In the first scene, Adam is reading Being and Nothingness, by Sartre. Later, in Pascal’s village, we see his bookshelf contains Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and five volumes of Republic, presumably Plato’s.

In the final scene of Adam and Eve, Eve is grumbling about having to read a book titled Natural History, possibly the one by Pliny the Elder. Adam is reading a book titled Vice Amply Rewarded, which is the subtitle of the novel Juliette by the Marquis de Sade.

OK, the plot of the episode proper! This one’s kinda great! We finally get the introduction of Pascal and the pacifist village, but rather than simply reprise the game, we add some cool new elements...

We open with 2B and 9S making their way across the ravine to the department store.

They changed the geography a bit here. In the game, you meet the pacifist machines right after defeating Simone, and their area can be accessed by a series of bridges from the Amusement Park; later it connects to the City Ruins and the Forest zones. The department store is very small, and it’s a route to the forest zone, but it is notably where you first meet Emil, who bursts out of the inside of a Machine Lifeform’s head which really underlines the similarity. It’s also where Emil made his underground monument to Kainé, full of Lunar Tears, where 2B will eventually be buried. But the above ground part of it is pretty barebones, just a large room.

9S excitedly picks over toothbrushes, plates, pans and even a PS4 - the first platform that NieR Automata was released on.

He asks 2B to call him ‘Nines’, but she refuses. (She knows she’ll have to kill this 9S eventually, and she’s trying not to get attached.)

The department store is much larger in the anime...

9S explains how he wants to go shopping with 2B and buy her a T-shirt after the war. His body language is really cute. 2B shuts him down with the usual ‘emotions are prohibited’.

They meet the Machine Lifeform village, where they’re all waving white flags. The Machine Lifeforms in the village are a mix of 2D animation and cel-shaded CG, and the first half of the episode is 9S getting over his skepticism that there could be peaceful machine lifeforms disconnected from the network, and deciding to try to learn more about them.

One interesting difference from the game is that here, the Stubbies actually come in a variety of sizes...

...cementing the roleplaying of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ in the village. We see various machines in outfits either painted on or made out of scraps of cloth; there’s a couple of cameos of sidequest characters from the games, notably the pair of sisters with pink and blue bows:

Sadly the part of the dynamic where the Medium Stubby was the big sister and the Large Stubby was the younger sister seems to have been dropped.

After this montage, things diverge from the game in a really interesting way. 2B and 9S see a ravine by the edge of the village, and descend, where they find...

...a tree with an Emil in it! 9S determines he can hack this Emil because something something radio waves, and dives in to find memories of NieR Replicant while Emil (Sacrifice) plays:

The desert outside Facade.

The garden in the Shadowlord’s ‘castle’, the last thing the gang saw before Devola and Popola’s betrayal.

Devola and Popola’s library, with the roof broken open by the Shadowlord’s attack; a highly traumatic location for Emil since this is where he was forced to use his power to turn Kainé to stone to protect the village.

Kainé and Grimoire Weiss; likely the scene where Kainé was revived after the time skip. Kainé acknowledged Emil immediately despite his changed form.

Devola and Popola in the library, their faces obscured, representing their deceit. The one time Emil entered this office, they told him and Kainé to sleep outside the village.

Nier himself, taking care of Yonah. Not entirely clear when Emil would have seen this!

Emil forcibly discconects 9S, but 9S pulls up some data about him.

This is very different to what happens in the game, where 2B and 9S don’t have the first clue what Emil is and almost attack him on their first meeting! The pane on the left shows Emil’s mansion and the fountain which conceals the entrance to the hidden lab; the pane in the middle shows the multiple-Emil head form he adopts during the optional battle in the desert before changing to Halua chained up underground; the pane on the right shows Emil and Halua in their human forms before the evil child experiments. 9S refers to Emil as a weapon, an ‘it’.

At that point Pascal arrives and explains the pacifist village worship Emil(!) and that’s why Pascal stopped fighting. We get a flashback which uses a high contrast saturated colour scheme reminiscent of Takashi Koike, one of the coolest sequences in the whole anime.

Just like P-chan/Beepy did when rising from the mountain, Emil says one word: 生きて (live!) The magical force of this command causes Pascal to awaken. We get to see an older version of the Machine Lifeform army, where the fundamental modular unit is a Pascal-like chassis:

Pascal is given the ability to fear death. And he’s terrified by his indifference to the lives of his comrades. だから。。。

...he becomes a pacifist, and founds the village.

As Pascal is pulled back to the other machines, one of whom has found a music box (from an earlier sidequest at the resistance camp... I have so much useful knowledge in my brain lmao), 9S retreats to a nearby rooftop and derides them as selfish as it starts raining in a big old pathetic fallacy moment.

He says separating from the network and yet forming a village is a contradiction. 2B and pod 153 reply that it is impossible to live alone. 9S’s vision flickers with a glitch, showing the department store briefly...

He awkwardly tries to cover for it by making a kinda childishly flirty comment towards 2B - one that underlines the distance that still exists between them and 9S’s sense of loneliness. 2B gets it and instructs Pod 042 to mark the department store so that one day in the future, they really might go shopping there...

But we end the scene in an indirect mirror shot of 2B looking after him with a grim expression.

She knows that isn’t happening. (Don’t think too hard about the perspective of this shot lmao.)

As 2B and 9S return to the village, they see one of the machine children trying to keep the music box to itself...

Pascal is hopelessly ill-equipped to stop the conflict and the children fight; inevitably the music-box is broken.

The androids observe that, even in the pacifist village where there is no war against the androids, conflicts still break out just due to conflicting interests. 9S almost intervenes, but is interrupted by a message from Operator 21O.

Finally we have the last scene with Adam and Eve.

The post-credits puppet show omake scene depicts the effect of the self-destruct input, which causes 9S’s shorts and 2B’s skirt to get blown up ingame. This leads to sexy illustrations of both androids...

Unfortunately Emil gets the same idea.

We get ending Y from the game, where Emil kills everyone on Earth. I think this would be incomprehensible if you haven’t done Emil’s mission in the game.

All in all, a really cool episode. I loved the style of Pascal’s flashback and it’s cool to flesh out his character a bit more. Creating a connection between Emil and the pacifist machines is fascinating. The game definitely intimates towards a connection between Emil and the Machine Lifeforms from the moment Emil is introduced, and given that Emil was fighting the aliens, it seems very likely that they built the Machine Lifeforms in his image. But I don’t know of anywhere this is actually spelled out explicitly (and it’s kind of contradicted if the old model of Machine Lifeform looked like Pascal). Still, if that was true... in a sense you could even say the Machine Lifeforms give Emil - the last surviving human, permanently kept in this child state by his magical immortality - a way of growing up!

Also it’s nice to see anime Kainé lol.

I had a lot of doubts about this adaptation at first, and the conditions it’s being made in are pretty dire honestly, but despite all that, they are genuinely managing to add something that makes the adaptation a worthwhile addition. They’re being reasonably judicious with the action, which lets it be really flashy when they do show it; I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do with characters like Gruen and the Forest Kingdom later. Most importantly, they seem to be getting the tone right.

If we’re up to episode 5 and we’ve only just met Pascal, I can only assume they won’t cover the entire game in this one anime. I suspect they’ll probably just take it up to the end of Route A/B - at least, I hope they don’t try to cram the whole of Route C into a couple of episodes.

Anyway, really glad this is turning out to be good after all. I still need to write up NieR Automata on my NieR guide pages and I’ll definitely be including this anime when I do.

#nier automata #nier automata ver 1.1a #anime #nier #nier automata anime #nier automata spoilers #computer games

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