Heavenly Delusion Review

Hirotaka Mori's series does its best work in layout. Production I.G build a collapsed Japan out of specific, researched ruin: a drowned shopping arcade, a highway with saplings coming through the asphalt, a love hotel still lit by a working generator, all composited with a depth of field that makes the two leads look genuinely small inside it. Against that, the facility sequences are flat, bright and clean, and the cut between the two registers before any dialogue explains the connection.

The creatures are the smartest design choice in it, smeared white shapes that never resolve into an animal, animated with a weight that makes every encounter read as a physical emergency rather than a fight scene. Maru and Kiruko are a superb pairing, rude and funny and dependent on each other in a way the show keeps complicating, and the reveal about whose body Kiruko is living in reframes every earlier scene without cheating.

Tokio and Mimihime inside the school are slower but the dread builds properly. The problem is the ending, which is not one. Thirteen episodes set up the relationship between the facility and the ruin, hint at the answer and then simply stop, and the season also detours into sex comedy in a register that half its audience found hard to take. Judged as a piece of craft it is close to the top of its year. Judged as a story it is one third of one.