I am back with another anime highlight and this time I have chosen to highlight the dark dystopian thriller, Psycho Pass. Check out this amazing amv from Veritable Galanthus below:

Psycho Pass takes place in a frighteningly believable future.  Humans and society have become so dependent on technology and, in this show, on the Sibyl system.  Each person has a psycho pass which is a meter that measures their mental health.  The Sibyl system, which is everywhere, continually scans and monitors the people and their psycho passes.  Anyone with a Psycho pass lower than a 100 is considered healthy.  A high level psycho pass is flagged by the Sibyl system as a latent criminal and police officers are sent after them.  Even if someone hasn’t actually committed a crime, if their psycho pass is high, they can be sent to therapy, imprisoned or, in the worst case scenario, executed on the spot.  The police are given weapons,  called dominators, that allows them to scan people’s psycho pass and the gun (the Sibyl system) will determine which course of action they can take like stun or execute.

The police force units that handles these situations are made up of Investigators and Enforcers.  Enforcers are people with high psycho pass levels and are considered latent criminals.  Instead of imprisonment, they decide to work as Enforcers and back up the Investigators.  They are the muscle of the team.  The story centers on unit 1 group of Investigators and Enforcers.

This anime is dark, gritty and extremely intelligent.  I love the characters, and the storyline is so well crafted.  When I first saw it, I was immediately struck with how eerily close to our on current society and how much we depend on technology.  In this society, the case is extreme because people don’t know how to deal with stress and bad situations since they are essentially shielded from it.  It seems peaceful and utopian, but, in a story like this, it definitely has a dark underbelly.

Character Development

The characters in this anime are so well done.  Each of them have a interesting back story and are complicated and completely human.  They make mistakes and are flawed, but they are characters that most people can really identify with.  There are three main characters I would like to focus on and they are Shinya Kogami, Akane Tsunemori and the villain, Shogo Makishima.

Shinya Kogami

Shinya Kagami (or Kagami Shinya) is the main male lead, and is very reminiscent of Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop at least in physical attributes. He is strong, intelligent, has sharp instincts that have been honed from having formally been an Investigator who has been downgraded to an Enforcer.  His story is tragic and, in many ways, the center of the main plot line.  I won’t go into too much detail, but a tragic event caused his Psycho Pass to shoot into the latent criminal limit and completely changed his life.  His instincts are hardly ever wrong and that may be because he can think like the very latent criminals he is trying to catch.

Akane Tsunemori

We actually start the story following the rookie Akane Tsunemori as she joins the unit.  She is a new Investigator that graduated high in her class.  Her ranking could have allowed her to be whatever she wanted, but instead she joins the Public Safety Bureau and becomes an Investigator.  She’s very smart and very level headed.  She is probably the best in dealing with bad situations.  Her psycho pass hardly ever gets very high because she has a healthy way of dealing with the dark things she sees in her job.  In a way, she becomes the heart of the team in my opinion in terms of making a human decision because it is right even if it does not align up with Sibyl’s judgment.  We see this best in the first episode where she will not shoot the victim whose psycho pass shoots up into the lethal enforcement psycho pass territory due to the horrible things that was done to her.  There are times when Akane questions the system and Sibyl’s judgement especially after something happens to a friend of hers.

Makishima Shogo

Makishima Shogo is one of the most maniacal and clever villains I have come across.  His intelligence  wreaks havoc in this society.  Some call him an anarchist and some call him a sociopath.  In a way he is definitely both.  He is a rare sort of person, called a criminally asymptomatic person, whose psycho pass can not be determined by the Sibyl system as he can easily circumvent the law and system. He can kill a person right in front of a Dominator (Sibyl’s eyes) and it would read his psycho pass as being normal when it would normally have flagged him as having a extremely high psycho pass and authorize immediate execution.  In a way you understand him as being a conscientious objector, but in another way his methods are horrible.  Still, having such an intelligent villain makes the story so much more interesting.

References to other literature and media

One thing that I really found impressive was how referential Psycho Pass is to classical literature, philosophy and science fiction.  I found myself really enjoying when something is mentioned that I recognized and even found myself wanting to read some of the of the literature mentioned.  Here are some of the few references that I caught in psycho pass:

• When I first starting watching Psycho Pass, there were several shows and books I immediately thought of.  One of the movies that I thought this show resembled was Blade Runner.  I got a delightful surprise in episode 15 when Shogo Makishima talks about some of his favorite authors, one of which is Philip K Dick.  Philip K Dick wrote the science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is the book that Blade Runner is based off of.  In fact, his accomplice asks about an old movie made from it.
• The Jean Jacque Rousseau reference is made by both Masaoka and Makishima,and this philosopher is very fitting for this story.  Makishima references one of his quotes when he says “To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act.”  This is a very central theme to this story as humans have seemed to have lost the will to act on their own anymore.  Rousseau is also largely known for his Social Contract theory.  The Social Contract theory is the theory that the people and the government are bound together by a contract (our constitution is an example of such a contract).  He talks about the natural state people are in versus a more “civil” society where people give up some fundamental rights to a sovereign entity (government) to ensure that everyone works together for a peaceful society.  Well this is the extreme case where the people have signed over almost all of their rights and free will to the judgment of the Sibyl system.  In a way, Makishima, in his psychotic way, is a voice of opposition to this society.
• In the opening scene of the anime, we see Kogami facing off with Makishima.  We know this is an important moment even if we don’t know why or who the players are yet.  In this scene, Akane is doing a voice over of this encounter and she mentions that “they were not two ships passing in the night…”  This phrase is a reference to a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called The Theologian’s Tale in his collection of poetry called Tales of a Wayside Inn.
• Rene Descarte, a man considered the father of modern western philosophy, is briefly mentioned in the series and is in line with the sort of authors, philosophers and books that Makishima would like.
• Shakespeare is referenced early on in the series, but what I found interesting is that most Shakespearian references made in shows are to the main plays that most people know like Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet.  This show references Titus Andronicus, a play that is less well known and much more fitting to the theme of the episodes it is mentioned in.
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is mentioned quite a few times in this show.  One of the major references to it is of a Doctor of Balnibarbi. The Doctors of Balnibarbi would perform strange scientific experiments.  Makishima mentions how a Doctor of Balnibarbi would sew two brain halves together in experiments and this is mentioned in a very relevant part of the show though I won’t mention anything more than that for spoiler purposes.

And there were so many more references that I haven’t even mentioned.  This made me enjoy the show even more.

So if you are looking for a dark, intelligent thriller with characters and a plot you can enjoy check out Psycho Pass.