I live for this level of weirdness. Two years ago, the launch of 7G cellular service ripped apart the world. Different regions have suffered different effects. For instance, the people of Agano all become animals when they turn 21. A town once an hour away now takes days to reach across warped landscapes and over inland seas. The skies at night are filled with moons and encroaching galaxies.
Most places have taken these changes apace. If you can’t do anything about it, you may as well welcome life as a bear or grow content with your brain becoming a fertile bed for mushrooms. In the midst of this, four girls refuse to give up on finding their friend, who ran away just before the 7G disaster. When they get a lead where she is, they take off on a disused train into an unknown world.
I love when a story like this can be told so earnestly. There’s this strange scene where the girls notify a guinea pig that her human granddaughter is still alive and…the weirdness of it all disarms you so much that you forget to have your guard up. I wasn’t prepared for how bittersweet it was to see a guinea pig looking at a family photo and missing everything that once was.
On their way home, the girls argue about how long guinea pigs can live, and how much time she might have left, until the argument turns to whether they should even be talking about this in the first place. That overflow of conversation might be a bit much for some viewers – this is a very dialogue-based show. Yet it gives us an idea of how people still live inside this trippy, unknowable world. It’s not just world-building, it’s the step beyond it: witnessing people who already live in a built world day to day.
“Train to the End of the World” isn’t based on a pre-existing manga or light novel. It’s an original work commissioned for the 150th anniversary of Japan’s first railway. When the U.S. does things like this, we usually get a light infomercial and a commemorative coin, not a thoughtful and weirdly uplifting cosmic horror.
There are metaphors you can read into it all – being stuck on your phone all the time stops you from riding the train to visit new places, but they only serve as premise. When those new places waffle between magical realist landscapes and the horrors of the abyss, I’m not sure how much service this is really doing for Japanese railroads. I’m glad they took what could’ve been a simple assignment and went wild with its ideas.
A series like this can be so audacious it breaks genres, or it can fall flat on its face. The light comedy works, the premise is engaging, the world is strikingly realized, the storytelling is energetic, the relationships between the four girls feel real, and some scary bits are unnerving. It doesn’t feel too close to anything I’ve seen before. You can make comparisons to the train sequence in “Spirited Away”, though only for a moment.
If anything, its breakneck conversation and the thin border between the funny and the melancholic sparks of recent Natsume Shingo series like “Sonny Boy” or “Tatami Time Machine Blues”. Even that comparison only goes so far. The aesthetic of “Train to the End of the World” is more modern, the underlying feel of it less nostalgic and more (potentially) uplifting, and it’s becoming more narratively focused rather than metaphorically so. Four episodes in and things have gotten very weird – even momentarily repulsive, but still maintaining a strangely wholesome vibe. Given the main characters, it’s also thankfully avoided anything exploitative thus far.
Every season I look for an anime that wants to break things with a purpose. We don’t always get one of them, but “Train to the End of the World” is a good candidate. It’s different from most in the category because of its more optimistic characters. All the Spring 2024 anime are at least a couple episodes in by now. So far, this is my favorite of the season.
“Train to the End of the World” is on Crunchyroll.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 