Wheee! Cartoon binge! Dennou Coil, Red Garden, and various favorite episodes from the Dini/Timm Superman late-Nineties series. I never got around to watching the fansubs of the last few episodes of Red Garden, so it's nice to know how that series ended. Very "Twilight of the Gods", really. The two-part OVA "Dead Girls" was pretty unexpected. I'm not sure what it was I was expecting - some sort of flashback or re-telling of the main story, maybe? But the delivered show was peculiar in a way which I can't really describe without massively spoiling the TV series. Dead Girls was an awful lot like Batman Beyond, actually. Cut maybe with Anne Rice.

But Dennou Coil. I'm kind of on the fence about how to rave about that show. It's like the demon spawn of My Neighbor Totoro and Serial Experiments Lain, half cheery Miyazaki-NHK children's extravaganza, half gloomy haunted cyberpunkish psychological mystery. On the one hand, bright spritely Ghibliesque crowd-pleasing spectaculars, and on the other hand, complicated emo wangst, tormented little kids in peril, and urban legends about dead girls. I'm not sure if the mainstream would eat it up, or be completely confused and repelled. It's utterly brilliant, but there was perhaps about a half-episode's too much of the wangst and emotional gnashing-of-teeth in the conclusion. It *needs* to be released in North America, but I'm not sure if it'd be successful. It bears strong structural and thematic resemblance to Fantastic Children, and that pretty much dropped into the marketplace & sank without a ripple.