"Casshern Sins" is a one and done 24-ep anime series from 2008, well before the streaming era. In today's world it'd show as 3 seasons of 8 eps. Its animation is rather unique with characters drawn in a soft, porcelain-like manner. It's captivating. And the several leads are all drawn to be beautiful/pretty and they compliment each other throughout (though there's no intimacy). The series is about an android society that succeeds humans in a post-apocalyptic world. The androids are very human-like with emotion and desires/wants. The first half of the series is pretty decent describing the scene where Casshern, one of three special killer androids, killed the cutie called Luna (the sun named moon), and this brought about The Ruin which is when androids start to decay and crumble. However, Casshern doesn't remember killing her or why he would. So, much of the series is him wandering the land to uncover the mystery, meeting interesting characters along the way. Each episode also finds him set upon by vengeful, menacing robots so there are a lot of pointless fight scenes because Casshern has the special feature of auto-healing. And for an android killing machine, he's built like a ballet dancer who's lithe and fleet when striking. Fight scenes are really more dance moves than brutality. And Casshern cuts a sympathetic figure, he's a gentle, thoughtful, even philosophical killing machine. In fact, the writers clearly embedded Christ imagery and symbolism within Casshern's story. And there's a unique story element about these three special androids. They have the ability to reproduce! This was the final element separating humans from androids, and the element most needed to finally rid the planet of humans for androids that breed. Unfortunately, this wasn't exploited as a plot element which leads me to the following observations. The back half of the series goes stupid and doesn't even make sense, the story loses its internal consistency, it's as if a whole new writing staff took over. Witness, IMDB only shows writing and directing credits for 8 of the 24 episodes! By the time you trudge to the end of this series, you won't even care how it ends, because it - doesn't - make - sense. And this makes it tough to rate. I'd rate the first 14 or so episodes high up there, like an 8. But the remaining episodes in whole would rate a low 2 or 3. So, since the series ended so architecturely poorly you have to give more weight to it than the series beginning. In fact, alot of shows start pooly but end strongly and get high ratings because of that, so the final episodes are how a series is remembered, and "Casshern Sins" will be remembered more for its technical animation excellence than its screenplay, and that's ashame.
