Some of my favorite science fiction stories take one seemingly impossible premise and explore all the ways it ripples through everyday life, from Gattaca to The Leftovers. Netflix’s latest original anime is another perfect example of that trope.
From a surprise collaboration between two iconic anime studios, Sunrise and Shaft, Fool Night imagines a future world where the sun has long disappeared, leaving humanity with the unusual solution of turning volunteer humans into plants for oxygen. It’s a bleak setup, made all the more gripping by a visual identity that constantly juxtaposes human decay with budding flora. Netflix only provided us with the first three episodes (out of 12 total) for review, and I’m entirely hooked. Between its sharp character work, unsettling world-building, and melancholic atmosphere, Fool Night is shaping up to be one of the most striking new shows of Fall.
A chilling premise rooted in unsettling beauty
Based on the manga by Kasumi Yasuda and directed by Atsuyuki Yukawa, Fool Night is a surprisingly intimate story set against an enormous environmental catastrophe. Rather than throwing viewers into an expansive science fiction mystery, Yukawa takes his time introducing its main characters and how their lives become intertwined by circumstances neither could have anticipated. It’s a more methodical introduction than some might expect, offering plenty of room to establish the people at the center of a world literally steeped in darkness and comforted only by the discarded remains of the volunteers transformed into grotesque flora.
That’s the kind of setting Fool Night presents, a miserable environment governed by survival. With the sun gone, oxygen increasingly scarce, and most plant life dying off as a result, humanity has turned to a process called transfloration, allowing terminally ill volunteers to undergo a procedure that implants a seed inside their bodies for a payout of 10 million yen. Over the course of two years, that seed gradually grows until that person becomes what’s called a “spiritflor,” essentially a sprout that helps replenish the oxygen humans need to survive. It’s an extraordinary solution to an extraordinary problem, although the implications are considerably more disturbing when you see what it actually looks like.
Spiritflor are everywhere in Fool Night. Their bodies litter the streets, fill abandoned alleyways, and even occupy the stairwells and corridors of apartment buildings. Some look almost beautiful, with sprouts and foliage emerging from what remains of their human bodies. Others are considerably more grotesque, their former appearances barely recognizable beneath the vegetation. They’re like haunting reminders of the people who once lived there, transformed into something simultaneously beautiful and deeply unsettling. The worst part, of course, is that they’re still alive.
The series introduces its grotesque imagery ingeniously in its opening sequence, establishing how accustomed the world’s inhabitants are to their surrounding environment. Standing outside a guitar store, a young child named Toshio Kamiya insists to his friend Yomiko Horai that he’ll be a musician one day. It’s pure wishful thinking, and Yomiko tries to ground him, even as Toshio beams at the thought of future stardom. As they’re walking down an alleyway, with Toshio making little guitar noises and pretending to play as he twirls around, the lighthearted moment is juxtaposed with the bodies of spiritflor lining the fences around them.
It’s an especially eerie scene, with the children paying little mind to the grotesquery around them. They’ve presumably walked past these bodies countless times before, and that’s perhaps the most disturbing part of the entire sequence. This is simply what life looks like now. It’s an incredibly effective way of introducing the series’ central conceit without stopping to explain every little detail. The world has adapted to something that should be horrifying, and the children have grown up knowing nothing else.
Two sides of a dying world
What makes Fool Night immediately compelling isn’t just its grim premise and setting, but how sharply it uses the childhood friends Toshio and Yomiko to expose the class divide at the heart of its dying world. Now adults and reunited after years apart, the two represent opposite ends of transfloration’s bleak economy.
Toshio is trapped at the absolute bottom of society. A disillusioned factory worker crushed by poverty, systemic debt, and an abusive home life, he’s left with no viable future other than to sell his body to the state. In doing so, Toshio trades his remaining two years of humanity for a 10-million-yen payout that he barely gets to keep — only to get robbed almost immediately following the procedure. Yomiko, by contrast, sits comfortably on the clinical side of the glass as a researcher at Transflora Medical Facility 4, approving candidates and overseeing transfloration procedures, all while the morality of what she’s doing hangs over her head like a creeping vine gathering blight.
Their contrasted situations give the series its strongest dramatic friction. Early on, Yomiko is defined by a chilling professional detachment. When a colleague admits he feels like they killed someone after performing a procedure, she coolly insists they’ve “extended” a life, hiding behind the rhetoric of personal choice. It’s easy for her to rationalize transfloration when the patients are strangers, and that’s precisely why Toshio’s sudden appearance in her waiting room hits so hard. Reuniting after years apart only to find someone she genuinely cares for cornered into becoming a plant shatters her clinical distance, turning an abstract ethical debate into an immediate personal crisis.
Rather than bogging down in misery, however, the show smartly pivots their reunion into an intriguing partnership. When Yomiko discovers that the procedure has left Toshio with the bizarre ability to hear the voices of spiritflor, she pulls him into the facility’s orbit. Alongside sour-faced Unsection Chief Jin Hiragishi, the two begin untangling the darker mysteries behind the program. It’s a sharp, character-first hook that grounds the show’s high-concept sci-fi in genuine human stakes, one saddled against the backdrop of a looming murder investigation that could change the world forever.
Sunrise and Shaft deliver
If there’s one thing that immediately separates Fool Night from other science fiction anime, it’s the sheer confidence of its visual presentation — though, it definitely helps that two of the most legendary animation studios collaborated on the production. Sunrise, best known for its work on Gundam and Cowboy Bebop, and Shaft, the same studio behind the Monogatari series and Virgin Punk, have more than enough history behind them. Seeing them come together on a project of this caliber is mindblowing, and the results so far more than live up to the occasion.
What impresses me most isn’t necessarily the scale of the animation, but how much attention the series pays to composition. There are so many shots that deliberately position characters in unexpected places, sometimes leaving enormous portions of the screen occupied by otherwise unimportant scenery. Rather than constantly following characters with the camera, Fool Night lets them exist within the environment, allowing the world around them to communicate just as much as the dialogue.
There’s a particularly good example when Yomiko speaks with the front desk clerk about midway into the first episode, asking whether Toshio had gone through with the transfloration procedure. It’s a relatively somber moment, with Yomiko and the desk clerk occupying just a small portion of the left side of the screen. Taking up almost the entirety of the composition is a plant just out of focus, filling the surrounding space rather than simply centering the shot on Yomiko’s back.
The same approach appears at the very start of Fool Night. As the child versions of Toshio and Yomiko walk down a fenced-off alleyway, Toshio launches into a short sprint like a musician would on a stage. Instead of directly following him, the camera tracks the fence on his left, moving along the cold steel as the jogging Toshio only takes up the right side of the frame. These are small decisions, but they help communicate the darker implications behind this captivating sci-fi dystopia and give the show a striking visual identity unlike anything I’ve seen before.
A slow-burning mystery that earns your patience
Fool Night isn’t in a rush to lay all its cards on the table. While early episodes drop breadcrumbs of the wider conspiracy surrounding an investigation into bizarre murders involving plant-based lacerations and a shadowy organization attempting to stop transfloration procedures, the series largely holds its burgeoning mysteries at bay until the final moments of episode three. Rather than feeling sluggish, that restraint pays off by offering you a firm grasp on how transfloration has warped the show’s society and why these two leads are so deeply entangled within it.
Three episodes in, it’s still too early to say where Fool Night will ultimately land, particularly with so much of its sunless world left unexplored, but what I’ve seen so far has me hooked. Its unsettling premise, wonderfully complicated characters, and gorgeous animation have already made for a compelling start. If the series can maintain this level of visual ambition while continuing to build on its central mysteries, I can’t wait to see where Fool Night goes next.
Fool Night hits Netflix on Nov. 26
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