Introduction
It is the year 2100, and on the colonized Moon, a project is under way to explore new aspects of energy. Amami Kurau is the daughter of the chief scientist on the project, and on her 12th birthday, she accompanies her father to the lab to observe the experiments. Then something goes awry, and Kurau is struck by twin bolts of light. In the aftermath, her father is dismayed to find that his daughter is no longer his daughter. Rather, her body is now home to two energy entities with fantastic powers.
(Source: ANN)
Audience reviews
8 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
SepTheSep
Forget LoTR... because this here is the ultimate drinking game challenge! You see - the humble game, in spite of its ultimate purport, must not lay the player to ruin (read: on the floor) in the space of a few hours, for that would constitute a plain old piss-up - but neither can it overly entertain, at which point the undertaking is jeopardised through detraction. Kurau Phantom Memory is, as an unsuspecting anime fan might find out, the perfect tool for the job, with enough writing mishaps to fill an abandoned diamond mine and spanning what seems like four times the amount of airtime over what one would expect. From the very first episode the key "pint action" moments establish themselves and then continue to amplify in both magnitude and frequency as the episodes roll on. Something impor…
Read at the sourceFirechick12012
In all the years I've spent watching anime, or movies and TV in general, I've found plenty of genres that I don't particularly gravitate to, with one of them being sci-fi. It's not that I hate sci-fi series, but I often find them hard to understand. A lot of sci-fi stuff seems to rely too much on technobabble to tell their stories, almost like the creators of said stories only want to appeal to hardcore sci-fi fans who would actually understand the overly scientific terminology they use rather than people who just want to watch/read an interesting story and follow a set of characters. A lot of this is why I couldn't get into something like Orbital Children, as it relied way too much on just dumping science-y exposition and pretentious philosophical concepts at you without giving you time t…
Read at the sourceUnconfidence
No spoilers.
So, I went into this blind, and just from the title and date I wasn't expecting much. And in the beginning I sort of didn't know if I liked it. But the concepts were interesting and the execution seemed on the spot. So I stuck it out, and I am incredibly glad I did, as I'd say this is one of the best anime I've seen.
The characters are all well-done and believable, without being too humanized for extradimensional aliens in human bodies. The show really manages to capture the sense of gravity in everyday interactions, and especially in interpersonal relationships for these Rynax. Unlike so many other shows where the alien is just magically capable of human levels of expression, the sort of simplistic expression of emotions between Kurau and Christmas seem really true to form,…
Read at the sourcethegl25
Produced by studio Bones and directed by Yasuhiro Irie, Kurau phantom memory is a slow burn. If you come here looking for cool super-powered fight scenes, you’ll find a couple here, but for the most part you’ll be disappointed. Not saying that kurau phantom memory is a bad anime but it’s like Moribito and Gunslinger Girl in the idea that you might first think that you are getting a cool action show but instead you’re treated with story and heavy emphasis on character development. Instead of various fights with alien superpowers the story revolves around Kurau and her “pair” Christmas as they try to avoid capture from the GPO. The GPO hunts Kurau, Christmas and others because they are powerful life forms called Renax. Renax are powerful aliens that have the powers of flight, super strength,…
Read at the sourcejyagan0
The science fiction elements form the backdrop for the story, and there are bits of mecha, and routine space travel to a populated moon and some people with extraordinary powers. There are some heroic conflicts and battles and issues of both good and bad effects of technology, but ultimately this is a story about the relationships between people, loss, loneliness and ultimately happiness. This story touches me on a very emotional level - much more than most. There are many plot twists about who is friend or foe, and as in real life, it is often not that simple as people grow. Christmas is a recurring theme, but one of both great happiness and great sadness. The story arc was written as a single season, and all the episodes advance the overall story line, and everything reaches a satisfying…
Read at the sourcexxAnjixx
Oh boy, where to start?
Characters: Boring and disappointing for the most part. Which is very sad when in the first few episodes there is much potential in Kurau, the heroine of the series. Literally the first image in the series is of Kurau standing alone on a building structure high above the busy flying cars of a future city, apathetic to what should be dangerous to any normal human. Very Ghost in the shell, Major Kusanagi visually......also there are doves flying in the backround. Which you understand later what that scene represents in the story, but this is the moments of the first episode, so I was thinking more along the lines of John Woo and Kurau was about to do a slow motion dive through a skylight. Taking out a room full of bad guys with dual pistols. (End Tangent)
Later on…
Read at the sourceDarkGyraen
Kurau was one of those anime I went into with certain expectations, thinking that it’d be a more action based anime, based off some artwork and what I’d heard. Instead, I got a deeper show that didn’t focus on the actions as much, but was even more enjoyable than I had anticipated.
Story: Kurau takes place a couple of hundred years in the future, where multiple world wars and uprisings have given birth to a single power, the GPO, who provides security for the earth and the colony on the moon. Beyond that, Agents are often used for jobs that may fall outside of the GPO, and when the series starts, that’s the role that Kurau plays. Given that description, Kurau doesn’t seem to be any different than any other futuristic anime out there, and would seem plain on the surface. Fortunately, there…
Read at the sourceYuunagi
"I am free, but I do not wish to be alone."
The premise: In the far future when mankind has advanced technologically to colonize the moon, two girls are hunted by the authorities for their mysterious supernatural powers.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons why this series doesn't get enough attention; it's so easy to dismiss KURAU Phantom Memory as just another generic sci-fi/action title. Of course, there are several familiar elements such as mecha, power plant disasters, conspiracy theories, beings from another world, and rogue subjects from questionable scientific experiments, but the lack of any elaborate explanations only goes to show that most of these technical details are mere plot devices. At its core, KURAU Phantom Memory is a drama about personal relationships.
Although many…
Read at the source