PSYCHO-PASS season 1 is absolutely fantastic.

 

It's long overdue that I finally make a blog post about anime. It's such a vast medium that covers a dynamic array of topics and scenarios and there's almost an anime for everyone and everything. So, the question that I asked myself is in such massive medium, where would the appropriate and ideal starting point be? I decided that the best possible anime to look at first would be a personal favourite of mine, PSYCHO-PASS! Heavily inspired by a multitude of various books and movies such as Blade Runner, Psycho-Pass season 1 first aired way back in October 2012 and ran until March 2013. 

Set within a very dystopian future wherein Japan is governed by an extremely powerful biomechanical computer network which uses a cymatic scan to measure the the biometrics of Japanese citizens' brains and mentalities in order to assess their Psycho-Pass. This allows the Sybil System to judge the Crime Coefficient index, which in turn reveals the citizen's criminality potential with a neat colour-coded hue. Should the citizens hue turn cloudy, then it is judged that they are likely going to commit criminal acts and they are to be apprehended by Inspectors and Enforcers from the Crime Investigation Department of the Ministry of Welfare's Public Safety Bureau. Inspectors are in charge of the dispatched teams a s they research and investigate crime scenes and everyone involved. Enforcers are latent criminals that are allowed to join the CID provided that they don't attempt to run away and are confined to their personal quarters and the CID floor of the Nova tower when not on a mission. They serve under the Inspectors, following their instructions and protect them if needed. When on assignment both Inspectors and Enforcers carry guns known as Dominators. These special guns are part of the Sybil System with the system determining who can wield them as well as who's a big enough threat to fire upon. Dominators have a non-lethal paralyser mode and a lethal mode in which it leaves criminals a gory mess if there's anything left of them. Inspectors can fire upon Enforcers if the situation calls for it. 

Season one follows Division 1 of the Public Safety Bureau. We swiftly meet the naïve and yet good-natured rookie inspector, Akane Tsunemori within the first episode. During a case involving a kidnapped woman, Akane works with enforcers Shinya Kogami and Masaoka. As their Dominators judge the poor, traumatised kidnapped woman to be a threat, Kogami goes to shoot the victim only for Akane to knock Kogami unconscious and saving her from an undeserved death. She questions the judgement of the Sybil System and this comes into play thorughout the season. Seemingly random cases turn out to be linked with a criminal mastermind pulling strings behind the scenes and exposing the flaws of the system. This mastermind turns out to be a man whom Kogami had been chasing for quite some time and the man responsible for the death of his friend and colleague, Sasayama. 

Akane Tsunemori is a very intelligent young lady who is idealistic and quite positive, often butting heads with the much more experienced and harsh fellow inspector, Ginoza. She does work better with her enforcers, Shinya Kogami and Masaoka with Masaoka acting as a mentor to her. Akane can be viewed as a stand-in for the audience upon her initial episodes as she is thrust into the world of the CID and Public Safety Bureau, much like us the viewers and learns from the others as well as from experience on the job. Her character development is a pretty slow burn, but it's well worth it as she ends up becoming a capable, strong-willed and thoughtful inspector that's up to the task. Seeing her stand up to Ginoza was a great moment. 

As previously mentioned Akane's fellow inspector, Ginoza, is rather strict and vastly more experienced at the job than Akane. He can be quite cold towards the rookie, demeaning her and insulting her when she makes even small mistakes. It is revealed that he has a reason for being harsh as both his best friend, Kogami as well as his father, Masaoka were demoted from being inspectors to being enforcers and that he himself has a high capacity for being crime coefficient. This means that he doesn't want to see another fellow inspector demoted. 

Then there's former inspector turned enforcer, Shinya Kogami. Kogami is both highly intelligent, showing a stunning aptitude for detective work which would make Sherlock Holmes proud, and also incredibly apt at hand to hand combat. He keeps himself in great physical condition, training with the bots at the CID training facility on the highest difficulty setting. His keen mind allows the team to find out criminal motives and also determine their likely next moves. He's essentially the anti-hero, with his strong sense of justice influencing his decision to pursue the man responsible for his demotion at any cost overriding orders rom his team and the Sybil System. His obsession with catching Makishima led to his demotion in the first place as no one believed he was real until they had his image as proof. 

The Moriarty to Kogami's Sherlock Holmes is Shogo Makishima. Makishima is a cold, ruthless man obsessed with taking down the Sybil System by any means necessary. His influence is behind the vast majority of the events within the season with him supplying the means for criminals to carry out their crimes and rarely getting personally involved. Makishima felt alienated by the system due to it being unable to detect the fact that he's very much criminally inclined. It is his belief that the people have become unthinking automatons with no free will due to the Sybil System and wants them to be free-thinking, independent humans, liberated from the system. He also believes that his dangerous and deadly actions will alert people to the flaws of the system and force them to think for themselves without relying on it. To this end, using his own Psycho-Pass as reference, he invents some helmets that allow the wearer to us the Psycho-Pass of a nearby citizen to mask their own and allow them to commit crime undetected by Sybil. Whilst his intentions are quite noble and in fact truthful, his methods are quite the opposite, such as slitting the throat of Akane's good friend, Yuki Funahara, in front of her to test her resolve.  

The animation is top-tier with Production I.G. doing a fantastic job at bringing the world of Psycho-Pass to life. Combine that with the tight, well written script by Gen Urobuchi and you have a winner. The backgrounds were at times very reminiscent of sci-fi/cyberpunk genre movies such as Blade Runner, whilst also having a distinct uniqueness that allowed them to separate themselves and stand out on their own. The colouring was immaculate as it gave the dystopian world a colourful look, but with bleak, dark undertones that were very appropriate. The night time shots of the tower were gorgeous. I also really loved the way in which people's lives were shown to be always connected to the system, even down to how they dress and decorate their homes with holograms. I also love how it predicted the virtual worlds seen in VRChat, the Metaverse and others. It is quite easy to see the world of Psycho-Pass being a quite realistic version of the future should we ever create a system like Sybil. That's a scary thought.

I loved the fight scenes. The animation in the sequences was stunning and the choreography could put a lot of live-action movies to shame. The animators managed to convey some rather intricate moves, especially within the 2 showdowns between Kogami and Makishima, tremendously well. 

Psycho-Pass also manages to blend together multiple genres quite seamlessly. Those genres being crime, cyberpunk, mystery, psychological thriller and science-fiction. It's impressive just how well it managed to do so and is definitely at the top of my recommendations for each of those genres.