Ura works each day at the Restoration Department in his artificial world, rediscovering the lost history of Earth within corrupted digital archival footage. Little does he know, Earth is closer than Ura realizes.
I watched Pale Cocoon a little over a decade ago, and much like Hotarubi no Mori e, it was a short film I suddenly had the urge to re-watch.
Well, that’s actually a lie – I wanted to see if I still saw the same things nearly 11 years ago that I now see today when I watch pieces of media – or rather, if I could find something that reflected our current reality even in the slightest.
I found what I was looking for, and it is a lot more optimistic than I had hoped for.
Pale Cocoon Anime Movie Review
Pale Cocoon is a film that oddly enough, takes place on the moon. Although, the characters don’t know that yet.
And it seems like they never will, since those who (could have) discovered the truth quit the Excavation and Archival Divisions long ago.
I guess where I find that Pale Cocoon differs from the normal post-apocalyptic genre TV shows is that the film is a mix of real-world truth and lies. There is an opening statement where one of the main characters, Ura, who works in the Restoration Department mentions that all human life was believed to exist in the sea.
That is a universal truth in our world, and in this short film, as well.
Some say that the embryonic fluid babies are incubated in for 9 months during development mimics water, as they exit their mother’s womb through the birth canal. Likewise, in real life mythology, folklore, and the very ancient histories of literally just a mere 100 years ago, most people believed in the Waters of Chaos beneath our living realm. People believed that there was a firmament above separating us from the heavens, and beneath it the Waters of Chaos were where new souls were born after arriving there to “die”.
The Water Dragon that guards the Waters of Chaos is even called ‘Tiamat’ in some legends, which should sound familiar to those who have seen Shinkai’s film “Kimi no Na wa”, or “Your Name”.
Now as for where the lie comes in, humanity in Ura’s timeline believe that it is better to live below on the deepest levels of their structure, toward the sea. Many people have moved down there, but our characters of Ura and Riko never mention knowing anybody who actually currently lives there.
Even Ura’s friend who helps him over an intercom in the Restoration Department expresses wanting to quit “this job” with the inference being that he would rather go live by the sea. It seems many people who work in the archives eventually become depressed after seeing the life humanity once had, and instead retire to the deepest depths of their artificial structure on the moon.
Again, they don’t know they live on the moon – in a place called “Sea of Tranquility” and that they are most likely not the last humans, after all. After finding out the truth, Ura presumably dies due to the malfunction of anti-gravity equipment just above their settlement’s surface.
Moon Colonies Eventually Turn into Concentration Camps
Ura blatantly calls his dismal, gray, and factory-like reality a concentration camp. He feels like a prisoner, simply clocking in and out, the only hope – the only hint of life and color coming from images of earth centuries before he was born.
Ura mentions that maybe he became obsessed with the old earth, or “Ao Tamago” (“Blue Egg”) because he wanted to believe a piece of the old history still survived. Clinging to an old book he finds, Ura eventually leaves the artificial structure and reaches the dome-like structure on the surface alongside the ruined Pale Cocoon mothership that brought his ancestors there centuries ago.
Riko, Ura’s (Ex? Estranged?) girlfriend who is disillusioned with life and wishing to quit her Restoration Division job, lies on the floor all day in a corridor in the exact location where her grandmother died. Apparently according to Riko, generations ago people could still live on the moon’s surface. The equipment still worked fine then, according to the music video Ura finds after it taking days to restore.
It became unstable to live above the artificial structure within view of earth, and it is heavily implied that Riko’s grandmother fell to her death, just as Ura soon will once the equipment malfunction rectifies itself, and he stops floating in the air.
A Nuclear Disaster Event in the Future?
Since there seems to be “an event” in the future around 2218 A.D. that causes the earth to “turn to rust” and become uninhabitable. The Pale Cocoon is the first colony seemingly around the year 2313 A.D. to enter the “Sea of Tranquility” but something went wrong with the ship, if we are to believe Yamaguchi Yoko’s old broadcast.
Since there was a generational disconnect between living on the moon’s surface and learning the history of earth’s past save a few corrupted digital archival files, it seems like Ura and Riko’s generation have no clue they were never meant to permanently stay on the moon.
This reminds me a lot of The 100 Season 1 plot, where 100 youth ‘criminals’ are sent from a space station orbiting earth back down to the ground to verify if it’s inhabitable after a world-encompassing nuclear war created by a rouge AI program turned it into a “rusted” wasteland 100 years ago.
If you’ve seen the show, you will know that people survived the cataclysm on earth, and the population was massive in the North-Eastern/Southern part of America until Skaikru showed up and started murdering everybody though countless, petty wars and misunderstandings. There were even people living underground in a military bunker, who couldn’t leave because they were not acclimated to the radiation like the Sky People were.
Who is to say that the earth in Ura and Riko’s world isn’t inhabited right now? Especially since as Ura sees in his suspended state – that it is back to the “blue egg” it is supposed to be?
Ura could have brought hope back to the people who quit working on a solution and lost hope to maybe fix the shuttle and fly back to earth. But instead, he is stuck, suspended in their trapped dome – the artificial moon colony turned concentration camp due to lack of knowledge and apathy by his fellow community members.
Strangely enough, there is a line in the film where Ura mentions that the sun disappeared – an event that has happened in world history of the past and according to some suspicious commercials airing, could possibly happen again today. (We even have China placing artificial suns in the sky, while Bill Gates wants to block out the sun, for some odd reason. Don’t forget Elon’s proposed moon colony! …ugh.)
It’s funny in an ironic way that the one person who never lost hope, ultimately dies with the knowledge he discovered that could save the moon community from their depression and reinvigorate them to find a way back home to earth.
But, what do you think?
Why do you think people stopped talking about the surface world and earth after the anti-gravitational equipment stopped working on the moon’s surface?
Did the moon colony devolve into a totalitarian concentration camp, around then?
Why did the Pale Cocoon never make a return trip home if the community was always meant to have more people? Was it sabotaged before that could happen?
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☆ In Asian Spaces
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