Anime Spotlight #83: Godzilla - Singular Point

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Animeister.

I said back in my Shin Godzilla review that it was my last live-action Goj-Year-ra project review of the year. And with my having to trash two months of scheduling to design Dara, Lillianna, Isolde, Mirabelle, and Break, and finish writing the first eight chapters of Darkness In Crimson: I Reincarnated As Prey In A Fantasy World, So I Charmed the Vampire Queen for my one thousand post milestone, I had all but decided it would be the end of Goj-Year-ra, period.

But things worked out amazingly well, so the project is back for some Netflix anime action, starting today with Singular Point and finishing a November of Fridays with the film trilogy.

But to understand "the anime you need a PhD to understand" (which sounds like a layman's gross oversimplification of an excuse to not watch or like said anime, because I don't have a PhD in Computer Science, Cryptography, Robotics, Mathematics, or Quantum Science, but I have a decent academic grasp of enough concepts, and an active enough imagination to fill in the gaps, plus the characters do that folded paper and pencil analogy from every multiverse and time travel movie ever, just with a skewer and a piece of Jell-O because it communicates the timey-wimey stuff better with a more dimensionalized object and foreshadows an awful outcome because Jell-O is theoretically edible and this is a Godzilla anime...not that Godzilla ever ate anyone, but...), uh...yeah; to understand why Godzilla: Singular Point is the way it is (heavy in scientific, pseudo-scientific, and theoretical jargon from multiple disciplines and featuring barely a hint of depth or connection between the human characters), one must first understand who its author is (both of the script and the Japanese-only novelization that apparently goes into more detail about the nature of the kaiju depicted in the series).

Reading up on Toh EnJoe, he is essentially Japan's answer to Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, though Singular Point takes a lot conceptually from Lovecraft's cosmic horror philosophy (not so much with the overtly hostile racism, which, I should not have to tell you the morality of that subject in 2026) and jargon-heavy writing style, and has dialogue reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's nonsense approach to logic (digesting food you haven't eaten yet, animals that do the opposite of what they do because they don't exist where they're perceived, questions that travel to the future to become their own answers, etc.). To be kind, the man seems a genius with no qualms about displaying his breadth and depth of knowledge, but such a clinical approach (even if I find the high-concept aspects of the end result fascinating in their own right) does not lend itself to continuous engagement, worthwhile characterization, or broadly appealing entertainment.

Getting into Singular Point itself, I'll begin as I often do, with a nod to the music. The expected Ifukube stingers are here, and hit as they should, but the opening ("in case..." by BiSH) is a banger that reminded a bit of Casey Williams' RWBY intros. I didn't care for the end credits song, so I skipped to the next episode every time, but the animation is apparently full of franchise and genre references. I'm not going back to look, so...here:

As for what I could comprehend of the plot, when a grizzled polymath named Ashihara dies, two employees of the Otaki Factory repair company begin to investigate his estate, discovering his odd research notes (which seem to consist of pages of scribbled eyes and strange number sequences) and an eerie recording of a children's folk song ("ALAPU UPALA" by Annette Phillip) that begins broadcasting from a secondary location (a research facility with a kaiju skeleton in the basement).

Unfortunately, the broadcast suggests that EnJoe might be an Evil Dead fan, because soon after, the sea turns red and begins spawning kaiju. First, it's Rodan (with increasing size, numbers, and adaptability to the atmosphere, until they swarm the globe by the hundreds). Also, Manda is there sometimes. Then the red spreads to the air as particulate pollution that can warp reality, and we see creatures like an Anguirus (his best design ever), a swarm of Kumonga (with blue blood that turns into a Hedorah-looking hive mind construct, which is weird and awesome), what looks like a cross between Gabara and the GMK version of Baragon, and finally, the calamity himself, Godzilla, who evolves throughout the second half of the series like Shin Godzilla, ultimately achieving a sort of unhinged, crocodilian form, and has all of the aura from the tenth episode onward, because if I'm understanding even half of the jargon and quantum theory correctly, this series' Godzilla is basically Darkseid. Like, the Godzilla we see onscreen is just the three dimensions of his actual, thirteen-ish-dimensional presence that can fit into human reality, he exists to destroy anything that attempts to comprehend him (kind of a meta take on Millennium Era Godzilla's apparent purpose), and he cannot be killed or permanently harmed by anything that originates from lower-dimemsional space.

Meanwhile, the human-shaped jargo-position dispensers do what badly-written humans in Godzilla things do, and with the help of a couple of AI assistants (because Singular Point was written and released before artificial intelligence became an obvious plague on humanity—which reminds me: I learned today that an AI Return Of the Living Dead sequel exists, as if that franchise needed to get worse) with Jet Jaguar and Moguera bodies, the dead(?) scientist's notes, some cubes that break the conservational laws of physics by borrowing energy, matter, and data from the past and future, a sentient supercomputer with multiversal personality disorder that may or may not be a rogue piece of Godzilla somehow, by turning 69 into a moebius strip (yes, really), and figuring out the Konami code to mix the contents of the Orthogonal Diagonalizer (same initials and appearance as the Oxygen Destroyer, but I think it does something anti-Lovecraftian to the red mist, like converging divergent or parallel geometries to access higher dimensions or whatever), they save and/or ruin Japan's future, and the season (EnJoe teased there would be another one in production, but it's been five years and Studios Bones and Orange probably have other things on their plates right now) cliffhangers on a work-in-progress Mechagodzilla (it looks like the Shōwa design with some Heisei flavor, but is suggested to maybe have a Kiryu-like origin because there were hints that the 1954 attack is canon in Singular Point, and those bones kept being a thing).

Yeah, Godzilla: Singular Point is dry and dense for a thirteen-episode series/season, does nothing meaningful with its human characters, and has its boring moments (especially if you can't grasp what the fuck anyone is talking about, and/or can't stay awake), but it's also insanely, enjoyably high-concept, and I wouldn't mind if someone wanted to yank Season Two out of a nonexistent distant future so I could see where the story will go from here.

Please Stay Tuned for more monster action, and as always, continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Patreon, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Animeister,

Out.