Stream It Or Skip It: ‘7 Seeds’ on Netflix, a Post-Apocalyptic Anime Saga with a Zillion Characters and Giant Scary Bugs

Netflix original 7 Seeds adds to the growing pile of anime that has accumulated on the streaming service in recent years. The series launches with a dozen episodes, and has potential to be an extensive epic — it’s based on Yumi Tamura’s manga of the same name, which numbers 35 volumes published from 2001-17, and won a Shogokukan award in 2006 for manga targeted specifically at teenage girls.

7 SEEDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An establishing shot of an unidentified city.

The Gist: A couple watches a baseball game on TV. A girl nuzzles her cat. A young man walks down an urban alleyway. A pianist plays a melancholy song. These may be the dwindling vestiges of memory. The girl with the cat awakens alone on a sinking ship, disoriented; she’s ushered to an inflatable life raft by a woman with long braids. Hazy flashbacks. Grim voiceover narration. A meteorite hurtles toward Earth.

And then, an insanely uptempo, chirping theme song best described as happy electro-emo-ska kicks in — a little weird for a grim, post-apocalyptic story, but we’ll ride with it. The girl is Natsu, a painfully shy teen. Botan is the braided woman. Two others join them on the raft: Semimaru, a sexist bully, and Arashi, a nice guy. All four of them appear to have amnesia. They paddle to a nearby island and search for water.

Elsewhere — on the same island, I assume — a girl, Hana, is running from a horde of skittering bugs roughly the size of Schnauzers. She outruns them, collects water from a waterfall and stream, then is attacked by stark-white, red-eyed praying mantises roughly as big as smallish trees. Tsunomata and Yanagi come to her aid, but Yanagi gets a stinger roughly the size of a bayonet in his back. He survives, but the sting seems to be amplifying his already aggro demeanor. They belong to a group of people camped on a large wooden raft attached to three inflatable rafts; the crazy-eyed and increasingly quarrelsome Yanagi leads an attempt to leave the island, but a storm wrecks their raft and washes them back. Yanagi falls into a pit full of giant mantises, but later returns to the group, apparently uninjured, and not at all happy, his cross expression conveying a grudge roughly the size of Gibraltar.

Meanwhile, in an unidentified metal room, six people awaken from cryogenic chambers. Unami, their leader, enters the room, but the others draw guns on him. Before he can say “What the hell is going on,” they fire. He hits the floor, cursing them. Cut to credits.

Our Take: OK, I’ll say it for Unami: What the hell is going on? 7 Seeds gives us sparse snatches of background, which is fine, because who needs a bunch of annoying exposition? But it throws 20-ish characters at us, and feels like a light, annoying tickle instead of a heavy, tantalizing tease. This pilot episode is a sketch in need of a few more details. It leaves us sorting names and faces instead of compelled to puzzle over the whys and hows of the premise.

Admittedly, I may not be used to the quick pace and brash editing style of anime, but a good story is compelling no matter the genre. A cursory Google search helped. Tamura’s comics were set in a future far enough ahead that new species developed; governments chose groups of people to be cryogenically preserved, presumably to repopulate the planet after it once again became inhabitable.

This is reasonably compelling stuff. Of the three groups we meet, two feature morally corrupt alpha-male types in dire need of comeuppance, so there’s some socio-political relevance among the sci-fi fodder here; somebody needs to righteously Me Too the living crap out of these patriarchy creeps pronto, please. I felt compelled to binge away, thirsty for more information about the giant bugs, and what giant whatevers might possibly have evolved below the ocean, and why humans squabble perpetually even in the face of a humongous survival challenge. This debut could easily have been double the length.

One recommendation: Pick the English dub for 7 Seeds, because reading subtitles makes following a complex narrative more difficult.

Sex and Skin: None, although Semimaru is a pig who likes to grab the backsides of his female companions, endearing him to precisely no one.

Parting Shot: Unami lays face down in a growing puddle of blood. “You bastards,” he groans.

Sleeper Star: There are too many hastily introduced characters to single one out. So I’m going with the shape Natsu sees beneath the ocean, which seems like just a throwaway line of dialogue, but hopefully isn’t.

Most Pilot-y Line: “When you awaken, you may find yourself in heaven,” the narrator says, “or you may be in hell.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Post-apocalyptic sagas are a dime a dozen these days. But when they’re well-conceived, they can be fascinatingly speculative. 7 Seeds is well-animated, and carries enough credibility via its source material to entice us to keep watching.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream 7Seeds on Netflix