Author's Note: The version of Pale Cocoon I watched was a fan-dubbed translation that, as far as I can tell through research, is a decent English translation from the original Japanese. I fully acknowledge that it isn't perfect, but the general consensus is it gets most of the core dialogue right.
Pale Cocoon is an original video animation (OVA), a little over twenty minutes long, that explores a post-apocalyptic setting through themes of isolation, apathy, curiosity, and hope. It's environmentalist message is clear from the beginning, but the lens through which it establishes its world and the actions of its characters is the archives.
Written and directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, Pale Cocoon, released in 2006, introduces the audience to Ura, an employee of the Archive Excavation Department. At some unknown point in the past, humans went underground after an ecological disaster left the surface uninhabitable. Information from the past has largely been lost except for a massive archive where people like Ura try to repair corrupted files and piece together the history of their forgotten world. One such file sent to Ura is the first he's encountered with audio and it sends him down a rabbit hole from which he will never return.
It's important to set the scene a bit because there's very little time to explain things in the film. The archive is a gigantic structure, though it's unclear if the archive also acts as living quarters and community spaces or if those are separate locations. Regardless, we get a sense of scale when Ura is climbing the structure and the neon green core goes up and up and up without stopping. It's a marvel of engineering, but overwhelming by its very existence, which is, in many ways, how the people in the Archive Excavation Department feel about the relentlessness of their task. As someone who's had to deal with a seemingly endless backlog, no matter where I've worked, I can relate.
From the moment we meet him, we understand that Ura is good at his job even if his enthusiasm is a bit low. A combination of monotony, apathy, and depression seems to be reason enough for people to leave the archives. Ura, however, remains curious and that curiosity pushes him to keep searching and recovering lost data because it can only mean good things to know what happened in the past.
As a deliberate contrast, Ura's friend Riko is disillusioned by the hours she spends sifting through data that continues to reveal the worst aspects of humanity. When she's not at work, Riko lays out on a particular platform and stares up at what she can only think of as the sky. A black void to which the archive stretches towards and disappears into with no sense of its end. When Ura joins her, she wonders what would happen if they just stopped looking at the data. What's the point of knowing how the world was ruined when they're already living in the consequences of past actions?
This was the point at which I really started paying attention. Not that I wasn't before, but Ura's A-plot digital recovery project doesn't pay off until the last few minutes. Riko's heartfelt breakdown is devastating from an archival perspective. It's rare to see any piece of media look at the emotional impact of archival work on the people doing the job. In most properties I've examined, the archivist is an obstacle or a side character who lacks any life beyond the function of their role within the narrative. They provide the information and then take a back seat to the protagonist's emotional spiral. It paints a picture of a profession full of emotionless robots detached from the reality of the work they do when that couldn't be further from the truth.
The fact that a twenty minute OVA has done more work providing a nuanced characterization of archivists compared to most Hollywood productions is itself a bit depressing. But we have to work with what we have, right?
Anyway!
Ura and Riko are a fascinating duo of archival representation that I don't think has been summarized so succinctly in such a short amount of time. Ura is the driving force of curiosity, the positive outlook of archivists determined to see the betterment of humanity by way of understanding the past. Riko is the burn-out, the disillusionment that comes with years of dealing with the cyclical history of human atrocities. To be fair, not all archivists deal with the same level of horrible records, but they definitely experience some form of burn-out over the course of their career.
The mood of the film favors Riko's perspective with its muted color palette, slow pacing, and the general monotony of work in the archives as seen through brief montages. Ura's position makes him unique among his cohorts because he hasn't given up hope on what's yet to be recovered. He surrounds himself with images of what Earth used to look like, a mosaic of sunsets, night skies, grass, flowers, and animals he's never seen in person but knows existed. The images reinforce his determination to learn more and ultimately lead him toward an answer he wasn't expecting.
No spoilers on this one. Sorry.
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