That first encounter, Saki trying to explain herself to the police as her naked savior (soon to adopt the name Akira Takizawa) strolls across traffic to deflect official attention as only a nude guy with a pistol can, sets the tone for the series. It's a hilarious scene, but also a gripping one, and already colored by Saki and Akira's cute chemistry. It's a strange start to one of the stranger political thrillers in recent years; a bizarrely appropriate prelude to a twisty tale of conspiracies and revolution that plays equally well as action vehicle, character comedy, sweet romance, or speculative near-future sci-fi.

What follows that prelude is a trail of increasingly surreal clues to Akira's identity. To say too much more would be a disservice; one of Eden's chief pleasures is trying to make sense of things like why Akira lives in an abandoned shopping mall with a basement full of discarded cell phones and clothing. Or how exactly Careless Monday—a massive missile strike on Japanese cities that inexplicably killed no one—relates to serial genital mutilator the Johhny Hunter and the disappearance of twenty thousand NEETs. Or how Akira was involved in it all and what that says about the man he once was. The truth is delivered in small, weird and often darkly humorous doses that as often as not leave things even murkier than before. They eventually lead, however, to a satisfyingly lucid—and outlandish—tying up of the series' many mysteries; while teeing off a perfectly smashing climax no less.

It's all very clever; from the Hitchcockian way the series dumps its clueless protagonist into the middle of a stew of ominous, blackly comic goings-on to the sly transformation of the finale into an off-the-wall homage to Dawn of the Dead. And smart too. Akira's mid-series decision to turn Japan into "a nation of NEETs" doesn't just put a nifty kink in the plot; it casts the NEET phenomenon as an act of unconscious revolution, a sort of life-long sit-in. For once, though, writer/director Stand Alone Complex and you'll see just how far Kamiyama has come.

Of course, the cast owes its rather delightful nature in no small part to original character designer SD? Priceless.

Kamiyama spent his career perfecting his cinematic form (often to the detriment of cinematic heart), and even as he discards robotic precision for something looser and more entertaining, that training serves him in good stead. There isn't a frame of Eden that's laxly composed or less than beautiful, and certain sequences are perfection personified. There's the Johnny Hunter's escape, through a shattered high-rise window on raven wings of molting black feathers. There's a slow-motion hit-and-run that plays deftly with different points of view. And then there's the series' final sequence, a crisis resolution so preposterously cool that giving away any more would be downright criminal. Kamiyama controls the series down to the smallest detail (the expression of the hit-and-run victim as he rolls across the car's windshield, for instance, is priceless in its clarity) and the care pays off spectacularly.

If there's a chink in Eden's armor, it's Kenji Kawai's score. And it isn't much of a chink. It's an evocative work with some thrilling vocal highlights (specifically during the climax). It's just that it isn't quite on par with the chilling beauty of his finest work.

Oasis's original opening song "Falling Down" only for the first episode. "Falling Down" is perfect for the series—both lyrically and sonically—and the quieter Japanese tune that replaces it just doesn't compare.

Universal appeal is not a term to be bandied about lightly. But Eden of the East has it. Male or female; child (not that they should be watching, there's some gory stuff in here) or adult; fresh-faced anime noob or battle-scarred veteran of decades of disappointments—anyone can enjoy Eden, and probably will. Even Mamoru Oshii liked it. Yeah, it's a letdown that Funimation could only license the opening theme for a single episode and, yeah, the Platonist turn it takes at the very end is a little lame, but those are the granddaddy and grandmommy of useless, nit-picking criticisms. This is quite possibly the year's only truly great anime. So get watching.