4 Star

When Time Stands Still, but Life Carries On.

From relatively new anime studio Geno Studio (Golden Kamuy) comes their first anime directed by Yoshimitsu Ohashi (Galaxy Angel Z, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans). Kokkoku: Moment by Moment is an unusual anime, in that it is a tale of a young woman and her family’s secret ability. It doesn’t really veer away from that, which may not appeal to everyone but I think it is a breath of fresh air.

Juri Yukawa (Amber Lee Connors, RWBY, Tokyo Ghoul, Assassination Classroom) is a young woman who is desperate to leave the family home and start life in the city, but she has failed 19 job interviews in just one day. She lives with the head of the house Grandpa Yukawa (Carl Masterson, Mardock Scramble: The Second Combustion) her laid off dad Takafumi (John Swasey, Fullmetal Alchemist), her working mother Nobuko, her NEET older brother Tsubasa (Josh Grelle, Fairy Tail), her single-parent sister Sanae and her nephew Makoto (Kalin Coates).

Depressed about her job prospects, she takes it out on the lazy Tsubasa as she sends him to pick up Mokoto from kindergarten. Reluctantly he agrees, only after his console is turned off. When he finally manages to pick him up they are stopped by a gang in a van and suddenly they are both being kidnapped. They were expecting the girl not Tsubasa.

Back at home the phone rings, it’s the kidnappers and they want a 5 Million Yen ransom within just half an hour, not a vast amount but it stretches the Yukawa family coffers to the max. They argue so much that it becomes impossible to get to the handover in time. However Grandpa tells them to shut-up and sit down, then produces an orange rock and tells them to put their hand on it and not to remove it. He draws some blood and it drops into a hole in the top of the rock. A field forms around them and expands exponentially and three ‘Jellyfish‘ appear and go into their bodies.

What they find is the Yukawa’s family secret, ‘Stasis’. Everything has been frozen in time, from water drops to the flapping wings of insects and every vehicle and heartbeat. But with the jellyfish inside them they can freely walk about and do whatever they want and what they want is their family members back.

“Even if mosquito promised you it wouldn’t bite you anymore, it would still be faster to squash it than believe it.”

When they get to the ransom hideout, everybody is frozen and they must work out how to get Tsubasa and Makoto back to the family home. But to Grandpa’s  surprise and everyone else there are others that can move in Stasis and they are after Grandpa’s stone and are prepared to kill everyone to get it.

They are hired thugs of the Genuine Love Society which is led by the stoic Junji Sagawa (Luis Galindo) and his helpers Shiomi (Clint Bickham, Chivalry of a Failed Knight) and the mysterious Shoko Majima (Marissa Lenti, RWBY: Volume 4).

With rules to learn and powers to master, the Yukawa family has to work out how they can all get out of Stasis safely and stop the man that wants to live for millennia.

Kokkoku: Moment by Moment is available on Blu-ray