Psycho-Pass

• 1. Introduction

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  Psycho-Pass drew more than 1,000 people to a queue outside a venue that could seat only seventy. They had come for the final episode. Fuji TV producer Akitoshi Mori watched the line form. The show was the first work under his control, and the early screenings at the Noitamina Shop & Café had barely filled the room. Viewers trickled in at first, then arrived in growing numbers, until the crowd outgrew the space.

  The series behind that line is a Japanese cyberpunk psychological thriller made by Production I.G. It began airing in October 2012 on Fuji TV's Noitamina programming block. Its Japan is a country where public sensors read the mind of every passerby, and a single number can mark a person as a danger.

  Why would a story about total surveillance win such devoted fans? How did a veteran director, a screenwriter and a team of animators build a world so strict that the characters feel almost played by it? And what does the series ask us to think about punishing a crime before anyone has committed it?

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• 2. The Sibyl System

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  A cymatic scan is how Japan's Sibyl System sees its citizens. Sibyl is a biomechatronic computer network, and it continually reads the psychological traits of the whole population. The result for each person is a Psycho-Pass, the assessment that gives the series its name.

  A Psycho-Pass holds two main readings. One is the Crime Coefficient, a number that reveals how likely a person is to commit a crime. The other is the Hue, a color code that alerts law enforcement to further data. The Hue also shows whether a Psycho-Pass is improving, which the series calls clearing, or declining, which it calls clouding.

  The figure 100 is the line that matters. When a person's Crime Coefficient rises above it, field officers of the Crime Investigation Department give chase. Those officers work for the Public Safety Bureau of the Ministry of Welfare. A target is either arrested or killed.

  Two kinds of officer do this work. Inspectors are the elite. They examine crime scenes and evaluate everyone involved. Enforcers are latent criminals who assist them, add their own expertise and carry out their instructions. Their other duty is to protect the Inspectors.

  Every officer carries a Dominator, a hand-held, gun-like weapon. Its built-in scanner reports the Psycho-Pass of whoever it points at. It can fire only when Sibyl approves and its owner pulls the trigger. Inspectors may even aim one at an Enforcer who endangers the public or the Inspector. That power sets the stakes for the first mission of the rookie at the center of the story.

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• 3. Hunting Makishima

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  On her first mission, Akane Tsunemori turns her Dominator on one of her own Enforcers, Shinya Kogami. She is a rookie Inspector in Unit One, also called Division One, of the Criminal Investigation Department. She judges that Kogami threatens the life of a captured criminal. Her shot stops him from decomposing the man.

  She feels ashamed afterward. Kogami thanks her instead, because she kept him from doing what could be seen as murder. His words persuade her to stay on the force.

  Shogo Makishima is the prolific mastermind the unit comes to hunt. He is Criminally Asymptomatic, which means Sibyl keeps rating his Crime Coefficient as low no matter what he does or says. That rating shields him from Dominator harm.

  Tsunemori works beside Nobuchika Ginoza, a strict veteran Inspector who looks down on Enforcers. The Enforcers include Tomomi Masaoka, a middle-aged man who used to be a detective. Shusei Kagari is a carefree young man who was marked as a latent criminal in childhood. Yayoi Kunizuka is a former musician who became a latent criminal through a relationship with a terrorist.

  Kogami is the one most consumed by the chase, because Makishima killed a friend of his. Meanwhile, Joshu Kasei, the android form of Sibyl, invites Makishima to join its ranks. He refuses and flees. Kogami leaves Unit One to find and kill him.

  Sibyl orders Tsunemori to capture Makishima and to execute Kogami. She agrees only if the execution order for Kogami is withdrawn. Kogami learns that Makishima is planning biological terrorism.

  Masaoka dies when Makishima tries to kill Ginoza, who is Masaoka's son, with dynamite. Kogami wounds Makishima, but Tsunemori stops him from finishing the job. He agrees to cooperate. Then Makishima tries to kill Tsunemori, and Kogami shoots him dead with Masaoka's gun.

  In the epilogue, Ginoza has become an Enforcer, and Tsunemori leads the unit, welcoming a new Inspector named Mika Shimotsuki. Kogami is last seen aboard a ship.

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• 4. Assembling the Team

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  In early 2011, director Katsuyuki Motohiro approached screenwriter Gen Urobuchi with a proposal to work together. Production I.G. had wanted a successor to the achievements of Mamoru Oshii, creator of Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor. To get one, the studio hired Motohiro as chief director, along with veteran I.G. animator Naoyoshi Shiotani to supervise the direction.

  Motohiro wanted to return to anime after a long hiatus, but he needed a charismatic writer. He and his staff had been struck by Urobuchi's contribution to the acclaimed series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Motohiro had also read other works by Urobuchi, and that persuaded him to make the approach.

  Early on, Motohiro gave Shiotani a rule. Nothing in the series should be something that could not be adapted into a live-action film. Shiotani had been busy with the film Blood-C: The Last Dark, and once it ended he turned to the series and its quality. Fuji TV announced the project in late March 2012 at the Noitamina press conference.

  The cast included Tomokazu Seki as Kogami, Kana Hanazawa as Tsunemori and Takahiro Sakurai as Makishima.

  The schedule caught up with the team at episode 16. It was the most challenging episode and the most popular, and afterward the staff found themselves "out of stamina." An outside team made the next two episodes, and several animation problems showed. The producer of that work said he had expected trouble but had done his best. Shiotani apologized for the quality as well. The original team returned from episode 19 and ran to the finale. They also decided to remake episodes 17 and 18 for the retail release.

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• 5. Anti-Moe by Design

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  Atsuko Ishizuka, director of The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, once described how she first designed her characters. Shiotani realized his team worked in the opposite order. They had to build the setting first, and the characters came after, because the characters "are almost being played by the world."

  Manga artist Akira Amano, known for Reborn!, designed them. His task was to balance the dark atmosphere, so the characters were made "palatable and very relatable." The staff also avoided bright colors that would stand out. Tsunemori was built as the most relatable figure, an outsider who questions the setting as the audience would. As a heroine, she also stands between Kogami and his rival and enemy, Makishima. The staff's main goal was to carry her from an innocent newcomer to a mature and haunted person.

  Motohiro let his team use very graphic elements, even though they might reduce female viewership. He admitted the series might be too violent for younger viewers. He said he would not want his own son to watch it because of its psychological brutality. In his words, the team wanted an "artistic series that just happened to have some violence included in it." Shiotani told Urobuchi, "just let us deal with it."

  Some violent scenes happen off-camera. When a protagonist was involved, though, the moment was shaped to be memorable. The television station twice complained that scenes went "overboard," and the team remade them both times.

  Motohiro also wanted the series to push against the anime trends of the day. The word moe was banned at staff meetings. The staff admired dramas such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Patlabor, which centered on conflicts between male characters. Because the series was "anti-moe," the team had Kogami remove his clothes rather than Tsunemori.

  The show attracted female viewers anyway, since the conflict between the men appealed to fans of the shonen ai genre. Shiotani had hoped to avoid romance between male characters. He believed the fight scenes drew those fans without anyone intending it. The staff chose to emphasize friendship.

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• 6. Borrowed Futures and Borrowed Songs

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  L.A. Confidential stands out as the Western film that most inspired the series. Shiotani named other influences too, including Minority Report, Gattaca and Brazil. He compared the series most closely to the 1982 American film Blade Runner.

  Before production began, Urobuchi insisted on a dystopian narrative inspired by Philip K. Dick. The psychological themes trace back to Shiotani's childhood viewing of Lupin III. He wondered about adding what he called "today's youth trauma" to a story of his own. The rivalry between the leads came from dramas the staff liked. Some voice actors were credited with shaping their characters, because of the traits they added.

  The music had a rocky start. The staff struggled to find an opening theme until someone supplied music by Ling Tosite Sigure, and the band was engaged for the job. The ending theme went to Egoist, who had debuted on Noitamina with Guilty Crown. Shiotani said they asked Egoist to record three versions so the endings could be alternated to suit each episode.

  Time limits forced changes. Ending songs were sometimes removed, or replaced by instrumental versions, so that no scene had to be cut from an episode. When the song producers worried, Motohiro and Shiotani talked it through with them.

  After the first series, composer Yugo Kanno remixed the original background themes, since the staff enjoyed them. Sony Music Entertainment released the first soundtrack on the 29th of May 2013, with fifty-five tracks by Kanno. A second soundtrack followed on the 18th of March 2015.

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• 7. Fear and Feeling

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  In the first episode, a kidnapped woman's trauma clouds her Psycho-Pass. Under Sibyl's rules, the police may decompose her. Tsunemori delays and speaks gently to her until the woman's Psycho-Pass returns to the acceptable range. The scene challenges the assumption that the potential to commit a crime equals committing one.

  Anime News Network wrote, "We are all capable of doing bad things at times," and asked whether people should be punished for thinking about hurting someone before they act, or for being victims. The same review traced the whole question back to Tsunemori's reaction to that first victim.

  Urobuchi himself has said that fear is one of the series' central ideas. Sibyl works on the principles of opportunity cost and acceptable risk. Killing people who might commit crimes is tolerable, the logic goes, if the harm to society outweighs the harm to someone falsely accused. The paradox is that society as a whole fears no crime, while each individual fears Sibyl's verdicts. Makishima's actions grow from feeling out of place. Sibyl cannot accept him as he is and labels him a deviant within the structure of society.

  Emotional repression is another theme. Latent criminals are identified partly by emotions that society judges negative, such as sadness or anger. Kotaku observed that, because of these scans, the series imagines a future where "mental beauty" is as sought after as physical beauty. It added that the police might become latent criminals themselves if they did real detective work, because they would start to think like the criminals they chase.

  The characters often feel nostalgia. The series refers repeatedly to older literature, philosophy, music and theater. One analysis described the effect as "nostalgic world building for a time before psycho-passes."

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• 8. Reception and Afterlife

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  Rebecca Silverman of Anime News Network praised the series for its "high level of interest" in depicting its dystopia, but she warned that the violence was gruesome enough to scare viewers. Her colleague Bamboo Dong called the series "a real blast to watch" from episode 12 on and liked Tsunemori's development. She also condemned the twist about Sibyl's true identity as "one of the stupidest revelations in the history of anime."

  Thomas Zoth of The Fandom Post praised the relationships between the protagonists and called the sixteenth episode "Urobuchi's masterpiece." DVD Talk lauded Makishima but found some of the supporting cast underwhelming, naming Karanomori as the least-explored character. Silverman found the low lighting hard to follow, while Hiroko Yamamura of Japanator admired the high budget and the attention to detail.

  The awards followed. In April 2014 the series was nominated for the Seiun Award. In 2013, Newtype readers voted it the fourth best title of the year. Episode 11 won "Best Episode" in the Noitamina 10th anniversary fan vote. A 2017 NHK online poll placed it nineteenth in "Best Anime 100," and Crunchyroll listed it among the top 100 anime of the decade.

  The story spread across formats. Hikaru Miyoshi's manga Kanshikan Tsunemori Akane began in Shueisha's Jump Square magazine on the 2nd of November 2012. By November 2013, 380,000 copies of three volumes had shipped, and by December 2014 more than 1 million were in print. Makoto Fukami wrote a novelization, and Aya Takaba wrote a prequel novel, Namae no Nai Kaibutsu. The game Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness, with an original story by Urobuchi, reached North America on the 13th of September 2016.

  The anime itself kept returning. A second season aired from the 10th of October to the 19th of December 2014, and a film opened on the 9th of January 2015. Before that season began, the first season was condensed into 11 one-hour episodes. Its fourth episode was cancelled because of similarities to a real-life murder, and Shiotani apologized on Twitter. In June 2015, China's Ministry of Culture banned the series along with 38 other titles.

  Three films called Sinners of the System premiered between January and March 2019. A third season of eight 45-minute episodes streamed on Amazon Prime Video that autumn. The film Psycho-Pass 3: First Inspector premiered on the 27th of March 2020. For the tenth anniversary, Shiotani returned to direct Psycho-Pass Providence, released on the 12th of May 2023.

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