Japanese anime Vexille is set in 2077: Japan’s advances in robotics and biotechnology have led to United Nations censure, and the country’s consequent retreat into total isolation. A crack American special services unit is ordered to penetrate its formid­able defences and find out what’s going on – most are blown up on arrival, but one girl survives to team up with a female leader of an underground resistance movement, bring down the tyrannical Daiwa corporation and save the world.


Vexille is, then, an unsophistic­ated reworking of the sci-fi staple ‘beware runaway techno­logy in the hands of megaloman­iacs bent on world domination’; the storyline is basic, the characterisation bland, the exposit­ion clunky and the moralising heavy-handed.