#yumi just casually gets devirtualized

[chronicallylatetotheparty]

Watching Code Lyoko on Netflix

I know so many spoilers for this show I only watched, like, 15% of when it was airing.

Season One

Wow... The animation has not aged well. That's painful.

You'd think the worst part would be whatever Ulrich and Yumi have going on but no...

The worst part is return to the past erasing the secondary characters' character development.

I can't believe this show made it past the pilot.

I mean, I'm glad it did, but really? A giant teddy bear?

XANA on Earth: OP as heck, turns off gravity wtf, casually hacks a space laser, tries to trigger a nuclear meltdown.

XANA on Lyoko: needs a 3:1 monster ratio for a 50/50 chance of stopping one(1) prepubescent teen

Oh my God, these kids need therapy.

IDK if the writers know this but computer viruses can't possess organic matter.

Season Two

Is it my imagination or is the animation a little better?

Aileta on Earth, yay!

F*** you too, XANA!

IDK if the writers know this but computer viruses cannot possess the weather! WTF!?

Going from not being able to possess humans to being able to possess anyone is kinda cool though. In an evil sorta way.

Ulrich, I like you but you need to get over yourself.

William, you are very lucky this isn't Miraculous Ladybug or you would've been punched in the face.

Aileta and Odd are my favorite characters.

Oh my God, these kids need therapy!

Holy s***! The bad guy won!

Season Three

Oh, yes. That's much better. Easier on the eyes.

Lol, they build up Yumi and Ulrich for two seasons

Only for Yumi to decide she isn't putting up with this drama

Queen.

IDK, if XANA can possess an entire bus full of people you'd think he'd try that trick again.

The running gag with Jim's former jobs. "I'd rather not talk about it," he says after bringing it up is hilarious, actually.

Aileta gets to be the badass I knew she could be even without being possessed.

(XANA possessed Aileta is so OP, regular Aileta should use her powers like that more often.)

I love how these kids get to be flawed, actually.

And they're not afraid to call each other out.

Odd is really dependable on Lyoko, actually.

Lol, okay Ulrich. That was kind of a funny way to apologize.

William, you are very lucky this isn't Miraculous Ladybug or you would've been punched in the face.

That random doctor is pretty badass. I like her.

Wow, I didn't think they'd address Odd not getting visions anymore... Take the teleportation Odd!

. . . M'kay the teachers are kinda jerks, actually.

I really like Yumi being the one against recruiting William instead of Ulrich.

XANA threw Jeremy in the river! That jerk!

How many jobs has Jim had!?

I really hate Ulrich's dad, actually. He deserves better.

RIP William

Oh my God, these kids need therapy!

I can't believe they kidnapped Odd's dog to perform a science experiment on, lol. Rude.

I can't believe Sissy was this close to being a Lyoko Warrior.

Aileta is so selfless, I love her.

Season Four

I'm digging the new looks.

No offence William but you're much more interesting possessed.

You'd think they'd make a bigger deal of remaking Lyoko from scratch after it was destroyed.

I like them expanding Aileta's interests beyond Lyoko. More please.

. . . Are we sure the copies aren't sentient? I'm worried about copy!William.

Jeremy's right. It is about time everyone learned how to use the scanners.

Lol, the funniest thing about Aileta and Odd's fight is how they annoy Ulrich and Yumi.

. . . Wow, devirtualizing your friends must be traumatizing.

The number of "secret" government space lasers is worrying, actually.

Yumi's little brother is a little crook!

Using XANA's goals against him? Heck, yes.

Ulrich... isn't very good at plans.

Wow, switching the music gives it a different vibe.

LAVA MONSTER!

Okay but some of the jokes are hilarious.

Noooooo! Clone!William! He was so young.

. . . Kinda rude to blame a brainwashing victim.

He was just un-possessed!

Ooh, goodbye XANA!

😭 I don't even know you but Aileta is sad and that makes me sad. 😭

Last hurrah...

Oh my GOD, these kids need THERAPY!

Final Impression

I would like to know what happened to Aileta's mom.

It does get repetitive but each season mixes up the formula in interesting ways.

They were this close to XANA just winning, huh.

How did the supercomputer turn off in the first place?

How did Aileta lose her memory?

Who were the government agents that drove Franz Hopper into Lyoko in the first place?

Ulrich gets two swords and Aileta gets wings but what do Yumi and Odd get? New outfits?

Lots of similarities to Miraculous Ladybug, actually.

. . . No one let the ML fandom anywhere near these kids. I don't trust them.

How could you do this to me!? I have two AUs and at least one crossover that I'm never going to write in my head now!

[sheepydraws]

And So They Lived (6/6)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 

Ulrich pretty much just dropped into bed by the time they got back to their room, but after his mid-freak out nap earlier and the late dinner that Jeremie had squirreled away for him Odd was too wired for sleep. He sat down at his desk and rummaged around for his favorite pen and a fresh notebook. It was spiral bound with a flimsy cardboard cover. Odd dicked around for a few minutes, scratching his name into the purple cover and then the eye of XANA under it, but he was stalling. He knew where he had to begin.

I brought my dog to school with me because I was afraid that I wouldn’t have any friends here. I have plenty now, but only because I brought Kiwi and Ulrich had the balls to dognap him.

Odd wrote all night. He kept expecting to reach a stopping point, but the words kept coming. Perhaps it was because he didn’t just include XANA attacks. He wrote what the world thought really happened, too. He wrote about Sissi, and the shitty things she did to them, and the shitty things they did to her. He spent more ink than he would care to admit on Yumi and Ulrich’s ‘let’s fight-let’s fuck’ relationship. He wrote about William and his betrayal. He wrote right through Lyoko’s final summer as they took everything apart piece by piece.

Something strange happened. A narrative emerged. Events took on a shape. Days didn’t just end, arcs did. Things didn’t just change, they grew. When he stopped to explain what he thought were simple things to someone who might not understand, stuff he had never stopped to think about finally made sense to him. He knew it all sounded crazy, but as a story it was a pretty cool one. He remembered that it had been an adventure.

He finished the dismantling of the supercomputer and the scanners sometime around one in the morning. Then he kept going. He wrote about school, and Elizabeth, and trying to live without Lyoko, and how it should have been easy. He got a bit disgusting and sappy, and may have made some terrible metaphors about Elizabeth’s eyes and the night sky, and he might have cried a bit about how it was never going to be the same between him and his best friends, but they were always going to be his best friends, whether anyone else remembered all they had done for him or not.

Ulrich woke him at seven. He was hunched over his desk, drooling on his own hand.

“I have to give this to Elizabeth.” He said before he had even sat up, although it probably came out more like, “I hafta givisss t’Lizze.”

“What?” Ulrich said as his head popped out the neck of the sweater he was pulling on.

“I said, ‘I love you’.”

Ulrich had just kicked off his pajama pants and stood there in his boxers for a minute, staring at Odd. Then he smiled. “Yeah. I love you, too.”

In the cafeteria Odd wolfed down two bowls of cereal and a hot chocolate before Elizabeth arrived. He got up and caught her before she had even gotten in the food line.

“Here.” He said, and he placed the notebook in her hands. “It’s everything.”

She idly flipped through the first few pages and then kept flipping. “Whoa.” She said. “It-“ She stopped on a certain page. “Am I in this?”

“Of course.” Odd said.

She closed the notebook and clasped it to her chest for a minute. She had this little smile that Odd though was going to turn into a laugh, but it became a kiss instead. Not a long kiss, not when Elizabeth was blocking the cafeteria door, and Ulrich, Jeremie, and Aelita needed to be kept from cardiac arrest, but a good one.

“Is that why you’ve been so crazy?” Ulrich said the second Odd was sitting down again. “You’ve been falling for Sissi?”

Odd gave him a mysterious smile. Then, because he hated that kind of bullshit, he said, “It’s why I wasn’t in our room last night.”

Ulrich’s eyes bugged out while Jeremie and Aelita laughed.

“You realize,” Jeremie said, “That once Yumi gets here, you’re going to have to tell us everything.”

“Yeah. I think I can manage that.”

It is impossible to separate this movie from the chaos caused by its trailers. Last year instead of the laughably bad slew of christmas movies everyone seemed to be talking about a trailer that had premiered along side “To The Top” (a movie whose only discerning feature is having ten percent on rotten tomatoes). It was rather tricky to discuss, though, since the trailer did not reveal a plot, title, or release date. It seemed like an advertisement for a boarding school, complete with bored student volunteers, bad lighting, and bland pop songs. The camera recording this waste of tuition runs low on battery and is shuffled around before being plugged in, at which point the screen slowly goes white and a symbol flickers across it before disappearing. Aside from a slide with the words ‘coming soon’ that was the trailer in it’s entirety.

People started talking, but thanks to hefty non-disclosure agreements, no one came forward to explain what was going on. The second and third trailers appeared almost simultaneously a month later, and caused even more confusion. One looked like a sci-fi thriller, the other a young adult romance. However, they shared the same title, Code Lyoko, and the setting and symbol from the first trailer.

Finally, writer and director Odd Della Robbia casually mentioned that he was behind the project while doing an interview with Teen Vouge. The director is best known for his work on Buried in Stars the sleeper hit of the summer movie season two years ago, best described as the surrealist, most vividly technicolor rom-com to ever grace the big screen. When the interviewer asked about the discrepancy between all three trailers, as well as the secrecy that surrounded filming, Della Robbia responded with,

“When I pitched Code Lyoko the first thing they said was, ‘How are we gonna market this? Is it a heartwarming coming of age story or a YA sci-fi thriller?’ and I said, ‘If I can’t convince you it’s both by the end of this, then we might as well scrap the whole project.’ I guess audacity still counts for something.”

‘Genre defying’ is a greatly overused compliment, and in my opinion, it dismisses the importance of genre. There’s something to be said for going into a horror movie and getting a horror. Of course playing too tightly to a genre’s guidelines without shaking something up can be dull, but so can a movie that tries too hard to include many different elements without properly following through on any of them. Code Lyoko, however, does manage to step outside genre lines without over-burdening itself trying to be three stories at once.

Della Robbia deftly mixes over the top action and teenage drama with the keen eyes of someone who has been there before. Though the movie follows several different threads, the core of the story is the small group of friends it follows, and Della Robbia never forgets that. Unlike Della Robbia’s work so far the style is simple and sharp, the colors muted and the lighting high contrast. Even the virtual world of Lyoko, which is a bit brighter and more cartoony, has graphics simplified to the point where they are almost cubist in feel.

This serves the plot well. The main conflict at the beginning of the movie is that Walter (played by John Beck) finds an abandoned computer, which contains a virtual world and Gemma (Gina Pedroza), a young girl who claims that she is a real person who is unable to devirtualize. Walter makes it his mission to fix this, and accidentally begins recruiting people to help his cause. Unfortunately, keeping the computer on so that Walter can attempt to understand the code that will free Gemma allows another program in the computer known as ZENAT to wreak havoc on the outside world. While this could be a movie all on it’s own, the group’s interactions with each other, as well as their parents and other students, along with several satisfying twists, completely fill out the story and make it unforgettable.

Interestingly, the technology examined in Code Lyoko bears a striking resemblance to advances in virtual reality being proposed by Nintendo that are currently being developed in a team with Aelita Schiffer and Jeremie Belpois [Article Here], and though the technology isn’t the  showcase here, it is rather shocking to think that this film could theoretically happen in five years time. Although that is not the only element that lends Code Lyoko uncanny realism.

The mixture of high school drama and thwarting an evil invasion shouldn’t work this well outside of an after school cartoon, and it’s not just the depth that Della Robbia gives all the story lines, as well as the fantastic acting, which allows these seemingly dissonant themes to gel. In a subsequent interview with The New Yorker after the film’s release Della Robbia said, “I remember when I first asked my wife to read a draft of the story. As soon as I gave it to her I started to overthink. She told me she liked it, but I said, ‘There’s kids fighting giant robots!…Are you sure I shouldn’t take it out? Or make it a metaphor for standardized testing or something?’ and she said, ‘When I think about high school I don’t think about taking standardized tests, I think about fighting monsters.’ so she saved the monsters.”

By injecting it with sci-fi terror Della Robbia has stripped the fantasy from teenage coming of age stories, allowing it to resonate long after you leave the theater. Five stars.