At only ninety minutes long this feature length anime from Gonzo studios packs a tremendous amount of story and action into its short running time. Amazing visuals and thought-provoking ideas abound, as one would expect from the best anime.
A forestation experiment being conducted in a sealed biosphere on the lunar surface goes awry and dealy hybrid plants that can survive in any environment are released, descending to Earth and laying waste to the cities, blanketing almost the entire planet in a new, primordial wilderness.
Three hundred years later some survivors live in a place called Neutral City on the edge of the forest, trying to co-exist with the ever-encroaching vegetation by maintaining an uneasy agreement with the Zruids, strange beings more plant than person, and the equally strange twin sisters who command them.
Other humans live a harsh, austere existence far away in the industrialized, militaristic nation of Ragna. Neutral City holds a truce with them as well. The founders and administrators of Neutral City are all “enhanced” humans, transformed into faster, stronger beings by the twin sisters after agreeing to continue to promote peaceful co-existence.
Into this divided world come Toola, accidentally released from suspended animation in the ruins of a facility called the Stayfield that has been swallowed up by the forest. The one who released her is Agito, capricious son of one of the founders, whose enhancement is on the verge of consuming him and turning him into a tree.
Toola is brought before the administrators, who are actually not at all surprised by her presence. They tell her about a young man named Shunack, who came out of the Stayfield five years ago. Unlike her, he left to go and live in Ragna.
Toola slowly settles into her new life in a new time, becoming friends with Agito and his cohorts. One night, though, Shunack arrives in Neutral City and tries to persuade Toola to come with him to Ragna. He tells her that he was a colleague of her father and that her father was working on a way to bring the hostile plant life under control. Toola, desperate to find any link to her lost life in the past, agrees to help him. When Agito learns of the choice Toola has made he makes the ultimate sacrifice and lets the twin sisters enhance him. He becomes a warrior for the forest and sets out to find her.
Like Princess Mononoke, and before that, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Origin carries the powerful message that humans are as much a part of the ecosystem of this planet as any other living thing and that we as a civilization desperately need to reconnect with, and live in harmony with, the natural world.
