“As long as we collect enough parts, we can be put back together.” That’s the promise that Rutile makes to our protagonist Phos, while explaining the unique nature of their crystalline bodies. It’s a true statement, and a source of comfort for Land of the Lustrous’ stars, but its implications also speak to the fundamental question and hope of this entire narrative. “As long as we collect enough parts, we can be put back together” we tell ourselves, as the world chips at us, and our bodies betray us at every turn. We can be fixed. We can be remade. Perhaps, one day, we could even be whole.

Land of the Lustrous is a fascinating production for a variety of reasons, though its unique and beautiful visual style is the most immediately apparent. Though anime has been integrating CG objects and movement into productions for decades, such inclusions have generally happened for practical, rather than aesthetic reasons. Animating mechanical objects in motion is a difficult art, and more recently, studios like Polygon have established themselves as fully dedicated to CG productions. But in spite of CG’s ubiquity, I’ve personally always felt CG objects clashed harshly with traditional animation, and CG characters lacked the fluidity and personality of traditionally animated characters. Land of the Lustrous doesn’t entirely avoid such issues, but at the very least, it certainly manages to gracefully integrate CG characters into a traditionally painted world.

Basically all of Lustrous’ fundamental design choices work in service of this integration. The show’s characters all wear a similar black and white uniform, with their dazzling hair generally acting as the main point of separation between them. Though these costumes are borrowed from the original manga, they naturally facilitate compositions that create dynamic, stark contrasts, with the show’s fight scenes embracing the natural contrast of black and white figures, green grass, and blue sky. The original manga’s clean linework and minimalist, dramatically partitioned panels are equally well-suited to CG adaptation – each layout’s beauty relies less on minute detail than on bold geometric contrast, and bold geometric contrast is something CG can do very well. The end result is an anime where nearly every frame feels like a carefully designed tapestry, and even the incidental conversations are given a sense of emotional consequence through the blocking of the characters.

Lustrous’ storytelling tends to match its visual aesthetic, illustrating the lives of these characters with clean, graceful minimalism. In this first episode, we’re introduced to our hero Phosphophylite, who lives along with twenty-seven others in a community of living gems. Though these gem-people do not die, their bodies are coveted by invaders known as Lunarians, necessitating vigilant defense of their community. But with a hardness rating of only three point five and no physical abilities to speak of, Phosphophylite isn’t suited for combat, and seems like they may not be suited for anything. And so Master Kongo assigns them the role of writing an encyclopedia, which ultimately causes them to cross paths with Cinnabar – the one gem resigned to night patrol, whose naturally toxic emissions make them the only gem less valued than Phos.

While the overt narrative content of this premiere is relatively straightforward, the show’s conversations are already diving into complex and painful discussions on the relationship between our bodies and identities. Phos ends up being broken into pieces multiple times throughout this episode, prompting lengthy back-and-forths on how these gems perceive themselves, and how they find value in their lives. Neither Phos nor Cinnabar chose the bodies they were born with, but both of their self-images are shaped by their unhappy relationships with those bodies. Though Phos acts carefree and assertive throughout this episode, that very gaiety seems reflective of their internalizing the idea that their body makes them useless. And Cinnabar has an even worse relationship with their body – their poisonous nature drove them to self-hatred, meaning they cannot live for their own sake, and can only justify their own existence in terms of the tasks they perform. And with no meaningful task to perform, Cinnabar is left so directionless they actually hope to be captured and shattered, if only so their body can finally provide use to someone.

Given its intense focus on our relationships with our bodies, public perception of those bodies, and how both of those factors inform our overall self-image, it wasn’t surprising in the least to see Land of the Lustrous embraced by the queer anime community. Not only is it perhaps the only anime focused on a largely genderless community, but its cast constantly grapple with many of the same issues that make announcing you deviate in any way from a conservative gender paradigm so dangerous. Though its characters are genderless gems, Lustrous seems to understand better than the vast majority of media how living in a human shell can feel like a perpetual, exhausting argument with an extremely unwanted roommate. How we can feel isolated even from our own bodies, and further isolated from a world that only recognizes us in terms of those bodies. And how we rise to meet that harsh world, and are shattered by it, and rebuilt in turn.

The shattering of Lustrous’ characters is one of its most shocking, terrifying concepts, and also one of its most vital. Its characters dance in glittering fragments through its opening song, the concept of any “true physical self” made ludicrous through their fluid churn. As we soon learn, there is indeed a link between these gems’ physical and emotional selves, but it’s an indirect one – if any of their pieces are shattered off and permanently lost, they lose whatever memories were stored within those fragments. But that’s how any process of death and rebirth goes, and if anything, we should feel lucky to pay such a small cost for the promise of a resurrection, a different and perhaps happier self.

Land of the Lustrous’ stars are broken by their world, and through their breaking reveal the true cycle of living in our own. We shatter and are rebuilt, shatter and are rebuilt, because living in a body is a process, not a stable state of being. The world breaks us, and we are shaped by it in turn – there is no nobility in the process, it is simply what it is. Sometimes we come back and are stronger for our scars, and sometimes we’re actually weaker; either way, we are forever becoming different people who are still fundamentally us.  It’s the frank, unadorned acknowledgment of that fact that perhaps most speaks to me in Lustrous. In the modern world, with all of its infinite pressures and cosmic hopelessness, being continuously broken and reformed feels like the most fundamental truth of the human experience. It’s that Undertale acknowledgment that “in spite of everything, you’re still you,” a truth that feels more empowering with every step we take.

Land of the Lustrous isn’t renowned purely for its acknowledgment of this brutal reality, or the savageness with which it illustrates its truths. Rather, the show’s acknowledgment that this is the way of the world feels more like an empathetic validation – and as Rutile says, our pieces can always be gathered back up. We will break, yes, but we can be rebuilt. It might not be pretty, it might not be soon, and we might not be happy with where we end up, but there is always tomorrow. If we broke poorly yesterday, perhaps we will break better the next time.

Or perhaps we’ll meet a person like Phos, who acknowledges our humanity no matter what our shape may be. In search of something that defines them, something they can do which no else is capable of, Phos fails to recognize the way in which they are already different: their genuine concern for Cinnabar, a concern born in the painful ways life informed them of their own fragility. Phos’ concern for Cinnabar lies at the core of Lustrous’ philosophy, and is the reason I’m so happy to return to this devastating, beautiful, heartfelt show. No matter how the world rails at us, no matter how it crushes us and reshapes us and denies our fundamental humanity, remember that we all deserve someone like Phos – someone who doesn’t ask us to prove our value, and is still willing to offer that simple, vital “I don’t want you to go away.”

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