Netflix’s trippy anime hybrid Adam by Eve projects an artist’s dreams into reality

polygon.com:

“Have you ever fallen asleep in class and woken up with a jolt?”

That’s more or less the most precise way to articulate the vibe Japanese singer and composer Eve (stylized as “E ve”) gives off in his work. For most of a decade, his animated music videos have been chasing that ephemeral feeling of a dream that feels too fantastical for reality, yet solid enough to be a memory. In his songs — featured in anime like the Jujutsu Kaisen series and the movie Josee, the Tiger and the Fish — everyone shares that uncanny feeling, where the line between dream and repressed anxieties gets blurry, represented through the clash and hybridization of music and different kinds of animation. Eve’s new audiovisual work Adam by Eve: A Live In Animation, now streaming on Netflix, is a multimedia experiment that sifts through all his work to this point. Though it’s packed with remixes of and callbacks to Eve’s history, it’s a dazzling, surprisingly accessible summation of his visual and sonic styles.

The story’s focal point is one of Eve’s past creations, “Hitotsume” (One-Eye), a supernatural being that appeared in Eve’s manga Kara no Kiokuand several of his music videos. Here, One-Eye is a mysterious being that appears in people’s dreams, particularly those of high-schooler Aki (actress/model Hanon), who is searching for her missing friend Taki (singer/model Ano). It doesn’t take long for Adam by Eve to take on the general tone of the singer-composer’s music videos, that of a kind of odd waking dream. This 58-minute music video/concert film/animated dream journal pushes that idea to its logical end point, with Eve’s dreams and visual imaginings intruding into the real world, in the form of animated beasts and disembodied limbs that crawl