If Franz Kafka wrote an anime, would he have more than one bug?

OK, let’s skip the highbrow literary references and go straight to the world of Cagaster of an Insect Cage.

In the future, a disease with ravish the world by turning people into giant insects who devour people who have not turned into insects. The army tries to control the situation, but it takes a group of specially trained Exterminators to kill the monsters. Kidow is one such Exterminator.

While traveling through the wilderness, Kidow comes across a man and his daughter under attack by the insects known as cagasters. The girl survives, and Kidow promises the man he will take the girl to her mother. Only the girl’s memory is a bit incomplete, and Kidow has no other clues. They settle down temporarily in a small town, but there are always those man-eating bugs to worry about.

Plus the girl, Ilie, is no average 14-year-old. We figure that one out halfway through the series. She has a secret deep inside her. Is Ilie a pawn in some madman’s dream? How is it connected to the civil war which breaks out among the various sectors? And exactly who is that half-cagaster Acht? And what are Franz’ real plans?

This is a good story, tightly told. Somehow within the twelve episodes they found the time to give detailed background stories. The flashbacks make the present not only violent, but even more dark.

There is lots of action, and those scenes are well done. But overall, the animation seems a bit inconsistent. It seems to be a mixture of computerized and hand-drawn images, but I will let someone better versed in animation go into that. Let me just say that mostly the character movements seem fluid, but at other times they seem quite stiff. It is as if they did not put the effort into certain scenes.

But my complaints about the animation are nit-picky. This is an entertaining show. I do recommend Gagaster of the Insect Cage.