Garakowa: Restore The World is a 2016 Science Fiction film directed by Masashi Ishihama. It centers around two cute antivirus programs named Dorothy and Dual, who are tasked with protecting the Wisdom Box. The Wisdom Box contains backed-up data about all of human culture and society from various time periods, and to do their work clandestinely, they insert themselves as the family and friends of certain people within them. After one particular deletion, the pair meet a girl named Remo, which triggers a series of events that changes everything they knew about the Wisdom Box...
The movie is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, for free users as of January 23rd, 2016.
Garakowa: Restore the World contains examples of the following tropes:
- Aerith and Bob: We have Dual, Remo and Dorothy.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Mother program was designed to solve the problems of humanity and create a utopia. Except it saw humans as the problem. Subtly through the use of social lethargy, it killed off the human race. By the time humans realized it was a problem, it was too late. Also within The Wisdom Box, Mother is sorting through data it considers "beautiful". What it doesn't think is beautiful is marked for deletion, which Dual and Dorothy perceive as data that's infected by a virus.
- Artificial Intelligence: Every single person on the planet had an AI copy created within the Wisdom Box. The main characters, all being programs themselves, also apply as this.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Dual explains to Remo that things can be good to her, if she thinks they're good. Used often with food, where Dual says something tastes good if she thinks it tastes good.
- Chekhov's Gun: Dual's tragic keepsake.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Sumire, serves also as the Unwitting Instigator of Doom. In the real world, she heads to London to fulfill her dreams, meets Daniel who becomes her husband, and they have a daughter, Diana. Daniel creates ViOS which becomes the only OS the world uses. Diana is the mother of Remo, or at least the person who Remo is based on. Remo dies in a tragic event that causes Diana to create Mother in order to create an ideal world. Mother can then carry out her plan with ease due to ViOS's widespread use.
- Computer Virus: The main 'villains' which Dual and Dorothy must 'compress and delete'. Partially subverted. Mother released updates to view fragments of programs as viruses. Deleting worlds has created more of these.
- Corrupted Data: Many of the viruses are actually this, remnants of when their worlds were deleted. The antivirus programs have been updated to view them as viruses.
- Emotions vs. Stoicism: Dual shows signs of being attached to the worlds she deletes, while Dorothy has no problem, believing being attached makes it worse to delete an infected world. This comes to bite Dorothy in the ass when she gains an appreciation of emotions after exploring multiple backup worlds with Dual and Remo and has to delete a world where she was part of a loving family.
- Gratuitous English: The Japanese title has an official English name with a bit of Purple Prose: "Vitreous Flower & Destroy the World". The Japanese title itself means "The Glass Flower & the Destroyed World."
- Retro Upgrade: Dual and Dorothy are reverted to their original capabilities, which grant them even more power due to Mother screwing with their algorithms up to this point
- Spoiler Title: Done subtly for the Japanese version. It's the real world that's been destroyed and no hint of this was given until halfway through the movie.
- Tragic Keepsake: Dual keeps a hair ribbon that was worn by Sumire, whose world she had to delete. Dorothy tries to convince her to delete the ribbon, believing it to hold Dual back.
- Walking the Earth: Dual, Dorothy, and Remo wander around all of the backup data to see if Remo can remember anything from it and at the same time scan for viruses. In effect, they learn a whole lot more about human emotions and discover life beyond being programs.
- The World Is Just Awesome: Much of what Dual, Dorothy, and Remo experience is the best of what Earth and humans had to offer.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: Discussed at one point. Dorothy believes it's been five years since they were installed into the system, but they don't know how long really it's been outside the system. Visiting backup data also has a hint of Year Inside, Hour Outside.
