A bureaucrat becomes humanity's only negotiator with a being that doesn't think like us, doesn't want what we want, and speaks in geometric impossibilities. The show treats first contact like a legal deposition, not a blockbuster, and Shindo has to argue for human survival using paperwork and principle. By episode three you realize the real threat isn't invasion, it's that the entity might be right, and accepting that truth costs everything he's built his life defending.

A passenger plane waiting at Haneda Airport is swallowed whole by a colossal cube that appears without warning. Inside, its 252 passengers find themselves unharmed, greeted by a calm, human-looking visitor who assures them they are safe. He is Yaha-kui zaShunina, a being from a higher-dimensional universe called Novo. A message on the passengers' phones, addressed to all of Japan's citizens, declares that he will intervene in the country's internal affairs, and he says his aim is to advance humanity, beginning with Japan. Kojiro Shindo, a composed government official and skilled negotiator who was aboard the plane, ends up as the go-between for this visitor and a human world struggling to make sense of the cube, called Kado. The government also sends its own negotiator, Tsukai Saraka. Who zaShunina really is, and what he truly wants, drive this tense sci-fi thriller from Toei Animation.