Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is either the best-timed anime release of all time or the worst. To begin airing in a time when scientific thought and discoveries of the past 150 years are under attack—by reactionary forces claiming to be speaking on behalf of God, no less—hits with stinging precision. But I’m very glad we have this show, which has a very good chance of being the best anime of 2025.

Adapted from a manga by the same name, Orb takes place in mid-20th-century Europe, and begins with a boy named Rafal, who has spent his life trying to present himself as the perfect child in pursuit of an easy life. However, he has a minor interest in astronomy, and when he learns the heretical idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, it sets him on a path in conflict with the Church and his own peace and comfort, and changes the lives of others who also similarly discover that the pursuit of truth isn’t easy when the authorities in your world want to keep you blissfully ignorant.

Throughout the show, one thing that stands out to me is how the characters are products of their time in terms of how they both follow and defy the predominant conventions around them. For example, while you have characters who are proponents of heliocentrism, they are often also deeply religious and believe that they are celebrating and worshipping God by doing so. They are shaped by both personal qualities and cultural forces, whether it’s a zealous inquisitor named Nowak who thinks his bloody work helps protect his family, a scholarly monk named Badeni who thinks scientific discovery is important but that literacy should be restricted to the elite, or a young girl named Jolenta who loves to learn but is faced with pervasive and entrenched sexism of her environment.

I hope as many people as possible watch Orb because while its ideas aren’t exactly new, they are especially important to remember and take to heart right now and likely in the coming decades. I would recommend that you go into this show knowing next to nothing, but if you don’t mind spoilers, I’m going to list some additional thoughts I had after finishing the series.

Before that, I need to mention the fantastic theme song, which has become a massive hit in Japan. If nothing else convinces you to watch this show, maybe the opening will.

SPOILER SECTION

I want to first start at the end, and think about the fact that the attempt by Rafal and all the others before the finale was ostensibly for naught, as they failed to get their book on heliocentrism published. However, by having the last protagonist be Albert Brudewski, showing him initially dismissing the idea heliocentrism but still believing in math, and explaining in the epilogue that this was a real-live person who would later become Copernicus’s teacher, the series emphasizes something important. Orb is basically historical fiction about what if there were earlier people who had made Copernicus’s discovery but were forgotten because their work was destroyed, but it also shows how the simple act of observing the stars with a curious mind can bring back ideas thought lost to time. Science has the power to persist because its findings can eventually be rediscovered. This even shows up when Badeni looks at the orb necklace hanging on two nails and inadvertently realizes that the planets have elliptical orbits—in the real world, it would be Johannes Kepler who theorized it over 100 years later. 

The destruction of human knowledge is not fictional. Famous real-world examples of this include the destruction of the Library of Alexandria as well as the Imperial Library of Constantinople, and even today, we are seeing the loss of both knowledge and lives that has been the result of the current Trump administration and its sledgehammer gutting of science and health initiatives. The tragedy we are seeing will ripple forward, but there is hope that we can come back from this someday.

In thinking again about how the characters are shaped by their circumstances, one thing I really love about Orb is how the transmission of science across time is done through very imperfect individuals, instead of giving us brilliant intellectuals altruistically motivated to progress human thought. Badeni and his selfish scholarship is one thing, but there’s also Draka, whose profit-obsessed mind is what allows her to pursue unconventional avenues of thought and push things ahead where others might falter. Oczy is in no way an intellectual, but his tremendous eyesight and humble personality both help push things ahead, especially when he makes Badeni realize the potential there is in a simple book written for the (presumably dumb) layman. 

Even figures who aren’t the protagonists or adjacent to them impact the course of events in fascinating ways. Count Piast pushes away a doubt he had about geocentrism for most of his life in the fear that it would render pointless his life’s work (and that of his mentor), but he ultimately acquiesces because he realizes being wrong is just as important to finding the truth as being right. A young inquisitor in training who thinks little about what his work truly entails later becomes the priest in the church where Albert makes his confession, and that priest’s questioning of Church orthodoxy is the result of seeing his colleague help Jolenta escape at the cost of being burned at the stake.

What a work, man. I hope it gets as much recognition as possible.