Aoi Blink Review – 77,5/100

You might be wondering what the heck I’m doing with something that looks like a weird bastard child of Astro Boy and My Little Pony, but this is actually the last series that Osamu Tezuka directed in his life, before succumbing to cancer. In fact, he sadly couldn’t live to see its completion. It was recommended to me by hairgreen, so I decided to give it a shot. Aoi Blink really is a children’s adventure. It follows the lead character Kakeru as he travels together with a talking flying horse, two thieves, a princess and a bus driver in the search of his father, who has been abducted by the evil bad guy. Is it formulaic? Yes. Is it simple? Yes. Does it have very odd survival chances for the lead character? Obviously. Do I regret watching it? Nope. The format of this series of course has a lot of problems in terms of believability. The side-character’s motivation is simply that they support Kakeru in his quest to find his father, and are hungry for an adventure. They don’t have a lot of history or background either, so they’re not the most complete characters out there. The basic format of every episode is also rather predictable: the characters arrive in some sort of town, have some fight with some bad guy who is causing problems in this town and at the end of the episode everyone is happy and the characters leave again. Yet, this series does have enough to make up for this. The characters may lack background, but because they’re such an odd bunch travelling together it becomes fun to watch them; Osamu Tezuka has always been known for his ability to create lovable characters, and here too he creates a cast with a nice little chemistry together. He also stands out in his creativity: it’s amazing that at the end of his career, he still had more than enough interesting ideas stuffed into this series. A big reason that makes this series avoid the pitfall of most boring adventure series is that a lot of episodes, while their scenario is nothing new, they are centred around some interesting idea. At first sight, this series does have a clear distinction between good and evil: evil people do bad things and good people are nice. However, despite the lack of a gray area between them, this series starts playing with these morals surprisingly often: sometimes people you’d think are good are actually evil, some good people come across as evil at first, some good people are brainwashed to be evil and one episode even has this reversed. This especially becomes fun near the end. I’m not going to say much about the ending because of spoilers, but the final episode in this series was my favourite of the entire series, in which in a series which seemingly existed out of random episodes, everything surprisingly comes together in a truly kickass conclusion. Aoi Blink is a flawed adventure series, which is why I rated it rather lowly. Kakeru, despite being a kid and all, manages to outsmart grown adults over and over throughout the series. But if you’re looking for adventure, then this series has it. The characters are simple and childish, yet they grow on you. Because of this, there are a number of episodes that are a bit tedious to get through, but if you’re into children’s adventures then this series has a lot to like. If you are not interested in this genre however, this series isn’t going to cause you to see the light.