Category: Series which were Dropped

I guess we can’t truly escape the beach/pool episode curse, doesn’t matter what anime we see featuring high school kids these days. As such, we have a beach episode with girls in bikinis and boys (briefly) having a hot for each other in a show that clearly doesn’t need ones. I must say that the sheer commitment for Kanata no Astra to embrace its anime tropes is something worth… pointing out for. I was expecting that the journey gets grimmer the more they go, so this Paradise planet/ island really caughts me by surprise, not in a good way. The drama in these two episodes, as a result, isn’t about men vs nature but more about the dynamic between team members themselves and their relatives back in their home planet. In a way, episode 5 is the first time we get a perspective outside of these kids and head towards their parents during the search for their lost kids. They are in a real bind as well as they are considering to go through the process of declaring them legally deceased. Except from Aries’s Mom who opposes the idea, the others are composed, too composed, in fact. There’s certainly something beneath the surface regarding (some of) the parents here, and with many of them have high social status (Ulgar’s dad is a vice-president, Luca’s dad is an infamous senator, Yun-hua’s mom a famous singer, and so on), they certainly can pull something as big as sending their kids for experiments, but for what goals?

Continue reading “Kanata no Astra – 05/06 [Paradise/ Secret]” →

Even with all the worries from manga-readers regarding whether or not Kanata no Astra can wrap things up in 12 episodes, for me from an anime-only perspective the pacing so far is just about right. This week our group arrives at the second planet in their journey, and I enjoy the fact that this planet is vastly different from the first, and increasingly more sinister as well. Each place they visit the ecosystem varies significantly, and that provides a good opportunity for new experience (hello riding strange animals) and how well these kids adapt to the new environment. Of course, Kanata no Astra also knows its medium so it’s never shy on playing up the character tropes, which personally I can live without. I was crying inside when Quitterie’s first reaction when Zack butts into the bathroom was “I understand how you feel. But now is not the time for this” (seriously, who says that in that situation in real life?) and Kanata’s logic of taking off his helmet to find the medicine shiny mushroom still bugs me. But other aspects of this episode are strong enough to compensate for these missteps.

Continue reading “Kanata no Astra – 04 [Star of Hope]” →

This week in Kanata no Astra happens almost entirely inside the spaceship, and with that we come to learn more about some characters, the “conspiracy theory” and how once again they need to work together to save their asses. Put frankly, I found the way the discussion turns into a suspect game just based on Funicia’s mistranslation a bit of a stretch, but it does provide a nice mix of tension for the cast. It’s normal for someone like Quitterie to lose her composure for a moment there, after all, it’s never easy to hear that “the culprit is amongst us”. All the guessing game heads towards Yun-hua and Ulgar at the moment, but for me they are simply red-herrings. The thing that makes them suspicious is that we don’t know their motivation/ perspective in the first place so that we (and our cast) can’t entirely trust them. In this case it’s normally the person who appears the most normal is the one behind it, but I don’t want to point any finger at this early stage because it can ruin the mystery fun.

Continue reading “Kanata no Astra – 03 [Meteor]” →