Category: Cobra The Animation

I have to admit, it’s been a while since I watched a series that I considered a guilty pleasure and actually enjoyed. With series like these, I just have one thing I’m looking for. It’s obvious that the characters in this show are just shallow stereotypes, and there’s no way for the story to make sense, so instead I’m just looking for one thing: creativity. And that’s where this show delivers. I have no idea how faithful this series is to the Cobra manga, and despite the flawed storytelling I’m at least glad that they’re not shying away from strange ideas, and don’t try to play this series as safe as possible, just because of the financial crisis.

The villainness in this episode was just hilariously incompetent. At first it seemed like a nice idea for her to pretend to be nice to Cobra later, but then she actually tried to kill him. By pushing him over the edge of a boat. Despite knowing fully well that Cobra can breathe under water. She never even stops to think, and instead just keeps going on with her imaginary evil laugh, for Cobra to take plenty of time to shoot him. I also loved her reasoning: men are nothing but egoistic pigs. Overgeneralization FTW!

There are so many scientific holes into that story of the frozen women in the underwater current, but I have to admit: it’s a pretty neat idea. It was neatly built up, overall an exciting episode and while the visual direction wasn’t exactly up to Osamu Dezaki’s standards it still was fresh and imaginative, so I’m not complaining.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Oh gawd. This show is so ridiculously masculine that I can’t help but enjoy it. Remember last episode, at the end of which Cobra was about to die from poison? My prediction was that Cobra would find some cheap way to escape his certain death. Well, as it turns out he sort-of didn’t. The poison just… disappeared, never to get mentioned again. He just gets his memory back, and for some reason this is so awesome that it automatically neutralizes the poison. Also, what was the point of having this “unique key” around, when people from the underground city could just walk into the control chamber whenever they’d like to?

This turned out to be quite the ludicrous series, but it does have this strange kind of charm that I’m missing with most other series this season. It’s just so unpretentiously enjoyable: it knows what it is and delivers on this. There are also two points at which it deserves genuine praise. The first is the soundtrack. After four episodes of listening to it, I’m sure: Cobra has the best soundtrack of the new season. I’ve always been a big fan of Ike Yoshihiro, and he yet again delivers a great soundtrack for this series.

The second is the creativity. I have to admire the BALLS of this series, to go with such a crazy idea of giving Cobra amnesia so that he leaves his female companion inside a gravity trap for two whole days. The idea of having a woman fall down a cliff, get her head impaled to so become the controller of the planet’s propulsion system also was a pretty nice find.
Rating: * (Good)

This show is really something else. It’s very much a guilty pleasure, and I’m actually enjoying it more than most other shows this season. But damn. the things it tries to pull are just completely ridiculous.

So get this: Cobra and the girl arrive at the core of the planet, and are about to shut off its propulsion system that threatens to destroy it. A gravity field then gets triggered that traps them both. Cobra then trips, falls down a trap hole, ends up in a weird city, hits his head, loses his memory and suddenly an the show suddenly turns into a mafia street-fighting story. I mean… wtf?

The worst thing is that while Cobra (erm… or Joe) is spending days in that underground city, fighting, Secret is still there in the same place, being crushed by the gravity trap. I can understand Cobra himself: after all with amnesia he wouldn’t know what was going on there. What I can’t understand is the mindset of the writers when they came up with this? I mean, amnesia already is a cheap and overused plot device (just look at Dance int he Vampire Bund), but this just takes the cake in complete over-the-top and ridiculousness.

But yeah, I guess that that’s the charm of this series: it’s completely ridiculous, but at the same time it never claims to be something deep or realistic. And unlike most other shows this season, it’s actually got quite a bit of creativity and originality, and it’s one of the few series that doesn’t follow any of the modern bandwagons, other than being another remake. And this is why I love remakes: every single one of them tries to pay homage to its original series in its own way.

This episode thankfully looked a lot nicer than the previous ones. The direction still was lazy (one shot we see Cobra carry a naked Secret… the next shot she has her clothes back on. But the CG was really well done in some of the scenes. The art looked actually pretty good, and at least I’m glad that this isn’t a series that blew all of its budget in the first episode.

But yeah, the only tension in the fight is there thanks to Yoshihiro Ike’s soundtrack. It’s really getting ridiculous how insanely powerful Cobra has become, up to the point where the enemy has to poison him in order to win. It’s so obvious that in the next episode, Cobra is going to pull yet another ridiculous stunt in order to get back at them like that.
Rating: * (Good)

Well, I guess that this series is lucky to air in such a dry season as this one. If this would have been a regular season, I wouldn’t even have thought of blogging it. But yeah, the thing with this season is that not only are there less series than usual, the series that carried over from the previous seasons are also very small in their numbers. I’ve got seven open blogging slots this season, and by the looks of it there are only eight series even remotely worth blogging (this one, Sora no Oto, Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Durarara, Ookami Kakushi, Nodame Cantabile Finale and Katanagatari). Out of those eight, I’ll probably skip on Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. As a comedy-series, it’s just overwhelmed by the other comedies this season (just about the only thing that isn’t scarce in this season: thankfully there still are tons of great comedies).

And this series can boast two great names: Yoshihiro Ike for the music and Osamu Dezaki behind the screenplay and storyboard. It’s a shame that Osamu Dezaki isn’t directing this thing, so his influences are much less noticeable. I’m therefore not expecting this series to become as interesting as Ultraviolet was, far from it. The direction here is a bit sloppy (one moment Cobra shoots his arm away, the next it’s just attached back). However the parts where we saw Cobra run away in infrared were really typical of this guy, and fun to watch. 😛

And yeah, the creators were really lucky that they got Ike Yoshihiro to compose the soundtrack. This guy is consistently awesome and because of that the soundtrack is among the best of the season, among the one from Letter Bee and Armed Librarians.

Also, with this episode I think I saw a bit of the charms of the Cobra franchise: it’s a bit like James Bond: this is really meant to be an unrealistic adventure series that’s more about entertainment and doesn’t care in the slightest in creating a realistic setting. Because of that, the creators can really include neat ideas that otherwise would have made no sense, and I have to admit: the mechanical bull with infrared vision and the giant rays with weird faces were much more creative than the random monsters that generic fantasy anime usually throw out.

This series really is going to have to make it with its characters and ideas. As long as the characters remain fun until the end, and it keeps using these neat ideas instead of cliches, then I’ll probably enjoy it until the end.

Oh, and on top of that it has something that only very few other series this season can boast: it’s actually about adults. For once we have a lead character who isn’t a teenager of some sort and fanservice of women who are actually over eighteen years old.
Rating: (Enjoyable)