With the guy behind Kakurenbou as director and the director of Akira behind the screenplay and character-designs comes the ambitious project called FREEDOM, one of the few anime to be totally rendered in 3D cell-shaded CG. It’s obviously a technique that has its pros and cons, and most people will probably need to get used to the style, but once you can look beyond this, you’ll be rewarded by a charming little science-fiction series.
The big strength of this series is its cast of characters. Even though they’re a bunch of hot-headed 14-year-old guys, this series somehow makes them worthwhile. The stereotypes are there, and yet the antics of the main protagonists turn out very charming. The flaws in this series mostly pop up in the final episode, where the creators try to be a bit too epic for their own good.
Ah crap, this review is rubbish. Apologies, I’m having a blackout right now. A tip for all you reviewers out there: do not write a review if it’s been half a year or more since you saw the majority of it… If you want to get a better idea of this series, then read the rest of the posts I’ve written about it. It’s a very nice OVA to watch with great characters and it’s got a soundtrack that’s among Ike Yoshihiro’s best work. Period.
| Storytelling: | 8/10 |
| Characters: | 9/10 |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 |
| Setting: | 8/10 |
Koharu Biyori temporarily made me lose my faith in OVAs. Thankfully, FREEDOM managed to restore it. This is everything a shounen-adventure should be: fun, creative and most importantly: innocent.
And seriously, I love the OP and ED for this series. I finally realized that the OP consists out of rendered images from previous episodes, and it really looks excellent, and this really gives this series an even more unique style. The ED also still is catchy, even after hearing it a few times.
This episode was really different from the previous ones, and it mostly consisted out of the males, having fun and making idiots out of themselves. I laughed quite a bit, though, and some of the banter between both Takeru and Biz and the truck of idiots they run into was priceless. Takeru is one of the few shounen-leads that made an impression on me. Simply because he actually has a dream, albeit a little childish one (meeting the girl he fell in love with and all) and he doesn’t stop until he reaches it.
This is so much better than your average shounen lead who doesn’t have a goal beyond “score a girl”, or “become the best X in the world”. To me, it just shows that they just go in brainless random directions without any real goal in mind, and that’s not really that exciting for me. It also helps that this show is quite well written, with perhaps a few bugs as where the characters get their water from.
I also laughed when Takeru and Biz were really planning to show themselves to Ao in gold and silver alien-suits they received from the guys who provided them a ride. You think that the encounter would be the most romantic thing ever, but no, the writers had other ideas. ^^; Perhaps it’s because of that that the climax worked again so well, despite the predictability (I mean, they had to find the girl at the end of the episode, didn’t they?). It is going to be fun to see how he’s going to talk himself out of it, the next episode should promise to be fun, and I’m interested in how the creators decide to portray Ao.]]> 
Even after its third instalment, FREEDOM still doesn’t fail to entertain, and yet again, it leaves us with another powerful climax. This probably is strengthened even more by the ED. The best OPs and EDs, in my opinion, don’t just consist of good songs, but also contribute to the anime they belong to. Mushishi, for example, just went on with its peaceful mood even when the ED set in. The OP for Wellber no Monogatari is a perfect introduction, which captures the essence of the anime quite nicely. It’s so much better than these OPs which feature flashes of each different protagonist just because they have to, or the EDs, whose only purpose is to show the credits.
The goal of this episode: send Takeru to Earth. Pretty straightforward, and it’s handled quite decently. He managed to escape from these strange robots we saw in the previous episode, barely avoiding suffocation, though. And I finally realize how important Alan is in all this. He took in the citizens who didn’t want to live in Eden. If I’m not mistaken, he called it Freedom, hence the title of this anime. Because he helped Takeru, though, he endangered it, and the citizens of Freedom are threatened to be retrained and turned into proper Eden Citizens. Still, he does manage to give Takeru instructions on how to use one of the escape rockets that were in the original version of Eden.
One thing I also like about this anime: it knows what it wants to be. It doesn’t try to introduce any needless side-quests in order to impress its viewers, it just wants to tell the story of Takeru, and how he unravels the mysteries around earth. That’s one of the advantages of being an OVA: you can’t waste time on needless fillers. So far, things have been very believable, with only a few botches, like the fact that when you slowly drive a car, it uses less fuel than when you race at full speed, and the fact that Tairo was very lucky to have run into Takeru like that. Apart from that, it avoided some major pitfalls, and it actually made the fact that Takeru got lifted off in the end plausible and believable. The solution for the food-source also was pretty nice, although I do wonder why people would leave a box full of instant-noodles in a place like that. XD
What also surprised me was how Kazuma ended up being left behind, while Bis, who was reluctant to go ended up going. Taira also was great when he tried to help Takeru get his way. Without him, Takeru probably would’ve failed, and I love how the rivalry between the two of them ended up. ^_^]]> 