Star Crossed Anime

I’m surprised that it’s taken me this long to realize, but a common theme of a Gonzo-series seems to be subtle jabs towards aristocracy. The best example of this is Trinity Blood: in that series, the Vatican is an important party, and yet the Pope is a shy and incapable 12-year old boy and women have been appointed at high-ranking functions. Or take Hellsing: a series about a bunch of blood-thirsty vampires who justify themselves through the queen of England.

But also some of their other series show similar themes. The shinsengumi in Peace Maker Kurogane aren’t necessarily royalty, but they were a high-ranked organization, back in those days; and infamous for their immoral acts, and there they’re portrayed as the good guys in that show. The less subtle attempts can be seen in anime as the Seven Samurai and Romeo x Juliet, where the enemies are basically the aristocrats. Now I also understand why the setting in Special A was so overblown, since that too was a way to mock the upper classes.

The series where these themes are the strongest is without a doubt Glass no Kantai. At heart, it’s a space opera and a satire of the aristocracy: the entire series plays throughout the eyes of the aristocrats, and shows how in a futuristic setting, the nobles have taken back control over the democracies. It shows how they dress up in ridiculous clothes and act on their own selfish ideals, without much consideration for others. The pope may not be a twelve year old boy, but the guy does have a daughter, the emperor is gay and a shotacon, and the series is full with those kinds of references to make the aristocrats look ridiculous. Of course, it never tries to be a comedy.

This is indeed all behind a serious story. Like mentioned above, it’s a space-opera and shows how one of these nobles leads a rebellion for the common people. Throughout the series, we get treated to a healthy combination between space-battles and large-scale politics. The interesting thing is that there’s hardly any attention for small-scale politics, and there’s hardly any focus at the common people (again, this has probably been done to show how little the lives of common people mattered to your average aristocrat).

The storyline is a pretty interesting one, and it evolves as the series goes on. The problems with this series lie in the storytelling, however. The entire series is full of small inconsistencies and left-out scenes that feel like riding over a bumpy road with broken suspensions. They break the flow that the storyline is trying to create. The best example of this is the concepts of “air”. This series has actually managed to create quite an ingenious galaxy, where there aren’t any planets, but rather small chunks of land on which everyone lives, and which can be linked together. I personally loved this idea, but it’s as if the creators didn’t spend enough time to flesh them out and think of how these chunks of land would retain their atmosphere. The result that some random places in space suddenly contain air, and while others don’t.

And there is of course the animation. The animation in this series is horribly inconsistent, and ranges from pretty to downright abysmal. This series is like Hatenkou Yuugi or Kiss Dum: there’s a project with potential, which gets held down by one or more very lazy staff-members. In the case of Glass no Kantai, I think that te producers are to blame. They didn’t realize that creating an anime takes this much of an effort, and as a result the rest of the staff had to rush through their work in order to get their work done in time. As a result, this series lacks polish, since there was no time to check for any bugs or inconsistencies, which resulted in beauties like this one. It’s not that Glass no Kantai was held down by a small budget, but rather the time-constraints that worked against it, and a good producer should be able to have known this.

Despite this mediocrity, though, I liked Glass no Kantai. It had a clear vision, which is something that can’t be said of, say, Dragonaut. And the storyline, how botched up it may be, does come together in the end. It’s interesting: the past two series I’ve watched definitely had their flaws, and were at times tedious to get through, but their final episodes did end the series with a great enough climax; something which definitely can’t be said for every other series.

Storytelling:	6/10
Characters:	8/10
Production-Values:	7/10
Setting:	9/10

When I first read about Betterman, and how it was set in the same world as GaoGaiGar (according to Anidb, at least, I expected this to be some kind of fun and GAR mecha action show. And with the same mindset, I started watching this series. What I got, though, was something slightly different. Sure, there is action, and there are mecha, but Betterman is much more suspense than that it is about action.

You can almost classify this series as horror. Throughout the series, the bad guys throw all sorts of huge monsters, creeps and psychological attacks at our protagonists, and the main focus is much more on trying to not die than to kill the enemy, because more often than not, they get saved by some outside force. This series does have its problems, but this series does succeed in never losing steam, making the action-scenes worth watching.

The big problem with this series, though, is that it doesn’t have anything that makes it really worth watching; it misses that final “oomph” that makes the viewer glued to the screen. Any area that it could have delivered in is flawed somehow. Take the setting: it’s surprisingly deep, spiced up with a lot of scientific analysis in order to explain all of the supernatural stuff that gets thrown at the viewer’s screen. A lot of interesting facts and titbits pass the screen. Unfortunately, the creators do tend to get lost in their own techno-babble, making their scenes unnecessarily confusing with all sorts of different terms and jargon. Especially the final episodes, when everything is supposed to get revealed, feel like a huge information-overload, due to the overuse of techno-babble.

Thankfully, the final episodes are saved by the characters, and they make sure that the series leaves on a good note, rather than an overly confusing one, but their problem is that their development starts awfully late for a 26-episode series. They only show a bit of depth to themselves around the final quarter of this series, and the villains are even worse off with no depth at all. Most of them feel just incomplete and uninteresting, and this series would have been much better if you actually were interested in the final villains. I do have to give credit to the male lead, though. For once, he isn’t a shy boy, or a voice of reason. The overall cast is also fun to watch in those few moments when they’re not serious, and my personal favourite was the rather eccentric Akamatsu.

Overall, because of these flaws, this series never hits any heights, but it is a very consistent one. The different parts fix each other’s weaknesses, making this enjoyable through the end, and because of that this series never hit any real lows. It always has some kind of creep that’s attacking our heroes, so if you’re into suspense series, you could give this one a try.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	8/10
Production-Values:	8/10
Setting:	7/10

This one can just be considered as both a first impression as a review, since there’s only one episode of Takane no Jitensha anyway. It can easily be considered as the brother-anime of Yume da Maya Kidan: both are only twenty minutes long, both are down-to-earth with supernatural elements, both have produced on a short budget, both are about accepting your younger sibling and both aren’t bad by any means, though they’re not really something special.

Takane no Jitensha offers a small look at the live of a boy called Takane, and the sort of problems that any boy of his age has: getting a new bike (jitensha = bike) because his current one is old and his friends keep beating him. The things here strike especially close at home. The other half of the airtime adds in a bit more excitement. The realism disappears a bit, unfortunately, but it remains an enjoyable story.

This review is short, because there’s hardly anything interesting to say about this series, but if you’ve got twenty minutes to waste, you might as well give this one or Yume da Maya Kidan a try. In terms of slice of life, Takane no Jitensha is better, while Yume da Maya Kidan is better with the supernatural stuff (especially the Tanuki in Takane no Jitensha came from nowhere and delivered one heck of a deus ex machina).

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	7/10
Production-Values:	6/10
Setting:	7/10