The Longest Road

While I consider myself a somewhat knowledgeable, well-rounded anime fan, I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to sports anime. This is normal; sports shows don't tend to get released very often in America, and have a history of selling poorly when they do. Nevertheless, it's a hole I've been meaning to fill, so at my sister's urging (much better-versed in the genre than myself) I picked up two shows over the last year or so: cycling anime Yowamushi Pedal and volleyball anime Haikyuu!!. Haikyuu!! I recently finished the first season of, and enjoyed a lot. Yowamushi Pedal I petered out on a long time ago.

The biggest reason for my disinterest would be Yowamushi Pedal's glacial pacing. Over the twenty episodes I watched, the main characters never take part in an official competition. Okay, so there is actually a lot of racing; the characters usually spice up their training with plenty of informal competitions to keep things fresh. An early episode where the hero, Onoda, and his friend are determined to catch up to a littering driver is great. And we glimpse the end of a qualifying race that some upperclassmen take part in. But despite how they spice things up, the fact remains that we spend seven episodes on a training camp that only matters because everyone keeps insisting that it matters.

In contrast, Haikyuu!! keeps things moving briskly along. Over twenty-five episodes, three official games are played start to finish, as well as two practice games, training camp, and bits and pieces of games played by other teams are touched on. That pace is just easier for me to go along with, especially after I found out that Season One of Yowamushi Pedal ended on a cliffhanger, and Season 2 spends almost its entirety on a. Single. Race. Tell me that doesn't sound like a punishing watch. Maybe they should have added a few exclamation points in their title to speed up the pace . . .

But length is meaningless if the characters are lovable, right? Well, here again I found Haikyuu!! the stronger of the two shows. Not for its lead characters; naïve, enthusiastic Onoda and cold, haughty Imaizumi are almost carbon copies of --- and --- from Yowamushi Pedal. It's the team that sticks in the memory. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, but is basically a good, well-rounded person in their own way, maybe even with goals and interests that extend outside the volleyball court. The upperclassmen are helpful and supportive, never holding themselves above their juniors, in one case sacrificing their own time on the court for the greater good. This kind of teamwork doesn't happen as often in Yowamushi Pedal; the seniors; idea of support is “make the underclassmen bike one thousand kilometers after we let some air out of their tires.” Tough love, indeed. We unfortunately don't even have any rival bikers to shake things up because, you know, there haven't been any actual races yet at this point. These are problems I hear got fixed later, but of course I didn't stick around to see this. When so many basic elements haven't fallen into place twenty episodes in, Yowamushi Pedal kinda fails at being a compelling sports drama.

That's not to say it does everything wrong, though. The animation and music are both top-rate all the way through. Better yet, the show goes into the basic tactics of cycling enough for a novice like me to respect it as a serious sport. And it's not like I actively hate all the characters; they're fine, except for some upperclassmen. Like the guy with the constant rapeface.

No, not that one.

Gah! Okay, he has one too, but I didn't even get to his character introduction before dropping the show!

Yeah, he's who I was thinking of. Look at those hungry eyes.

But the way I see it, Yowamushi Pedal doesn't do well at two vital components of sports anime. I'm not invested in the races because there aren't any, and I'm not invested in the characters because there aren't enough truly sympathetic or engaging ones. It focuses too narrowly on the sport itself, while Haikyu!! is more about the drama. Characters grow and change on and off the court, and a steady barrage of new situations (read: actual games) keeps that growth constant; it's just more compelling than watching --- learn a new stamina-saving technique that's . . . nice, I guess, but doesn't affect the team dynamic or his psychological growth in any meaningful way.

If you love Yowamushi Pedal, awesome. I can't call it an outright bad show by any stretch. But this is one sports ignoramus who thinks Haikyu!! beats it on every level. Now, can anyone offer advice on how to get this face out of my nightmares?

In Harm's Way

With a name like Harmagedon, what kind of movie would you expect? Probably a crappy one, unless you've heard that famous director Rintaro was attached. While this guy has a notorious hit-and-miss track record, even his bad stuff tends to be at least competent. And this film came right on the heels of his excellent Galaxy Express 999 movies, so it can't be too bad, I reasoned to myself.

It was. Harmagedon turned out to be an unexpected so-bad-it's-good classic.

The first thing you notice is the English dub, even if you fully intend to see it in Japanese. I did, but the first scene of a crazy blue lady prancing the moonlit streets of Tokyo got me thinking that the Japanese track was awfully flat. Only by switching over to English was I able to appreciate that “THEY ARE VANISHING! THE STARS ARE GOING DEAD, ONE BY ONE! HALF A BILLION SYSTEMS HAVE ALREADY BEEN CONSUMED! THE HUNGRY VOID IS FOUR MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY, BUT EVERY SECOND IT RUSHES CLOSER TO US!” Sadly, no one sounds quite as crazy, but very few deliveries actually fit the given line. Of particular trouble are the single-syllable grunts of assent or denial that Japanese is so fond of, yet the English track doesn't know what to do with. It seems like the dubbing writers had no idea how to handle extraneous lip flaps, as evidenced by a possessed cop's Kool-Aid Man shout of “Oh yeah!” to punctuate his evil monologue. There are some things that just . . . automatically place your movie in the same tier as Battle Royal High School.

Another hilarious aspect is how poorly this film is paced, though being based on a long-running book series, we'll cut it a little slack. But consider: fully half of your huge, epic, globe-trotting intergalactic psychic war is dedicated to the main character discovering he has psychic powers and resisting the call to adventure. The second half introduces about a half-dozen major characters with no backstory given, which is especially infuriating since the first half wasted time with a backstory for a character that never ends up developing at all, explaining plot points in the process that would be explained again later. The climax doesn't feel as rushed as I feared, but it never gets as epic as all the buildup would have you expect.

Also, this might be just me, but I thought some of the character movements seemed a bit awkward in an otherwise well-animated movie. Harmagedon was one of—if not the—first anime film to shoot for realism with its character designs, and while they had a lot of influence down the road, I think you can see the growing pains at times.

Now, I won't deny that Harmagedon was a fairly important work, historically speaking. Not only did it add to Rintaro's impressive resume, but marks Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo's first foray into animation. Several other future big names can also be found here, like Yasuomi Umezu and Yoshiaki Kawajiri. The generally nice animation certianly reflects this. But Harmagedon fails as an engaging film because it has huge ambitions with a lot of narrative ground to cover, yet no idea how to fit those into its runtime. If you're not going to properly pay off a rivalry with someone's best friend later, cut the subplot out. Don't show Luna's origin story if she's not going to evolve beyond “lead psychic girl”. Focus on the action, maybe, or on showing Genma's galaxy-destroying power, otherwise we'll be disappointed when he ends up being some doctor standing in a volcano.

If you want to see an ambitious work that ends up squarely in the shitter . . . actually, watch Garzey's Wing. With Harmagedon, things never get so crazy that you can't see the potential. But as a result, Harmagedon becomes its own unique cocktail of good and bad that's much more worthy of a point-by-point analysis. Definitely give it a watch if you get the opportunity; you'll at least get the implied epic-ness of the source material, and will probably appreciate its influence on the visuals and storylines that followed immediately after. And you'll get to see Bambi being saved, so there's that, too!

Winter 2016 Overview

Hey, all!  Another season, another barely-squeezed-in-among-a-rare-break review!  Let's get right to it!

Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans

I personally think this cour was an improvement on the last, but understand how a lot of people might not like some of the developments in plot and character. I'm just glad the plot moved forward at all; it looked for a while like very little would happen. But goals were indeed established, characters were pushed to the limit and changed accordingly, and the battles still looked awesome. I'm curious what the reported next season will do to expand on this.

Gate

I'll admit first off that this cour of Gate did more right than the previous one: the episode where they fought the dragon was great, for example, mostly because the heroes were the underdogs just this once. Also, I really wanted to see the villains defeated. But all the tension came from irredeemable assholes doing whatever they wanted for a dozen episodes. “I don't like Japan, so let's work hard to frame them! Now let's throw everyone who disagrees with me in prison! Boy, I'm the best king ever!” The good guys still aren't good; the show just began relying on constant shit-eating grins from bad guys to keep us invested.

Osomatsu-san

Okay, this is officially one of the best comedies in recent years. This cour has been even stronger than the last, with wonderful sequences like the road race and the kerosene heater incident emphasizing how much humor can come out of shitty people. A big hit nobody expected.

Haru Chika

Those looking for a good mystery show should look elsewhere, because this one relies heavily on the Ranpo Kitan model of crazy. Want to see piggy bank houses, underground radio broadcasts by illegal nursing homes, and high school students running a business that tests whether middle-aged womens' first loves were true? Then this is the “mystery” show for you! At least it didn't have Ranpo Kitan's ego, but my god was this a boatload of wtf.

Active Raid

In my write-up a few weeks back I essentially called this show a piss-poor pastiche of Patlabor. Nothing's changed my mind since then. Are we really getting another cour three months from now?

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu

It's always nice when we get us a historical show like this, because I usually end up learning someone. In this case it was the ins and outs of a very unusual art form, as well as the time period that saw its twilight and gradual decline. While slower-paced and more serious than most shows, the great chemistry between characters keeps things entertaining even if you have zero interest in history. I'd recommend this to someone who wants a series a little bit off the beaten path.

Dimension W

While this show looks as great as one expects from Studio Bones, the characters are a total buzzkill. The main character in particular is such a joyless, angry, abusive waste of a tragic backstory that he negates whatever happiness the side characters could have brought into our lives. Worse, several recurring villains/antiheroes share these exact same characteristics (and dead girlfriend syndrome), so it's like being beaten over the head with EDGY. The plot's generic, too, but I don't see it conjuring any empathy for these characters even were it more ambitious.

Assassination Classroom

The show continues every bit as strong as when it left us. A solid shonen action/slice of life series with some good messages; looking forward to the upcoming finale.

Erased

The standout show of the season, though you may not have heard anyone talking about it because shit gets pretty real. Time travel aspects aside, this is a story about child abuse and abduction, and it does not shy away from showing you what that means. Almost the anti-Dimension W, in that the well-written characters practically jumped off the screen at you. I was deeply invested after only an episode or two because everyone is treated with so much more realism than you'd expect from, you know, a time travel story. As long as you don't mind some dark images and implications, I'd definitely recommend this dramatic thrill ride.

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash

While not perfect by any means, I really enjoyed this more introspective trapped-in-a-video-game show. It took its characters seriously, know how to show rather than tell the world's intricacies, and kept us wondering if everyone would survive the episode. That's more than many similar shows accomplish, plus it's nice to look at.

God's Blessing on this Wonderful World (Kono Suba)

This show was sort of the hybrid between Grimgar and Osomatsu-san, now that I think about it. While focusing on the least glamorous aspects of a fantasy world, most humor came from how crappy the main characters can be. Though much less consistently good than those other shows, I still found myself looking forward to it, and I plan on watching the eventual second season.

Bubuki Buranki

A fun show, as long as you watch for the crazy visuals and cheesy emotions alone. The plot can some odd directions; it's clearly just a vehicle to show off all those CG character designs. But I wasn't expecting much worse, so it turned out to be a nice little diversion.

Lupin III

Oh yeah, was this show worth the wait. Despite an unusual (for the Lupin franchise) ongoing plot, the best episodes were the stand-alone ones; just a character and a caper. A must-see for Lupin fans, and also a great introduction for potential new fans.

Koyomimonogatari

Okay, even I know these Bakemonogatari-related shorts were superfluous (until the very end; holy shit). But these characters have proven to be entertaining just sitting in a room talking about whatever weird, random idea entered the author's head. I'd still welcome more pointless stories.

Sushi Police

You don't have to enjoy sushi to like this show a lot. Although disliking it may make you feel a little guilty. Regardless, it was nice to see CG animation put to good use; shows that rely heavily on it tend to get a lot of backlash from fans, so maybe shorts like these are the way to go for now.

Oshiete! Galko-chan

Despite being nothing more than a bunch of high schoolers swapping dirty jokes and questions about sex, a fun little show. Probably best it's only seven minutes long, though.

Sekko Boys

This bizarre bit of humor was hit-or-miss for me. Not all the situations were funny, but the laughs came easiest whenever the show tried to act like your standard idol show. I mean, these preening, dysfunctional celebrities are . . . statues. In that respect, I found the credits consistently hilarious.

While this was a pretty good season overall, it still felt like a slight letdown because there wasn't a huge crowd-pleaser to fill the enormous shoes of One Punch Man.  But who knows what next season will bring?  I'll soon find out . . . right after I work through a slight backlog problem!

It's a Jungle Out There

Mamoru Hosoda is a strangely difficult director to talk about. Although just starting his career, he has a mountain of expectations heaped on him because Studio Ghibli happened to be petering out at the same time as he got popular. Why else would a relative newcomer be called “the next Miyazaki” despite his films being entirely different in message and scope? That's why many were let down by The Wolf Children, and why I walked into The Boy and the Beast with lowered expectations. How did it hold up? I enjoyed myself, but wouldn't call the movie any better than fine.

The story isn't anything groundbreaking. A young boy, Ren, running away from his foster family encounters a bustling society of monster-people hiding in the shadows of our own, and gets taken in by the bear-like Kumatetsu. He's loud, slovenly, and disagreeable, only taking Ren in so that his lord will consider him a candidate for succession. Both characters have a lot of growing up to do, and do it with each other's help. What I realized afterward was that you can split Ren's journey into six parts, and my enjoyment of each part differed greatly.

Part one covered the opening, of course, which I thought was very well done. The first few minutes of exposition dumping was carried by some fantastic music and CG work, and character introductions were effective as well. Less effective was the next part which focused mainly on Ren and Kumatetsu's clashing personalities. They yell at each other and make lots of funny faces directly into the camera, which basically lays the foundation for all their later interactions. The movie's actually quite weak here because not only is this not funny or charming, neither characters' motivation comes through strongly at this point. Why are these two shouting at each other across the table when neither really has a good reason to even sit at the same table? Too bad, because characters like mild-mannered monk Soshi and sorta-antagonist Iozen are introduced here, both of which feel like they'd be more interesting to watch.

Part three I consider to be when Ren and Kumatetsu both get serious about training, and here things pick up again. Realizing that they each can learn from the other, their relationship becomes one of sidelong glances and unspoken words underneath all the bickering. It's pretty cheesy, but it's the closest to human warmth those two get. Besides, training montages! Always a good thing.

And then things get weird with a timeskip of about ten years or so. Without giving too much away, Ren becomes suddenly involved with the human world again, specifically with a pretty young female student, with his absentee birth father, and with applying for college. Now the first one or two plot points I can understand, but all three at once? Out of the blue? This stretch is all over the place with ideas, but none of them stick. Kumatetsu then finds out Ren's been doing things in the human world, gets mad about some part of that for some reason, and the two predictably separate, leaving Ren to question his own identity and place in the world.

Just as predictably, he returns to encourage his father figure in part five, which encompasses Kumatetsu's battle with Iozen for lordship. This is handled well enough; Hosoda really isn't an action director, so the fight doesn't put you on the edge of your seat, but I was engaged enough. Sadly, the sixth and final part rears its ugly head as the fight ends with the reveal of the true villain, in a shocking turn of events only those with eyes saw coming.

Mamoru Hosoda's typically uplifting messages are found as expected in the climax, but boy do you have to dig through a pile to reach them. Plot holes abound as the human world is needlessly brought into the conflict; the villain really has no reason to rampage there for one thing. Also, the laws of passage between realms is casually violated by a group of low-ranking beastmen for the sake of a single line of exposition we already knew. References to Moby Dick, already a bit forced in this film, are hammered in way too hard. The CG looks good, but is overused to the point of distraction. The final battle's pace just drags. And as Ren's not-really-girlfriend clings to him throughout the end, she doesn't feel like she belongs in any of this.

In summary, I enjoyed The Boy and the Beast while viewing it, but afterwards the flaws jumped out at me more than the good parts. I've heard Hosoda lacked one of his usual writers for this film, and I believe it; lots of meaningless plot points could have been cut from the second half for a more coherent feel, and personalities should have been shuffled a bit so side characters weren't more fun to watch than the main duo. This was essentially a clumsier version of Hosoda's previous works, and he'll have to either make better-constructed movies about the importance of family in the future, or do something completely different to hold our collective interest.

You're one of the last well-known directors of original anime films. We're all rooting for you, man.

The Raid: No Redemption

I took another gamble this season by choosing to watch Active Raid. I usually follow the critics' reviews pretty close when deciding which shows to follow, and on this one they were somewhat evenly split. Mistakenly giving it the benefit of the doubt, I found Active Raid to be the kind of white noise I mentally flush about a week after the ending. But what did intrigue me now is why this show fails when other, similar shows succeed.

In Active Raid, X technology has revolutionized society, but also given rise to X crime. Enter Y, a police force that pilots their own X to counter this. But Y is actually staffed by a ragtag group of quirky individuals! Will justice prevail, or shenanigans ensue?

Sound familiar? You replace X with Will Wear and Y with Unit 8 in this case, but could just as easily substitute Labor and SV2 to get Patlabor from about 30 years ago. When comparing these two directly, however (since it's pretty hard not to), I find Active Raid falls far short in the character and plot departments.

To be fair, almost everyone is an over-the-top archetype in both shows. But Patlabor tends to feel just a tad less ethereal; while eccentric, we can still kinda-sorta see a gun nut like Isao Oota or an unpredictable prodigy like Kanuka Clancy existing in real life. Active Raid gives us diehard train otaku and former gambling legends, both cute girls of course. You wouldn't exactly find many people like this in real life, and yet these quirks are usually revealed and showcased over just a single episode.

This causes two problems: first, it kills the characters by not weaving their personalities into the show bit by bit. Haruka is a train otaku because it came in handy that one episode; personality established, moving on. Second, it kills the humor by not fully capitalizing on characters' quirks. If Haruka was constantly talking about trains, looking at pictures of trains, forcing her obsession on everybody, then maybe you'd have a decent running gag. As it stands, characters exist in a purgatory where they don't feel like real people, yet don't act out enough to work well as cartoons. How are they suppose to make an impression on us?

Patlabor lies firmly on the realistic end of the spectrum, a weird place for a comedy series. Not only could some characters be just like our own more eccentric co-workers, the world it sets up still feels like it could be our own ten years from now. The humor works because it's easy to imagine most off-the-wall scenarios happening, then being made worse by a gaggle of offbeat personalities. Even better, Patlabor can get serious when it needs to, establishing real stakes at times and introducing villains with genuinely scary worldviews. This stuff's compelling even today because it's still easy to see parallels between life and this particular piece of art.

Active Raid is anime imitating anime. You've got your easygoing slob of a male lead who always pisses off his trash-separating clean freak of a partner. You've got your good-looking hacker main villain, always smugly confident of his ideals even though we have yet to hear what the fuck they are (seriously, there is no hint of what he thinks is so wrong with society that it's okay to put thousands in danger). You've got your pop idol episode, your giant robot episode, your high-stakes gambling episode. We've seen all this done before, better, and guess what? Our investment in the show isn't really helped by the constant shifts in focus, especially since there isn't any clear message beyond “good guys stop bad terrorists!”

Despite my ranting tone, this is not a terrible series. There's no janky animation, intolerable filler arc, or backwards morality to be found. It just doesn't aspire to do anything but mimic a half-dozen shows it liked, once, without thinking about what made them work. The watered-down diet soda aftertaste it leaves is definitely preferable to other crap I've sampled, but doesn't need to be sought out by anyone. Don't settle for an imitation like Active Raid; go for a series that had ideas and did something with them.

Do the Robot

Whenever discussing the history of anime, Astro Boy usually comes up. Despite its unquestionable influence, though, you find few people familiar with the title beyond the concept and maybe a few characters. I sought to fix that a few weeks ago upon finding the 2003 reboot cheap at an F.Y.E. After all, this was a particularly high-budget production that made special effort to be accessible for all nations! Does it live up to the hype?

Uh . . . sorta-ish?

To acknowledge the elephant in the room, this show is Americanized, sometimes painfully so. I can understand making sure no one dies and using only “harmless” laser guns, even if it lessens the drama in many harder-hitting stories. But the episodes themselves are so obviously cropped that it's a constant distraction. This was clearly made for TVs larger than a little box, there's clearly stuff going on at the sides we can't see, and there's nothing we can do about it. Likewise, only the English dub is available, with no way of knowing what the more direct translation would have been. I say this because at some points dialogue doesn't seem to match the facial expressions; sometimes Astro will say a snarky line but look very sad and confused while speaking. Pretty sure he didn't have a dumb catchphrase like “Let's rocket!” in Japanese, too. I'm not enough of a purist to say any and all changes ruin a show, but these changes do sometimes take you out of the story.

The story itself is quite good. While not as dark as Tezuka tended to lean, the show mainly deals with anti-discrimination commentary, with robots taking the place of insert second-class race here. Mankind's somewhat delicate relationship with technology is also touched on. While the vast mojority of episodes are stand-alone, entries featuring the Blue Knight form a loose ongoing arc as simmering social tensions boil over into a full-fledged robot revolution. Yeah, for a lighthearted kids' show, things can still get pretty real.

The characters were a highlight for me. It was pretty cool to recognize a guest character and flip through The Art of Osamu Tezuka to confirm that, yes, they had appeared in dozens of other series in various roles. Not everyone was particularly fleshed-out, mind you; I lost count of how many bad guys hate robots “just because”. But at least there was a certain charm to watching famous character designs hamming it up (perhaps ham-and-egging it up in the case of Ham Egg?) that kept things entertaining. Besides, a surprising amount of heroes, antiheroes, and even villains are given the full spectrum of morality, considering this show is squarely aimed at kids. The aforementioned Blue Knight, for instance, fights for a good cause but threatens human/robot relations by doing so. Baddies like Rock and Lamp are shown to have sympathetic backstories which explain their misdeeds, as well as potential for redemption. Even the black-clad, charismatic main villain Dr. Tenma is often portrayed as a lonely, self-destructive man who teaches Astro many important lessons.

The voice acting itself is hit-or-miss. I never quite bought the gravelly, Ash Ketchum-ish voice the clearly female actress gave Astro, and kid characters in general sound kinda dumb with the possible exception of Reno. Most one-shot and recurring characters get similarly cartoony voices, but they usually come off as more endearing than grating. Dr. Oshay's actor seems to have the most dialogue behind Astro, and delivers it well enough that I wish his character had more meat than one-note good guy exposition factory. And I found myself wondering when Dr. Tenma would come back to say something with his cool voice. The music, unfortunately, is mostly miss. They replaced the Japanese opening theme with somewhat serviceable techno music. It gets less serviceable the more often it's used in-show as battle music, which is almost every episode; I can't say for certain how many other tracks were thus replaced, but none stand out. Animation is good for the time, especially given how often the camera movies through CG environments. They say each episode had roughly three times the budget of standard anime episodes, and I can believe it, but it does feel duller and more processed than its fully hand-drawn brethren. But hey, maybe the bit they cropped on the sides looked downright spectacular!

All in all, Astro Boy was a seriously flawed show that I can forgive because it remains fairly solid and completely well-intentioned. It reflects Tezuka's heavy themes as best as it can for the wide target audience, and throws plenty of bones to the author's diehard fans despite rebooting some aspects for maximum accessibility. The Americanized changes are by far the biggest problem, especially since I don't believe any alternate version has been or will be released. Still, the version I found was ten dollars for fifty episodes, so really who am I to bitch? The 2003 reboot of Astro Boy remains a competent introduction to a much larger world, and in the end that's just what the creators intended. Don't be afraid to check it out.

Blast from the Past

Continuing my bad habit of impulse-purchasing anime, a few months ago I bought myself a copy of Super Dimension Century Orguss. Never heard of it? Yeah, me neither. But the cover art just screamed Macross at me, and sure enough, the two shows shared character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto. Even better, they shared Noboru Ishiguro as director, one of the more renowned figures in sci-fi anime who also did the first Megazone 23 OVA and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Those are some solid credits right there, but what about this more obscure show?

From episode one there's a solid mashup of science fiction ideas. In the future, two major world powers are at war, and asshole pilot Kei becomes a key part of one's mission to bomb the enemy's orbital elevator. Not with just any bomb, mind you, but with a deadly Dimensional weapon that, due to a few miscalculations on everyone's part, ends up warping space and time. Kei gets flung twenty years into the future to an Earth comprised of multiple timelines; humans evolved different ways on different timelines, other creatures dominated the planet on others, and machines on still others. Now all possibilities are stuck with each other, and Kei must navigate the warring factions long enough to save the Earth from a slow death via increasing dimensional instability.

So it's basically a free-for-all where anything is plausible, but the plot turns out more grounded than you might expect. That's because the focus is only two or three races and the interactions between their members. In this sense it again recalls Macross, where humans, Zentradi, and Meltlandi found common ground and learned to coexist only after many confrontations. The ragtag crew eventually assembled aboard the Glomar and their conflicts demonstrate on a small scale how people (and robots, and dinosaur . . . psychic . . . things) can more or less live together despite their different viewpoints or backgrounds. Our love for one another makes it possible.

Sounds trite and cheesy? It is, as befits a space opera from the early 80s, but the cast gets treated with enough dignity to sell the idea. Almost everybody wants something beyond just survival, and goes through at least a few introspective scenes wherein they question what they want and what they're doing. Mimsy may be mistaken at first glance as the doe-eyed, stereotypical love interest who eventually realizes she can't live without the hero. But that would be overlooking her long-running goal of using Kei as a tool to help her race, her conflict between duty and friendship as she discovers said race's intentions, and her reservations against entering a relationship that may be fated to end quickly. Kei, for his part, puzzles out the meaning of responsibility without completely losing the free-spiritedness that made him endearing. Shaya is a mess of contradictions and insecurities under her warm, matronly personality, and even mascot or comic relief characters have their own personal conflicts and tragedies. There's plenty of cheesy interactions to be found, which maybe I unfairly write off because I have a thick skin for the stuff, but also lots of emotional meat to enjoy if you aren't totally allergic to melodrama.

Likewise, the video quality itself will either be a bonus or a turn-off depending on the viewer. Orguss is an early 80s TV show. It looks like an early 80s TV show. Quality ranges from decent to janky, with stock footage rearing its head during many a battle scene. The trade-off is that vehicles, missiles, and explosions have a hand-drawn charm that no CGI can replicate, but it's understandable if many get annoyed seeing the same three missiles blow up the same three Nikicks over and over. On a similar note, while the Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs have a beautiful retro look in key art, when budgets wear thin you'll notice eyes wandering all over faces, to say nothing of weird limb movements. The music remains consistently good, at least, never dropping below serviceable, and the opening theme is an earworm.

I can see why people would turn their noses up at this title. It looks hopelessly dated, it's got cheese coming out the ears, and the ending is the very definition of “your mileage may vary”. But Super Dimension Century Orguss is also a show with a lot of heart, one that has fun with science fiction concepts, develops its characters well, and knows how to leave you on a good cliffhanger. Praise be once again to Discotek for letting us own this lesser-known title; no other anime licensor is as dedicated to bringing back neglected chunks of history. Until a decent amount of Macross gets its own release (fingers crossed), Orguss is a worthy successor to the message that emotions conquer all.