Ao no 6-gou

Yet another anime I remember watching during my Toonami days. I remember not liking it very much when I was younger, due to the dark plot. But I've recently rewatched it again (years later) and I must say, this was a kickass anime.

I was rewarded with a great plot, jazzy music, excellent animation, and a good moral lesson.

The story itself had a pretty interesting and original twist on the End of the World genre of movies. With the theme's of man vs nature and such (it does this much better then The Happening, but that isn't very hard to do).
I only wish that they'd ... have made a few more episodes. I'd really have liked to have seen the plot deepen somewhat, which we didn't get the chance to see with just 4 episodes.

The animation was great, at least the hand drawn portion. It flows very nicely and the colors are vibrant. The drawn stuff has aged very well... the CGI not so much. They added quite a bit of CGI, which probably looked cool 10 years ago. But now you can CLEARLY see the age. This can be an eye sore at times.

The soundtrack was quite interesting. You'd think that something like this would have an epic orchestra score. But instead, the soundtrack consists of a group of jazz tracks. The jazz actually fits very well with the anime, who would've thought...

The characters aren't very complex save for Zorndyke, who ends up being a very complex and deep character. Other than him, the other characters remain 2 dimensional. Hayami is your standard antihero, Kino is your standard annoying female counter part, and Verg (who is actually my favorite) is your standard bad guy, up until the end where we see a completely different side to the monster shark captain.
Once again, I blame the lack of episodes for this. We're just not given time to watch these characters develop at all.

Overall, this is a pretty good anime from beginning to end. It has and uses some very interesting idea's, some elements work (the concept and story) while others don't (the CGI).
I recommend this to any action/apocalypses junkies.

Blue Submarine No. 6 got quite a bit of exposure on Toonami years ago, hence how I became familiar with this 1998 OVA series from Gonzo. While I did have interest in wanting to see what all the fuss was about, I was also a bit hesitant to acquire this for my collection considering Gonzo's rep for the quality of their works being all over the place and making it hard to recommend them as a studio for consistently good quality works considering for as excellent quality works they can make like Gankutsuou and Bokurano, they've also made stinkers like Witchblade and Zaion: I Wish ... You Were Here. In the case of Blue Submarine No. 6, the series felt like wasted potential to me.

The series depicts a post-apocalyptic future where most of the Earth has been flooded and humanity is at war with a army of mutant sea creatures given sentience by a rogue human scientist. The main focus of the anime is on a young man named Hayami Tatsu who is recruited by the submarine forces of Blue No. 6 to aid in humanity's efforts against the creatures. He strangely seems indifferent at wanting to contribute to the cause as he is acting pacifistic, but the series explores why he acts as he does as it progresses. This makes him the most well-developed character of the series and a major highlight for me, though that's not saying much as I'll cover later in the review.

The animation for Blue Submarine No. 6 is probably some of the most impressive I've seen for a 1990s anime thanks to its nice mix of CG animation and traditional hand-drawn animation, possibly rivaling the quality I seen with the excellent animation work for Macross Plus. While the CG animation looks rough in detail compared to more modern implementations of the technology, it still features nicely rendered designs of sunken buildings and the various submarines in action throughout the OVA's run. Animation was very fluid in this series as well, as characters moved about at a natural pace, sea creatures swam convincingly fast in the water and submarine battles were nice on the eyes as the CG animation produced air bubble effects for the use of said submarines and any torpedoes they fired in the heat of battle. Character designs were reasonably detailed, though human designs were a bit on the plain side. However, some of the character designs for the sentient sea creatures were quite unique and original for an anime series, particularly designs for Verg and Mutio.

Getting all praises out of the way though, Blue Submarine No. 6's quality suffers quite a bit thanks to its pacing. The series immediately throws you into its action and rushes through its events at a very quick pace. This, combined with the limited run time and episode count of the OVA, greatly limits any opportunities for world building and fleshing out of plot and characters, as only Hayami and Mutio get any real fleshing out or development. Mostly every other character is tacked on with a character archetype and we get little to no details revealed about them. The anime seemed like it was trying to express some sort of moral lesson about how man's excesses to the environment could lead to the future of Blue Submarine No. 6 without any coexistence between man and nature, as seen with Zorndyke's monologues and Hayami's actions. Yet without any reasonable fleshing out or world building, the effectiveness of expressing this lesson is greatly crippled.

But perhaps the worst feature to this OVA would be its choice of soundtrack. Consisting entirely of upbeat jazz pieces, the musical tracks are totally out of place for the series and are more obnoxious on the ears than enjoyable for me, possibly rivaling the annoyance I had with the synthesized techno-rock soundtrack used for Geneshaft.

Overall while visually pleasing and having some promising elements to its storytelling, Blue Submarine No.6 is another anime that I felt had wasted potential thanks to its limited run time greatly limiting what focus could be given to characters and its world, hence adding another subpar work to Gonzo's rep for the varying quality of their works that I've seen.

STORY SECTION

Post-apocalyptic world, animal-like mutants, a submarine out to save what’s left of humanity by an insane scientist, and some more typical elements, packed in only 2 hours. The main theme of the story is hardly original. The pace of the story is almost predictable. The conclusion is on the other hand promising but fails to wrap the story smoothly or even to make sense. You almost feel like the scriptwriters were not given enough time and ended the story in a rush, unfulfilling way. The scenario clearly needed more episodes and development in order to run smoothly and to make sense. As it is, ... it feels like a lot of fuss happened for no reason and the conclusion will leave you more frustrated rather than satisfied. It had potential for greatness, thanks to all the talking about humanity’s greed and ecology. It didn’t make use of it though and thus the story is half good. A typical GONZO mistake. Very good visuals and promising stories that are always ruined by their apathy at keeping the pace of a series as good as it begins.

CHARACTER SECTION

- As it is, the only character with interest is the “evil” scientist, who wants to wipe out humanity. He has a good reason for what he is doing and is not a typical bad to the bone villain.
- The only thing the rest of the characters do is fighting for or against him, instead of having personality and goals of their own. There is supposed to be some personal drama around the leading man and woman but given the short duration of the series, it will feel uninteresting. All the whining and crying of the shark-like leader and the renegade female mutant feel more like pointless torture time, rather than reason for acting as they do. None of the characters has much coloring or development because of the duration. Most seem to have something interesting to show but nothing of such is shown in the end. As soon as their development begins, we see the ending credits.
- Even the scientist is not that great, as his plan is not given enough time to be explained. I mean, destroying humanity and most of the world just to replace sentient life with a race of warlike animals? How will that help the planet? Duh!

ART SECTION

- This is amongst the first anime that managed to mix 2D and 3D without making it look utterly stupid. There is a huge amount of details and colors given to almost everything, making the optical department a sight of sore eyes.
- Realism in motion is quite good, although casual viewers will probably dislike the way 3D objects move and the mannerism of the characters. They both look weird and not natural, something that was expected for an early CGI work. But it’s not like GONZO learned from its mistakes and improved later on.
- Anyway, the animation takes some time to get used to but it eventually becomes bearable. The 3D doesn’t always look ok next to the 2D but if we think this is GONZO we are talking about, we must give them a credit for taking animation in anime to a whole new level with this title. Really; just check how lame all previous attempts were. Hell, just check how uninteresting most upcoming 3D anime were.
- Other than that, the character designs were way too generic and simplistic to the point you cared more about the backgrounds and the action than about them. This tends to make them less interesting than the theme of the story.

SOUND SECTION

- Jazz for humans and tribal ouga bouga drum music for mutants, almost made it sound like a strategy game with themed factions. Voice acting was decent, although the voice synk for the mutants feels more like dubbing than actually listening to what they say with groans and barks in their native language. Beyond all that, the context in the dialogues is mostly philosophical and scientific and you get a kick out of paying attention to what they say.

ENJOYMENT SECTION
The aesthetics are better than the story and the characters put together. It all comes down to a silly ecology theme of value your planet and recycle or the shark boogiemen will eat you. The Blue Submarine is sinking in term of enjoyment and you won’t remember it for something particular.