Ranked #4948

Blue Sonnet

Akai Kiba Blue Sonnet is the adaptation of the homonymous manga, made for promotion and fan pleasing. You must know from the start that it is incomplete; it ends suddenly, without conclusion. If you are interested enough to know what happens after the OVAs’ end, you’ve got to get out there and find the manga. Well, good luck if you try, for I’m reading manga for over a decade and I have never even heard of this title.

ART & SOUND SECTION: 6/10 [Typical 80’ graphics & sound and out of date on all directions.]
Its action and death scenes are ok but mean nothing if you have seen any recent gore anime. Completely nothing original or memorable worth mentioning, other than the fact that the female protagonist, Sonnet, looks like Lafiel from Banner of the Stars.

STORY SECTION: 6/10 [Promising. Though being incomplete makes it lose some points.]
The story is about a young psychic girl named Sonnet. In the past, she was kidnapped, raped, went haywire and killed the rapist and even her father when she returned home. A mad scientist found her and helped her control her powers and surpass her shock of emotions by turning her into an obedient cyborg and the army’s top weapon.

She now kills enemies of the government and finds other psychics like herself for military purposes. She finds a schoolgirl with similar powers and joins her school with a false identity in order to get close to her. The OVAs show us how she slowly matures from a heartless killing machine who even murders innocent people who witness her powers, back to a human being with emotions and cherish for life. She and a possible boyfriend of the girl, protect it from terrorists and later from the military itself, which produces inhuman biorganic weapons in secret laboratories. The OVAs end when Sonnet rebels against her master and goes away with her new friends.


It was good on its own in the classic sense, but its small duration (at least the part of the story we get to see) ruins any chance of evolving to something equal or better than all the other similar scenarios we have watched over the years.

CHARACTER SECTION: 7/10 [Rather typical, but quite good for a short action series of its time.]
Sonnet is definitely an interesting character, having a dramatic backdrop story, a major character development and ass-kicking powers that most action heroes would envy (and all that in just 4 episodes). The rest of the crew is negligible if you have seen enough anime. The human “good-guys” students and the military-scientist “bad-guys” think and act simple-minded and predictable. But at least, they are not unrealistic (they do not make stupid puns, get chibi or do inappropriate or out of place actions). Still, without a conclusion they loose a lot of appeal.

VALUE SECTION: 1/10 [Oblivion got the upper hand on it.]
I haven’t heard or read anything about this series even once, it’s not original, it’s not special, and it left me no mixed feelings or deep thoughts. So… no good.

ENJOYMENT SECTION: 4/10 [Although the story is interesting, the plot is boring most of the time.]
There is a lot of character interaction (a lot of blah, blah). The elements that may keep you interested are a few flashy but otherwise typical action/horror scenes. And I say it again; there is no conclusion. The end credits leave you wandering what happened afterwards (a nice promotional trick but the manga is very rare). And for the love of God, how many more scenarios with secret inhuman military projects can we stand before jumping out of a window?!

VERDICT: 5/10
The accused is found … GUILTY! … For failing to provide us with an interesting and complete work.

SUGGESTION LIST
All these titles involve psychics, secret human experiments and a lot of splatter scenes. And all of them are superior to this anime for all I care.
Elfen Lied, Choujin Locke, Akira. read more

Utterly average and despite all the gory violence and action, boring.

PLOT: Well to be honest I wasn’t really expecting much from this series when I read the synopsis, so I was actually surprised that I quickly became interested in the two main characters Lan and Sonnet – they are both quite well developed despite this only having 5 episodes (well despite this being called ‘Blue Sonnet’ Lan is the true main character). However the plot is a terrible mishmash of scenes and suffers from completely random plot progression. It's like watching a load of disjointed scenes stuck together – there is no real flow to the story. I suppose this is what happens when you attempt to condense 17 volumes of manga into 5 OVAs!

As such all the characters apart from Lan and Sonnet are terribly shallow, there’s no clear motivation for the villains and no real closure on anything at the end. The random romance thread that was kind of rammed into the last 15mins of the last episode was felt out of place too. And then there’s the sheer amount of gratuitous and gory violence on display (although if I’m honest those where the bits I enjoyed most). I couldn’t really see what point there was to the long action scenes other than to show off how powerful the 2 girls were. All in all I just got the impression what stuff was happening way too fast with little to no explanation for anything – a bit of back story and an epilogue would have been nice! But what really surprised me is that Blue Sonnet is based on a shoujo manga published in Hana to Yume! This is definitely not your typical shoujo – there’s no fluffy romance, bubbles or flowers, its actually quite dark, gritty and violent with very few light moments.

ANIMATION: Ah the animation has not dated well – extremely 90s, but not of a high quality. Backgrounds lack detail (the scene in the tanker really highlights this) and the character animation is extremely blocky, although I did quite like the character designs themselves. The action scenes were fun to watch though – seeing someone get their head kicked off or cut to ribbons never gets old! Absolutely no shortage of blood and guts in this OVA, it seems like the animators just had a touch too much fun creating a heap of different ways to kill people off!

MUSIC & VOICE ACTING: I didn’t like the music – the OP & ED don’t appeal to me and the BGM was occasionally too overblown and grandiose. Voice acting was pretty good though.

All in all Blue Sonnet was a bit of a mess – I can see that the would have been potential in the characters but its buried under poor writing, messy storytelling and bad editing and as such this series remains distinctly average. read more