Ranked #3004

Dragonaut - The Resonance

Dragonauts is another anime done by Gonzo. This show shows some promise, but due to certain presentation of its characters and style, it pretty much falls back quite a bit.

Story: The beginning of the show starts off with a young Kamashina Jin as he witnesses his family's deaths as their space shuttle gets blown to bits by a mysterious falling object from space. The main plot then follows an older Kamashina Jin as he gets thrust into a world of government secrets concerning "dragons", envoys sent by a living asteroid... thing called Thanatos floating around the remains of Pluto. Enter the Dragonauts, an elite team of humans paired up with their own artificially born Dragon. Jin and the Dragonauts are on opposing sides at first, but a government conspiracy eventually leads them to the same objective. The plot progresses at a fair pace and even has a nice short timeskip to compliment its mid-climax.

Art: The character designs are done by the very same man who did the designs for Witchblade... so you can definitely expect lots of women with unnatural proportioned bodies. The show also makes use of CGI for its dragon battles. The CGI is not very good looking as it clashes with its 2D counterpart if you even dare to compare them. The dragons themselves all have unique looks to them but it is hard to determine if the dragons are suppose to be organic beings or some kind of bio-mecha. Other than that, the art is decent except for weird proportioned women but you can never forget Sieglinde's 6th finger. Good job, Gonzo.

Sound: The music in the show is nothing special. All the tracks are not memorable enough. There are your generic suspenseful themes and romance themes and of course your action themes. I can't even write anything about it since I forgot what music the show even had.

Character: Never has a show made me hate so many characters before. I will say that the main characters have their fair share of development but the supporting characters don't shine much.

Jin is one of those "I-don't-want-to-fight-anymore" guys that does nothing but tries to talk his way out of life and death situations and Kazuki is one of those annoying cretins that just keeps coming back to kill our beloved hero blind to the fact that he's a complete asshole. I hate Kazuki as much as I hate Kururugi Suzaku. Other than that, everybody just seems... completely flat.

Enjoyment/Overall: I had hoped this show redeemed itself constantly especially through its character department but is still fairly disappointed. If you focus solely on the story, you might enjoy it some but other than that, everything else just completely ruins a potentially decent shounen show. read more

This show had a lot going for it: good clean animation, a range of interesting-looking characters, a reasonable story line...and dragons (because we all love dragons...well, I do)
The problems arise because all, or at least most, of this potential disappears due to a lack of following through.
The characters reveal themselves to be pretty detestable. I said they were interesting-looking, but once they started opening their mouths, well, that's a different matter. The only ones I didn't hate or at least dislike were the ones that never really had enough airtime for me to build up a dislike for them. They were mostly flat and underdeveloped and just plain irritating, although nowhere near as irritating as the protagonists, who just seemed to be very very stupid. Jin and Toa couldn't see beyond how besotted they were with each other (which got really boring really fast), Kazuki couldn't get over his personal (and somewhat jarringly over-the-top) vendetta against Jin, and Gio took most of the series to figure out that three really does make a crowd (admittedly when realisation did eventually dawn on him he proceeded to instigate the highlight of the series by: blowing stuff up - lots of stuff.)
The animation was the other thing that really annoyed me. It was fine, there were no real problems with it - until the CG dragons came along (the CG looked very out of place amongst the otherwise perfectly fine artwork), closely followed by massively over-endowed ladies (as in serious spinal injury type bosoms).
The only thing that stood out for me above the rest was the music. It was a little generic, but I still enjoyed some of the themes.
Overall it was a bit disappointing to say the least, but if you happen to want to watch something with the single intent of picking holes in it and laughing at it, then this is right up your street. read more