Ranked #3187

Trava

STORY: 6
Well, the story is quite basic, we start off with two characters, Trava and Shinkai, on board of a spaceship. They are freelancers, and their current job is to travel and survey an unknown planet. They find an object drifting in space, and locate a girl inside of it who seems to have lost her memories. Sound familiar?
The story doesn't start off partcularly exciting, but it's enough to keep you interested. Eventually, the trio ends up landing on the planet and realise that there are some crazy things going on there. The problem is, the story does seem random, while that can work, like in FLCL, here it feels a bit awkward. The show explains that Trava and Shikai hope to collect money to be able to enter a sort of mecha suit battle tournament, but the anime ends before any of that takes place. It seems like they had more story to show us, but ended up just wrapping up the show in 4 short episodes.

ART: 8
Best part of the anime. The art is really creative and different, kind of a mix of a Aeon Flux and Mind Game. This will turn off some people, but if you value art and like creative applications of it, this OVA is for you. The character designs are very funky and sometime silly(the female character's huge hips) but i found them very interesting. Overall, i found it to be stylish and eye catching.

SOUND: 6
Fair for the most part. Nothing really memorable here, but it works and none of the music felt out of place. Pretty solid overall. The voice acting was very good and fit the funkyness of the characters.

CHARACTER: 7
Well, this one was hard to judge. There is no character development here, but in some cases that can be a good thing. We are introduced to several eccentric characters and, in the end, it is fun to observe their actions and mannerisms, so i decided to go with a positive score.

ENJOYMENT: 6
I liked this overall, but it could have been much more, it's simply too short to be impressive. Now, short anime can be wonderful, but here it felt like a 12 episode anime cropped into a tiny 4 episodes of 13 minutes each. If you don't care about art, or don't like this kind of animation/character design, subtract two points here.

Overall score: 7 read more

Very cool animation with an interesting premise - in some alternative future universe two freelancers work to survey an unexplored planet when... you realize that besides the OVA's animation and a few funny lines here and there, Trava has absolutely nothing to offer.

I liked the series' animation. A lot of dark tones, flat and edgy shapes, strong shadows and interesting camera angles and perspectives. Too bad most scenes consist of Trava and Shinkai - the pair of protagonists - talking about stuff the viewer has absolutely no idea of. There is zero exposition. The show simply bares itself in front of you and expects you to be instantly aroused, when in fact you see nothing. Whoever wrote the script forgot to give the audience a pair of eyes through which "Trava: Fist Planet"s strange and unfamiliar world can be seen. The only interesting moments of the OVA were the jokes the two characters throw at each other... and that is because humor requires no introduction. But even those moments are few and far between. This is a very, very slow show. Even if it's just four episodes, each fifteen minutes long... it seems so much longer because it's paced like a slice of life series, when in fact it is not one.

The voice acting is really dull, it sounded like even the seiyuu's were bored out of their minds and they too didn't know what in the world they were talking about, or maybe that's just a character trait - the "people" of "Trava: Fist Planet" are monotone, bored individuals. The soundtrack was unimposing, in a bad way. I don't know why they even bothered with writing some background music for the thing, it's barely noticeable. Well, with the exception of the ending song which was decent...

The characters themselves aren't interesting in the least. Besides the fact that they look weird (as per the OVA's animation style) they have nothing going for them. The series doesn't even bother to make the viewer more aware of who they are and why are we even watching them doing their thing. It has this documentary-like feel. It's like some random fluke of a person got their hands on a camera, jumped through an inter-dimensional portal and started filming whatever crap happened to be in front of them. If you don't mind that kind of thing, maybe you'll like this. I didn't. read more