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Mar 18, 2024
The Vision of Escaflowne tries to juggle a lot of different balls, and basically succeeds. Firstly, it's a good old fashioned fantasy adventure serial with goodies and baddies and sword fights and monsters and thrilling escapes and all that exciting stuff. Bound up with that is the fact that it's somewhat of a mecha series, with the magically powered suits naturally allowing major characters to dominate fight scenes. However, it's also a mystical and rather melancholy series about fate and how it can be fixed or changed, punctuated with a fairly large amount of on screen death and injury. Also it's got a rather shoujo-esque
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romance with a knotty love polygon and some really beautiful looking men. The series was originally intended to be 39 episodes rather than 26 and you can tell - some plot threads sort of just stop, appear late on, and/or get resolved jarringly fast. That said, I'm not necessarily sure that an additional 13 episodes wouldn't have come along with making the pacing a bit sluggish. As is, it seems to fill 26 episodes more or less nicely, even if it has to lurch a few times to get there, especially in the back half, and the ending in particular feels rather rushed.
Hitomi is a likeable heroine, and the script manages to quite effectively let her make choices that drive the plot without having to have her take part in the fighting herself. A careful balance is struck between giving her a believable fear of violence and death with a drive to see them not meted out to her friends. The Escaflowne's pilot Van isn't as deep, remaining driven by the need to avenge his homeland throughout, but still gets to evolve in how he approaches it emotionally. The central two are supported by an ensemble of engaging side players: the swashbuckling Allen, the lovesick princess Millerna, and the petulant but vulnerable catgirl Merle, among others. The truncated length does leave a few of the cast with slightly less to do than was perhaps intended, but the most important ones are correctly kept to the fore.
Escaflowne is almost always a lovely series to look at. It is animated with all the lushness you'd expect of Sunrise at the end of the cel animation era, with beautifully fluid motion on the mechs in particular, and the direction makes great use of it to bring life to some wonderfully artistic shot compositions. Yoko Kanno's score is predictably great, and gives the strange and wonderous elements the accompaniment they deserve.
The bottom line is that Escaflowne is a fantastically well produced series that is let down mostly by the circumstances of its creation, and make it less than it perhaps could have been, but what is there is broadly an well executed marriage of disparate elements.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jul 2, 2023
This is a review of both seasons taken as a single piece. It's one continuous story and is best looked at as a whole.
It has been a very long time since I have enjoyed anything as consistently or as viscerally as Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. It is a piece of work that builds on the legacy of Gundam as a franchise, but also draws significantly from Neon Genesis Evangelion and plays with concepts drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The series has a deep and clear anger at how rich nations exploit poor nations and the military industrial complex forments conflict for the
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sake of profit, and at how the older generations are willing to sell out the younger generations for their own comfort in general, and that anger is given meaning by the tenderness and humanity with which it treats its characters. The warfare of this setting is not an all out conflict, but a pervasive ill whose wider effects draw in and harm people outside of it, and despite the efforts of some to contain it, death and destruction can still spill out into places that seem safe. This is a very astute and appropriate evolution for a franchise that is principally about the horrors of armed conflict but is now in a world where Japan and the main markets for anime are now separated from it, even as it continues elsewhere.
The principle defect it has is that it's only 24 episodes long, and unavoidably feels truncated at that length. There is simply not quite enough time for the world and the characters to breathe and simply be as much as they should, and there are a couple of moments where the plot makes slightly jarring progressions. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that it still does a very good job of fitting as much as possible into the time available and has the ambition to try to do so, and the short length gives it a great intensity of pace. I'd have preferred more, but the concentrated dose we got has a great effect all its own.
The animation and direction is good, if unshowy. The fights between the mobile suits are suitably impactful. I don't know if any of the designs will go down as classics, but I do very much like the look of the central Gundam Aerial. The direction contains many subtle flourishes that make key moments hit harder, and since the general direction is fairly standard this actually allows them to stick out more. The series does a very effective job of making space feel very big and hostile, which is appropriate for a story which considers whether humans belong up there at all.
The series is mostly hinged on the odd couple relationship between its central characters. On the one hand there is Suletta, the anxious and naive but skilled Gundam pilot. On the other there is Miorine, the sharper and more worldly but very vulnerable heiress to the biggest arms manufacturer. They play off each other well, offering new perspectives drawn from their differing backgrounds, but also hurting each other because they are damaged people without the emotional tools to properly relate all the time. They are also pawns in a larger game being played by their respective parents and indeed pretty much everyone around them. There is a pervasive sense of threat as the duplicitous schemes to rob them of their dignity, agency, and lives play out. Suletta's mother Prospera is the series resident masked villain, at once cloyingly sweet and ruthlessly driven, and is a particularly memorable creation. The series has a fairly large supporting cast and cannot give them all interesting things to do in its short length, but still covers more than you may expect. There is one miscellaneous criticism I have which is that the leads don't get to kiss on screen - a bolder emphasis that this was a love story would have made the ending work just a little better for me.
To sum up, while the deficiencies of The Witch from Mercury are very evident, this is still a triumphant assertion that Gundam still has a place in the anime landscape, delivering moments of tragedy and triumph with the incomparable, genre defining image of a mobile suit in motion.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 12, 2023
The Big O starts out a stylish, oddball fusion of hardboiled detective fiction and tokusatsu style superheroics, but gradually evolves into something altogether weirder and more existential. It is partially successful in this.
First, the positives. The Big O aims to capture a very particular vibe, and succeeds. It's got interesting shot composition, a distinct visual style, and an achingly cool soundtrack of mostly jazz and funk. Most of the episodes consist of Roger looking into some case on behalf of a client, occasionally aided by an arsenal of gadgets, before a climax where he gets into the Big O and fights another giant robot in
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the middle of the city, and the show absolutely sells the idea that these two things belong together. The Big O itself is a fantastically designed super robot, and you get a real sense of it's weight and immensity whenever it's on screen. The Big O itself, and the rest of the setting, has a wonderful retro futurist analogue technology feel, all buttons and switches and levers. Over the course of the series the function of each control in Big O's cockpit is clearly shown, which makes it feel a lot more real than many other mecha. There's a lot of fun, sparky chemistry between the main cast of characters, particularly between Roger and the deadpan android Dorothy.
However, vibes only go so far. The stories of the standalone episodes often feel truncated to accommodate the mandatory giant robot fights, and the main plot is often not well explained, particularly the ending which may leave many viewers completely lost. There's also an excessive amount of time spent on characters having conversations which sound mysterious but tell the audience nothing, which adds to the vibes, but detracts from one's ability to understand anything that's happening, and twenty-six episodes is arguably too long for a show taking this kind of approach.
The things Big O is certainly worth a try for fans of mecha, or those who are intrigued by it's unique style, but if the first episode doesn't hook you in I personally wouldn't recommend continuing with it; everything that makes the show good is right there from the off.
CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD
YE NOT GUILTY
"Big O! Action!"
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Feb 17, 2023
Eureka Seven is first and foremost a coming of age story, but more broadly it's about how everyone can and should adapt as their circumstances change. It's also about mecha on flying surfboards, the horrors of war, the power of love, fascism, counterculture, Gaia Theory, the importance of family no matter its form, how you shouldn't meet your heroes, some really out there sci fi worldbuilding, and finding your first love. Even at a stout fifty episodes it's positively overstuffed with ideas, which does mean some have to be run through at a million miles an hour and arguably don't get the screentime that they
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should, and people coming in with an explicit desire to see a *lot* of mecha action may leave disappointed. However, all of the ideas clearly belong together and play off of each other to create the texture of the story. It's a very post-Evangelion series in much of its ideas and iconography, but is also a repudiation of the former show's crushing nihilism. The animation itself is not necessarily awe inspiring, although it is consistently good, but the designs are visually interesting and there's a very considered use of colour that means things that need to stand out, like lasers and the trapar waves which allow flight, do. The first part of the story is a bit slowly paced, but patient viewers will be rewarded with a cavalcade of "oh blimey" moments, in various forms: shocking plot twists, scenes of visceral horror, and moments of punch-the-air triumph. It is a wild and uneven rollercoaster ride that will leave viewers with a preference for more tightly constructed plots behind, but I absolutely loved it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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