Kachou Ouji

Kachou Ouji (Legend of Black Heaven) is a 13 episode TV anime original produced by studio AIC and A.P.P.P. It was directed by Yasuhito Kikuchi (Macross Frontier) and aired from Jul 8 1999 to Oct 7 1999.

The story goes something like this. Ouji Tanaka is a middle-aged sallery worker, working a dead end job, and living in a tiny apartment together with his wife Yoshiko and their son Gen. Ouji is living his mundane everyday life with nothing exiting happening. The only thing to remind him of the exiting times of the past is his flying V electric guitar that he used to play when ... he was in a metal band called Legend of Black Heaven. One day a woman called Layla Yuki starts working at the company Ouji works for. She is very interested in Ouji, and it turns out that she is an alien who has come to get him to play his guitar for them in, cause his music is the only thing that can activate their ultimate weapon to protect the earth from getting involved in a space war. Ouji happily agrees and gets to live out the glory days of his past and rekindle his love for music.

There are a few characters that could be worth mentioning, but I'm only gonna stick to the most important ones.
First we have our main character Ouji Tanaka. He's the former guitarist of a metal band called Legend of Black Heaven, who had aspirations of making it big in the music world, but sadly it didn't work out for them. Now he's working a dead end job and living with his wife and son, and nothing exiting happens.
Secondly we have Layla Yuki. She's an alien commander who come to earth to get Ouji, cause they need his music to activate their ultimate weapon which only activates from his music.
Finally we have Ouji's wife, Yoshiko. She was once a groupy of Ouji's band, and they ended up getting married. Now her life together with Ouji is not going great. While Ouji is unhappy and stuck in the past, she wants to move on, and in order to make room for their new life and child she tries to throw away all of Ouji's music related things, and even ends up throwing away his flying V guitar.

The animation in this show is not good. This show definitely does not excel in the visual aspects. It's not bad enough that the show is unwatchable because of it, but you're not gonna be blown away visually. Also the CG is as you would expect from a 90s anime.

The music in his show on the other hand is very good. Being mostly made up of metal and hard rock this is right up my alley when it comes to music. Everything from the OP, all the way up until the ending was very good. However the ending really felt out of place. Almost like it didn't belong to the same show, and their choice to use the song they did for the ED was a strange decision. Another complaint I've got about the music is that while I think it's good, I do wish they would have had more music to use. Because, even though I really liked the OP song Cautionary Warning, hearing it played on most of the episodes as an insert song as well got a bit boring. But if you like that song as much as I do, it won't really be that much of a problem.

Overall I was surprised by this show. Hearing about it and reading the synopsis it sounded like just another stupid anime premise, and it definitely is, but this is the sort of stupid I can get behind. I enjoyed the show, and even though the writing at times got a little weird (shocking, I know) it for the most part felt like the show had a very good idea of what it wanted to be and do. At least up until the end where they started pulling some weird stuff because "aliens". The only other thing that got a bit annoying for me was the 3 retards of the show. They were to this show what Jar Jar Binks was to Star Wars, just a waste of a comedic relief character, and having 3 of them in this show isn't exactly a dream come true. But despite this I enjoyed the show, and I would definitely recommend this show if you just want a dumb show about a man fighting aliens with metal music.

Kachou Ouji is a fun romp from 1999 with an engaging premise and fun execution, limited both by the resources available to it at the time and by shortcomings well within their control to fix. The idea of Ouji being a regular salaryman, thrust into the limelight of a galactic war to save the earth centering around his passion for music is pure gold, but at the end of the day the execution fails to live up to its premise. The story as a whole is fun and cool, but also nonsensical, and not in a way the bones of ... the show feel ready to support. There are too many problems for the show to be taken seriously, but the show itself isn't stunningly cool or wacky enough to forgive those problems. Perhaps the biggest problem with this somewhat generic storyline with a twist is the fact that I had trouble suspending my disbelief while I watched it. It wasn't consistent enough to fix those problems, and it wasn't quite good enough to forget about those problems, so the whole time I was very aware I was watching an anime.

As for the art, it is on-par for a late 90s anime, though the 2D often feels flat in the middle of the season, which shows in their faces and their inability to express emotion. They also reuse shots over and over again, and 100 percent of the 3D is atrocious, but again it was the 90s so while its unsightly, I can't in good faith fault the show for those things. The character design and background concepts were really well done, and the conceptual nature of these aspects were communicated with a great deal of skill.

The sound is where this anime really shined. The musical compositions made for this anime really did rock, and though they repeated pieces fairly often, they mixed it up often enough to keep things fresh too. Beyond all the hard hitting music, the sounds of the world also held up really well, like the sound of a file against a nail, or the varying sounds of footsteps depending on the footwear of certain characters.

Speaking of characters, I feel like that was a definite weak spot for this anime. Ouji and his whole schtick is funny and connects with the viewer well, but his motivations are oftentimes incomprehensible, and his reasoning often lacking. Same goes for his wife Yoshiko, who often seems to be flying off the handle of one extreme or the other for no reason at all. The rest of the characters were alright, and added a lot of depth to the show itself, especially the alien trio and Ouji's old bandmates, but except the alien major guy who was written like he was animated- with a stick up his ass. At the end of the day I had a fun time watching Kachou Ouji, but it didn't blow me away, which a show like this needs to do if it is going to work. Look at Gurren Lagann for a good example of something like that at play. Now the finale, THAT blew me away, but it ended abruptly and even itself didn't necessarily feel earned. It almost felt like this show was filler between episodes 1 and 13, thrown together to justify episodes 1 and 13. If the rest of the show showed the level of dedication and quality that episode 13 did, this show would probably rank closer to a 7, but alas, it did not. At the end of the day it was still fun, I do not regret watching it, and I certainly do not regret listening to it.

Definitely not worth watching this one. Animation is not good. It's choppy and lacking details. Backgrounds are one gradient away from non-existent. It's as if someone realized they can't use black so they made some silly spotlight looking gradient. To make matters worse it's static and repeated about 55 times each episode. Impossibly lazy. Same goes for character animation, still bodies with only lips moving and reused shots.

Characters themselves are annoying and not believable one bit. Wife which throws away everything husband likes, then goes on to worry if he's not liking her anymore while not missing a single opportunity to criticize him for everything, ... him being the only provider while she stays at home and fails child education. And it keeps going like that. One unbelievable action after another. And main character's child is the absolute worst. He behaves as if education is not a thing and he's free to do whatever he wants and break anything without any repercussions. At times it feels he's there only to be a tool for writers to create drama when needed. Characters seriously made so upset I desired for ability to slap them.

For some reason it's also rated as 18+, not sure why. There's nothing in there to warrant such rating apart maybe from few adult suggestive shots which were not really necessary at all and had no purpose.

Only, and literally only, redeeming factor this show has is music and it's entirely too short. Few awesome riffs here and there make you want whole 20 minutes were just filled with music. Not worth watching at all.