Akai Kiba: Blue Sonnet

No, this is not a bad anime. Keep on reading if you want to know why.

I feel obliged to comment to clean the reputation of a jewel from a bygone era. Starting with the characters, strong girls were a favorite type in Japan anime during the 80s. It stemmed from the real life sukebans and bled into fiction in many shapes and forms. Military themes were included in these. Group of secret agent and women soldiers that more or less echoes the cold war -historical important moments that the world was undergoing at the time. The reader just needs to imagine the newspapers of the ... era to realize why these themes were interlaced with the archetype of a popular character of that era.

It is not slow-paced. It just doesn't have tik tok editing rhythm. Frames are not frantically changing and, even though, it has upbeat music (and good one! I encourage to check the soundtrack) is not something you'd hear today. It remains true to its time. I urgr the prior reviewers to try and practice focusing attention since it is good for brain function. The pace is average, an average is good. The kind of average that makes the story coherent. The editing pace had significantly change in 2020 with the massive consumption of fruitless 1-min videos.But get a grip this is not social media. It is a piece of art.

In true honesty, i see more action than violent scenes. And I deemed them necessary since help the viewer understand the power of the esper and create a menacing atmosphere around this being. It could be also because this is an OVA meaning not release on tv and they find the loophole in censorship. Animators wanted to show something otherwise unattainable to the anime fans.

The story makes sense and it's true to it's era. I've seen much much worse. Don't mind the angry short-attention span 2010 watchers that don't have the capacity to understand visual language from different decades. If you like biotechnology plots and mad scientist you'd definitely enjoy these! And did I mention the soundtrack? It's a blast.

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.

“Blue Sonnet” is yet another case of an OVA trying to cram too much story into a short runtime. The scenes feel disjointed, the backstories messy, the plot devices hackneyed, and the characters unsympathetic.

The 5-episode series based on the manga of the same name centers on Lan, an average high school girl who has psychic capabilities that start becoming dramatically stronger after a certain “incident” occurs for the first time (let’s just say blood is a major motif in this show). A shady organization called Talos aims to create a “scientific utopia” using cybernetically-enhanced psychic soldiers, and their ultimate weapon is a young woman named ... Sonnet. She has a backstory that’s shown in a series of images in the opening, but what is actually going on in those scenes is never addressed in the anime. Sonnet has been assigned a mission to go to Japan and monitor Lan. After “testing” (read: nearly killing) Lan with her telekinetic powers, She and Dr. Merikus, the resident mad scientist, try to capture and use Lan for Talos’ nefarious and twisted purposes. However, she is aided by her younger brother, her guardian, a guy who they keep calling “Bird” who is actually another cyborg, but apparently not psychic, as well as a telepathic woman.

This OVA is rife with seemingly pointless scenes of graphic violence and sexually explicit or fanservice-like content that does not contribute to the plot. There are also some unintentionally ridiculous scenes — for instance, there’s a scene where one cyborg basically attaches jumper cables to herself to charge another cyborg, like they’re cars, and she’s topless while doing so. As for the plot itself, the writing is inconsistent, the dialogue is redundant, and the characters repeatedly make mindbogglingly dumb decisions. It has an inconclusive ending.

Also, I should note that are a number of sexist remarks in this show, which is unusual for a Shojo title, and serves to make the series feel even more outdated than it looks.

The central cast of characters don’t get much development, but enough to give them a defining trait or two. Secondary characters get little to no development. There’s a scene near the end where one of the main characters is remembering all of her friends, and I don’t even know who two of the five or six people she mentions are!

The technical aspects range from bland to subpar. The animation is not good — it’s somewhat static, like when cars are moving, etc. The character designs are average, but Lan and Sonnet look interesting. The voice acting is not particularly good, and neither is the dialogue. The opening theme is a heavy metal song, and it doesn't really fit the tone of the series. The ending theme is a rock ballad that also doesn't fit. The background music is okay, but feels a bit overpowering and takes over the scenes it’s used in at times.

For those who are photosensitive, be aware that there are a fair amount of scenes with flashing lights in this series, so you may want to exercise caution if you watch.

Overall, “Akai Kiba: Blue Sonnet” is too rushed and jumbled to enjoy, and it is full of issues on all levels. I would not recommend this OVA.