Oh! Edo Rocket

During festivals in Japan it is customary to shout "Tamaya!" or "Kagiya!" when the fireworks are lighting up the sky. I knew about this, but I had always wondered why they would shout something like that. Now I know.

Oh! Edo Rocket is about a firework maker named Tamaya Seikichi and his friends in Edo during the mid-1800's. A time that was hard on anyone with a profession that leaned more towards entertainment and suchlike, well to be quite fair it was probably hard on most common people living in Japan during this age.

I normally don't write reviews about animes I have given a high rating, ... I'm not good at praising things, but I felt I need to hype this anime up a bit since it's clear that it's not a very popular anime, atleast not here on MAL.

I'm going to start out by saying that this is a fairly original anime, not just because it's about a firework maker, not just because of the mix of character design and art, but also because of the themes that the anime lean towards. It is common to see comedy and drama mixed together, but it's not common to see the kind of comedy you usually expect to find in parodies and spoof animes such as Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei or Pani Poni Dash! just to name a few mixed with sometimes very serious dramatic scenes. I especially liked the few, subtle, but very funny references to other anime, fairly recently produced anime at that.

There was a story in Oh! Edo Rocket. Initially you don't see it, but after a while you realize there's actually a story that's being told and it actually progresses with one defection at episode 20, but still it's refreshing to see an anime that actually has a story that's not afraid to go in the right direction. I'm getting a bit fed up with all the sidetracking of recent series I've seen. But above all I am getting really pissed off at the fact that most animes have endings that hardly are endings at all, they're either really bad because the manga isn't finished or the money grubbing productions companies might want to make a sequel because they made enough profit so they make cliffhangers that make the movie cliffhanger seem like a good movie (it wasn't, it has Sylvester Stallone in it and I think the director just let him say anything he wanted instead of reading the script). Oh! Edo Rocket has a distinct ending that actually ends the anime. Well to tell you the truth there are two endings, imagine that!

Now that helpful votes don't exist anymore, I'm completely untethered and can review the most obscure anime possible without feeling any pressure to review seasonal stuff. What better way to kick off the new MAL than with Oh Edo Rocket, an anime that you've never heard of, and nobody cares about.

Oh Edo Rocket was based on a stage play that heavily relies on political satire. It apparently used the Edo period as a metaphor for the Japanese politics of the 1990s and the reactionary policies that accompanied the lost decade. Basically, if you don't know who Yoshiro Mori is, just assume everything is going ... to fly over your head. Funimation figured this out quickly after agreeing to adapt this one, so by the 3rd episode the dub stops making any attempt to follow what the characters are actually saying. It never quite reaches Ghost Stories level, but a character will say "Even a mosquito can blow me down" then the dub will add a character screaming from offscreen "THAT JOKE DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE IN ENGLISH!". I think the reason this series is so disliked online is that people watched the sub and just felt like "What the hell is this? I don't get it! Is this referencing something?". However, if you just watch the silly dub, you can actually have a fun time with this series.

Oh Edo Rocket's plot is very loosely based on the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. This story is interspersed with the story of young rebel who wishes to make fireworks, but everything is tightly regulated and repressive because it's the Edo Period. This anime is fucking bonkers with a tone that is all over the place. We could have predicted this since the anime was a Sho Aikawa script. This is the same gentleman who wrote such classics as Genocyber, Legend of the Overfiend, Angel Cop, and the Violence Jack film trilogy. I still remember a line from an old ANN review saying "Oh no! You've hired rogue anime writer Sho Aikawa! What have you done?!" However, Oh Edo Rocket has a double dose of crazy since the stage play was written by Kazuki Nakashima, who you probably know for writing Gurren Lagann and Batman Ninja. In one episode, a corrupt policeman murders a young mother and drains her blood for his vampire girlfriend, leaving her baby to freeze to death in her arms. 5 episodes later, there is a big dance party on the moon, and everyone is invited! I'm serious. It's that kind of anime.

This anime had zero ability to market itself to gaijin, but it actually wasn't cheap to produce. This was a 26-episode anime by Studio Madhouse that looks gorgeous and cost a pretty penny. The opening theme was sung by Puffy during the height of their popularity. You know, the JPOP band that got so popular that they had their own non-anime cartoon in America. That Puffy!

I would recommend this anime as both a highly unique experience and a time capsule of an earlier period in American anime dubbing. When everything under the sun still got a dub and often dub studios were forced to accept random anime that they didn't want so that Japanese animation studios could recoup their losses. In 2022, some of the best seasonal anime like Kongming can't get a dub. It's hard to even imagine there was a time when something like Oh Edo Rocket would receive a dub and be physically in America. My buddy found this in the bargain bin of an anime con and fell in love with it. None of us have seen a copy of it since in the wild. You can find them online, but if you go to anywhere that sells anime DVDs, you just don't see this one. I hope all of this was enough to convince some of you to give this one a try.

My patience wears thin. I'm sure that 3 years ago or something, I would have watched at least 6 episodes, and perhaps 5-8 years ago, I would have watched the entire thing.
Oh! Edo Rocket is a show made in 2007, but it really feels like it was made in 1995 for how crappy the animation is. It feels like I'm watching Orphen, but instead of a crappy formulaic adventure magic show, it's instead a crappy formulaic comedy action show.
I don't really care what genre it is, or when it was made, the show should have some sort of structure and pacing. Oh! Edo Rocket ... does not really have anything desirable. It plays weird jazz OST in tense fights, it does quick jumps from one scene to another that have basically no relationship with each other, each depicting completely random dialogue and interactions. Best of all, none of it is remotely funny. Any attempts in comedy is clearly a failure. Random does not equal funny OK? Bobobobo is extremely random, but it's also hilarious. Oh! Edo Rocket just makes you scratch your head wondering what just happened because some random crap happens to a random character. Each scene involves a different character, and in the few minutes you have to see the character, you really don't care about them. "Funny" scenes just make you wonder what the hell the punchline is, and it never comes.
The art is horrendous. CGI is god awful, and so are the OST. Fight scenes are mediocre at best, and there's a lack of detail when it comes to the choreography. Character art sometimes have over-embellished features for a comedic tone and effect, but they're crappy regardless. Even the standard faces and animation is just bad.
It's a nonsensical random anime that probably culminates into some serious plot line that I don't care about since the characters are terribly crafted and made. Comedic scenes are attempted all the time, but it's just not interesting in the least bit.