Chinmoku no Kantai

This anime was visible in my video recommendations for a while, and with a newfound affinity for older anime I finally decided to pick it up!

I haven't watched war-related anime much, and my expectations were quite low. I only knew this production was based on a manga, that there is another version of the series that has never been translated into English, and that this OVA was cut for a western release. I must say it does end quite abruptly and absurdly.

The plot progresses quite smoothly and quickly, but not too hastily. Details concerning warfare, politics and technical details seemed accurate enough. However, when it ... is time to contemplate the essence of war, Silent Service fails to deliver. Character development is nonexistent. A lot of things are conveniently explained through the Japanese culture's traditional, ingrained views on honour. It also wants to criticize the USA for acting as a "world police", but doesn't really offer much insight into why this is a good or a bad thing, other than countries and cultures having the right to arm themselves in return. Sometimes the role and motives of Japan and USA start to shift, merge or switch places, but whether or not this was intentional in the narrative, I couldn't tell.

The duration of this OVA was approximately 90 minutes, and it was a reasonably interesting glimpse into 90's animation as well as the attitudes towards nuclear technology and world politics in the 1980s.

The first thing to clarify about this anime is that the databases have their information a bit wrong, there are technically three episodes but they are not 30 minutes long. In 1995 a 95 minute movie was released, covering all those 30 minutes you see there, and in 1997 and 1998 two sequel OVAS came out, each one being an hour long. So the episode count is right, but the duration of each and the total in your account if you add it as complete is not.

The second thing to clarify is how hard it is to even find it, the movie can be watched ... without a problem but the sequels can only found as RAW on YouTube by searching them by their English name, and the translation of the automatic subtitles in them is hilariously wrong more often than not. So unless you know Japanese you won’t really get the story as a whole, thus making it a hard to recommend title.

As for the anime itself, it’s a political war drama about some nationalists Japanese marines stealing a nuclear submarine as an undercover mission, only to betray even their own country and declaring independence, scaling to show the political conflict it leads to between the implied countries, Japan and the United States, how each of them want to deal with the situation, and how different political parties want to benefit from it, and also heated arguments in congress about the situation, while it is also not bad in terms of battles.

With that said that last aspect stands in a place between realistic and spectacular, thus I think not a lot of people would be please with them, as the ones looking for realism would be annoyed by the not very realistic moments, while those that prefer spectacle would be bored with them most of the time. As for me, since I know nothing about how submarines work, I was mostly pleased with them and the combination they presented, thus even though there were some moments when I thought “huh? How’s that possible?” I didn’t have any real issues nor immersion breaking moments regarding them.

Since the show is overall low on action, it might seem slow paced but the truth is that at every moment the characters are investigating about the submarine, finding it, dealing with the nationalist ideals of the protagonist, showing some battles, as well as the States and Japan accusing each other of treason, then the latter and “Yamato” discussing, for the whole world to see, the dangers and necessity of nuclear power in the hands of powerful nations like the United States and how a little slip in trust could lead to a global disaster, as well as Japan is falling behind in militaristic strength and depending on others, with the weird logic of the main character being that Japan needs to have nuclear power to stand against others if needed, but ultimately deciding that, for nations to be at ease, the whole militaristic power should be exclusively in the hands of the United Nations. I guess the anime takes a stand in showing his reasoning as madness so that’s ok. And the whole third OVA is action, so there’s that.

The presentation looks and feels old by now but was good for its time. The artwork has its weak moments and there are coloring mistakes at times, but for the most part the anime looks very good for when it came out. The character designs may look simple but they are serious, mostly realistic, not repetitive, and have some of the best jawlines in the medium. I remembered the backgrounds being limited to just the submarines but turns out I was wrong, as there are a lot more things to see in it, and everything is really well done in that regard. The motions are good but mostly absent as the series is mostly characters sitting and talking, and the special effects are also really well done.

The audio department has limited but good orchestral music, sometimes with even an in-story reason for its use, and some beautiful endings. The voice acting is hands down one of the most mature and more fitting in the whole medium. The problem are the sound effects, which are really old, and even often unfitting, imagine torpedoes impacting and what you listen are sound effects from guns from the 50s while that is happening, we are talking that level of weak. Based on the Japanese people commenting this anime on YouTube, the sound effects are reused from Uchuu Senkan Yamato, thus we are talking about a series from the late 90s with sound effects from mid to late 70s, easily the worst aspect of the whole show.

Not to say that it doesn’t have any other important problems, there are three in fact:

-No ending: The anime is based on a long manga and thus the adaptation is far from over, it doesn’t even have any kind of conclusion on its own, it ends in the middle of nowhere.

-Not very good characters: Though character driven, the anime is clearly more focused on the plot, thus although the characters are mature and with good characterization, and no one is a caricature nor demonized, they are also dry, don’t have much of a backdrop, development or catharsis, and are not very memorable.

-One sided presentation of the conflict: As I’m sure I mentioned in the past, it is an issue when a war drama has clear cut good and bad guys, in the case the United States being the latter. They are not demonized, and the anime doesn’t feel like propaganda to me, but still it’s worth to mention that they are clearly presented as treasonous and inferior than the awesome Japanese marines.

As a whole, it’s a serious and well-presented political war drama for the most part but that can also make it very unappealing for most and there are serious weaknesses in the narrative that some might be even find offensive if they are Americans. Luckily I’m not and I happen to dislike that country most of the time, thus I love this anime, bite me.