Wasure Hoshi no Volicia

Wasure Hoshi no Volicia (Volicia of Pluto) is an incredibly strange Anime, deliberately so. At every step, in every scene, it deliberately takes actions that make the plot harder to follow and the motivations of characters even less clear. It is not even as if the plot is strong enough, or meaningful enough, to warrant this - it is just, quite simply, a self-indulgent story. Watching this through and trying to understand the plot seems like a fruitless endeavour with massive events, and supposedly important characters just being thrown in haphazardly. It is genuinely only through the help of taking an extreme amount of notes ... that I seem to have come to a slight understanding of the plot. For instance, one can be pretty sure that Ayano is a Vampire, and Akio becomes a Vampire at the end, but even that is uncertain.

Reading through that one might get the impression that the series is utterly unenjoyable and an effort to try and traverse, but if you ignore the plot, can learn to forgive parts of it thanks to its nature as an indie project, and instead focus on the characters arcs of the two main characters (Akio and Ayano), what you are left with is a pretty compelling Yuri Mecha anime about to girls who taught each other how to live and would give up everything - paying a great price as Akio did at the end - to be together. This results in a rather incredible open ending as you begin to see the price Akio had to play and brief, ambiguous, scenes of their future together. And considering that this is just 30 minutes long and an Indie project the sheer amount they managed to convey is genuinely impressive.

But the positives don't end there. The production values are also vastly superior to most other Yuri that seem to be produced. Despite its nature as an indie project, the action scenes are compelling and dynamic, the animations are genuinely fluid, and even at its very worst (some of the animations feels quite artificial in places and the perspective is off), it still manages to look better than Sasakoi. The music is also incredible and genuinely feels like a perfect match for the series.

So when this comes together, if you can forgive the plot, you get a genuinely enjoyable, in the action sections even exciting, Mecha Yuri with a genuinely compelling relationship and strong main characters. It's an easy anime to recommend - if you can even find it anymore.

So , first off , I have a really important question for the creator of this anime : what pushed them to do this ? what were their motivations for starting this project ? when did you decide to start it ? , and to be fair I have a Hypothesis on the answer , and if it is what I think it is then this is absolutely mind-blowing, like my jaw would drop to the fricking floor , like did you do that for the sake of making a yuri anime?
I mean they do advertise it that way , so I have my reasons ... to think so , because that would be some absolute sheer dedication , like I thought me going through a 6 months process to take over a 10k subreddit to turn it into Yuri was something but this is on a whole other f*** ing level , I don't know how much time it took you , months ? years ?
either way , and no matter what happens I'll always think highly of your work , because imagine making an anime but you're the only person making it (or at least most of it if you don't count the voices , the music , the sound design etc..) , most people wouldn't be capable of doing such an effort and time-consuming task , which is all the more impressive when you consider the technical skills involved ,
yeah sure some plans and shots are still images and shortcuts are taken like loops and stuff , but all of it is excused when you look at the bigger picture and the circumstances , just know that I was more entertained watching 30 minutes of this than watching 5 episodes of strawberry panic , that means they definitely achieved something here

now I want to go a bit more in-depth about my perspective as the viewer , I thought giving some feedback would be helpful to you , although it is strictly from an amateur's point of view , so these words are to be taken with a grain of salt , I'm not trying to tell how to do stuff and I'm in no position to say that , even if constructive criticism can sound a little harsh but I'm learning art myself and I believe that sometimes receiving tough criticism is actually the most helpful , I am in no way trying to say it's bad or anything like I said I think highly of it, I'm only picking on the things I want to point out :

first I felt like a bit lost from time to time on the development of the story , well you can argue that I'm a bit braindead but I feel like there's a lack of contextualization and characterisation , and yes sometimes it's intentional but here I feel like it's not well adjusted , I'm acknowledging the fact that there's a chapter 2 coming out eventually but you have to anticipate that this is a movie and chapter 2 is currently being funded , so it should have its stand-alone kind of thing going on , even a little bit would be nice just to not have this "throw that in , now figure it out" kind of feeling , like I'm wondering about , fire of life ? interdimensional thing ? what/where exactly am I looking at ? pilots ? apocalypse ? gods/divinity ? shrine maiden ? etc... , all of those things are valid but feels like it lacks some setting up ,
and maybe the animation itself adds to the confusion (but like I said that's not your fault , you're like the only person making the visuals)
and lastly, when you have a close-up on the feet when someone is running like at 1:41, why are the legs so T H I C C ? (nah ok I was joking a bit there)

Like I imagine a lot of these lower budget independent projects turn out, I think this would have been better pitched as a proof of concept than it is as a more complete work. As a proof of concept, there'd be a huge amount that should convince someone to put some more budget into it. There are definitely some strong concepts in there, a pair of protagonists I'd like to learn more about, strong vocal performances (always easier to make the standout with a lower-budget piece), and a really, really nice hero mecha design.

Unfortunately, it suffers from its budget and runtime. It crams a ... lot of story into a 30 minute film, which means not only is it incredibly fast paced, but also doesn't really explain anything. You sort of pick some of it up, perhaps more than you'd expect even, but I can't really tell you what the story was past the broadest of shapes. The animation is also fairly poor, not unreasonable for an independent piece, but that doesn't actually make it better - although the mecha battles, not limited by having to give some approximation of human movement, manage to be a lot stronger than those human scenes.

If, like Mecha-Ude releasing next year, this short and its sequels picked up enough traction for a bigger studio to bite, I'd be thrilled. With a proper budget, the story you can get your head around is strong enough that I definitely think a fully produced version would be pretty incredible. But this isn't that version, and if it's to be seen as anything other than a proof of concept, those ideas aren't quite enough to make this stand on its own merits.