Break Blade Movie 1: Kakusei no Toki

‘Break Blade’ is essentially a 50-minute teaser.

It starts with a rather chaotic scene featuring giant robots shooting at each other, only to shift focus to a young man fainting in the desert a couple of minutes later. It’s eventually made clear that conflict has broken out between 2 nations and that one of them has discovered a special weapon that could turn the tide in their favor if only they know how to use it. Enter our fainting young man in the desert who actually knows the ruler of said nation and, surprise, can use the weapon!

That’s the bare essentials of the main story. There ... are plenty more characters but none of them really develop in any way. Every character introduced gets a scene or 2 to establish his/her personality and maybe a few hints about their background and past relationships. All of them fall into familiar archetypes: there’s a clueless hero, a plucky comic-relief character, a stern but well-meaning enemy commander and so forth. All the characters are potentially interesting but the short length of the movie makes the potential stay just that, potential. We’ll have to wait and see how the characters are developed in future installments.

The art and animation are good, as could be expected from Production I.G.. Though the designs of the characters and (especially) mechs are rather uninspired to say the least. There’s also the occasional still-frame here and there but these are few, far between and very short. One last complaint I have is that the bullets fired by the mechs didn’t really have much impact for me. There wasn’t much ‘oomph’ when a mech got shot down.

The audio is sufficient. The music is completely forgettable (so it’s not terrible at least), the sound-effects do their job and there’s plenty of now-popular seiyu (eg. Hiroshi Kamiya, Yuuichi Nakamura, Kana Hanazawa) to please the fans.

There were a few cool twists on certain clichés such as how every person in the movie’s world can use magic and being unable to do so is considered strange or how the main character who falls into a mech’s cockpit for the first time doesn’t immediately start kicking ass. This gave some novelty to an otherwise derivative final product.

I was entertained enough to with this movie to at least check out the next one (though it helps that it ends on a huge tease). There are some elements in here that could make for a fun experience if executed well; but whether or not the creators will manage it is still up in the air.

INTRO: Broken Blade was a bit of a let down for me. I broke one of my own cardinal rules for watching anime; I had expectations. I saw the nice art, I saw that it was from I.G., and that it was an OAV, saw some good-looking characters and therefore launched right into the assumption that it HAD to be great! And maybe it is, but it certainly wasn't my cuppa! I was kinda bored throughout this series....and I'm not sure why Broken Blade isn't classed as a series because you can't watch any of them independently or out of sequence, that's enough for it ... to be classed as a singular series. And that's how I've written this review...for the WHOLE series, So yes, bored and disappointed I was, as Broken Blade broke no moulds, the: same old mecha-driven plot complete with "unique" pilot, yet no true human story or character development and even though the art was lovely...it wasn't ground-breaking.

VISUALS: I.G. Definitely did not disappoint on the art and animation. They rarely do. Very good battle scenes, complex movements, dramatic slow-motion scenes all packaged nice and neat. The desert looks beautiful with it's infinite sand dunes, fine grains of sands slipping through fingers, lightly dusting everything it touches: clothes, boots, war-mecha...and it certainly seemed hot there. The castle interiors looked large and spacious, definitely Anglo inspired...once again [gag, eye-rolls!!! Would be nice for an anime to TRY and BE inspired by other cultures for once, how about Turkish, Moroccan, Greek?? Anything from Africa??] Sighs, geez, either way, the art was nice for what it was.

AUDIO: The OP theme was pretty grand and majestic sounding. It's the type of music you hear for films and anime that have a great story to tell, mostly the types that have been adapted from novels. It kind of reminded me of the theme from Lodoss War, that same kind of majestic “once upon a time” feeling. It definitely, encouraged me to think "yeah this story is gonna be great!" Big letdown. The ED theme was forgettable. I watched it in Japanese dub, typical shounen acting and screaming....bored, now. NEXT!

STORY: I'll tell you what's wrong with the story, it's unoriginal and completely uninspiring. The story is centred around several battles within a war for natural resources, namely quartz. Fine, I'm OK with that, I love politics, military and tactics, but this series had little of that. It was about the mecha and the battles, making the true characters of this series are the mecha....and that's why I got bored and lost interest. I'm not opposed to mecha-themed anime, per se, [loved GUNDAM, loved MACROSS] however those stories contained a solid foundation of human interaction and drama. With Broken Blade, human interaction is purely incidental, merely used only to fill the spaces between the combat scenes--where the true dramatic elements reside.
You can't create REAL drama from combat scenes only the illusion of drama with screaming, rage faces and blood drippings but you don't get the great drama that hits you in the gut because there is no character development. All the great war films and anime were splendid because time was spent fleshing out credible characters we can become attached to...no one beyond the 3 or 4 central figures has a solid back story. We only get to know who is related to whom then maybe there is some minimal interest by proxy: maybe they have a kid, maybe they were war-orphans, maybe they were slightly insane but there is no why or how they got that way. How did Sasuke [yes I know his name isn't Sasuke but these characters were so generic it's irrelevant] wind up on the opposing team? Why did Psycho-man turn against his comrades? What did he say to Naruto [yes I know it's not his name too] before going down in a blaze of glory? And there are many more questions that could have been answered were time spent more on that than the battle scenes.

CHARACTERS: OMG! If I see another blonde haired, blue-eyed lead character....I'm gonna hurl! Whatever happened to the old days when anime characters looked purely fictional with pink and green hair and all different color eyes? When did they start this raging trend to look like Hitler's army? If we're gonna stick to realistic human colour schemes, how about some black/blue, black/brown, brown/brown, red/brown...I'd even settle for blond/brown. But please, please, PLEEEEAAAASE! Stop with the blondes especially blonde/blue combos! I honestly couldn't even get into the characters because as soon as I saw blonde, I tuned out. I saw the glaring lack of originality and just tuned out. I saw Naruto, jumping into a mecha that of course ONLY HE can magically operate and I saw Sasuke on the opposing team, genius though he is, he's still misguided and he's still brooding as usual. And then some other equally boring archetypes thrown in the mix: Big boobs, gentle giant, midget loli-warrior, the over-plotter who doubles as the narrator to help the viewer follow along, crazies who get boners from warfare and killing. Now bake at 380 for six hours for the typical anime recipe, Ting! Boring! NEEEEEXT!

VERDICT: It's was a mediocre unoriginal story with nice art. It's pretty obvious this anime has only mecha-fanservice and battles scenes in mind and if that your cuppa tea, then have at it you'll be thrilled. But for those of us who've seen all that and are now looking for a bit more substance, forget it....you'll go hungry! You're better off with Escaflowne, they did already and MUCH better.