Glass no Kantai: La Legende du Vent de l'Univers

Glass no Kantai (Glass Fleet) is an odd anime. Combining elements of space opera and medieval Europe, its strength is in its strong characterization of its three main characters.

The story is set in an alternative universe, in which self-proclaimed Emperor Vetti seeks nothing but power over others; the handsome lone wolf Cleo - who carries the blood of the overthrown royal family - seeks to bring down Vetti; and the rebel aristocrat Michel Volban seeks to establish a people's republic. Michel eventually teams up with Cleo, and the main story unfolds from there.

Each of these three men harbors a major secret concerning their ... identity; and some adult themes are explored starting around episode 11 or so. Despite the general adventure theme look of the anime at first, it's really not for younger kids.

The production design is interesting and eye-catching, particularly the medieval-inspired costumes. There are strange anomalies, like the fact that apparently humans in this alternative universe don't need atmospheres on their planets in order to breathe(!).

I rented Glass no Kantai because I'm an Akira Ishida fan. He plays Vetti, the villain, with a much lower and deeper voice than he normally uses - and it's very sexy too. ;)

If you're an Akira Ishida fan, or if you like the "different" animes, the ones that don't quite fit neatly into any one category - you might like Glass no Kantai.

A lot of anime are influenced by others in one way or another, but rarely have I seen one that shows its influences as blatently as "Glass no Kantai - La legende du vent de l'univers" (wow, what an exceedingly long and pretentious sounding title). This anime rips off so many sources and does it so badly and in such a painfully obvious way, that the result is comparable to a patchy rag doll, crudely sewn together from many different pieces of cloth.

Though at the time of viewing I remember noticing many similarities between "Glass" and numerous other anime, now I've either forgotten what most ... of those anime were, or I've forgotten the similarities in question. However, I do remember thinking that it appear to be ripping off "Last Exile" in particular.

Right from the start the signs were there. The opening of the first episode featured two fleets of flying ships doing battle, with people in the ship dressed like aristocrats. Hmmm where have I seen this before... of course - these were exactly the exact same things that caught my attention in the opening scenes of "Last Exile"! In what is possibly a feeble attempt to reduce the glaring similarities, the creators of Glass have decided to set this in space, rather than on a steampunk world. But soon enough, more similarities piled up, too many to be coincidental. To name a couple: a rogue ship making a flashy entrance in a fashion similar to that of a certain other rogue ship from "Last Exile" - even the skills exhibited by the two ship captains are pretty similar. Also, the tactics deployed by Admiral Gawain in the big ship to ship battle mid series could easily have been inspired by the the brilliantly orchestrated battle at Dragon Fang in... well you can probably guess where. Perhaps on their own, these similarities can be dismissed as coincidence. But so many in a single anime strongly implicates some serious plagiarism going on. If it isn't for the fact the Gonzo made both "Last Exile" and "Glass no Kantai", the makers of the latter would probably get sued.

As if blatent rip offs aren't bad enough, the production of anime is often downright terrible. I suspect I would be in for a laugh when, about 30 seconds into the jpoppy opening theme, a totally inappropriate bit of rapping is thrown in, no doubt in an attempt to make the anime seem "cool". And sure enough, this anime did indeed deliver plenty of laughs, virtually all of it unintended. There is some flakey, overarching plot over the whole thing, and some of its ideas definitely has merit, but it's often let down by the production and the wooden characters. Plot progression wise, it's probably the opposite of "Monster", where the plot execution is done almost to perfection. In "Glass no Kantai", there are numerous parts where the plot progression feels forced, bewildering or like they've plainly just cocked up. Prime example of this is the "twist" in the early episodes regarding one of the characters - the producers manage to shoot themselves in the foot and actually caused me to inadvertently stumble upon it without knowing it was meant to be a twist to be revealed later on (it sounds complicated, but you'll exactly know what I mean when you see it). The character are also fairly incompetently done. Other than ripping off from other works that came before it ("Creo" is basically Alex Rou from "Last Exile" with a dash of the devil may care attitude of Spike Spiegal from "Cowboy Bebop", Michele Volban is also ripped off another character that I can't actually name, as it will "spoil" the aforementioned twist for you), the character development feels heavy handed in general and just plain ridiculous at times.

Despite all its flaws (like, all 402 of them), the series isn't all bad. The Admiral Gawain part of the story is pretty good, despite stealing its battle strategies from "Last Exile". Some of plot points are also well executed and shows hints of promise... but it's just that most of its flaws are amplified simply because it's an anime that takes itself waaay too seriously. It obviously fancies itself to be something of a sweeping epic, perhaps not too disimilar to the kind of grand operatic feel found in "Gankutsuou". The music, arguably the one aspect of "Glass no Kantai" that's not riddled with flaws, do manage to provide an orchestral score befitting the epic it's *trying* to be. But that air of grandeur it's trying to achieve is something an anime can only get away with if it has genuine class... like "Gankutsuou", for example. "Glass" asks to be ridiculed far too often for its better points to be noticed (they do exist, few though they may be). In fact, for a long while one of my friends couldn't work out whether "Glass no Kantai" is meant to be completely serious or a tongue in cheek comedy (true story, I kid you not)!

Presentation wise, this anime isn't bad. Though visually the anime appears to be quite pleasing at first, I soon found that a lot of the character designs seem a little... off, for lack of a better word. It's as though they tried to go for some attractive character designs, but did not quite succeed. The general feel of the anime is that it's trying to create a big budget affect with a small budget, so it cheapness often glares out from beneath a thin facade. There is this one hilarious scene where one guy fights a group of soldiers. The soldiers unleash a barrage of arrows at him... and he somehow manage to single handedly unleash a barrage of similar size back at them... with his one crossbow. You'll really have to see it to fully appreciate the unintended comedy of the situation! It just felt so cheap! But due to "Glass no Kantai" severely lacking in substance, the presentation, despite feeling amateurish, is probably its strongest department. "Amateurish" is probably a word that can be applied to the anime as a whole. As much as I love Gonzo at their best ("Last Exile", "Gankutsuou", "Hellsing" springs to mind), they do produce far too much cheap trash like this ("Gad Guard" springs to mind here). They should just concentrate on making a few great series instead of wasting their time and money by pumping out crap. I mean seriously... do they really think they'll can con people out of their hard earned cash with anime of this calibur?!

Glass Fleet is studio GONZO’s attempt to make its own version of Legend of Galactic Heroes. That is the same as expecting from a monkey to write something close to Shakespeare, so you know right away it will not end well. Although the basic theme is the same (trying to unite the galaxy under a new, fair leadership) the way everything happens is one big mess. Every single event in this show is based on the rule of cool and not on some sort of strategy or reasoning.

But it’s not like it doesn’t have its merits. The setting is quite catchy on a superficial level, ... as you basically have humanity living on scattered asteroids and each one is ruled by nobility. Each time a war or a marriage takes place, the asteroids merge to represent the total space a family rules. And of course each side has its own space fleet to wage war if needed. The decorations on ships, buildings, and uniforms are also very eye-catchy and interesting to keep looking at. All that sound cool and fine in theory and if there was proper handling we would have a masterpiece on our hands.

But as I said, this is a monkey named GONZO we are talking about so it ain’t gonna happen.
- The animation is subpar for the time the show was made. Very frozen or stiff motions, along with some bad CGI stuff GONZO is so good at making them ugly.
- The detail on character figures is usually very crude. They usually have vague facial structure and thick outlines.
- Unimpressive soundtrack and voice acting. This is supposed to be a serious tale regarding the unification of space and they throw in j-pop garbage and high-pinched voices. Space operas go with epic chorus you fools!

All the above can somewhat be forgiven if the directing and the storylines are at least decent. And nope, in just the pilot episode alone you can already find stupid scenes full of ludicrous bravado and events that happen for the sake of retarded coolness. Here, let me give you a few examples from the first two episodes.
- The first episode begins with a space battle. One side wins but we are never told how. Something about attacking the enemy from the rear but we are never shown how they did it or why the other side didn’t see it coming.
- The second scene is about a wedding being interrupted by a rebellion. We already had a battle a moment ago and instead of focusing a bit more on that they just threw in another battle??? That takes gravity out of both events.
- And aside from that, the choreography is simply horrible. So much over the top ridiculous stuff happen that you just can’t take it seriously. The funny thing is that it’s not supposed to be comical and it tries to pass as very serious.
- The priest performing the ceremony is in fact the rebel leader. Instead of just attacking the nobles right away, he prefers to first memorize and perform the whole thing before revealing himself. As if it would matter somehow.
- Then the nobles perform an ambush and start bombing the place. The funniest part is when the hit the main square and there is no one there when two seconds ago the place was full of people.
- The rebel leader decides to fight back. For that reason he drinks tea served by a bimbo maid, boards a horse wagon that jumps out of nowhere (which was totally out of place in this setting), and with that goes to his spaceship.
- Said spaceship was all this time disguised as a huge glass building. Why the devil didn’t anyone notice a huge building appearing in the middle of the colony?
- Then he lures the noble fleet by driving them inside a space storm. Specifically his radar officer spots it as they are getting surrounded. He even says “we have a problem, there is a storm ahead” (which is completely retarded since that was clearly the least of their worries at that moment). So they just move towards it and none of the enemy ships detects the storm. Which is simply impossible since the damn thing was big as a planet and they were heading towards it.
- So anyways, the whole space storm thing fails and thus we realize this was nothing more than a cheap way to waste a few minutes.
- But worry not as a magical super transforming spaceship arrives and saves the day. So much for tactics and strategy; all it takes is to have the magic super ship on your side.
And the show goes like this all the way to the end, with everything playing out as the scriptwriter thought it would be cool at the second he was writing it down. Typical crayon-drawing GONZO kids… Of course and the ending is a far fetched fairy tale and of course we get lots of gay vibes in a poor attempt to keep us interested.

So after all this mess do you think the characters are any better? Nope, they are all one-dimensional comic book villains and heroes. Most of them are goofing around while dressed like they are going to a bondage party instead of trying to rule a galaxy. They are all so simplistic, straightforward and dried up, you end up not caring about any of them. Plus they are desperately trying to be funny and fail miserably since they simply are out of context with whatever is going on around them. Like penguins in a desert. And seriously, I am not into all this pretty boy gay stuff.

In all, this is an insult to anyone’s intelligence and an example of how a great premise can turn to shit if it’s given to the wrong people. Avoid at all costs and stick to good old Legend of Galactic Heroes, the one and only emperor of all Space Operas.

p.s. Calling this thing space opera is a bit off, since there is no actual vacuum anywhere. That shows how much they cared about physics while making it.

And now for some excused scorings.
ART SECTION: 5/10
Analysis: General Artwork 1/2, Character Figures 1/2, Backgrounds 1/2, Animation 1/2, Visual Effects 1/2

SOUND SECTION: 6/10
Analysis: Voice Acting 2/3, Music Themes 2/4, Sound Effects 2/3

STORY SECTION: 4/10
Analysis: Premise 2/2, Pacing 0/2, Complexity 1/2, Plausibility 0/2, Conclusion 1/2

CHARACTER SECTION: 5/10
Analysis: Presence 1/2, Personality 1/2, Backdrop 1/2, Development 1/2, Catharsis 1/2

VALUE SECTION: 1/10
Analysis: Historical Value 0/3, Rewatchability 0/3, Memorability 1/4

ENJOYMENT SECTION: 1/10
Analysis: Art 0/1, Sound 0/2, Story 1/3, Characters 0/4

VERDICT: 3.5/10