That’s the question that I had to ask myself as I finished watching Sousei no Aquarion, because at its core, this is a show that is fundamentally flawed in a number of areas, but at the same time, I found myself enjoying it throughout. Thus I have to wonder if it’s a good show, even if I don’t think the individual parts are good.
The story of Aquarion isn’t that much different from most of the other giant robot shows you may have seen over the years. Humans are being harvested by a race of beings called the Shadow Angels, and the only method they have to fight back are three ships called Vectors, which have to be piloted by Elementals, and can join together to create the giant robot Aquarion. The show doesn’t stray far from convention at this point, as it’s very similar to other shows like Voltron and the likes, where you have individual fighters who join to create one giant robot. Outside of the giant robot portion, you have the character interactions, which focus on the elementals and their personal baggage, as well as a 12,000 year old love story due to reincarnation. The story isn’t terrible, but it misses a few steps along the way. The reincarnation angle could have worked great, if more than 2 characters had memories from their past lives. But since only the 2 seem important, the rest of the characters simply make up side-story elements, and thus never have the weight behind them that the main characters do. Beyond that, the Shadow Angels, while interesting for villains, don’t really hit the cord to make you despise them, and thus the show lacks a lot of punch. In the end, the story is sound for creating a giant robot show, but it’s certainly not a selling point, and truly falls short of better shows in the genre such as RahXephon and NGE.
When it comes to the characters themselves in Aquarion, I find myself rather torn. One the one hand, the interaction between them is generally fun, and adds a lot to the show. The problem is that the characters themselves are often entirely unlikable. The main character, Apollo, is shown throughout the entire show being bestial and nasty, due to the fact that he had to live a hard life as a child. That’s all well and good, but you’d like the character to evolve beyond that at some point, and become better all around. You see hints that such evolution is happening, but then they throw that all away by having him pick his nose, or do something else childish and disgusting at every opportunity. Sadly, he’s still more likable than the female protagonist Silvia, who spends most of the show having to get past her brother issues and the fact that she’s a spoiled princess. Other side characters range from the strangely out of place soccer player (who still wears his uniform) to the rather cliché mopey, I have only bad luck but everyone loves me, to the I’m cute but helpless moe type character. Despite all the flaws of the characters, their interactions are still fun and enjoyable, and they do make the show better. I think despite their flaws, these are rather charming characters that I just couldn’t make myself dislike.
The animation of Aquarion is pretty much all over the place. Generally, the animation is pretty good, nothing spectacular, but it’s fairly sharp. There are a handful of episodes that just aren’t as good, but they normally don’t stray too far into the terrible territory, unless they do it on purpose. My problem is again with the implementation of the CG, such as the robots. I just never enjoyed the CG aspect, and I didn’t particularly care for the design of the Aquarion, which left all of the giant robot fight scenes particularly displeasing from an aesthetic reason. When it comes to the artistic design, I found the humans to be relatively bland. They look like any other gathering of humans that you’d find in any other giant robot show. Where the show ventures off and becomes creative is the Shadow Angels, and I found their artistic design to be quite enjoyable. The character Otoha, with wing like arms and multiple eyes was truly interesting from an artistic perspective. The end result is a mishmash of animation, that is sometimes striking and fascinating, other time conventional and fine, mixed with bad CG that drains away a lot of that credibility.
If there’s one area that Aquarion caught me completely by surprise, it’s the music of the show. This is a truly hidden little gem of a sound track, but in retrospect, that comes as no surprise. I didn’t know the composer when I was watching the show, but I found myself enjoying a lot of the rather catchy lyrical songs, as well as truly loving the classical pieces, particularly when the piano was used. It came as no surprise to me when I learned that this was another soundtrack composed by Yoko Kanno, so my natural love for the music made immediate sense. Truly, this is the high point of the show, and I always found that the use of music here made things have more emotional impact than they should have, but that’s a power that Ms. Kanno has always had.
Beyond all the parts of Aquarion, the show is quirky and that both works for it and detracts from it. I don’t understand the reasoning behind the women experiencing orgasmic feelings when they powered up the Aquarion. That always felt weird and out of place in this show. Also, this is a truly “Rinse and Repeat” show if I’ve ever seen one. About 80% of the episodes of this show can be broken down into the following steps:
1. The show starts with a little character interaction, usually setting up which character will have the breakthrough moment in the fight this episode.
2. The enemy will attack, and three elementals will be sent out to fight them.
3. The good guys will get overconfident and have to confront some new enemy attack that they don’t know how to beat; 1-2 of the elementals will likely get knocked out at this point.
4. The character from the earlier interaction will realize they have some special talent or insight into this particularly enemy.
5. Cue catchy Yoko Kanno victory music
6. The good guys beat said enemy
7. There might be a little post fight character interaction, and then the episode ends.
That’s pretty much the way almost every single episode goes, with the exception of the first and last couple of episodes where they move things along quicker for storyline purposes. Beyond that, some of the episodes are incredibly random for a giant robot type of show. There are episodes about dreams, vampires, dieting and awful animation (I swear they were on serious drugs for episode 17).
When you look at any particular area of Aquarion, with the exception of the music, each aspect of the show seems horribly flawed, and one would think it’s a terrible show. But somehow when you pull together all these flawed parts, this show has a great amount of charm and I couldn’t help myself, I found that I liked the show. It’s not great, and it doesn’t stand up against the better shows in the genre, but if you have the time and you can overlook those flaws, Aquarion might just be able to win you over with its charm as well.
