Reviews

This is a quick review to let people know that this anime is terribly underrated. Not a lot of people have watched it so I guess it’s only recently been subbed. But I seriously recommend it. For a 1983 mecha, it features the best animation and characterization of the genre for years to come. In that decade, the flowing animation and clear character designs were rivaled only by OVA's and movies. I kept googling it and double-checking just to see if I wasn’t watching a 90’s/00’s remake by accident. You’ll watch this and wonder how Macross (slightly earlier) and Zeta Gundam (two years later) managed to look so unappealing. More so considering this is apparently also Tomino’s brainchild, though he didn’t seem to be involved in production.

The premise doesn’t sound that original at first. A group of kids are stuck on a spaceship, somehow managing to survive constant alien attacks. The spaceship getting hounded by aliens thing has been around since Space Battleship Yamato, but the new thing is that the main group of characters are really just teenagers and mostly very small children. Suddenly your parental instinct kicks in and the stakes are alot higher. They wouldn't kill off a 6 year old main character right? Right...???
The other new thing is that it works. It’s light hearted, fun but exciting and suspenseful, very consistenly so, for 46 episodes. If you like the first couple of episodes, you’ll like all of them. Even my favorite genre series so far had boring filler episodes or flaws that stuck out like a flamingo at a funeral.

At the very least it wins the prize for least flawed mecha series of the early 80’s.