Studio 4c° is back baby! The backgrounds are lush and imaginative. The animation looks like it was animated on 1’s and 2’s consistently, including some incredibly slick acrobatic movements. (Not to mention the scenes with water!🤤). Studio 4c° looks to be in top form except…
The didn’t find a team of writers who could adapt this portion of Tezuka’s Phoenix into a compelling narrative. Partially a pacing issue, partially a failure to set up motivation for its characters: where Phoenix falls flat is the writing. [Minor Spoilers] The story sets up stakes for a survival story only to quickly abandon that and shift to a story about nostalgia and failing civilizations. Phoenix it never really explains why the civilizations are failing, or why its characters are so haunted by nostalgia. Villains just sort of appear and do nasty things with no obvious motivation. It’s a good example of characters being driven by the needs of a the story rather than the story being driven by the needs of its characters. The end result is a gorgeously animated mess of a story. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to experience Phoenix: Eden17, as its animation exists in a pantheon with only a handful of other anime greats: Redline, Princess Kaguya, and the Blade Runner short film come to mind. But I can’t help but still walk away feeling disappointed that this lavish animation was wasted on a mediocre story.