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Title Info
- seen: 1 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- made: unknown
- Review created: Fri Jan 12 23:34:05 EST 2001
- mod: none
Well, this is not one of the better known titles for two important reasons. The first is that it's pretty old (and hasn't dated that well). The second, and more salient, is that it probably wasn't that great when it was new.
Hm, i'd really love to give a recap of the story...but I couldn't make much sense out of the disconnected scenes and strange characters that flitted across the screen. It almost felt like there were a whole bunch of anime's edited together. I do know it's set in some sort of futuristic world full of alien creatures and strange technology. I do know that we follow a lead female who rescues a young princess in a daring escape, although the story never really deals with her again. We also know that she also rescues two men who are busy doing a boxing epic set in prison. They don't seem too thrilled about getting yanked out of that though, because they immediately decide to do a `hover racer' anime. This is neatly concluded when the evil empire holding the princess comes back for revenge. This is done both in the hover race and as a final shoot-out. So four major sections, none of which seem to have much logic behind them or degree of interconnection.
It's certainly not helped by the characters. These people appear out of nowhere. Who are they, what are their motivations and why are they working together? I certainly don't know. Perhaps the dedicated media student can pull all the pieces out of the subtext, and the dialog is confusing enough to give lots of opportunities, but I certainly couldn't be bothered. It's either a bit of a mess or possibly the result of assuming familiarity with the foundation manga series. This is also not helped with the sub-titling occasionally just giving up for short sections. Likewise there's multiple factions and forces introduced, but in such small detail that they make no more sense than the characters.
It's possible it actually wanted to be an effects movie. This could easily explain the novel design, variety of different scenes and even the limited importance of the characters. If so it's a shame, because this animation certainly isn't going to impress. The design is very different, there's some weird looking monsters, vehicles, weapons and worlds...but the style of it looks as old as anything else in the anime. Whether representing the manga or trying to be novel it really doesn't look that impressive. There's also a pretty weird sense of pacing, which further reduces the impressiveness of the action. It's not painful, there's even a handful of nice moves, but it's ultimately pretty dull, decidedly unimpressive, and not really worth bothering with. The voices seemed okay, while the music was pretty disastrous synth stuff and some terrible 80's sounding guitar whining.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:15 WST 2009