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Idol Project
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Title Info
- seen: 1-4 of 4
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- genre: dumb_fun
- Other elements of this title:
- Contains excessive fan service.
- source: fansub
- form: sub
- dur: 120
- made: unknown
- Review created: Sun Mar 11 03:05:25 EST 2001
- mod: none
I really don't know how to introduce this one. I'm still not sure exactly what the designers were trying to acheive, but if they wanted something shallow, silly and fast-moving they've got it. Sadly it will probably be more fun to write the review than it was to watch it.
The show begins with an almost shoujo feel. Although a couple of quick serves of fan-service lead to the suspicion it's for young males. In any case we follow a young girl as she heads off to star crystal land (a theme park) to audition for a chance to be an `excellent idol'. Along the way she meets the 6 existing excellent idols, who are pretty weird, and manage to involve her in their own acts. Although, thanks to this interference, she misses her audition.
Not to worry though, because at this point the story warps into the middle of the weird dimension. Effectively everyone gets kidnapped and taken to an alien world. More specifically an alien world designed by someone taking some heavy duty and very questionable medication. It's just completely nuts, and the plots get stranger and sillier as the show continues. The only important thing is that the whole universe is idol mad, indeed idol's may be the greatest cosmic force there is.
I don't think text will be able to express just how silly this all is. It's crazed, frenetic and full of action (and fan service). The story weaves from event to event with the minimum logic neccessary. If you can take `dumb fun' then perhaps you'll enjoy it, but I just found it senseless and annoying. Meanwhile, on the character front, each of the excellent idols has a `role', such as rock star idol, dance idol and ninja idol (don't ask me), but they don't seem to have much in the way of personality. Meanwhile the first girli's story seems to get put on the backburner until it is pulled out once more to give a conclusion to the whole mess. There's some feeble attempts to make this `meaningful', but not even they can take it that seriously.
Add in the fact that it's trying to be super-cute, but fails to manage it, and things look even worse. Perhaps it's the messy design, the shallow characters or the fan service but this is quite unattractive somehow. Then again, the whole `idol' thing is pretty hard to stomach at the best of times. And some of the story elements do a good job of approximating `idol philosophy', which is not something to recommend the anime. To fill in the time the characters get thrown into various crazy competitions which is fun eye-candy but ultimately sort of tedious.
I don't know what they were trying to acheive, but this is just a bit of a mess. The animations not going to save it either. It looks like they had a competition for how `crazed' they could get and the animation reflects this. It's sketchy, chaotic and lacks any coherent style. As mentioned the girls are suprisingly unattractive, despite their obvious best attempt. Some of the action sequences, including one `fighting girl' who basically laughs her way through the whole show, are actually quite fun (in a silly way) but they fail as ofen as they succeed and are not even that impressive at their best. The voices were generally hard on the ears and the music was light pop stuff of little value.
Other Reviews
- THEM review Well, the review identifies it as show for otaku with a story solely designed to show off the girls. No argument there, but it also champions it as worth watching, with cute girls, fun situations and lots of anime in-jokes (4/5).
- Lord Carnage review Looks like i'm outvoted. While Lord Carnage is not quite so positive his comments echo Akemi's more than my own. He also found it to be "very weird" (2.5/5).
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:20 WST 2009