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Legend of Lemnear
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Title Info
- seen: 1 of 1
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- Other elements of this title:
- This title may offend the sensitive.
- made: unknown
- Review created: Sun Nov 12 22:22:53 EST 2000
- mod: none
An interesting mixture of top notch animation and questionable motives in this fairly formula fantasy piece. It seems that the world is solidly under the heel of an evil madman. And, as required, he has awesome god-like magical powers. The legends state that color-coded hero's (bronze, silver and gold) exist...but they don't seem to be doing too well. The story opens with a town being put to the sword and torch and the hero of bronze getting swatted down like a fly. We then move to a young female warrior, in required medeavil bikini, who happens to have silver hair. She also intends to rescue the hero of bronze (who apparently is a friend of hers) and oppose evil. Unfortunately evil seems to also have an interest in her. It isn't too long before she finds herself fighting for her life against the ultimate evil in this world. This battle also marking the meeting of all three hero's, and the resolution of the conflicts between them.
That was pretty difficult, because really the story is pretty feeble. However the real flaw in this series seems (to me) to come from its origin as an OAV movie (it's about 45 minutes). An OAV movie must sell to make back the money on production, unlike TV where a sponsor has contracted at least some number of episodes. Thus stories may be `nudged' to have more of the elements that will appeal to OAV buyers. In this case they nudged a bit too far. In other words it has a sizable element of sex, violence and huge explosions. And, to be honest, this was blatant enough to detract from the whole. I mean the bikini is expected, but there is a long exploitative `slavemaster' sequence which is largely justification for sexual fan-service. Likewise the violence is suprisingly brutal (and requiring an unbelievable plot twist to assure lemnears survival). Meanwhile the need for action makes sure that story and character are firmly shunted into the background. Still, if you like your fantasy with a lot of breasts, blood and bangs then feel safe in giving this one a try.
And to be honest the animation in this one is pretty impressive even by today's standards. While the hand to hand combat is okay, the `epic' combat at the conclusion is really good fun to watch. Aerial sequences, spell effects, huge blasts of magical power and an impressive stage to trash really enhanced the effectiveness of the good quality animation. And it's also quite well paced, staged and `filmed' so it all looks pretty good. And this conclusion takes up about 15-20 minutes of the films running time, so there's plenty of it. The combination of detail and smooth motion gives a good example of what the OAV medium allows...I just wish there was a stronger foundation underneath all the flash. The voices were largely forgettable and the music was guitar pop kind of stuff, which was energetic but perhaps a bit too unsubtle in parts.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:20 WST 2009