Anime Meta-Review
Neighborhood Earth Defense Force
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Title Info
- seen: 1-4
- type: unknown
- grade: flawed
- made: unknown
- Review created: A while ago, i'll revise it eventually.
- mod: none
I am beginning to think I don't understand parodies, but then this was such a weird little video that perhaps it wasn't a parody. The story, such as it is, seems to resolve around the evil `telephone pole club' who have decided to take over the universe, but are going to start with the local neighborhood and work their way up. In response the Neighborhood Earth Defense Force is formed, basically by drafting the baseball club, to counter this dastardly, and largely insane, threat. This is further confused by a crazed doctor who enjoys cyborging people (one of the best lines, "How did you end up making a 2000 horse-power cyborg out of an accident victim?", "My hand slipped"). He also gives these creations regenerating missile packs, albeit with targeting systems that appear to be largely random and give new meaning to the term `collateral damage'. And so the stage is set for some silly fights, silly intelligence gathering and silly cyborgs.
There are some quite nice jokes in it, some good visual humor (such as the evil guys having a horde of people with masks bearing the text, "faceless minion") and the general insanity of two incompetent miniscule organizations feuding. However for me the humor was not enough to make this a worthwhile watch, with the jokes being a bit too infrequent and a bit too minor to really power the show. I could easily believe that this is an adoption of a manga which was probably funnier, as there were some plot jumps... or perhaps they just didn't care. The animation is okay, but is fairly simple and the action is nothing to get too excited about. If you really like comedy anime you might want to give this a try, and see if i've got it horribly wrong, but if I haven't then this is a fairly average attempt to be `weird and wacky'.
None of my sources has a review for this series, which suggests it probably isn't a well recognised classic I simply failed to get.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:22 WST 2009