Anime Meta-Review
Outlanders
Index's
Home
Alphabetic
Quality
Genre
People
Recent
By Date
Title Info
- seen: 1 of 1
- type: OAV
- grade: flawed
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
What a strange creature this anime is. It shows clear signs of being a minimal form of a big manga. What is really strange is that it thinks it is being cute and charming when really it just seems sort of pointless and disconnected. The story starts with a lone alien woman (in revealing armor) routing the worlds military in her biological looking spaceship then getting out to do a bit of chopping limbs off and watching people fall over slapstick. While wiping out a squad she suprises a cameraman, who suprises her and tries to restrain her. He then notices she's female and almost nude, and despite the dead bodies around gets aroused. Apparently this is a wedding proposal wherever she comes from, or perhaps it is just to annoy daddy? Who knows. But since daddy is the emperor it isn't long before the story is knee deep in aliens and their problems.
The aliens keep making monkey jokes, but they're a pretty primitive bunch themselves. Lots of fighting, drinking, ribald comments and rather obvious politicing. They also don't seem to mind offing one another. And even given the short running time of this video there is a lot of ecchi vision and dialogue to be had. The main problem is it just doesn't make much sense, the core story is simple but not very believable and some of the events that occur are just pointless. The characters are meant to be cute and energetic, but are very shallow. The attempts to be charming or romantic are simplistic and unexciting. In essence it just too simplistic and disjointed to add up to much.
In addition the animation is beginning to show its age. Some of the design is interesting, but the action scenes are fairly flat. There are also some weird attempts at humor mixed in with quite explicit violence, like a soldier `humorously' not realising his arm has been chopped off, which make you wonder what the creators were thinking. The male lead also does a credible `ataru' (ie. pulls strange expressions and thinks lecherously) through much of the running time which just looks odd and reduces from what is meant to be a romantic sub-plot. The english dialogue and dub is richly characterised, but perhaps a bit over the top at times.
Herself the Elf was given this tape by accident, but couldn't resist the urge to review it. Fairly cliche, badly dubbed and not great...but still a watchable title seems to be the summary.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:23 WST 2009