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Silent Moebius, TV Series
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Title Info
- seen: 1-8
- type: TV
- grade: worthy
- people: Asamiya
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
Kia Asamiya does interesting art, good (but somewhat derivative) character designs and invents interesting worlds for these characters to work in. Sadly he's not that great a writer, good at scenes, but not so hot on pacing and the overall story. This anime gives the answer to this problem, get someone else to write it! The story is in a cyber-punk near future, with much of the world uninhabitable due to a magical accident many years previous. The cities that survived are now huge, polluted and corrupt. On top of that demonic creatures from another world have started to explore and hunt in our world. Humanity's answer is the AMP, a special police force made from 7 special women. Will they be able to discover and foil the demons plans, while surviving the many human conspiracies arranged against them?
It isn't terribly original, but the combination of cyberpunk and spiritual combat is a fairly fertile ground. In addition the team demand a lot of story time, because they are a weird bunch, with interesting backstories and wildly different powers. This includes cybers, psychics, sorcerors, hackers and spiritualists and their interaction and stories take up a lot of the shows time. This is both a strength, because the characters are mostly interesting and a negative because it detracts from the larger story. On the other hand this show has some clever writing, good dialogue and a willingness to deviate from the manga plotline, while drawing from its essence, that gives me some optimism that it can be done. The anime even manages to make the romantic subplots within the manga both more interesting and more believable. I have a general preference for manga, but I have to say this combination of Mr Asamiya's design and someone else's writing offers reasonable hope of some interesting anime ahead. In addition it means those who have the manga can still enjoy this anime since it extends the manga story rather than simply re-tell it.
This is not hurt by the production. It is pretty good stuff, with very inhuman demons, flashy magic, and interesting technology all mixed together. The background of rain drenched concrete and `police no-go areas' is very familiar to cyberpunk fans (and in fact anyone who has seen bladerunner) but there's no reason to mind visiting it again. The action, both magical and mundane, is well handled and fluid although many of the first episodes have little combat. There is also some computer graphics which is relatively well used for doing magic effects. Some of the direction is interesting and unusual, with the interlaced narrative and color use on Kiddy Phenil's story (ep 6.) proving that the creators are willing to experiment. The voices and music, including the opening song, were solid and fitting.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:24 WST 2009