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Twin Signal
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Title Info
- seen: 1-3 of 3
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- form: sub
- source: fansub
- made: unknown
- Review created: Sat Mar 10 03:12:15 EST 2001
- mod: none
Strange things from dusty shelves come. This video features quite a bit of fighting and a huge amount of fairly silly comedy. It's fairly light, and doesn't even try to get too deep, but it's actually quite amusing.
We begin in a peaceful little village somewhere out in the wilds. The young boy we get introduced to is living with his grandfather, the local village robot designer. This is the first important clue that this is a little bit different from out world. Indeed in this world robots are fairly common and virtually accepted as members of the household. Especially in this case, because the designer has re-programmed his masterpiece, following the kids instructions, to act as a big brother...albeit a slightly violent one. A fun twist is that the kid sneezed during the programming. And now every time he sneeze the robot, name Signal, changes between his normal form a happy innocent little super-deformed mode.
And then, to keep things busy, all sorts of fun starts happening. The main event being a call from the designers son, who's also a robot designer. He cheerfully mentions that, on a whim, he's just finished adding huge combat blades and laser cannon's to signals prototype. He also mentions, in passing, that it's also been stolen and re-programmed by a bitter and twisted robot designer with a serious grudge against both them and signal. Along the way there's robot kidnapping, the construction of a guardian robot that goes beserk and all sorts of other fun.
The character's rarely take the events too seriously and neither do the creators of this show. There's lots of humor, both from the robots and the human cast. What's more, while it's on the dumb-fun end of the spectrum, it's actually fairly entertaining. This is especially true for the villain, and his `hostage', who have some very strange, but quite entertaining moments. During the three episodes no deep story emerges, but there's always several things going on to keep you interested.
Most of the serious stuff relates to the action component. While signal looks like a young guy, and his prototype is a downright bishounen, they're pretty powerful. There's some nice acrobatic combat which is fast moving, dramatic and generally entertaining. It's not incredibly detailed, but it gives a sense of movement and energy. There's even a little bit of chivalry and warrior morality to make it more entertaining and explain why it can continue through three episodes.
That said, the animation itself is fairly plain, especially for an OAV. I was seeing it on an awful, many generation fansub with bad tracking of course, which didn't help. But even then the linework is a bit chaotic and the coloring a bit muddy. Action is more suggested than detailed and backgrounds are often quite simple as are character designs. It's basically older TV quality, so there's no `wow' factor at all. The voices fitted well and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Other Reviews
- Lord Carnage review Once again i'm amazed by Lord Carnages scope and saddened that the reviews are so short. He didn't mind it but wasn't overly impressed (2.5/5).
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:26 WST 2009