bingerama

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=7213

Fifteen children attending a summer camp wander into a cave improbably filled with computers and are invited to take part in a game by a suspicious looking man going by the name ‘Kokopelli’ (!! I was trying to figure out why that name sounded so familiar and thanks to Wikipedia now I know – it was the name of a smoothie chain I used to go to in Singapore that had really good mango smoothies! Apparently it’s also the name of a fertility deity…wtf? Who names a smoothie store after a fertility god???). Um. So as I was saying, totally sounds like a trap but thirteen year olds are not too bright I guess, so they enter a contract to pilot a huge robot and protect Earth against foreign invaders. They are guided by a diabolical flying stuffed toy looking thing voiced by Ishida Akira (Gaara), who does an impressive job at sounding like a maniac.

Aznv.tv had this classified as, I quote, ‘Action, Angst, Mecha, Piloted Robots, SciFi, Tragedy’. I didn’t know ‘angst’ was a genre of anime! Although all anime arguably falls in this category haha. Anyway, from the genres quoted you can kinda figure out what’s going to happen…but I really like the story so far. Little pieces of information are revealed every few episodes, and I can’t say that I saw everything coming. The plot is interesting without getting too weird (not by episode 16 anyway). I like that they didn’t try to make it so that every one of the 15 kids had some kind of screwed up issue (though a disproportionately large number of them still do).

I also like that this isn’t your typical mecha type anime; the robots aren’t particularly cool looking and the fights are usually over very fast, plus there is actually some attention paid to the fact that when 2 huge machines are ramming at each other many many many buildings tend to get destroyed (which is one of the reasons I prefer watching anime of people fighting rather than robots!).

Things I don’t like are: (1) The very first time I watched this I had my volume turned up a bit too much, and the opening bit of the theme song consists of a chorus of female voices which sounds kinda freaky, and it literally made me jump. The song itself is pretty nice though, except its chorus starts with ‘uninstall, uninstall’, which are really, really strange words to be using in a song if you ask me. (2) The clip they play for ad breaks has this mechanical voice sorta whispering ‘bokurano’ which hella creeps me out.

Definitely one of the best anime I’ve seen so far. This was another one of Ian’s recommendations – Ian is 2 for 2 now, which is leading me to the inevitable conclusion that he actually has good taste in anime…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 2:57 am and is filed under Bokurano. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.