bingerama

I made TJ watch this and we finished it over the weekend, with me re-watching 18 episodes in the process. Sadly, most of these episodes were not as moving the second time around. Plus TJ has a heart of stone so he was quite unimpressed with most of the tear-jerking moments in the anime, which kinda spoiled the mood for me. =/

This would have ranked as one of my all time favourites, except that the ending was quite a let down. It felt like nothing was really resolved in the greater scheme of things, and no ultimate enemy was finally triumphed over. I would have let the lack of an explanation pass, if they hadn’t slipped in that little bit about the ‘Masterminds’, which seemed to imply that we would be getting a bit more information about the whole affair. But nope, 30 hour long fight and zip, ending credits. And what was with the half hearted flashbacks in the last episode that seemed to accidentally leave out half the cast?

I was also disappointed by the weak stories that Jun and Kanji ended up with, especially since they’d managed to groom Kanji into such a likeable character without giving him a real focus. He almost made my list of favourite anime characters, but his story turned out to be entirely pointless. Pfft. Thankfully, all these faults can be conveniently blamed on the fact that the manga is still ongoing.

I still really liked the individual stories. I think the anime did an excellent job getting you attached to the characters (some of them anyway) when there were so many sharing limited screentime. The general premise of the story is sad to begin with, and the way the characters were presented made it downright heartbreaking in some cases. Even the ending was quite poignant, despite its insufficiencies. I probably would have cried if TJ hadn’t been around making snide remarks.

What I liked best about this anime was the fact that it didn’t try to be anything more than it was. It wasn’t pretentious, it didn’t try to be different or unique just for the sake of novelty, it didn’t try to get you to like the characters by applying all the usual techniques. It told its story without fillers or fanfare and still managed to be entertaining and, in my opinion anyway, genuinely touching.

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…