I’ve got a pair of shows from Madhouse to review today and because it’s Tuesday I guess I could call this a Two-for-Tuesday offering Wednesday I can’t call this a Two for Tuesday. This one is a relatively old offering from them and the next one is a much more recent show.

Final Series Score: 7/12 B
Rewatchablity: 0.5/5 – Very Low; Outlaw Star doesn’t do much that would make viewers want to watch it more then once
Ending: 1/5 – Profoundly Deficient; The ending was very disappointing not just because it left the viewer feeling unsatisfied, it also felt tacked on and rushed.
Animation: 2.5/5 – Average; It is apparent that this series is now 11 years old but it’s holding up pretty good
Pros: Interesting premise, decent action sequences, fun vibe to the show
Cons: For a show about interstellar travel, Outlaw Star never felt like it was going anywhere – each story arc would reset the show with nothing to show for the time and trouble, characters were not interesting or engaging and the weak characterization never made them likeable, ending felt really rushed and tacked on and it relied too heavily on deus ex machina to resolve things

Story

Gene Starwind and his young partner Jim Hawkings are mechanics/bounty hunters/entrepreneurs looking to strike it big so they can leave their backwater planet and go to space. A once-in-a-billion opportunity comes knocking on their door and the pair end up with a prototype spacecraft that is much more then it seems, a mission to find the “Galactic Leyline”, and the enmity of magic-wielding space pirates.

Thoughts and impressions

The inspiration behind picking this series to watch came from it’s use in a skit from AMV Hell 3. I know clips for AMVs are often used out of context for laughs but I figured the show was worth a shot. And initially, I liked what I saw; I didn’t mind all the little things that mark a show as being a decade old (though I was always glad when Gene took off his giggle-inducing cape with monster shoulder pads). The characters were a little weak but there was plenty of time to flesh them out as, presumable, they searched for the Galatic Leyline but it slowly became apparent that the majority of the show was not going to be about the search for the Leyline. Instead the show was going to be about how the pair was going to pay off their debt that owning the most awesome ship in the universe incurs. Initially I applauded this twist because it was realistic to see Gene and Jim, a pair of normal people, having trouble outfitting a spacecraft but after awhile even these two should have been able to figure out a way to use their most awesome ship to make money except they don’t.

As a result the show started to remind me of the first part of Samurai Champloo where the entire show is about if and how the main characters will eat. I got to the point that I just didn’t care if the characters will eat that day or, for Outlaw Star, if they’ll pay off their debt. Samurai Champloo breaks out of this around the halfway point which left enough episodes that I could enjoy the series and not consider it a waste of time but Outlaw Star never breaks out of this.

Nor did the show bother with developing the main characters so the weak, not-very-likeable, characters we meet at the beginning are still the same weak, not-very-likeable characters at the end of the series. It’s telling when the best character of the series is the computer AI for the spaceship.

Awhile ago I mentioned in a post that watching anime out of chronological order could be dangerous when forming conclusions about a show because the wrong conclusions could be reached. In this case, having watched Gurren Lagann long before watching Outlaw Star I would be very tempted to conclude that Outlaw Star was a very poor attempt to create a show that felt like Gurren Lagann. Of course that’s not the case because Outlaw Star is much older and some of the feeling that the two are linked come from both being the same type of genre show. It’s a solid comparison, though, because it really summarizes my feelings about the show – namely, Gurren Lagann was meant to fill the same niche as Outlaw Star and Gurren Lagann does everything Outlaw Star does better, much better.

As such, I can’t really recommend Outlaw Star to anyone. If you’re looking for Space Opera SF – try Banner of the Stars. If you’re looking for an action-packed, “manly” show try Gurren Lagann. If you’re looking for a fun, slightly over-the-top SF anime that’s not Space Opera try Freedom.

Essential Information

• 26 episodes
• genre: Shounen, Action, Sci-fi
• animation studio: Madhouse
• director: Mitsuru Hongo
• OP: “Through the Night” by Masahiko Arimachi
• ED: “Hiru no Tsuki” and “Tsuki no Ie” by Arai Akino
• Seiyuus of note: Ayako Kawasumi, Rica Matsumoto, Sayuri, Shigeru Shibuya, Yuko Miyamura

And it still has a pair of the oddest closings ever.

Posted in anime, series review

I’m not sure how many people will care but I figure that I at least owe The Null Set readers an explanation to the whereabouts of it’s author and to offer some anime related content already.

During the last week of October and the first couple of days of November, I was helping my sister to nurse her one pet guinea pig, Lucy, back to health – trying to entice her to eat her food and when that failed, I held Lucy so my sister could force feed her. This ate a lot of time up in the day – not that I minded, in the 2.5 years we’ve had Lucy, I grew fond of her and also because it was the big brotherly thing to do. On Halloween it seemed like she was getting a little better but that turned out to be fleeting and by Monday, Lucy had passed away. Since than I’ve felt sad over the passing and depressed because my younger sister is heart-broken so I haven’t felt like writing.

This is a picture of her. I called her the ninja guinea pig because of her fur color and also because she liked to hide under things and silently move between things.

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So that’s why I haven’t posted anything in a while and also why I didn’t respond to the nice comments I got on my last couple of posts, even though I wanted too (and now it’s been so long it feels weird to). I’m going to try to get myself to finish writing my fall impression posts as soon as possible but before I get to that, there’s been a few thoughts that I’ve had dealing with anime that I’ll mention now so I won’t feel bad about meta-blogging and off-topic blogging.

The first is that about Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra. I haven’t been entirely impressed with the storytelling but I love the setting of the show. After a couple episodes I remembered something that made the idea of people having “books” sound not so far-fetched. One of my favorite science fiction writers, Charles Stross figured that if a video camera was set to record in Divx format using the same resolution as a DVD, that camera could record an entire year of someone’s life for 10 TB. That’s 10000 TB if a person lives one hundred years – an absurdly large number today but probably not so in a couple of decades. He figures that if Moore’s Law continues to the point that we can encode a bit of information in a single atom of some super-durable material like synthetic diamond (using different isotopes of carbon to be the 1 and 0) that it would only take 600 grams (1.3 pounds) of synthetic diamond to record the lives of the entire planet’s population for a year (assuming 8 billion people) and 60 kilograms (132 pounds) to record the entire population for a century. Leaving aside the question if people will want to do this, it’s entirely possible that in the future it would be possible that people will leave behind records that detail their entire life and makes Armed Librarians a little plausible.

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Next, I’ve been making my way through Outlaw Star after seeing it used in an AMV and it’s a pretty good show. In some ways it’s hard to tell the series is 11 years old and in other ways it’s glaringly obvious (think fashion and music choice). The reason I’m bringing it up here is that it has to have the oddest set of ending song animations ever in the history of anime. The people shown have absolutely nothing to do with the series nor does many of the scenes shown fit into the universe of the series. Even after watching 19 episodes, I’m still not convinced these are the actual closings; I still think the greater possibility is that they are some type of troll.

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Since posting how episode 12 of Despair was better than a large part of the fall season, I’ve realized that I could have swapped out that episode for several other recently watched episodes and the analogy would hold up. There was episode 31 of Cross Game when Akane was introduced or episode 40 of Kemono no Souja Erin when all the plot threads get tied together and episode 13 of Bakemonogatari to name a few. In the case of Bakemonogatari this episode definitely did a good job of switching the flow from Senjougahara back to the Hanekawa (it is her story arc afterall). I thought it was an interesting choice to have Araragi’s conversation with Hanekawa take place in the same park that he had that long conversation with Senjougahara back in episode 3. This made it easy to compare the two different relationships and it also allowed us to see how the return of the cat spirit has affected the Hanekawa, namely she’s not the all-knowledgeable person she was. After all, if Araragi has to explain several jokes to you, something’s wrong. Also in this episode was a halfway plausible reason for how all of oddities that Araragi has encountered have been woman so far – this made my sister happy since that’s been bothering her.

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And speaking of Bakemonogatari and Despair, I’ve been wanting to mention for a while now that gg has become my favorite sub group. I like how they just provide the English translation during the opening and closing songs. I also like how they strive to keep the translation sounding natural and I even like how they sometimes keep one of the commercials in their sub of a show. Just today I was watching the latest episode of Kampfer and the only spot of laughter I had while watching it was from the commercial for some sort of microwaveable hotdog that has left in by gg.

Posted in anime, general anime interst, meta/office keeping