Cinnamon Ass

ED - Suashi (AKINO) - bleepily bloopily slow but lovely (as to be expected) song from the eternally awesome Kanno/Iwasato team.

12,000 years ago, humanity and the Tribe of Shadow Angels waged war as the Shadow Angels attempted to harness the life energy of Purana inside humans. Humanity narrowly won thanks to a Shadow Angel, Apollonius, who defected to their side; using the powerful mecha Aquarion, he, together with the warrior Celiane and the human queen Scorpius, were able to defeat the Atlantian Shadow Angels, but Scorpius eventually betrayed Apollonius and assassinated him.

Now, the DEAVA organisation fights against the reawakened Shadow Angels with the use of their Vector Machines, transforming and combining fighter planes, enlistening superpowered teenagers to fly them. One of them, Silvia de Alicia, whose brother Sirius was recently killed in battle, has a vengeance wish against the Shadow Angels and foolishly heads into direct battle with Toma, their leader; she and Reika, a fellow pilot haunted by dreams of a past life, are hurled into a forest where they are captured by a feral hermit named Apollo. The three of them are linked by the past, however, and Toma’s indiscriminate treatment of life brings them together to fight as the pilots of the giant “mobile angel” Aquarion; however, is the past destined to play out as before, and what machinations has Toma set into place?

Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? I’m sure many of you out there will have seen Sousei no Aquarion, the TV series from Satelight and director Shoji Kawamori, which I enthustiastically blogged about a couple of years ago. The show was a rather odd mecha series which seemed to be mostly made up as it went along, with its plot meandering from bizarre sex addiction episodes to gripping drama and the animation quality and consistency varying wildly as it went; you never knew quite what you were going to get except for orgasmic mecha sequences and great music, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Along comes the Aquarion OVA, and all of what I affectionately call the “Aquaricrack” that Kawamori must have passed round the office has vanished (well, from the main episode itself, that is - an extra on the DVD, the “Continuous Polygon Theatre”, has a polygonal Silvia fighting her 2D and uber-realistic counterparts for Toma’s love…). Instead, we have a rather serious mecha show with a few moments of levity and a little touch of Kawamori’s environmentalism in the re-imagined Apollo.

Quite what most people will make of the Aquarion OVA I’m not sure. The tone of the show is very much more serious now, but the characters are still recognisably the same; in fact, you’d probably be pretty lost without having seen the original series, as characters like Rena or Fudou Gen will be completely lost on the Aquarion virgin. That said, it feels more like Aquarion “done right”, as it were; all the things that were annoying or overdone about the original series (Silvia’s overbearing onii-chan complex, Apollo’s entire personality) have been reworked here to make more dramatic sense, and the one plotline I never really understood at all (the thing with the red feather in Silvia’s bracelet) is re-explored here to what looks to be an interesting effect in the second OVA (the awesome trailer for which is on the end of the episode).

Most interestingly, the removal of Sirius and promotion of Reika to leading character gives the show much more dramatic depth. The revised backstory with Scorpius’ temptation by the Angels clears up exactly what happened to Apollonius all those years ago, something which was never made totally clear in the original series (he just kinda… died after he had his wing ripped off and turned into a crystal, which didn’t make a huge amount of sense), and I’ll be very curious to see how the relationship between our three leads turns out. The ambiguity as to who is actually who is also intriguing - Reika’s past visions make it seem as though she may actually be Celiane’s reincarnation, which would be an interesting path to take, although I think it may be a red herring given how explicit the trailer for Wings of Glory seems to make it…).

Suffice to say, the music (which is mostly reused aside from the ED mentioned above) is excellent, and the animation is generally pretty decent; the CG is absolutely fantastic and there’s a corker of a mecha battle at the end of the episode, but aside from one excellent fight sequence the 2D is mostly serviceable with a few sequences reused from the TV series.

Having watched the OVA through a second time I’m more clear cut on my feelings about the Aquarino OVA. It is quite different from the TV show - the characters are rethought, and the tone very different. However, although I can’t say that I absolutely love it, it took me a while to warm up to the TV series, and I did enjoy this OVA for being a much more competent show than its TV incarnation, despite not being as much… well, fun. Much of Aquarion’s popularity comes from it being perceived as something of a piss-take or a satire on mecha shows (a view I don’t really subscribe to - it was stupid and bizarre, but mostly indulged in its cheesy cliches rather than really commenting on them) and Wings of Betrayal really isn’t that kind of thing, but I think it’s probably actually a better show than the original Aquarion - it’s just really rather different, is all.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Aquarion. 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.