Cinnamon Ass

OP - Fly High (surface) - I have mixed feelings about this opening. On the one hand, I like the song (upbeat blokey Jpop, basically), and the visuals interest me greatly (armoured people fighting with swords + cool planes + mysterious glowing/drowning people = WOO!), but the OP just seems badly storyboarded and directed, with a 10 second still shot of Agate at one point being just one example. There’s also a bunch of shots from the first episode - NEVER good.

ED - Kimi to iu nano Hikari (Cluster’S, AKA the main seiyuu) - it’s like Weiss Kreuz all over again! Synthy pop galore and the usual sorts of ED images - driving, still shots, that kind of thing.

In a world modelled after early 1920’s Europe, a gang of armoured teenage boys execute a raid on an army outpost, stealing a couple of planes. One of the armoured boys, Chrome, is ordered by his brother Calce to keep out the way as he flies off.

Meanwhile, on the signing of a treaty acknowledging the occupation of the Rubels dukedom by the military of the LeGrante commonwealth, some creepy old dudes shut down their artificial human creation facilities as they will no longer need man-made warriors to fight. They warble about it trespassing on God’s territory and so forth, but you SO know someone’s going to bust out of there or all the main cast will be clones or something…

A train! Here, we’re introduced to our two lead characters - the country bumpkin Agate, who sleeps rough and sneaks around the train to try and get food, and the cultured nobleman Beryl Jasper, constrained by the expectations of those that surround him. Both are heading to be students of Cluster E.A., a highly prestigious boarding school. When the train gets stopped by the military due to the ongoing chase of Calce, Agate leaps into action when he listens in on the military radio, climbing into his plane thing (do they have names?) and summoning a wind from nowhere to fly to the rescue.

Calce is badly wounded as they fly into the harbour of a nearby town, and Agate’s attempts to get the military to stop firing on them end in near disaster as both their planes are almost shot to pieces - however, in classic let-my-power awaken style, everything goes yellow and he deflects all the shots from the surrounding planes and battleships, allowing them to fly through safely. Until a passing helicopter downs Calce, that is, sending him plunging into the ocean where Agate follows to rescue him. As he drags him out of the sea, Beryl gets in a fight with the drunken soldiers occupying the bar of the hotel in which he’s staying, and Ludwig (head creepy dude) is informed of Calce’s downing, burbling about how “Only Calce knows” something. Spooky!

Cluster Edge has turned out to be nothing like I expected, to be honest. It’s not a bad thing as such, but I was really expecting it to be My-OuJI, and it’s far, far sillier than that really. While the plot has the potential to be interesting and the animation is pretty decent, the atmosphere of the show is utterly bizarre. Despite the shiny digital animation, the whole thing feels like a throwback to the days of Rose of Versailles, with its overuse of cheesy string music and overblown “fanservice” shots (Agate and Beryl’s first meeting on the train is accompanied by twirls, a slow-mo shot and Agate’s declaration that “he’s made a friend!). It’s plain weird, to be honest, and I’m going to have to get past it to properly enjoy the show - I think Cluster Edge has the potential to be quite good fun, but I need to get more of a handle on where it’s going.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Cluster Edge. 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.