Cinnamon Ass

OP - Kimi e Mukau Hikari (Akino Arai) - the song is absolutely beautiful, my favourite of the OPs/EDs so far this season; I’m not sure whether we actually have an OP yet, though, as it plays as the ED this week and the animation sort of alternates between CG-assisted beauty and static pans. We’ll see.

The moon. The Zegapain robot is being horribly beaten by enemies and all hope seems lost; Kyou, the main male pilot, bids his partner goodbye as he jettisons her from the robot before activating the self-destruct mechanism. I hope this is a mysterious past-life flashback rather than a flash-forward to the end of the series, because I HATE those.

Present day Maihama South High School. Kyou Sogoru, currently living alone, is a first year and a keen swimmer, forced by his friend Ryouko Kaminagi into doing a student film; however, he’s unwilling to sacrifice his first kiss so easily to his co-star, and his attention gets distracted by a mysterious girl on the diving board of the pool whom he presumes is part of the school’s swimming club. He goes to introduce himself, but the mysterious girl speaks without making a sound before diving in; it appears as if she was never there at all, much to the amusement of the rest of Kyou’s class and his friends. She’s even disappeared from the tape that Ryouko filmed of her; clearly something is amiss.

That night, it chucks it down with rain; members of the school committee remark portentously on the fact. This is my kind of cheesy mecha show! Anyway, while Kyou and Ryouko have a friendly conversation about his dedication to swimming and the usual, he suddenly realises what the mysterious girl was saying - “Save this world”. Dum dum DUH! So of course his apartment starts glowing green and she materialises in the middle of it, along with a weird symbol on Kyou’s head; they teleport off to the swimming pool, and Mysterious Girl (she gets a name in a minute) tells Kyou it’s time to play “the game” before they plunge into the pool.

A few pretty Sunrise-animated swirly lights later, and we’re in a ravaged city with Kyou and the Mysterious Girl, whose real name is Shizuno Misaki, co-piloting a mecha called Zegapain Altair, unsurprisingly. They pick off their enemies with ease, and then help defend a Zegatank (hee!) before they all dematerialise (I have no real idea why they were fighting anything I’m afraid, sorry). Kyou and Shizuno end up back in the pool and she tells him “welcome back” before moving in for a kiss.

I had totally written off Zegapain based on its trailer; the CG was absolutely abysmal, and nothing looked particularly interesting about the show. While the story itself is obviously not very original or anything, I’ve done a bit of an about-face on the CG front - it actually works really, really well in the show, and is perhaps some of the better CG I’ve seen in anime.

No, seriously! It looks so much better in the episode than it did in that trailer. The whole show looks great, in fact; it may be a merchandise-tastic show, but it’s obviously given Sunrise enough money to do their usual sterling job with the animation. Nothing else is especially remarkable for this type of show; teenaged kids with special powers piloting mecha to save the world are nothing new, after all, but for some reason I actually like the three central characters (Kyou, Ryouko and Shizuno) as they’re portrayed relatively normally (even if Kyou is the typical hot-head).

It also helps that the OP song is so brilliant. Akino Arai love~

So yeah, I’ll definitely be tuning in to Zegapain next week. It’s hardly high art, but it could be a half-decent primetime mecha show, and that’ll be enough for me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Zegapain. 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.