Cinnamon Ass

OP - Sajou no Yume (Yuuko Sasaki) - pleasant, although slightly bland song, and a pleasant, although slightly bland, opening animation; it’s been a long time since I’ve last heard Yuuko Sasaki do an OP (Pure Snow from Himiko Den was the last one, I think!). Desert-tastic!

ED - ING (Chou Ikou Shounen) - generic rock and panning over drawings; after Zegapain earlier today it’s a bit disappointing, really.

Long ago there was A War that turned the world to sand; Honoka lives in this world as a sword-wielding mercenary, aided by the AI tank pilot Boggy and her mechanic Joey, who hunts beasts in the desert for a living; after killing hordes of spiders, she heads out again that evening to monitor the desert when she comes upon a mysteriously oblivious bishounen, Iks, standing amidst some glowing sand fireflies (the same ones Honoka herself observes at the start of the episode); she saves him from some more evil giant arachnids and discovers that he seems to have magical healing powers (i.e. he makes her headache go away). The friendly narrator tells us that this is an important meeting, too, in case we hadn’t got it!

Oh, and there are some weird three-eyed people holding council (and Honoka is obviously secretly one of them, as the series oh-so-subtly hints) over the monitoring of some bizarre meteor impacts on the planet to do with The Third (who is presumably Iks?); there is a Stoic Female Scientist overseeing this project, but she doesn’t seem to rank very high on the Cher Degre scale of Stoic Female Scientists so I don’t know if I’ll like her much as a character.

This show really reminds me of something else, and I’m not sure what it is; the animation reminds me a lot of Fafner (it’s got the same CG style, although I’d say the overall character animation in this episode is superior to most of Fafner), as do the silly little pretentious monologues (nothing seems to come close to “an umbrella of smiles”, but there’s a few too many wistful asides from Honoka and the narrator amuses me with his sing-song warm-and-loving-father-figure voice) but the atmosphere… I can’t quite place it. It’s like Trigun without the madness, maybe? I’m really not sure what it is.

Anyway, The Third looks like a promising little show. I can’t say it’s outright wowed me from the get-go; the show seems pretty much like a generic anime fantasy story, really, albeit hopefully one with pretty good production values and no annoying characters! Honoka seems like a decent enough heroine, even with her occasional SD faces, and I like the supporting cast quite a bit; it remains to be seen whether Iks’ pleasant dimness annoys me in the long term, and I hope we don’t spend too long on random mercenary missions (and also that Iks proves useful other than a MacGuffin for the Bad Guys to be chasing after).

Oh, and as usual, music comment: surprisingly good! It’s by Megumi Ohashi, who hasn’t done a lot of anime stuff before as far as I can tell aside from some Transformers stuff; nice orchestral stuff, it makes the silly monologues more bearable!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under The Third. 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.