t's actually possible to learn more about Blue Submarine's plot
and background story from the back of the video box than from this opening
episode, but adding both sources together suggests a few things: Earth's
oceans have risen. Its cities have flooded. Something named "Zorndyke"
wants to kill everyone. The crew of a submarine named Blue Six is prepared to stop him.
Beyond that, the first installment of Submarine is somewhere
between a truncated, mismatched-buddy cop movie and an episode of
Reboot. As the series begins, a self-righteous, fanatically
idealistic Blue Six pilot named Mayumi Kino is dispatched to a
flooded city
to request the aid of an embittered ex-submariner named Tetsu Hayami. Kino
presents her request in melodramatic fashion--drop everything and join
up, we're going to save the world--and Hayami sneers at her. A
self-professed "hyena of the sea," he makes his living by salvaging
valuables from the sunken cities, and his contempt for himself, his
customers, the old world, and any hope for a future world is obvious. Kino leaves in a huff, but they soon meet again when
Zorndyke's minions attack and Hayami saves her life.
The two pilots are wildly incompatible and guaranteed to dislike each
other, so naturally within minutes they become battle
partners, piloting
an underwater ship against Zorndyke's eerily organic-looking mecha
monsters. They destroy one and check the wreckage, discovering a gasping,
red-eyed, striped-skinned humanoid that nearly chokes to death on air
before Hayami can release it into the water. Kino is furious when it
escapes. "It is the enemy!" she protests. "One of Zorndyke's creations!" But Hayami shrugs her off. Clearly these two are bound for a lot more
fun together.
After that, there's a pitched underwater battle between Blue Six and a
flexible, whale-like enemy ship, mostly involving a lot of
explosions and a
lot of bubbles. Blue Six wins, naturally, but Zorndyke's creatures just
seem amused. "It's begun," Kino says ominously, and when Hayami pressures
her, she adds, "It's what they want. To kill every last one of us."
... but nice and shiny
It's hard to say much about a story sampling this brief. Watching it is
like sitting through one of MTV's early Aeon Flux shorts--there's
no beginning, no end, no continuity, and no sense of motive or intent. But hey, the animation sure is cool. In
fact, most of Blue Submarine is computer-generated; the visuals,
while disturbingly glossy and weightless in CGI fashion, move
fluidly and are impressively detailed and textured. The computer animation
lends itself well to sharp angle changes, breathless zooms and
awe-inspiring multiplanar depth shots, although it also makes many
sequences look like military simulations. The traditionally animated
characters, by comparison, seem simplistic but more solid than their
surroundings. It's a bit like watching traditional anime mapped over a
particularly glossy video game.
The audio track is similarly flat and reminiscent of a game--particularly the repetitive, cheerful, plasticine theme that underscores
the battle sequences. It rapidly becomes tiresome when it isn't just
forgettable. A scene where Hayami toys with the volume of his stereo while
discussing his future stands out, however, as an unusually disturbing and
creative use of sound both as metaphor and as a tool to unsettle viewers.
The dubbed voices are at least good enough not to be a distraction.
Blue Submarine contains a lot of intriguing little teases
seemingly designed to provoke interest in the rest of the story: the
strange creature Hayami rescues, which "speaks" to him in a
raucous squawk,
Kino and her captain's deliberately opaque prophecies of changes to come,
the brief glimpses into an underwater world of Zorndykian monstrosities
capering in a scene out of Dante's Inferno. But there's barely
enough here, all told, even to whet the appetite. At this point, the only certainty is that the rest of the series will be shiny,
sleek and full of eye candy.
For all the apparent video-game referents, this is actually based on a
comic book by Satoru Ozawa.
-- Tasha
he Jovian invasion begins in the year 2195, when a giant,
flower-shaped artifact appears from somewhere beyond Jupiter and heads toward
Earth. Once it reaches Mars, the artifact opens up to release a vast fleet of alien
spaceships whose advanced shields and weapons easily shrug off the United
Earth Forces. Earth's fleets are destroyed, and the colonies on
Mars and the moon fall almost immediately. Then the Jovians turn their
attention to Earth, which seems to have no military spacecraft capable of
putting up a serious fight.
What Earth does have is an enterprising arms manufacturing concern, Nergal
Heavy Industries, which has its own agenda for the war, its own high-tech
ship, and its own crew assembled from a variety of unlikely but willing
sources. ("I've chosen the very best! Of course, a few of them have some
slight personality disorders..." bubbles a Nergal accountant as he rounds
up a decorative executive secretary, an anime voice actress, and a sullen
child genius for the bridge crew.) The civilian ship, the Nadesico, does
impressively well on its first sortie, and the UEF immediately attempts to
commandeer it. Suddenly the Nadesico is facing a potential two-front war.
Meanwhile, the ship's gushy, inexperienced young captain, Yurika, is
distracted by the sudden arrival of a childhood friend from Mars.
Akito has the hand emblem that marks a nanotech-enabled pilot, but he
insists he's just a cook. He was on Mars when the Jovians attacked, but
doesn't remember how he got back to Earth. He has panic attacks whenever
the Jovians get too near, but he somehow always seems to end up in a mecha
suit, acting as a decoy while the Nadesico saves the day. And he's
suspicious and angry at Yurika because he thinks her family may have had
something to do with the murder of his parents. Or at least that's what
seems to be going on. It's hard to tell, what with all the shrieking and
flailing about.
Evangelion on fast-forward
Despite the relatively serious plotline, Martian Successor
Nadesico is a shrill, frenetically paced parody with little coherence
from moment to moment. Akito communicates mostly in howls, and Yurika gleefully ignores everything he says as he attempts fruitlessly to get past her bouncy, blithe exterior. The plot moves at
blink-and-you-miss-it speed, and much of the story can be picked up only
from inference and guesswork. (For instance, does Nergal Heavy Industries have to fall back
on inexperienced, inappropriate crew members because all the good fighters
are already in the military? Or does the accountant think they'll be
cheaper than skilled labor? Or does Nergal's military advisor
think there's
some reason to believe a blithering idiot will make a great
captain? Or did
the film's writers just think the idea of a voiceover actress as a starship comm operator was inherently funny?)
There are many genuinely amusing elements scattered throughout
Nadesico, particularly for the otaku who's familiar enough with the
genre to get the in-jokes. Neon Genesis Evangelion fans, for instance,
will notice a lot of familiar plot points and almost-familiar characters,
taken to their most illogical and silly extremes. Anyone who watched old
classics like Tranzor Z will probably appreciate the character of
Jiro Yamada, an anime-addicted pilot who thinks he's starring in his own
mecha series, and who shouts out stylized names for whatever
attack he's using. (He also pushes episodes of his favorite overwrought
action serial at anyone who'll sit still for it.) Even Yurika's bizarre
relationship with her father, a powerful UEF admiral reduced to tears by
her maturing figure ("My little girl is a woman!"), is good for a sardonic smirk.
But the series overall is enough to induce a severe headache.
It's loud,
jarring, disjointed and nearly impenetrable. ADV's dub is particularly
grating; the voices all sound forced and artificial, and the deliberately humorous voices--including one character performed as Bullwinkle,
and another
done with a bad British accent--don't help. At times the characters are
completely incomprehensible; at other times, only the story is
incomprehensible. Probably the best way to appreciate this series is to
move at the same speed it does: try drinking a case of Jolt, eating a box
of Oreos, and then starting the tape.
Note that the 90 minute run time listed on the box is wishful thinking at best. According to my VCR, this tape contained 68 minutes of show, plus 10 minutes of filler and ads.
-- Tasha
t's actually possible to learn more about Blue Submarine's plot
and background story from the back of the video box than from this opening
episode, but adding both sources together suggests a few things: Earth's
oceans have risen. Its cities have flooded. Something named "Zorndyke"
wants to kill everyone. The crew of a submarine named Blue Six is prepared to stop him.
he Jovian invasion begins in the year 2195, when a giant,
flower-shaped artifact appears from somewhere beyond Jupiter and heads toward
Earth. Once it reaches Mars, the artifact opens up to release a vast fleet of alien
spaceships whose advanced shields and weapons easily shrug off the United
Earth Forces. Earth's fleets are destroyed, and the colonies on
Mars and the moon fall almost immediately. Then the Jovians turn their
attention to Earth, which seems to have no military spacecraft capable of
putting up a serious fight.
