undam
creator Yoshiyuki Tomino once famously bragged that his
Brain
Powered series was inspired by
Neon
Genesis Evangelion, but would be better. From
the opening moments of this series, the Evangelion influence is
clear; just like Evangelion, the story starts off rushed, muddled,
and difficult to follow.
Many subsequent episodes (and no little amount of shouted exposition
between characters) eventually clears up some of the confusion and makes
some facts clear. World society is in disarray following the discovery of
what appears to be a giant organic spaceship under the ocean. A group of
fascinated, opportunistic scientists have boarded the ship to study it,
forming a society of people called Reclaimers, who are dedicated to bringing
the ship, dubbed Orphan, to the surface. Unfortunately, research has
proved that if Orphan is restored, it will surface, draw all the
life energy out of everything else on the planet and then take off in
search of a new galaxy. The Reclaimers are, for various misanthropic or
scientific reasons of their own, thrilled with this prospect. The rest of
humanity is significantly less pleased.
Meanwhile, the seismic turbulence that revealed the Orphan is
also exposing strange, luminescent disks called "Plates" which, under
certain unpredictable circumstances, undergo "revival" and generate
organic, symbiotic mecha called Anti-bodies. A similarly unknown set of
circumstances dictates whether a given Anti-body will be a Grand Cher,
devoted to defending and restoring Orphan, or a Brain Powered,
devoted to fighting alongside humanity against the Reclaimers.
As the
series begins, young orphan Hime Utsumiya witnesses a revival and bonds
with the resultant Brain Powered. Two Reclaimers, having failed to claim
her mecha's Plate before its revival, stand by in surprise, having
apparently not known that Brain Powereds could merge with humans just like
Grand Chers. One of the Reclaimers, 16-year-old Yuu Isami, is the estranged
son of the married scientists who are leading the Orphan research;
the event causes him to rethink his life, and he soon defects and joins
Hime aboard the Novis Noah, a cutting-edge U.N. ship that serves as
a Brain Powered staging ground and research center. Against a backdrop of
intermittent mecha battles and sudden revelations about the alien
technology all around him, Yuu struggles to be accepted and to come to
terms with his betrayal of his family and their betrayal of him and the
human race.
Familiar terrain, unfamiliar flaws
Brain Powered has a lot more in common with Evangelion
than the opening confusion; many of the characters will seem familiar to
Evangelion fans, as will the entire idea of mysterious,
semi-autonomous alien mecha that psychologically bond with their operators,
who use them as fighting tools without understanding their motives or
capabilities. In particular, Yuu's antagonistic relationship with his icy
mother and his bespectacled, pointy-bearded scientist father, who
ruthlessly use him as a test pilot and the subject of painful, traumatic,
alien-mecha-related experiments, is all cribbed directly from
Evangelion--and that's only the beginning of the series'
similarities.
Brain Powered does find its own footing in its many explorations
of broken families, which leads to an intriguing and sensitive exploration
of the nature and necessity of "family" itself. Yuu is a microcosm of
familial dysfunction unto himself, with his overzealous scientist parents,
his murderous, fanatical sister, and the benevolent grandmother, who raised
him and still tries to support him, but whom he can't forgive for not
producing a better mother for him. But Yuu's hardly alone; virtually
everyone in this series has deep-seated problems with their relatives. From
wavering Reclaimer pilot Kanan, traumatized by her father's prenatal
rejection, to the Brain Powereds, Orphan's estranged "children,"
most of the characters are trying to overcome their pasts and find their
own sense of self-worth. Hime, with a flock of energetic siblings and
lonely alien mecha looking to her for guidance, is the series' closest
thing to a contented mother or daughter.
Visually, Brain Powered is on the low end of the scale even for
TV animation; humans and mecha alike are simple and iconic, and both
movement and color are average at best. The series compensates for its
visual deficiencies with a breathtaking score by
Cowboy
Bebop
composer Yoko Kanno, who
makes heavy use of sweet solo voices and subtle choral work in background
music that doesn't always fit the action, but which begs to be heard on its
own.
Brain Powered has its definite strengths and weaknesses, but its
main problem is that these same strengths and weaknesses are already
familiar from a more original, more powerful series. Brain Powered
does beat out Evangelion in some regards--it's less inclined to
repetitive monster-of-the-week action, for one thing--but it's still the
younger sibling in the big anime family, and it's got a little too much to
live up to.
