yame, Renge and Sumire live a fairly normal life, for Japanese teenagers in the 1970s. They attend traditional town festivals, squabble with their dippy brother and their overbearing, square father, and tease their much younger sister, Satsuki. At least, until three men in dark suits appear at the annual cherry blossom viewing picnic and grab Ayame, spiriting her away on a motorboat. She's quickly rescued by a mysterious, heavily accented young man in a red duster—but the family's crises have only begun.
Soon, the three teenagers are leaving home to live with their aunt and uncle in order to escape their father's overreaction to the situation. While working on the family tour boat, the three girls witness the arrival of a humongous spaceship, which drops out of a rippling hole in the sky and ejects a giant robot. The robot promptly begins smashing things. Meanwhile, Ayame falls out of the boat and is again rescued by the young man in the duster, who drags her toward a building dangerously near the robot, and throws her into a dark space.
The next thing Ayame knows, she's in the cockpit of another giant robot, which is fending off the alien vandal. After dealing with the situation, she returns home, where the arrival of "her" robot's handlers leads to the exposure of many critical family secrets. The girls' true parentage the nature and origin of Ayame's giant robot and the reason she can pilot it are all revealed. In spite of the family tensions, and Ayame's efforts to keep her sisters out of trouble, Renge and Sumire soon have their own giant robots, which can merge with Ayame's to form the Z-Mind, a big, clunky-looking but ultimately powerful weapon. But by the time the older girls have come to terms with each other, little
Satsuki has also found out about the secret of their shared true parentage, and has run away in tears. Unfortunately, she's also blundered right into the dripping gray hands of the creepy alien invaders who are still sending giant robots to pummel Earth.
Big broad robots, big broad parody
If not for the genuinely spooky baby-faced aliens, the heavy emphasis on home life and family relationships and the telltale computer animation, Z-Mind could pass for an anime series from 1980. The old-school design is stiff and unattractive, the characters are shrill and simple-minded and the Z-Mind itself looks like something out of Jim Terry's Force Five cartoons. Its three component robots are painted in bright, primary colors and look a lot like generic Transformer knockoffs. The oft-repeated "Z-Formation" sequence, where the three robots transform and merge, evokes Voltron, except that it seems to go on 10 times too long. But the retro designs and obvious visual references are clearly deliberate, part of the show's self-conscious, self-referential humor.
Z-Mind creator Hajime Yatate is a ubiquitous force behind the scenes at Bandai—he also created The Big O, another recent retro-themed anime, and he's produced original stories for series ranging from the iconic Gundam Wing to the outlandish Outlaw Star. Z-Mind is a middle-of-the-road series with a variety of influences, balanced somewhere amid all of Yatate's other work. It's not as involved or angsty as Gundam Wing, and it's not as hip or tongue-in-cheek as The Big O, but it seems to be trying to be both, with its emotional confrontations and goofy sense of humor.
That humor is Z-Mind's saving grace, as it's about all that stands between the series and '80s-era obsolescence. Ayame and her sisters (who think everything's either "groovy" or "far out") give their mecha silly names like "Mind Battler," and yell things like "Z-Tomahawk!" when activating their weapons, much to their stuffy commander's chagrin. They even discuss what they'd do if they were anime
heroines. Like Ayame's strong, silent rescuer, a romance-novel fantasy come true, the girls are clear parodies.
They're also not quite enough to carry the series as anything else but a comedic satire. While some of the subplots, particularly the ones involving the young Satsuki, are touching and believable, the story is mostly simplistic and somewhat overdone. Fans of Tranzor Z and Force Five will have fun with this production, which mixes nostalgia, wackiness and mecha combat. But they shouldn't expect anything groundbreaking—Z-Mind has its ambitions planted firmly in the past.
Z-Mind was a six-episode OVA series, which is included in its entirety on this single DVD. While the series does reach a conclusion, it's a somewhat unsatisfying one, with a number of unanswered questions, and a post-credit sequence that all but screams "sequel." Still, it's a far more satisfying ending than that of other short, spoofy series like Teramonya Voyagers and Voogie's Angel.
— Tasha
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