o the Martian settlers of Zone of the Enders, Earthlings are a bit like gods. Thanks to Earth's proportionately high gravity, Terrans are more muscular than their slim Martian counterparts—and they're well endowed with a ruthless sense of superiority. To a hotheaded young pilot like Radium Lavans, star of the stand-alone original video animation Zone of the Enders: Idolo, his helplessness in the fact of Terran bullying is representative of Mars' own helplessness in the face of Earth's primacy.
But nothing compensates for human weakness like certain forms of technology, as Radium discovers when he becomes a test pilot for a mecha called the "orbital frame." The prototype's advanced technology relies heavily on a newly discovered Martian element, whose near-magical abilities manifest powerfully in Radium's hands. But soon, the mecha—which Radium dubs "Idolo"—refuses to respond to anyone else, and Radium's personality alters quickly and radically. Away from Idolo, he's sad and desperate, and clings to his technician fiancee, Dolores. But in the cockpit, he cackles like a madman and gleefully destroys everything in sight. Idolo's creator, Dr. Rachel Links, demands a stop to the tests, but the Martian military, excited by Radium's successes, refuses. Unfortunately, Earth's own military knows about Idolo, and has designs both on the orbital frame and on Rachel Links herself.
The Zone of the Enders television series continues the story via Rachel's estranged husband, James, and their two adult children, Leon and Noel. Informed that Rachel died in an accident on Mars, James quit his military position on Earth and became a space trucker of sorts, but his children still blame him for driving their mother away. He's trying to reconcile with them as he sets out on a standard transport mission to Earth. But his cargo turns out to be a sentient (if somewhat ditzy) mecha named Dolores, who habitually sings his wife's favorite lullaby and carries a cryptic plea from Rachel. Before long, James and his consternated children are wanted for murder and a variety of other crimes, and are protecting their charge, searching for the possibly-still-living Rachel, and clinging together as a family simply because there's nowhere else to turn.
A novelistic story from a surprising source
The Zone of the Enders OVA and television series are unusual in a number of respects: 1) They're about adults and adult problems, with no precocious child-pilots or teen prodigies in sight—James Links is a battered 49-year-old alcoholic with no remarkable smarts or skills, and his small ambitions (reunite his warring family and clear his name) are refreshingly human. 2) They neither neglect the background elements nor concentrate on them excessively—technology, culture and
interplanetary politics are all established and explored, but are no more a focus than the infrequent mecha fights. 3) They're video-game tie-ins, but they're good anyway.
Rather than emulating other anime series, Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i resembles David Gerrold's Jumping off the Planet trilogy, another story in which a broken family led by an long-absent father fights its way through competing interests to smuggle a much-coveted piece of technology off-planet. There's even an orbital elevator involved. (And a selfish, arrogant, but troubled boy, though insufferable businessman Leon Links is far older than Planet's Charles Dingillian.) The Idolo OVA is just a straightforward background story, grim, sincere and political in the style of the multifaceted Gundam adventures. Dolores, on the other hand, begins in a heavily characterized, decidedly novelistic way, and opens up an immediately compelling conspiracy whose players mostly seem like real people. Radium is a fairly standard flawed anime hero, but James is something special. Beer in one hand, self-help book in the other, he's more of an Everyman than anime usually sees.
There are exceptions to the "real people" rule, of course. The rabid, shrieking official chasing James and his family belongs in a Warner Brothers cartoon alongside Yosemite Sam, and the Terrans who bully Radium are practically apes. The animation also has its inconsistencies, though it's generally proficient in Idolo, and smoothly serviceable in Dolores. (Aside from the disturbing design of the orbital frames, which have bulging, crotch-level, phallic cockpits.) But overall, Zone of the Enders follows Gerrold in channeling a taste of true Heinleinian science-fiction, where politics are crucial, but the ties between people (and machines, and the past and the future) are more
crucial yet.
The vast discrepancy between ADV's dub scripts and sub scripts never fails to baffle me. On both Zone of the Enders DVDs, they have radically different tones and even diverge in story particulars. Sometimes the inconsistencies are weird and minor—like the Dolores dub's frequent references to "orbital flames" instead of "orbital frames"—but sometimes they just have nothing to do with each other at all.
— Tasha
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