great deal happens in the brief space between Power Dolls' opening and closing credits. A beautiful Navy officer named Yao saves some children behind enemy lines in the middle of an inter-planetary war. Her Marine partner, Sergeant Fan, rains insults on her head, emphasizing that tender-heartedness mustn't override military protocol. Both young women head into battle to take out a critical dam that's supplying power to the enemy, and Yao learns a lesson about putting her personal feelings aside, while Fan finds out that emotions are occasionally more important than rules.
This brief summary makes Dolls sound a lot more linear than it is. Its disjointed style doesn't present much information, but nonetheless includes a great deal of exposition -- including a commander reading Yao's and Fan's military dossiers out loud to herself, reciting their principal character traits and motivations for the viewer's benefit.
What's missing is an explanation of what the war's about, who's fighting it and why. The Power Dolls are all beautiful young women (in skintight, short-legged uniforms) capable of handling Power Loaders, evidently some sort of military hardware. They're apparently colonists living on Omni, a planet rebelling against Terra's "oppressive immigration policies." (Not letting people in? Not letting them out? Forcing them to come to Omni against their will?) Whatever the war's about, though, it features a great deal of tearing about in big robot suits and military transport vehicles, blowing things up -- particularly this dam, which Yao's father worked on before falling from it to his death. (Or possibly being thrown from it -- it's impossible to tell during the two-second flashback, and the topic is never addressed again.)
Did we miss something?
Power Dolls is apparently around for one reason -- battle sequences. To its credit, it does them clearly and energetically, with a lot of action packed into a very short space. The animation is vibrant and complex, though not unusually so. Unfortunately, that's about all this video has to offer.
Between fights, the characters seem to act entirely at random, regardless of plot or character consistency. Yao doesn't want to blow up her father's dam, and doesn't want to destroy the houses of the villagers below -- but she participates in the attack without second comments or second thoughts. Fan sneers repeatedly at weakness and exalts the importance of military protocol, but promptly turns around and breaks the rules to help Yao, with no apparent thought on the matter. Their commander goes out of her way to force Yao into the dam mission to make her face the need for practicality in wartime, and then acts less practical than any of them. This isn't character development, it's simple contradiction.
And with so much missing -- any details about the war, about Yao's father, about the children she rescues, about all the other apparently irrelevant details thrown in and left to wither unnoticed -- it's incomprehensible that the writers saw fit to repeat certain obvious bits of information over and over, such as the fact that Yao likes rules. One confrontation between Yao and Fan is even repeated in a series of visual and audio flashbacks only seconds after it takes place. Is there an editing problem here, a translation problem, or just a production team who've seen so many Schwarzenegger films that they think explosions can replace the need for a coherent plot?
