Jyu-Ou-Sei got attention for a lot of the wrong reasons. For being forced to be only 11 episodes thanks to Honey and Clover II being higher-priority. For having a famous voice-actor in the lead role for the second arc (he did a good job, especially opposite the guy who plays Zoro in One Piece). For having a very quirky OP that a lot of people detested (I really liked it; I like eccentric things – though I don’t know why the singer pronounces his words like an okama). For being a shounen-themed show that was written for a shoujo audience. But I, as always, took it on face value, as a story. And in that vein…it was frustratingly mediocre.
I like Bones. I like them a lot. Fullmetal Alchemist, Wolf’s Rain, Scrapped Princess, Eureka Seven – they’ve done some truly top-tier anime. Even Ouran I enjoyed quite a bit. But this was certainly not one of their finest moments. Some of the animation was very nice, but most of it was functional, awkward, and in the last episodes Thor’s movements looked bizarre, like a bad thesp severely overacting. Plus I never grew to like the way the noses had been drawn. That style works in black-and-white manga, but not in coloured animation.
And the trouble is that the story is really sub-par. The premise – twins are abandoned on a hostile planet, one is killed but the other survives to adapt to life in the tribal, vicious society – is unimaginative but workable. The young boy’s struggle to survive is fairly interesting, but the later episodes, where a series of insipid, far-fetched and clichéd twists are revealed, people start getting killed off for no reason but for a slightly poignant moment (or for a neater resolution) and you find out that either the rest of the series contained no real danger at all or the conclusions that the string-pullers came to are really based on hugely unscientific trust on one improbable outcome - they really feel messy, uninspired and thoroughly, thoroughly lame. No points for the ending, either.
And why is it that younger teenaged boys presented as sex symbols for teenaged girls in anime are so often dressed in bizarre cycling shorts and flimsy vests? Here, in Gundam Wing…it’s a really odd look!
(originally written 17.9.06)
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