I thought I’d read the original manga before progressing past the first three or four episodes of this anime, after hearing the director disliked the source and because of my admiration for Narutaru, the mangaka’s previous work - but in the end, it was the first anime in a long while that has left me craving more and more, so I happily consumed it all.
Apart from the character designs, quite a lot is familiar from Narutaru – the serious presentation of the extreme hardships teenagers can experience, and the near-fetishising of their suffering and burgeoning sexuality; the cute and bizarre mascot-like characters that you soon start to think of as sinister, and the affection for aircraft and weaponry. But the premise is much more direct and simple. It’s one of those anime concepts that makes you roll your eyes until it’s developed in full, and realise that it can really be taken seriously.
Fifteen children start to play what they believe is a video game, controlling a giant robot to fight off enemies. But of course, it turns out to be more than that, and they soon realise that those who play are ending up dead.
If it seems like a brainless concept in the beginning, and the kids seem to be drawn straight from stock, you soon realise that there’s a lot more going on under the surface, and remember that really, the things these children are feeling can’t be so much different from what goes through young soldiers’ minds when they are going to fight in a war. The situation is grossly exaggerated, but as a medium for provoking thought about mortality, battle and self-sacrifice, it works extremely well. Like Mai-HiME, which ended up in similar territory towards the end, sometimes it makes you uncomfortable watching it, with the inevitability of the characters’ suffering, especially when you start getting attached to them, and there’s no cheesy Sunrise magical resurrection ending to fall back on here. It’s blunt, abrupt and macabre, but also absolutely fascinating.
It’s not an anime to show to newcomers. It works by taking anime fans’ expectations and subverting them. Giant robots are fighting with advanced technology, but they’re also prisons and execution chambers. There are funny cute things, but they’re just avatars for twisted minds. Kids come to heroic decisions, but it doesn’t change their fates or make them anything more or less than the cowards.
A startling and grim anime, and certainly one I’ll be eager to watch again one day. Great theme song, too.
(originally written 23/1/08)
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