Sky Girls (Series)

It’s over four years now since I watched the Sky Girls OVA and giggled at the stupidity of it. I eagerly started to watch the series when it begun, but for a variety of reasons, including hard drive failure, backing up the files to some obscure corner of an external hard drive to wait for the last DVD specials, conviction there would be a second series and, of course, plain laziness, I only just watched the final bits and pieces this morning.

The full series of Sky Girls is more of the same. The three moé stock lolis from the OVA are given a much larger platform for their struggle against the mechanical menaces the WORMs, not to mention love interests who mostly look like their fathers and some adorable angst designed to evoke the desire to give a big hug. There are also two new Sky Girls for the show, both expanding the ethnic base: first, the blond-haired, Teutonic Elise, who looks even less likely to be in her middle teens than the other characters and makes the show yet more obviously derivative of Evangelion by acting bratty and conceited in a way that is very reminiscent of Asuka. Then there is the enigmatic Indian girl Aisha, who like many token characters with bindis, has mysterious mental powers.

Predictably, there isn’t much story to spin out into 26 episodes, so the pacing is woefully slow – and yet the ending is still rushed and the heavy-hitting emotional climax at the end of it all basically gets completely ignored after the event. The Worms are never interesting and the love interests are kept cutesy by means of much blushing, stuttering and awkwardness, and while that’s pretty adorable, it never actually leads anywhere, so the show ends up with no momentum at all, instead relying on a series of rather contrived mental issues.

But obviously, nobody should be surprised that Sky Girls is shallow. This is the show that features scantily-clad teenagers who look about 11 held in big flying machines that contort their bodies in all sorts of demeaning ways. This is not meant to be cerebral, or heavy, or emotional. It’s supposed to be moé moé. And with its incredibly cute art, it is undeniably that. Every face pulled by Otoha or Elise or Karen or indeed any of the girls is a poem on what is adorable and innocent and pure in anime. It’s cute children doing their best, and that is always going to be heart-warming. Even when you pretend they’re 16 and put them in skin-tight clothing.

I’ve mentioned the last gasps of the moé trend a few times now, how there seems to have been a backlash after the likes of Lucky Star took everything too far, and how fashions are now turning away from cutesy and more towards zany or violent to a degree that seems like a fetish. I can’t say I want to hold up Sky Girls as an example of how good things used to be, as it is undeniably brainless, objectifying, rather paedophilic trash, but at the same time if I had to watch it or more Panty and Stocking, I’d definitely have more fun with Sky Girls.

Well, there’s still Strike Witches for more of the same. But I have to say, I’m yearning for another Monster or Ergo Proxy. Maybe I should get back to watching Dennou Coil instead of just cycling through the big shounen shows…