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REVIEW: Aquarion DVD

The characters and weak plotting may not be able to carry the series on their own, but the visuals certain can. With this production Satelight has taken the ground-breaking combining-mecha CG work done by Gonzo in 2000's Vandread and, by applying techniques developed during their production of Noein, elevated it to the next level.

Opener “Sousei no Aquarion” by AKINO is a pedestrian anime theme that comes out slightly above average in execution,

I'll just like to point out that Aquarion was the Spring 2005 Satelight title while Noein was the Fall 2005 Satelight title. So Aquarion was developed before Noein, what an incredible year by Satelight.

Also if you ever get the chance to write a review for Macross Frontier I wonder what praise you would give it after what you said about Aquarion. Since Frontier does to Aquarion what Aquarion does to Vandread... I exaggerate (slightly!) but you get the idea. Of course the regular animation is the main improvement from Aquarion to Frontier but the improvement in CGI is still massive.

How can you say that about the best anime opening theme this decade!

Closer “Omni Magni” by Yui Makino, with its music box sound and wind-up effects, offers a very different song which may grow on viewers. Curiously and disappointingly, it is not subtitled in any setting, nor does it use Funimation's normal practice of having the Japanese credits roll when the Japanese dub is on.

the first half of Aquarion struggles partly because it tries to take itself seriously in places where it shouldn't, turning what could have been a quite fun exploitation of classic mecha ridiculousness and cheesiness into a pretentious mess of a series.

I'm very tempted to pick up this title, with the involvement of Shoji Kawamori and Yoko Kanno. I'm not a fan of obnoxiously obvious 3-D CGI in mecha titles, but I'd be willing to handwave it for the sake of those two big talents, at least for a few episodes to see if it engages me.

Some fans have long clamored for just such an approach, so it will be interesting indeed to see if this experiment proves to be the wave of the future or just an aberration.

What's the problem with a mech show trying to be true to its roots, Why it always has to play the "exploitaition" card. The past glory of the genre like Mazinger Z and Getter Robo still bubble on Japanese fans hearts, too bad R1 and some reviewers don't show the respect the genre deserves as this genre was the Anime Gospel in the 70's and 80's for most of the planet.

Vicserr wrote:

What's the problem with a mech show trying to be true to its roots, Why it always has to play the "exploitaition" card. The past glory of the genre like Mazinger Z and Getter Robo still bubble on Japanese fans hearts, too bad R1 and some reviewers don't show the respect the genre deserves as this genre was the Anime Gospel in the 70's and 80's for most of the planet.

You're not only missing the point and engaging in hyperbole (sentai series were every bit as prominent as classic mecha in the '70s) but apparently thinking I'm using "exploitation" here in a purely negative sense, which I'm not.

I am not going to get into a debate here on the merits of "old-school" mecha action. It's (usually) not my cup of tea, but I do acknowledge that it can, if done right, be very entertaining. In this case here, I think (as I more or less state in the review) that the series would have been better if it had stayed truer to its old-school roots, and just played for cheesy goodness, rather than throwing in all this other crap. Mecha series that can successfully be old-school while also having modern storytelling and characterization sensibilities are few and far between, and this isn't one of them. Look at both Gunbuster OVAs if you want examples of successes in that realm, but this series is definitely not on that level - at least so far, anyway.