The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms

Kitakagami City is a pretty normal town, except that some people have gotten their hands on Mecha-Ude, which is a powerful, sentient mechanical being attached to the limbs of their hosts. When middle school kid Hikaru accidentally activates Alma, a mysterious Mecha-Ude with no memory of his past, he forms an unlikely connection with the talking arm. But where did Alma come from? And why are shadowy secret organizations and corporate assassins with deadly Mecha-Ude of their own suddenly chasing Hikaru down, hell-bent on stealing Alma? Hikaru and Alma must learn to work together to uncover the truth behind Alma's identity and prevent him from ending up in the wrong hands (or on the wrong arm)!

Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms is based on an original story by Okamoto. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

This middle-grade action series is a little bit Kill la Kill, a little bit Pokémon. Mecha-Ude. The series comes from director Okamoto and the small indie studio TriF. You can read more details here, but the short version is that Mecha-Ude was made possible by crowdfunding. The studio behind it began in 2012 as a student and young creator group that evolved into a freelance team. Their background is primarily in music videos and commercials. Mecha-Ude very much looks like indie animated music videos I've seen on YouTube. Some of this comes down to the very clean, minimal line work, and the rest might be due to fewer in-between frames than I'm used to seeing in a finished anime project.

The result is the big action sequences aren't as fluid as they could be. We see tough-girl Aki pull off a series of stunts early in the episode but each impact doesn't quite seem to connect to the next. While the animation doesn't seem quite there, Mecha-Ude makes up for it with excellent character face-game. Hikaru and Alma's interactions are a highlight, with the former running through derision, disbelief, and embarrassment in increasingly comical ways. The simple yet distinctive character designs bolster this. The villains look like they'd slot right into an evil corpo running amok in a Pokémon game, with bold, neon-colored hair and random tech enhancements.

At its core, Mecha-Ude is aiming for a fun, afterschool entertainment slot, and it mostly delivers so long as its audience demo can overlook some of its technical shortcomings.

I could be cynical about Mecha-Ude. Other than the specificity of the aliens being mechanical arms, it's largely cobbled together out of things we've seen before. There's the reluctant male hero who struggles to do the right thing when he stumbles his way into a large-scale conflict that few people know about. There's the evil mega-corporation that runs the whole city, really capturing the feeling of what it's like to live in Seattle under Amazon's regime. There's the secret war involving aliens. There's the cool, stoic female mentor with a pleated miniskirt and thigh-high socks showing just a sliver of flesh -- just enough for her thigh tattoo to be visible. The action style is reminiscent of Studio Trigger, particularly Hiroyuki Imaishi's work; the musical score even has extremely recognizable contributions by Hiroyuki Sawano.

I could be cynical, but I'm choosing not to be. Even before I knew about the production history, it had a scrappy indie vibe that I found intensely entertaining. The animation is mostly pretty limited, putting a lot of its energy toward big fight scenes, but even in the dialogue scenes, the characters are posed and framed in interesting ways, even if they're not moving much. It made me think of the short anime created by the girls of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, which is comparable in spirit if not story and setting. It had the creative energy of a passion project by a small group of people who had to figure out where to compromise and what to prioritize.

And lo and behold, I found out after the fact that Mecha-Ude got its start as a crowdfunded pilot created and directed by one animator, Sae Okamoto, at a tiny studio with barely any credits to their name. As a critic, I try to keep to the text itself without taking a work's origins too much into account, but Mecha-Ude's origins shine through strongly enough that it was an essential part of its charm. Add in Tomokazu Sugita's stand-out performance in imbuing a robotic arm with emotion, and you have a show that rates highly for entertainment value, even if its originality score is low.