Shelf Life

Radio City Rockets

Holy crap, this show is great! I was grossly mislead by Funimation's annoying trailer for this title, and I thought it would be a mediocre comedy at best. Instead, Oh! Edo Rocket is absolutely delightful, and the most thoughtfully written anime series I've seen this year. From the first episode, it was an instant hit with my husband and I (for obvious reasons; you'll recall we got married in zero gravity because we're space enthusiasts). This is a show about raising the human spirit by sending a rocket to the moon, set in Edo-era Tokyo, with two aliens, seven ninjas, and plenty of samurai.

Edo Rocket is different from every other show out there because it's based on a stage play. If all Japanese theater has this depth of character, wow, I need to see more Japanese theater! Instead of populating Edo with anime stock types, Edo Rocket provides a cast with plenty of original characters with complicated back stories and complex motivations.

Granted, the protagonist, Seikichi Tamaya, seems like a Shonen Jump stereotype at first. He wants to be a great fireworks designer, and even has a goofy firework-like hairdo. His life changes when a mysterious girl commissions him to build a firework that will fly her to the moon.

A lot of good television is set in a town or community (from Cheers to The Wire); Edo Rocket examines the Furai row house, where a bunch of supposed “wacky” neighbors live in a warm-hearted working class neighborhood. As the show progresses, we find out more about each member of the row house and how it isn't just a coincidence that the lodgers all seem to have a screw loose.

Before I get any further, I ought to note that the character designs are bound to turn some people off. About half of the characters have normal anime-ish designs, but many of the minor characters are drawn in a simplified comedic way that looks like a cross between My Neighbors the Yamadas and Peanuts. Specifically, one character, the nagging wife of the neighborhood tile-maker, has teeth all the way around her circular mouth like a lamprey. At first the designs are a little jarring, but after just one episode ,I totally understood how they reflected each character's role in the story. I admire this show for going out on an artistic limb by pushing the edges of design. Not every anime series needs to look like K-on!, after all!

The music is great, too. The incidental themes riff on 1930's big band sound, which suits the show's retro-feel without being contemporaneous. This is just perfect, since there are a lot of anachronistic jokes (the characters even point out the historical contradictions). The opening and ending themes are fantastic, too (so much so that I'm looking up the singers right now).

To top it all off, the dub is fantastic. Some of the jokes have been edited for an American audience, but it's done with just the right touch, like the jokes in the FLCL dub (well, they take things a little a further than FLCL). When a famous Japanese historical figure is mentioned towards the end of the set, the dub encourages us to Google for him, which is both appropriate and hilarious. Kudos to Chuck Huber and Jamie Marchi on the English script.

As the show moves on, the focus shifts from Seikichi to Ginjiro, an older locksmith and ladies' man with a complicated past. Jonathan Brooks does a great job with Ginjiro in the dub. Brooks brings a lot of life to the character and his joke delivery is spot on.

Don't miss Edo Rocket, especially if you're looking for something new and different to watch.[TOP]

Birdy the Mighty is like Welcome to the Space Show, only more tightly plotted, and it stars a kickass girl hero instead of a talking dog (although, coincidentally, she is also from a planet with talking dog people).

Ordinary high school student Tsutomu's life changes forever when he's accidentally blown to bits by Birdy, an undercover galactic cop trying to catch a dangerous space criminal. While Birdy re-grows Tsutomu's body in a cloning tank on her ship, she shares her body with Tsutomu's consciousness. They can switch appearances back and forth as needed while Tsutomu goes to school and Birdy busts space criminals.

Around the same time, Tsutomu's parents move elsewhere for work, leaving Tsutomu and his college-aged sister alone in the house (Tsutomu's sister, as far as I can tell, proceeds to stay out drinking every night). Between sharing a girl's body (like The Man with Two Brains) and being home alone all the time, Tsutomu's life should've turned into something like Risky Business (the famous underwear dancing scene, anyway). Instead, Tsutomu is kind of a pansy and mostly complains about Birdy's abuse of his body (but not so often as to be annoying).

Birdy's cheesecake poses on these DVD covers are a little misleading. She could be just a sex object, and her undercover persona may be a fashion model, but instead Birdy is a great character. She kicks a lot of alien ass in nicely animated hand-to-hand combat sequences. For a fight scene to work, the protagonist ought to look like they're really getting hurt, and indeed, Birdy takes a lot of blows. When fight choreography is well animated, punches have real gravity behind them, and in this show we feel the impact of each hit landed on Birdy.

On the first disc some of the school scenes fall back on a sketchy, cheap-looking animation style that reminded me a little of “Kid's Story” from The Animatrix. This cost-cutting might turn off fans who are just in it for pretty anime faces, but I advise you to stick around for the second disc, when the producers stop penny pinching and bring in the big guns (er… good animators).

I've never seen the original OVAs of Birdy, although I totally want to see them now. I watched Decode at a friend's place and said friend had seen the OVAs and couldn't get interested in the first disc of Decode. He is totally missing out.

Several episodes take place in space or on Birdy's home planet, which is a nice sci-fi change of pace from the everyday school life episodes. The romance between Tsutomu and his "ojousama" classmate is a little hit-or-miss and stereotypical, but Birdy is interesting enough to make up for the generic stuff. After all, she used to be called "Birdy the Berserker".

The English dub is quite good. Luci Christian and Micah Solusod have a nice chemistry as Birdy and Tsutomu. The dub cast reads like a list of Funimation dub all-stars.

This two disc set wraps up the first narrative arc. I got Decode:02 in the mail as well, but I can't imagine what else could happen after this.[TOP]