The Spring 2014 Anime Preview Guide

Captain Earth

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 2 (out of 5)

Review:

Captain Earth seems like two shows spliced together. When the episode opens, we meet Daichi, a high school senior with no particular ambitions. His dad was an astronaut who died in some sort of tragic accident, and this may be behind Daichi's lack of planning. He spends his days playing games and doing research that he feels doesn't merit the name on the Internet. But when he was a little boy, he broke into some kind of secured facility where he met a mysterious boy named Teppei who could make circular rainbows appear. Teppei took him to see a little girl asleep in a watery sphere, and Daichi managed to wake her up. Years later, Daichi sees another circular rainbow and goes back to the facility, where he meets yet another mysterious child, who somehow leads to him piloting a giant robot. In Daichi's defense, and in what is probably the best line in the episode, he thinks to himself that he really shouldn't follow her.

Transitions are probably the hardest part of any writing, and it feels like the good folks who penned this program really dropped the ball with them. Why introduce Daichi's everyday life if he was then going to be shunted into a more spectacular one with little to no explanation? Who is Earth fighting its secret war against, and why does the inside of every major spaceship's command center look exactly the same? Will the girl the episode went out of its way to show us has a crush on Daichi come back later – or wait! Could she be the “ing magical girl” promised by the preview? These are just some of the questions Captain Earth's first episode raises, and the long sequences of people in command centers shouting out science fiction gives you plenty of time to ponder them. This episode really would have been better split into two separate ones, because this one just feels cramped with all of the information that it is trying to impart across as series of jumbled scenes.

Luckily for the show, it looks pretty good. Daichi appears to have teeny little feet, but apart from that characters are fairly distinct and remain on-model. Animation is attractive, and despite the battle setting of parts of it, most lines are not screamed, which is a definite plus in this kind of action show. If Captain Earth can smooth things out and start making more sense, it has the potential to be interesting. As of this episode, however, all I can really say is, “Well, at least it's not Captain Planet.”

Captain Earth is available streaming on Crunchyroll.

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Zac Bertschy

Rating: 4

Daichi is aimless. His astronaut father died in an accident years ago, and his grades are falling because he spends his time playing video games and studying things he finds interesting rather than what's being taught in the classroom. A mysterious rainbow circle appears over the city, one not unfamiliar to Daichi - it's something he re from his past, spending days on the island where his father's work was done, where he encountered Teppei, a boy with a magic medallion who could produce the same rainbow.

The boys awaken a naked girl holding a robot hand, and... wait, before all that there are these two anime characters with crazy hair and outfits who call themselves the Planetary Gears, who claim to have found the third one. Anyway, so they wake up the naked girl but get caught, and Daichi doesn't anything after that. So he heads back to the island and the facility from his childhood opens up to him, and a little kid with a flute leads him into a crazy sci-fi room where it turns out he's gonna pilot a big ol' mech, ostensibly to save the Earth from one of those crazy anime characters from earlier who turned into a giant robot-thing with a bombshell body who's heading there looking to fuck it up. What, you ask? Just go with it, it's a BONES mecha show!

So this is written by the same guy who wrote Rahxephon and directed by the guy responsible for Star Driver, and you can see the influence of both very heavily. Right now the show is basically a mass of science fiction gobbeldygook complete with reams of meaningless technobabble being shouted by big rooms full of starship subordinates. There are too many characters already, half a dozen plot threads and relationships to build and explore, a boardroom full of shadowy characters who are part of some faction controlling all of this that mention at least two other shadowy factions just in the few seconds they're on screen and we still don't really know who the bad guys are. Or why that pink-haired girl in the boob robot is attacking Earth.

Normally this kind of purestrain sci-fi nonsense is a turn-off, but the show moves at such a speedy pace I found it to be the intriguing kind of nonsense where I wanted to find out what the hell was happening rather than just roll my eyes and shut it off. The shades of Rahxephon don't hurt, and it does seem like the kind of puzzle box that won't be all that difficult to decipher once they start explaining something (anything, really). Mostly I was taken in by the show's incredible big-budget visuals; this is BONES operating at the peak of their considerable powers for a television show. Brilliant, bold and beautiful colors pop right off the screen, gorgeously fluid animation stuffs every corner of every scene and the mechanics are lovingly animated with technical prowess you rarely see on TV. If they can actually keep up this level of production value the show will be worth watching just to gawk at.

Captain Earth is a big ol' bag of nonsense right now but it's the kind of confusing mess I'm willing to wallow in long enough to find out what's up. Cool show, check it out.

Captain Earth is available streaming at Crunchyroll.