The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms

This middle-grade action series is a little bit 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 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 ion 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, 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.

Before prepping for this season, I had never heard of Mecha-Ude—not the OVA that came from it. However, I had at least heard that many were excited about it. And after seeing this first episode, it's easy to see why.

Mecha-Ude feels cut from the same cloth as the anime made by Hiroyuki Imaishi and Promare), right down to the Hiroyuki Sawano-composed soundtrack. It's over-the-top in all the right ways. We have a world where there is a secret war over sentient mecha appendages. One side wants to work with them as partners. The other wants to subjugate them as tools. In the middle of this, we have our normal kid hero, Hikaru, who ends up with a mecha arm prototype all his own.

Hikaru is a kid suffering not from peer pressure but from perceived peer pressure. Take for example the pregnant woman on the train. Society says that the correct thing to do is to give up his seat on the train. By not doing so, he feels like those around him are judging him for it. On the other hand, he's afraid that if he does give up his seat, people will look down on him for acting like a good person—like it's a performative good act and not an actual one.

Of course, the fact of the matter is it's all in his head. No one is judging him. Heck, he almost certainly doesn't cross their minds at all. However, his worries are ones that I think many people have had—especially when younger. This makes him incredibly sympathetic—and makes his decision to save his new robot arm friend during the climax all the more heroic.

I can't wait to see more of this one—not only Hikari and his arm but Aki and hers. Watching the arms try to take care of her by doing things like wiping her mouth when she's eating is surprisingly wholesome. What's not to like?

I had completely forgotten about Mecha-Ude's origins as a crow-funded indie anime until after I watched this first episode, but I clocked that there was something different about it from the very first action sequence. I don't know if it's because of the odd pacing of its key-frames or because of a combination of some sloppy editing and framing, but the whole scene just felt slightly off in a manner that I'm not using to seeing in your usual television productions. It gave me more the impression of the kind-of low-budget/high-ambition shorts that you see used as the opening cutscenes to spunky indie video-games; if you'd told me that this whole first episode was a collection of a bunch of such scenes for an Azure Striker Gunvolt type of side-scrolling punch-'em-up, I would have absolutely believed you.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of this to directly criticize Mecha-Ude. Point of fact, I really dug this first episode! All of it's jank and loose-stitching managed to give it an irably scrappy quality that worked in the show's favor, like if a bunch of Trigger's less-experienced animators cut loose to form a new Studio that was fueled more by gumption than raw capital or manpower. Plus, it promised me Mechanical Arms in the title, and by golly, it provided me with Mechanical Arms! Sometimes, all I ask for is honesty in advertising, and Mecha-Ude delivers on its promise of getting to watch cartoon characters use their magical robot-arm best friends to punch things really hard.

The unique designs and characterizations of the Mecha-Ude are a particular highlight of the show, so far. Hikaru's new partner in bad-guy busting, Alma, is given a whole lot of fun personality with his one expressive little eyeball-thing and his otherwise limited range of movement. I always love it when animators find new ways to anthropomorphize weird crap like this and I can tell that the show is going to have fun with its heroes' snappy back-and-forths. Aki and her twin Arms are also cool, providing most of the excellent action cuts that we get in this first episode. If nothing else, I am honestly wishing that this was a fun little budget side-scroller that I could onto my Switch and play too much of before bed. It would be a hell of a lot of fun based on the charm of this universe alone. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Mecha-Ude, this fall.