STANDARD ANIME.

It’s the sort of uninspired, inoffensive middle ground stuff that filled ADVs catalogue for much of the 00s.

Fantastically odd manga gets a fantastically odd anime, which then gets a just plain odd English adaptation. In that they didn’t bother doing things like they normally do, like translating the opening credits. I have the feeling that for kids who grew up watching this in the US & UK, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo will be their Samurai Pizza Cats (except truer to the source material).

Yet more down to earth science fiction about space flight. What was in the water in 2003 that caused this trend?

Another show that had it come out in the 80s would likely have got some European co-production money behind it and would have aired on the BBC. Classy Madhouse/Telecom co-production for NHK about a school field trip that goes badly wrong, leaving a group school children stuck on an uninhabited planet. One of those shows that there is an audience for, but it’s a TV audience rather than a DVD audience. And I’m certain US TV execs aren’t seeing this as being the sort of thing kids would watch (even though they probably would). If Erin is a success on Crunchyroll, it might be worth looking at similar NHK shows from the last ten years like this for streaming too.

The first 13 episodes are a great TV show, and achieves the “Shoujo for boys” idea that was being bandied around at the time. It switches between being essentially a shoujo story show set in school and the British telefantasy & 80/90’s Hong Kong movie-inspired action of the Read or Die OAV. Episodes like They Shout and In A Grove could have had their plots ripped out of The Avengers and are all the better for it.

Those 13 episodes end on a superb rescue sequence and had it stopped there we’d probably be talking about it as being one of the great series of the decade.

However then the fans of the OAV and light novels got what they had been complaining about being missing from the those 13 episodes and, possibly coincidentally, the whole production went to hell. As broadcast those final 13 episodes were just a mess. While the production problems were fixed for DVD release, the writing, which had been exceptional up to then, was in just as much a mess as the animation, bogged down in exposition and characters on the run for much the time.

An ambiguous final scene (was that dog supposed to represent a Churchillian depression or a creature like Black Shuck?) suggested more was to come, but given the loose continuity between the various ROD projects I’m not sure if they were hoping for a follow up anime or if it was picked up in the light novels.

A show I certainly avoided due to its character design and general look. Having now read that it was based on an Shotaro Ishinomori manga my interest is piqued a little, but I still think that had it looked more like Ishinomori’s art (below) I’d have been all over this like a rash.

Creepy show about turning little girls into hitmen. The idea is a sound one, and while it should be creepy, it is creepy more due to the mishandling of the concept than something they are going for deliberately. Notable, at least for me, for having a theme tune by Scottish Indie Overlords, The Delgados.

Not exactly sure why 2003 needed an F-Zero anime, but you got it anyway.

Boring prequel to the videogame. In yet another mind boggling stupid design idea, rather than use the character designs and mecha designs created by Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun) and Kousuke Fujishima (Ah My Goddess), they decided to go with the guys who’d go on to do Black Lagoon. Now they’re perfectly fine designers, but the look of the anime, once it starts to deal with the prequel aspect, is a real disconnect to what was arguably the strongest element of the game.

More of this now forgotten nonsense.