salinea | Anime review

PlanetES

Space, baby, space. And not any space; realistic, gritty, hard science space like you've never seen hard science on a TV or cinema screen before.

The year is 2075, space exploration is continuing at a steady rhythm, leaving a trail of a bunch of junk in orbits, and one day of course one piece of garbage causes a big accident, so various programs of debris collection are organised in the corporations that deal with space exploitation. Since of course, this is no profitable business, those programs are underfunded and a place to send employees nobody else wants. But they do their job nonetheless. Our story deals on one such agency, and in particular with a young Japanese woman Ai Tanabe, a clumsy, spunky, hard-working, idealistic busybody who just joined the program and needs to learn everything, and with Hachimaki (thus nicknamed because he always wears one) her senior astronaut, also Japanese , a jerk with a heart of... actually I don't think he's got much of a heart, but who loves space and dreams of owning his own space ship one day. The focus of the story starts very low key and episodic in a slice of life way with a side of romance, painting a broad and complex picture of space exploitation and exploration in the future along the way, then develops a more continuous dramatic storyline in its second half, brought to an impressive and emotional climax both on the global scale and the smaller scale of the characters.

Unlike most everyone I've seen talking and reviewing Planetes, I actually have mixed feeling about this anime. On the one hand, yes, it does some brilliant, beautiful and heart-wrenching things, and more over, does it about themes and situations that you almost never see anywhere else. Planetes does space like nothing else does it (but documentaries, I guess), and Planetes does personal drama excessively well, and both of those by themselves make it worth watching. But Planetes also does a number of irritating things I can't quite ignore; and also does a few problematic things that are so involved and complex I have difficulties even properly articulating them. I'll probably have to make a second spoilery post to even try addressing them.

For one the comedy is atrocious. Mostly based on having a couple of characters (and then a few more here and there in individual episodes) act like complete clown, so it triggers my embarrassment squick as well as being very much unfunny. A lot of other things are based on the low grade romcom that is Tanabe and Hachimaki's romance story. Basically their characters clash a lot, and there's a lot of bickering, and Tanabe being clumsy and naive, and Hachimaki being clueless and impulsive, and not only have we seen this a thousand times, but 750 of those times were done much better. It doesn't help that I have a hard time liking those characters. Hachimaki is very much a selfish and self-centered jerk, through and through, and while he does have certain ordinary person with the determination to reach his dream appeal, I have a hard time caring about him at all. Tanabe is a bit better, being fundamentally well meaning and kind, has well as having some backbone and grit underneath, though her naivety and idealism are being played in a frankly stupid enough way that I had to grunt a few times. Also there's the fact that despite the realistic depiction of the future, the gender dynamics don't appear to have progressed at all, or at least not in Japan (note that only Tanabe, Hachimaki and their family are Japanese of the cast of characters, the rest is very multinational as well as multi-ethnic, though they behave to very Japanese social standards quite a few times). Add to this the fact that Tanabe's the first character introduced as view point before the story turns out to focus much more on Hachimaki's story and dreams, whereas Tanabe's storyline is mostly about her feelings for Hachimaki; you've got a pretty irritating result.

The show makes up for this a little with some of the secondary characters. There's Fee Carmichael, who is an unabashedly awesome and tough woman of colour (and to the show's credit, has children back on Earth, yet is never portrayed as a deadbeat mother for it, even though we get that sort of treatment for a couple of male characters) and the pilot of the team. Fee gets one episode dedicated all to her, about that one time when she really, really wanted a smoke, the one good comedy episode as well as being downright epic. There's Yuri Mihairokov, a quiet, gentle, efficient astronaut whose backstory reveals one of the most beautiful and graceful personal drama of the series. There's Claire Rondo, an elite member of the control section, an overachiever with a background of being refuge from a (fictional) Latin American country to the United States as a child; whose characterisation and storyline aren't without reminding me of one Felix Gaeta in nBSG (I could ship them, too, they'd be snarkily and bitterly competent together *sighs*) and while I also have a few misgiving about her story she was probably my favourite character in the show. Other secondary and tertiary characters are pretty interesting, complicated and unique, and provide good drama (or in other cases, atrocious comedy). And even Tanabe and Hachimaki have dramatic moments that are breathtaking in their execution, intensity and depth.

The animation is excellent and detailed, very much played for the sake of the rendition of both the sense of wonder from space scenes and the grittiness of the hard science. The soundtrack is orchestral and in perfect adequation with the storytelling, although I kinda hated both the opening and ending sequences (despite the awesome summary of space exploration imagery that the OP does).

Thematics are also pretty damn awesome most of the time. The wonder of space exploration clashed with the politics and economy of space exploitation and the inequity it creates between countries on Earth; the bravery and dedication of people working in space contrasted to the cost, personal, selfish, in health and human lives as well as the lack of glamour and general lack of consideration given to the work of most of the cast, and a solid core of humanism remaining through. Those themes are woven deftly through the stories beginning to end and at both personal and global scales, painting a complex and though-inducing picture. There too, I have however some misgivings: while it's pretty damn awesome to see acknowledged the fact that space exploration, also, is political, and that it profits mostly to some selected few leaving Third World countries in the dust (and quite purposefully so), I would have liked if the point hadn't been done using fictional countries, as if it wasn't worth doing the research of using real countries, as if third countries are all equivalent and similarly easy to summarise by the reality of their oppression. Not to mention how it all ties to terrorism in a way that is, all at once, horrible, sympathetic, and the summum of cynicism (This is where I recognised the makers of Code Geass in this show). At least I can say those thematics won't stop making me think, which is already no mean achievement.

It's adapted from a seinen manga series, from which it diverges significantly at some points, which I probably ought to check as well.

In conclusion, Planetes is a very unique series, which has enough qualities it is definitely worth checking, especially for people with any interest in hard science and also for the beautiful human drama it draws at times, despite a number of flaws.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Dar Williams - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

luzisrighthand.livejournal.com

I love that series and own it on DVD.
It's the only anime series I ever bothered to watch completely(well I watched Dragonball as a kid but that does not really count).
Anime is certainly a very good medium for SF however the few other series I tried to watch have a lot of fanservice I'm not interested in and I dislike mechs.

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