What Am I Watching - Birth

Synopsis - Birth (or Planet Busters if you watched it on Sci-Fi) is about how four mercenaries find a sword that holds the power of the fuckin' universe, right? They are then in an 80-minute car chase with the inorganics in order to save what little left there is of Aqualoid. Will they succeed or fail (lol)?

Review - So it's not exactly a car chase, so Bullit fans can go watch their material somewhere else.

Many of my friends know that I love older anime. What they might or might not know is that I am that kind of guy who absolutely loves to buy or rent a series that never made it big. Don't ask me why, I don't know. Over the past 11 years, I've been experimenting with the Bavi Stocks of the world, and most of the time, I come away feeling accomplished. But, as with all hobbies, sometimes shite just appears to make your day that much more shittier. This was one of such occasions.

I don't want to go too much into this, because any sort of imagery I have is normally a bad one. Let's start the characters. Nam is your stereotypical shonen hero. He's a bit on the cocky side and the most important thing in his life is to be a hero. There. That girl you see plastered in three different images (if you have the DVD, it's two. I thought they were two different people) is Rasa, who along with her blob was actually interesting. I dig her hover-thingy too. Then you have the ship captain and his assistant who were also pretty cool guys. I enjoyed the assistant the most because he wasn't over-the-top.

The content of the show is very much like a car chase in that once one inorganic is dead, there is another one, and another one, and another one, for the next 80 minutes. There's very little character development or backstory because that sort of stuff doesn't matter in the post-apocalyptic world, I mean, geez, Hokuto no Ken clearly didn't have any of that.. Oh, you're saying that our unfortunate heroes have little or  no time to regroup? Those sort of situations are what makes war movies chock full character development and backstory. You mean to say that the OVA was too short? Bavi-Stock pretty much had a similar setting, and yet I knew more about him than our heroes here, hell I'll spoil it here and now, I didn't care for them when they DIED. There. Even the show's attempts at humor, while at times actually funny, were forced and at most, lame. While the action was nice, it got boring after the second time. I honestly cannot see where this worked.

The music was pretty funky. If you own the DVD version (!), the menu music is pretty cool...The new ADV dub far outshines the older dub back in the day, so that's another positive.

The art is really nothing to write home about, but I will say that Nam's outfit, though a bit weird, was kinda cool. I also enjoyed the fact that even with a serious plot, they included SD characters to lighten the mood. The animation is what you'd expect from Genesis Climber Mospeada.

If you've read this review, you know what kind of score I am going to give this. The saddest thing is that it really could have been watchable. The premise, while not the most unique, was interesting, and they infused some tongue-in-cheek humor here and there, but if the characters held up, the plot wasn't executed in the Timothy McVeigh sense, and the ending didn't suck, maybe just maybe this would have been a really good OVA. Here's another reason as to why this should have been above the bad scale. Shinya Sadamitsu (Shinesman, Blue Seed, Zillion) directed this. He also had Joe Hisaishi (Porco Rosso, Nausicaa) do the music, and Yoshinori Kanada (Akira, Arcadia of My Youth, Metropolis, Genesis Climber Mospeada) and Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nadia, Madox-01) dealing with character designs and animation, respectively.

So, why did this nugget turn into a turd in under 30 minutes?

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Story - 4.5

Characters - 3.5

Content - 3

Animation - 5

Music - 5.25

Voice Acting - 6.5

Overall - 4.5

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