Anime: Moldiver

And yet again I cannot keep my pie-hole shut... especially german residents will have heard of the 6-part OVA "Moldiver", published by pioneer and some months ago praised as the pinnacle of OVA-dom by a certain anime magazine that I won't mention here, because it'd trigger yet another story. (maybe later...)

So... since one of the few offered rewards for a subscription continuation was this title on a DVD, I reluctantly decided to choose it - mainly due to a lack of better options. Well, it is a kind of a "girl superhero" story spiced with a bit of fanservice and I finished watching it this morning - or maybe I should say "stopped" instead of "finished". It has 6 eps a 30minutes - I gave up right in the middle of #4 - and I never did such a thing before.

Boy, this is the kind of stuff that gives anime a bad name. Sure, it's old (early 90s), but that alone is no excuse or reason for it being terrible. "Key-TheMetalIdol" is also a rather aged candidate if concerning animation, design and release date, but it's worlds away from this one.

Hmmm - where to start the reaping? Let's take the characters. Protagonists acting illogically has been the curse of shallow anime series for a long time, but at least they'd always act in accordance to their character profiles.
Not here. The heroine switches from "scared girl" to "amiable clutz" to "nutcase" and back in a matter of minutes. And not for the sake of comic relief (we're partially used to that, after all) - no, it's rather as if noone ever bothered to write down even the faintest behavior profiles for the protagonists.
Not that the antagonists would be any better... the weird professor baddie-boss is a beneficient celebrity in one moment, a manic collector of antiquities in the next, followed by being a nice boss for the heroine's brother (who invented the superhero gear), just to instantly turn into a marvel-esque "evil for no reason" destruction maniac soon after. Then there is a muscle-packed acquaintance of the heroine (of course she's secretly in love with him) who is a strange amalgamation of a rocket scientist, Rambo and Chopin - oh yes, and he pilots space shuttles, too.

Their 'romance' is introduced in an unskilled and haphazard way - although taking place during an episode whose tension arc is the same as the temperature curve of Novosibirsk : a clean zero from beginning to end.
*shakes head*

But lets leave the characters and move on to the plot. You might think that an anime only having six episodes could be easily filled with a nice, story-driven, coherent plot. You thought wrong. Having seen 4 of the six episodes, I was so far unable to detect any visible background story at all, save for a fuzzy thing about "flying to space" and some "dimensional distortion device" that are never clearly mentioned - and had, in the last consequence, nothing to do with the plot up to then except for "being there".


So ok, let's drop the "overall plot" idea and hope that, at least, we find some nice episodical stories in each ep...
*blip*
*404 - thing not found*
Nothing here... while the first two episodes offer a certain kind of comic entertainment when we see the heroine secretly snagging her brothers superhero suit and re-programming its appearance to make it "cuter", the following ones are a bore. One consists of an idoru concert being held at the kennedy space center, disturbed by the evil professor stealing a shuttle, the next is about a city drowning in a traffic jam (yeah, really) where the protagonists spend a whole 30 minutes being stuck, continually missing each other at the meeting spots and the heroine half-heartedly fighting some baddies every 8 minutes. By far the most boring of the ones I saw. The next, 4, is something about the sunken WW2 battleship Yamato being salvaged because it contains some secret device needed for the professors plans - at the same time the captain of the Yamato was the professors granpa, and they try to spice the episode up with flashbacks that do nothing except for annoying the viewer.

Not to forget the apex of stupidity in #4: the (never-before mentioned) hero-suit-inventors 6y-old smaller brother discovers the stored "moldiver suit" data in a laptop at home. He instantly notices that THIS is exactly the technological detail missing at the "dimensional device" project the boss of his brother is working on - and decides to sneak into the facility where it is built to apply the changes himself instead of simply telling that to his brother or his boss.
Yeah, sure.
The boy and the boss end up on the Yamato - of course (chuckle) the boy soon notices that the boss is actually the weird-professor baddie and he doesn't tell him the secret - BUT he still happily and secretly works at restoring the strange WW2-device in the bowels of the ship while the baddie takes command of the Yamato - just for the joy of working with technology.
Again: Yeah, sure.

When I finally gave up, the Yamato was about to explode or something - actually I couldn't care less. I'd like to say that this one gave me goosebumps for being so bad, but not even that is true - it was just plain illogical, incoherent, inconsistent, boring and unoriginal. Thank god I didn't really pay money for this - but the fact that it was praised actually scares me.

D_R