What’s it about? Enoshima Academy has recently started its mysterious Elements program, which only has four students enrolled. Three of them—rebellious Sakko, amiable Rimiya, and bookish Toshi—are tasked with training simulations designed to fight interdimensional threats to the planet. The fourth, Sayo, somehow arrives for class despite her funeral being held only days before.
Despite hearing the name multiple times over the years, I’ve managed to unintentionally dodge every scrap of information about Aquarion as a series. My only thought when picking up this premiere to review was “huh, that sounds vaguely familiar.” That either makes me perfect for this anniversary outing or in deep trouble about two episodes from now.
The script definitely throws out plenty of exposition in this first episode, but it’s all pretty easy to grasp in broad strokes: the elite academy has a top secret military program that can only function with the help of some specially chosen teens who are connected to the giant robot. This is because they’re all reincarnations of some ancient race and missing some inherent part of themselves that resonates with said giant robot. Behind the scenes, the adults telling them what to do are Definitely Not Suspicious. The power of feelings is being evoked as literally as possible.
It’ll be familiar if you’ve seen Escaflowne or Macross, since all three titles trace back to Kawamori Shoji, and there’s traces of Evangelion and Please Save My Earth in there too with the probably biological robot, mystic cross-reincarnation bonds, and mission control full of evil adults. It’s all very throwback, but I say that with utmost affection. These are tropes I haven’t seen in a minute, which is fun for me and hopefully novel for readers who aren’t familiar with those older works (though they’re worth checking out too). The angel wing aesthetic in particular is something I didn’t realize I’d missed, in all its sincere and slightly cringy glory.
Aesthetics are mostly what there are to go on at this point, as the plot has too busy introducing its many proper nouns to get very far by the time credits rolled. All of the older series I mentioned above are from an era where they had at least 24 episodes to work with, so it remains to be seen if Myth of Emotion has been adjusted for the much more cutthroat pacing of modern anime. Then there’s the fractured visual style, which cobbles together CGI for the training and monster-battling portions; a simplified chibi style for the school segments; and a third, different CGI style for the reincarnation storyline dubbed the “Past Myths Arc.” That Past Myths storyline is also credited with its own director, Uchida Hidetake, whose only previous work was as the CG Producer for Belle. Mainline director Itoso Kenji is also pretty new, though Crunchyroll credits him as having worked under Miyazaki.
Still, there are considerably more experienced hands at the wheel too, and it isn’t as though being less experienced means being bad (though it certainly can). If anything, I admire the ambition of trying to juggle all these pieces. It’s certainly hard to turn down Kawamori’s appealing brand of mech design, even if I’m uncertain how well this team will be able to translate them into motion. It feels like a missed opportunity that the characters’ past designs are dark-skinned while every modern day character is pale, and I’m a little bummed that Sayo and Momohime haven’t gotten anything to do yet besides be generally emotionally encouraging to the boys. It’s still early days though, and looking at Rimiya’s past versus present design, I’ve got some tentative hopes of unearthing a bit of Gender here before the day is out.
AQUARION MOE (yes yes, I see what you’ve done) feels like the kind of show for whom the three-episode test is designed. That should give it time to get its conceptual feet under it and give the viewer an idea of how it intends to write character interactions once we’re getting more than bite-sized intros. I’ll be here for it—there’s always room in my heart for a weird show that swings big, even if it ultimately crashes and burns.
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