Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet - Anime Review

Welcome back to otaku no videos always. Thank you very much for joining me where today I am talking about gargantia of the verdurous planet as you can tell down there This is a mecha anime series from a couple of years ago as of the time I'm making this review and as always it'd be a spoiler free review It's an unusual anime in some senses in that it Very much lives and dies based on how much you I self-identify with the main character Or if not identify at least appreciate what he is going through the main character. You can see back there I think up back there is is Lito which it who is a soldier in a far-flung war in the future he pilots a giant robot as you do and He fights in this war against these savage aliens, and this is all episode one stuff. He ends up Essentially thrown through a wormhole and end up in this sort of pastoral Water world that is very much like old earth except. It's not at all Civilizationally or culturally the way older it used to be people live on these giant floating cities basically these these metal ships that have been retrofitted to all sail together in these fleets, and that's where everyone lives and Have very simple pastoral lives of fishing and salvage and things like that and so very very quickly and immediately the idea is that Lito suddenly Has no war to fight and he has been literally born and bred to fight in this war and so he quickly struggles with this question of what his purpose is and the show does a very interesting job of Making Lito a rather unemotional person or if I'm if I'm emotional a Somebody bred for one thing to be a soldier so he has very specific things. He knows to do and needs to do and He doesn't really know how to behave outside of that He's never had a reason to live and do things outside of his duties as a soldier now again this is one of those things where you have to appreciate what this character is going through to really Get involved and invested in the story But that's the the basic concept of the show Fortunately, it's got this lovely animation by I believe it's production IG and They do this this beautiful job of animating the characters and the environments the Mecca are all CGI But they're seamlessly blended in and Actually making those CGI turns out to be a very wise move the Mecca are supposed to be very different an alien They're supposed to be their own thing Something that is is very much not human And one of the things I really liked about the show is that they thought through a lot of their science-fictional premises a lot of Mecca series are Short on thinking through things and long on just giving you lots of action and while that's fine Gargantia gives you a It feels more like a like a Golden Age science fiction novel something by Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke where Or Stanislaw Lem where characters are thrown into this very unusual situation They have to figure out how they should behave in relation to it. I really like that a lot And that was handled quite well Now as I'm as I said a lot of this will live and die on your on your appreciation of the characters There's also a number of female characters that Lito quickly gets involved with including some message delivery girls one in particular Now here's what I have to bring up something. That's a little weird about the show the characters live on this apparently temperate to mild tropical World or in it's where the ships are and the girls all wear you can kind of see them there in the background They all wear these midriff bearing leg bearing outfits and all the guys wear long sleeve shirts and long sleeve in the jeans and Completely cover every part of their body and I can think of only one female character who is not wearing this Kind of revealing outfit and it just seems weird I mean, obviously it's fan service, but it is so ubiquitous It just comes across as very obviously fan service in a way that just seems out of place Moreover, there is a an infamous belly dancing sequence early in the show just kind of comes out of nowhere It's like oh the characters are doing this net. Why? It's obviously fan service, so there are a few moments like that in the show Fortunately, the characters are not particularly sexualized beyond their you know that their form and bodies So there aren't a lot of you know Ridiculous butt shots and panty flashes a couple of them throughout the course of the series But in general the characters are not sexualized and they don't have particularly Physical romantic attractions between most of the characters and their medical relationships are Appropriately quiet Where you know, they're not jumping at each other, but they're not trying to hide their feelings either necessarily They just don't quite know how to how to approach each other about these topics and it's only 13 episodes long It's only so much time do that. I think 2012 That's kind of how you have to you know Deal, that's something you have to deal with in the show The setting itself as I mentioned before is quite well thought out There are some weird idiosyncrasies and things like that and the Mecca are just kind of all-powerful In a lot of things they can do but Like a lot of good science fiction There are rules to how things work and different things work in power levels And it's once they establish what things can do They don't suddenly give things new abilities halfway through the show and I that was was kind of nice This feels like a more grown-up Mecca series and a lot of them that you might be used to Now I listened to or I watched this with the English dub and I want to commend the English dubbers for their work here, particularly with Leto having to be Distant not unemotional but distant and shut off and very deliberately. I mean, he's in this very weird environment. He doesn't know What they're gonna do how they're gonna react to him But also in the voice of the Mecca which is voiced by Matt Mercer, I believe and because the Mecca has to have this cool and and Equally detached personality and so often people do that by having a very simple and robotic voice or at least a voice that is very If not monotone then is just very simple and With this the idea is it's hundreds of years in the future So, of course the AI can handle full intonation and inflection. It just never gets emotional. It just never gets It never really speeds up or slow down It just talks like this the whole time and it has these very logical Beliefs and it just says these things much like Spock for example on original Star Trek where you know He doesn't speak in a monotone all the time, but he's just measured all the time. I think they did a nice job of that Overall, I thought the English job was certainly completely workable I also listened to it in Japanese dub for the last couple episodes and that seemed fine, too No issues either way with any of the jobs. So just FYI But yeah in general Yeah, this is definitely an interesting show and with only 12 episodes this that actually turns out to be to the benefit of the show It is a better show for being Brief because it can get through its story get to its ending and kind of develop its characters In a way that I think if this had been 26 or 50 episodes It would have dragged it would have been more Battles of the week you would have had more characters, which would have been nice But this already is pretty chock full of characters. This is a pretty large cast for a 12 episode show so good on them there and Overall, I was pretty impressed, you know I think you might not get into the show depending on how you feel about Lito and how about the and kind of the fan Service and just the very sci-fi ish nature of the show. This is a very there's a more high concept Science fiction show than a lot of other mecha series where it's just you know Oh aliens are attacking climbing a giant robot and just fend them off every episode so that's not gonna be everyone's cup of tea, but I think if that is definitely Gargantia is a well produced carefully Thought out keep using that phrase, but you know what I mean anime series