So, there's a
Godzilla anime coming later this year, and I fuckin' love me some Godzilla, so I was really excited to hear this! The dude who's directing it has done a bunch of Detective Conan movies (which probably isn't super representative what Godzilla will be like), and also the Netflix original series 'Knights of Sidonia', so I decided to give that a shot.
The premise of this Godzilla anime is apparently that, in the future, Godzilla (and presumably other monsters) has fucked up the world so bad that humanity evacuates in big ark ships and leaves for a distant star system. The system is less habitable than they'd hoped, so a group makes the decision to return to earth and duke it out with the monsters to try and win back the planet, but because of time dilation 20,000 years have passed when they get back.
The premise of Knights of Sidonia is that, in the future, giant aliens have fucked up the world so bad that humanity evacuates in big ark ships and leaves for a bunch of different star systems (though the Sidonia hasn't had contact with any of the others for hundreds of years, so as far as they know they're the only ones left). The aliens are basically everywhere, so they're constantly duking it out with the aliens to try and keep what's left of humanity alive.
So yeah, I think this might not be a terrible guide for what I should expect from the Godzilla anime.
Spoiler alert: I'm now a lot less excited for the Godzilla anime.
Knights of Sidonia starts off okay! It reminds me a lot of the first season of Battlestar Galactica, where the ship is constantly being attacked by the aliens, they have a very limited amount of the material that can actually kill the aliens permanently, and under all this tension, people's petty conflicts start putting lives at risk. Then the show slowly and insidiously transforms into a harem anime.
And, I'm just going to say this now, the art style makes it really hard (for me at least) to tell people apart.
These are all different
major characters.
Anyways, the series has a lot of... very dumb decisions on the part of its characters. The aliens (which look like very angry scoops of strawberry ice cream) attack by grabbing the heroes' robot suits with their tentacles. Then another character will heroically rush in to cut the tentacles with a big knife, thereby getting grabbed by the tentacles and heroically sacrificing themselves (instead of using the big laser beam that their dang robot suits have). This happens
multiple times. Additionally, the Sidonia is a spaceship, and consequently it sometimes experiences significant acceleration, so you would think that it would be constructed with stability in mind, making sure everything can be locked down fairly easily. Instead, the interior of the ship is built like the
Kowloon Walled City, and when the ship has to make emergency maneuvers, people are fucking falling out of
windows, furniture is flying everywhere, buildings and bridges are falling down. It's a very bad design.
Then the show starts slowly introducing... weird things. The show takes place a thousand years in the future, and roughly a hundred years ago there was a massive food shortage, so people have been genetically modified to photosynthesize. This is an excuse to have characters need to be naked on a regular basis, which leads to wacky, hilarious, and original hijinks in which the protagonist goes to visit a lady, sees her naked, and gets punched through a wall. Then they mention that the flight suits have a weird organic catheter, which is a little worm that slides its way up your urethra. This is all just an excuse for a scene where all the female pilots are putting on their flight suits and looking uncomfortable.
So, anyways, the protagonist's love interest gets eaten by an alien, then she later (kinda) comes back as a weird human-alien hybrid experiment. Most of her body is a big armored monster thing, but she communicates through a tentacle that, uh...
...looks like a penis.
Then the protagonist, two girls, and the tentacle monster all get an apartment together, and hey we have successfully morphed into a harem anime.
There's ostensibly a plot about a mad scientist trying to become god or something, but that never really matters much (maybe season 3? who knows).
Talking about the mad scientist reminds me that I haven't really talked about the characters much. Here's the quick rundown:
Protagonist:
- Likes food
- Sad when people die
- Oblivious to girls wanting to fuck him
Girls (including the tentacle monster):
- Want to fuck the protagonist
Beyond that, there are a lot of little things in the show that are either clearly borrowed from other
better anime, or very abruptly dropped. There's a shadowy council on the ship of folks who have modified themselves to be immortal, and are very clearly modeled after the Seele council from Evangelion, except whereas Seele continually hinted at secrets being kept from the characters, and was clearly orchestrating something big, the immortal council accomplishes nothing and then gets murdered. There's a special material that's the only thing that can permanently destroy the aliens, and they only have enough for 38 spears tipped with the stuff, except fairly early on in the series they figure out a way to mass-produce it and they're shooting it out of cannons and making all kinds of shit out of it. Characters bring up a bunch of times that maybe the aliens are simply misunderstood, and maybe they only seem to be attacking us because we can't understand each other, and I think this is presented in such a way that the viewer is supposed to agree, but it never goes anywhere, and it seems like the aliens are mindless monsters.
So yeah, it's bad generic anime. Now, it's very possible that all of these issues are from the original manga, so I can't
completely count out the director, but yeah, I'm much less hopeful about the Godzilla thing.
Just so I don't end on a down note, let me mention one thing I do like about Knights of Sidonia: there's a character who is a bear with a robot arm.
She is a chef. She has a regular human voice, and it is never explained why she is a bear.
