Around 1995, Japanese animation (anime) began pouring into North America, Europe and across the globe in video form. Most of these titles were unknown outside of Japan and never covered by animation journals. Whether a title is highly popular or very obscure, a high quality theatrical feature or a cheap and unimaginative direct-to-video release, they all look the same on a store shelf. Therefore, Animation World Magazine will regularly review several new releases (including re-releases not previously covered) that have merit.

See space girls gone wild in Galaxy Angel.

Galaxy Angel V.1, What’s Cooking? V.2, Angels a la Carte. V.3, Stranded Without Dessert. V.4, Save Room for More.
TV series (26 episodes), 2001. Directors: Morio Asaka, Yoshimitsu Ohashi. V.1 & 2, seven episodes/105 minutes; v.3 & 4, six episodes/90 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Bandai Entertainment.

This goofy sci-fi comedy features a troop of five space-going girls in the Imperial Guard of the Transvaal Empire, a galactic monarchy of 128 planets. There’s a Hawaiian beach resort planet, a casino planet, a Wild West planet, a Disneylandish fun park called Cockadoodledoowopadoo... you get the idea. The mostly-teen girls are trigger-happy Forte Stollen, superstitious Ranpha Franboise, cute lop-eared bunny girl Mint Blancmange (the only one with brains), devoutly religious (but to what?) Vanilla H, and giggly Milfeulle Sakuraba who spends most of her time making sweet desserts. The episodes have titles like “Roast Beef of Lost Technology” and “Vanilla Flavored Asteroid Trash Stir-Fry.” The troop’s official assignment is to search the galaxy for the Lost Technology, but arrogant high-ranking bureaucrats keep using them for personal chores from walking their dogs to catching a military tank with Artificial Intelligence so advanced that it goes AWOL. It’s very silly, but in the best possible way.

Galaxy Angel was developed by Broccoli, the Japanese design studio that specializes in carrying the anime ultra-cute style to ridiculous extremes. It started as a videogame and a manga novel with an actual serious plot about the girls having to rescue the Empire’s sole surviving prince after a coup d’etat. One of the DVD extras is a series of “Now I Get It” mini-briefings originally shown before each TV episode which explain the galactic historical and political background and hint at the serious drama to come, and which have practically nothing to do with the zany stand-alone comedies that follow.

The writers were apparently given free rein to make the episodes as funny as possible, mostly through lively action, witty dialogue and the character interplay of the main cast: bossy Forte, impatient Ranpha, exasperated Mint, clueless Milfeulle, enigmatic Vanilla, and snobbish Normand who is an AI chip from a “smart missile” installed in a Barney-like plush toy. Normand makes one wonder whether Galaxy Angel’s writers were familiar with John Carpenter’s sci-fi movie Dark Star, which also has an intellectually philosophical missile; and several episodes contain aspects similar enough to other anime and American sci-fi TV episodes, movies and novels (but in original ways) to imply, “here is how we would use this plot element.”

Galaxy Angel is about as frothy and tasteful as the gourmet desserts that Milfeulle is always whipping up. The TV episodes are short, only about 10 minutes without the “Now I Get It” lectures which have been stripped and repackaged together as DVD extras, leaving the viewer with a “betcha can’t watch just one” appetite for the next one. The 15-minute TV series, animated by Madhouse, ran on Japan’s Animax satellite channel from April 8 to Sept. 29, 2001. It was popular enough to quickly generate two sequels, which ran from February through March 2002 and from October 2002 through March 2003. The first DVD of Galaxy Angel Z (v.1, Back for Seconds) will be released by Bandai on Dec. 14, 2004.