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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001
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New from Japan: Anime Film Reviews
Sol Bianca: The Legacy. V.1, Lost Treasures. V.2, Separation.
V.3, Going Home. There is a school of thought that animated cartoons should look pretty but do not need to make much sense. Sol Bianca: The Legacy certainly plays to this philosophy. Yet its empty-headedness is unusually intellectual. Viewers will recognize the Alhambra in a palace on a distant planet, or that soaring holographic statues are based upon Alphonse Mucha's Art Nouveau posters. A giant maze is boastfully acknowledged to be a mechanical recreation (with deadly traps) of the levels of Dante's Divine Comedy. And where else would you find attacking space pirates dressed as though they were attending an opera? This is a sequel of sorts to Sol Bianca, a 1990 OAV space opera from A.I.C. (Anime International Co.) about a band of sexy all-girl space pirates who steal only from despicable planetary dictators. It was a mindless Star Wars imitation, but had very nice art design by Naoyuki Onda. Ten years later, A.I.C. has upped the ante with this second Sol Bianca, a serial consisting of six half-hour episodes, two per volume. It nominally presents the same crew in a new adventure, except that the characters have different origins and relationships. What is important is that there is no longer any pretense that the story is important.
Instead, this is an artistic tour de force for Director Hiroyuki Ochi and his staff of character and mechanical designers, notably Naoyuki Onda again, Atsushi Takeuchi, Koji Watanabe, Kenji Teraoka and Nobuhito Sue, with extensive 3D CGI work by Satoshi Shimura. The emphasis is on beauty. All men are handsome, all women are lovely, and every scene looks like it is posed (i.e., not much actual animation) for a fashion magazine. The space adventure still has gaping holes in its logic, compounded by a plot that jumps forward in medias res and leaves the viewer to puzzle together the 25th(?) century interstellar background from cryptic references to "the decline since the Space Frontier Age," "the search for lost Earth" and so forth. But there are now all the nudge nudge wink wink background cultural references to Inca ruins, Spanish architecture, the literature of Thomas Mann, etc., to indicate that any lapses in the plot are not because of a lack of sophistication. Rather, the viewer is meant to appreciate the visual aspects (Ochi's skillful direction distracts the viewer from the limited animation), and the personality interplay between space pirates April, Janny, Feb, Jun and young stowaway Mayo. These are the real focus of the adventure. As added evidence of the emphasis on the art direction, the opening credits and each preview of the next volume are edited to make an excellent music video. The DVDs also contain "Animetronic" music clips which are bonus music videos of 8 to 10 minutes.
Virgin Fleet. Even minor anime titles can have points of interest. Virgin Fleet is an example of what may be building up to a new sub-genre of teen military comedies about untested all-female combat units who must prove they can fight as well as the men. What makes Virgin Fleet (originally a three half-hour OAV series) particularly interesting is its alternate-history premise. The setting is an Earth where atomic power has not been discovered, but Japanese research into paranormal mental powers has awakened psionic energy in some humans -- but only women, and only as long as they are virgins. Fifteen years earlier, in a conflict similar to World War II, a ship of young women with this talent sunk a "federation" invasion fleet. This resulted in a cease-fire that has lasted to the present. A naval girl's academy has been opened to train new girls with psychic energy to crew a Virgin Fleet.
This is the background for a mostly silly teen farce. Japan has been at peace for so long that the academy has turned into a finishing school where giggly teens play at being sailors and navy aviators. New student Shiokaze Umino has enrolled to demonstrate she is still a virgin, to make a respectable bride for handsome Mau Sakisaka. Cadet leader Satsuki Yukimizawa, who is overly gung-ho about the fleet's military mission, is determined to force Shiokaze out. The schoolgirl catfights (with Mau as a comically inept mediator) play into the hands of naval Chief Tatsugawa, a reactionary who has been trying to persuade the government to abandon the Virgin Fleet and rebuild the Imperial Navy. The plot turns dramatic when enemy spies try to sabotage the Virgin Fleet in preparation for a reactivation of the war. Satsuki is ready to fight but she lacks enough Virgin Energy. Shiokaze has the energy, but she freezes in panic at the prospect of real danger. I was intrigued by Virgin Fleet's background portrayal of a Japan that has rebuilt itself without the dominating cultural influence of a Western occupation. There is technical modernization in appliances and the news media, but architecture and clothing styles are closer to those of 1940s Japan. The score by Masumi Ito is modern movie-music when punching up the action scenes, but in the style of traditional Japanese music in the street scenes. Even the opening and closing theme songs by Chisa Tanabe are pseudo-1940s or 1950s Japanese pop music, before it became as heavily Westernized as in our world today. (Production by A.I.C.) Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s.
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