Strange Dawn

Very obscure anime that I saw all of one time as a kid Arabic dubbed on TV and finally found again after years of wondering if I'd imagined it. And it is beautiful. Children's rating though? That's a lie - the only reason anyone would have to believe that this is a children's anime is the fact that the characters look like little Teletubbies. But it's an anime with lots of blood and violence, themes of war, love triangles and melodrama - heck, there's even (somewhat...) an attempted rape scene! If there's one major problem it's the very abrupt ending, as if the show hadbeen cancelled or something - but given that the beginning was just as out-of-nowhere and abrupt, it seemed kind of fitting. The story talks about two high school girls, Natsuno Eri and Miyabe Yuko, who find themselves lost in a world inhabited by 'humans' that are barely 2 or 3 feet tall and have the body shapes of marshmallows. The anime literally just starts with them walking around in this world wondering where they are and how they got there, which I think is great; no time is wasted seeing what they were doing before they got there, or how they got there, or anything of the sort. The importance of the story happens in this fantasy world, and ends as soon as they leave. The same could be said for the two main leads themselves actually, as while you're watching, you don't get the feeling the story is really about them either - they're just sort of there. There's nothing special about them other than the fact that they are three times the size of every other character, and the fact that their personalities are completely polar opposites. Insofar as the anime focuses on their struggles, it's mostly in the daily necessities that the fantasy world is sorely lacking in - bathrooms, sanitary napkins, a change of clothes - you know, the things that are never really addressed all that much in other anime, or any story really, that involves a character being transported to a past-times fantasy setting. The REAL importance lies in the inhabitants of the fantasy world, the little people of Belzerg, who are trying to protect their village that's being caught in the middle of a war between two neighboring countries. These are the characters you'll find yourself caring about or hating, and these are the characters that go through trials and epiphanies and realizations by the end through their interactions with each other and the two main leads. While I was watching the anime, I found myself able to enjoy it that much more after I decided to distance myself a bit from Miyabe and Natsuno and view them the way the little people did - as otherworldy beings with unimaginable powers, unable to empathize with human emotion. That way it made a bit more sense for their personalities to be so extreme, with Natsuno being quiet, uncertain, but trying to be helpful and Miyabe being loud, contrary, and completely uninterested. Even if you do try to put yourself in the girls' shoes though, when you think about it, their actions do still make sense - they don't really get full grasp of how serious these little people are taking their personal dramas and their war, and that their fights aren't just little squabbles but dangerous brawls with real weapons where people do die or get hurt, because the whole situation doesn't feel real to them, especially given the fact that, again, the little people look like baby Teletubbies. Not to dump on the character designs though; they do look cute, and more importantly individualized, and the art and animation is actually more solid and fluid than you'd expect. I love the bright colors in the anime, and the music is simply breathtaking. The one that stands out the most would be the opening song. It was actually the opening theme I was looking for when I found this anime, as it was what I had remembered most from the Arabic dubbed version I'd seen before. It sounds just as gorgeous in its original Japanese as it did in Arabic, and I advise you to give both a listen even if you don't want to watch the rest of the anime. I actually hadn't planned to either, at the start, but after sampling the first few and continuing to end on a cliff hanger with each episode, I ended up watching the whole thing in two days (when I should have been studying for a midterm too...)

Came across this when scouring around '00 for cute anime girls. It's actually pretty good, randomly. Doesn't look like anyone really watched it. Old-school isekai with two cute protagonists getting caught up in these little chibi people's war, and yeah it's real war they kill each other and use comfort women and such. I laughed for a minute straight when the little chibi guys made their initial appearance and just started murdering each other, but they've got a little wartime plotline with lots of interpersonal drama going on that is a little more sophisticated than you might expect. When it comes down to it, I mainlylike this show because Yuko is hot. She's also got a personality you don't see often, particularly in main characters. I recommend it purely for her if you watch stuff for quality girls. The chibi bros get a little too much screen time in my opinion, but their story is well above average compared to the random anime. Something unique to this anime that I thought was really cool was the reaction of the main characters to their isekai situation. They respond with sarcasm, pity, and annoyance at the struggles of all of the little chibi dudes calling them grand saviors and killing each other and stuff. Not a common trope. The MCs in general are pretty well written and believable characters, and show off their legs quite a bit. There's some good payoff towards the end as well as far as fan service goes. Another thing to mention is that it has a really nice symphonic soundtrack that I was impressed by. Quality girls, unique reactions to the isekai situation, interesting story. Could not tell you why nobody watched this. There are a lot of constructive messages about interpersonal relationships and the motives of others embedded throughout the story, good learning material for kiddos. And I'm telling you, Yuko rules.

Strange Dawn is a surprisingly good show for how obscure it is, but has some crucial flaws that prevent it from being great. In this case I think the flaws are more interesting to look at, so that's primarily what I'll be focusing on, but keep in mind that I think it's an overall good show worth watching. The writing is mostly solid, with a well-paced and engaging plot tackling interesting themes. The characters are well-rounded and seldom completely good or evil. The animation is also well-done, especially considering it's a 2000 show. The background music is charming and appropriate to the tone, and the voiceperformances are generally good. The art style, however, is one of the major problems. Except for the two main characters, all the characters are drawn in a super deformed style, or "chibis". While there's nothing inherently wrong about this, it really doesn't fit the tone of the show, which is a pretty serious and at times violent fantasy series. This style of character design is traditionally used for more comedic anime like Hetalia or Damekko Doubutsu, and so it just doesn't feel right to have to take them seriously when they talk about politics and war. I would assume that the choice to make the inhabitants of the strange world super deformed came at least partly from the realization that it's a simple and cheap way to draw and animate characters; anime is after all a medium that evolves through figuring out how to do things effectively on a small budget. However, this decision affects the show in more ways than just the general sense of tone mismatch. The premise of the show is a well-known formula: our protagonists get mysteriously transported to a foreign world, where they get involved in local affairs while trying to figure out how to get back home. The inhabitants of the foreign world all being tiny, the protagonists are initially feared and respected, as their sheer size makes them forces to be reckoned with, especially in a pre-industrial world where the main weapons are tiny swords and bows and arrows. Despite this, throughout the show they are mostly passive bystanders, victims and McGuffins. Although it tries to use this to further a theme of learning to stand up for yourself, the cinemanarrative dissonance of seeing these giant God-like creatures so easily restrained and bossed around by people so small they'd die if you stepped on one is too strong to really make it believable. Not only do the protagonists often feel powerless, they don't even feel important to the story a lot of the time. As characters they're well-written, they have an interesting relationship and they have some good development, and yet it feels like it'd only take 10 minutes in the writer's room to patch up the hole left if you just took them out. Of course, as with all works with this kind of setting, having a representative of Earth Humans present can make it easier to quickly and efficiently introduce the world and point out its differences to ours, which absolutely has its advantages, particularly in shorter works, but if that's all they're going to contribute it would be better to cut them and introduce the world more naturally. I half-seriously suspect that the only reason the main chars were added was so they had an excuse to use super deformed art designs for most of the cast and cut down on costs. Finally, although the plot is quite high quality most of the way through, the ending feels very abrupt. Without any inside info I can only speculate that perhaps it was intended to be longer (it did feel like a 2-cour show to me in terms of pacing for a large part of the show), but it got pulled prematurely. While this is a shame and I would have liked to see a better ending, I doubt it would have done much to alleviate its other issues.

If you've watched or read kingdom, this is the complete opposite. All of the characters are complete muppets. They have no motivation or reason for existing. Briefly, some grasp at the old, shriveled up and dry remains of a goal or motive, however the plot takes them, ties them to a string and makes them dance butt naked in a huge circle. That is what this show felt like to me. As far as being randomly dropped in another world, it's good. The main characters aren't in a videogame and they do not have cheat skills or knowledge of the far future. Literally their onlypower is to scream like lost puppies and go home. I'd like to mention that the writing is atrocious. Never before have I thought that whole episodes of a show sound like the demented monologues of the author(usually all it takes is a little effort to suspend my disbelief, but this time I didn't even feel like trying). Maybe it was only because of the terrible sub with spelling mistakes, but alas, even if that was true I fell like it would somehow make the tiny characters even more insufferable. The best part is that, at the end I thought they would make a "look how much we grew as people" and "the true adventure was the friends we made along the way" bullshit turn. but all I got was a black screen and credits. It positively shocked and startled me, seeing as I already had no expectations. As far as isekai goes it was very refreshing. So bad that I actually enjoyed some parts(that isn't to say that it didn't get painfully boring towards the second half).(To specify, I liked the setting and the main characters weren't bad as well. This premise could, by a better writer, be turned into legitimately good material) There are plenty of far better received shows that commit worse sins than this one. All in all I prefer a show that is not great through and through, Than one that could be seen as a masterpiece, but shits its pants halfway through. I have been watching so many good anime recently that, for a second, I lost my appreciation for the bad stuff. In conclusion, this story moved me so much, that I felt compelled to write a review and rate it as at least a 7, if not more.

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