Urda

Overview: Urda is an anime that I managed to discover after asking myself a very dangerous question: "What is generally considered to be the worst anime ever licensed by Media Blasters?" The following paragraphs explain the business model of adapting anime in the United States during the 1990s when Media Blasters was a force in the anime industry. If you are an older anime fan and already know this stuff, or if you simply don't care, then skip to the plot section. Anime Dubbing and licencing vs. Adam Smith's Economic Theory: So who the HELL is Media Blasters?! In the year 2015 the absolutely DOMINANT force inlicensing, adapting, localizing, and dubbing anime in the West is Funimation. If you started watching anime within the last 4 years and live in the United States, they have probably dubbed every anime you've ever seen in your life! During the 1990s when I first started watching anime, there were many licensing/dub studios and no studio had a monopoly. Some of these included: Central Park Media, Media Blasters, 4kids, ADV, and Ocean. According to basic capitalist theory, monopolies are bad because with zero competition there is no incentive to make good products. You could simply produce total shit and everyone would be forced to buy it because they have no alternative. However, the example of anime dubbing/adaptation flies in the face of this theory and the average quality of English dubs and the quality of the anime being adapted to the US has actually gone up SIGNIFICANTLY since Funimation gained nearly 100% of the market share. Once all competition was eliminated, Funimation didn't have to worry about having better profit margins than their rivals and were able to focus on actual quality. They were even able to start taking risks with shows like Spice and Wolf, which would NEVER have been adapted in 1990s for fear that it would be an expensive bomb and bankrupt the studio. The huge problem with anime licensing in the 1990s was that everyone thought that the best way to have a high profit margin was to adapt REALLY cheap series that NOBODY in Japan wanted the rights to. If it turned out to be a hit with US audiences the dub studio made a killing in terms of profit, and if it flopped then the loss wouldn't be a crippling blow. This is also why dub studios hired really cheap voice actors and paid them like shit. Everything was about keeping down costs! The absolute CHAMPIONS of this low cost approach to licensing was a company called Media Blasters! Although a tiny company today, they actually survived the recession unlike any of their 90s peers! Even the once mighty ADV who actually spent money and owned huge property like Evangelion eventually fell while Media Blasters limped on. How did they do it? By buying the shittiest anime known to mankind and providing some of the worst dubs in history while relying solely on boobs and blood to make cash off American otaku! Media Blasters once adapted a 2 episode parody spinoff of an anime that was never even released outside Japan...simply because the opening theme featured full frontal nudity! So how bad does an anime have to be in order to stand out in the horrendous repertoire of Media Blasters?! Read on if you dare! Plot and Characters: The plot is that some astronauts in the year 2100 are testing out a warp drive and somehow end up back in the year 1943. The spaceship is captured by Nazis of course, so a US Army woman that defected from the German Army and whose origins are never really explained, must stop the Nazis from harnessing its super technology. This seems like the plot to an early Wolfenstein game that would have run on MS-DOS! What surprises people watching Urda is that the graphics in this anime also look EXACTLY like a game from that era of computer technology! Urda was made in 2003 and was one of the first ever "ONA" anime released exclusively on the internet! However, internet speeds even for brand new computers were fairly slow in 2003 and most of Japan was still using dial up at that time! In order to make this anime more download friendly, they broke a 30 minute anime movie into 5 chunks of 6 minutes and used VERY primitive graphics so that it wouldn't take up much hard drive space. The biggest problem besides the graphics is that despite the seemingly bare bones plot, they STILL try to fit way too much character information and story in each 6 minute chunk. This leads to wild revelation after wild revelation in a highly anti-climactic and rushed fashion. Think of the ending reveal in “Mars of Destruction” only repeated 5 times in every 6 minute episode! Obviously the plot becomes a laughable mess and the characters aren’t given any chance to be actually fleshed out. Urda earns a very clear “F” for story and characters. Graphics and sound: I’ve already mentioned how bad Urda is on a technical level and referenced that it looks like a cross between PS1 polygon cutscenes with perhaps late 1990s PC graphics. Great art isn’t necessary to having a great anime, but Urda is simply unacceptable! It was a stupid compromise to butcher the art in order to make it easy to download. If technology was too limited at the time for ONAs then they should have waited until computers were more advanced or released Urda as a PS1 shooter game. Instead they tried to force a project to work regardless of technological limitations and created an atrocity! The music really isn’t much better, but at least they refrained from using midi renditions of classical music like Mars of Destruction! Thank God for small miracles! Overall: Urda isn’t just an everyday bad anime. Urda is the kind of shit that you simply have to see to believe! If I were reading this review and hadn’t seen Urda, I would think that this review was some kind of prank. Clearly no animation studio would ever greenlight an idea this bad! The problem is that this wasn’t made by an animation studio that cared about making money. This anime was released by a tiny studio created by the same man that wrote and directed Urda! Basically, this is the anime equivalent of a vanity published novel. The Japanese director who simply goes by “Romanov” had the money and didn’t give a fuck about how badly this would bomb. He was making this product for the lulz and no one could stop him! This is often how the absolute worst films are made: Birdemic, The Room, Manos, etc. One stubborn man with way too much spare money and a REALLY idiotic vision. Urda has truly earned its place in the pantheon of terrible anime!

Firstly I have to say: "Urda" could have been great. Set on the western front of the second world war, a landscape relatively unexplored by anime, "Urda" threw together a bunch of random plot elements like Nazis, UFO and time travel ... and ends up with a surprisingly intriguing sci-fi tale. But alas, the potential went to waste, as the end product felt more like the result of someone experimenting with CG from his home PC than a proper anime. With its short length and undercooked story and characters, watching "Urda" is about as satisfying as getting served a starter when you're hankering for afull three-course meal. In fact, the anime could almost be passed off as a multi-part trailer to a longer, greater series. From "Urda"'s often amateurish production values, I'd estimate its budget to be around the astronomical figure of £5. One of the primary offenders is the cranky animation, which was often so shoddy that I had trouble comprehending what was happening on screen. That said, "Urda" has its moments; at times, the direction felt sharp, and it seems to have a good instinct for handling mood and atmosphere, particularly with its use of music. The action sequences possessed a surreal stylishness, and made me think they took inspiration from movies like "The Matrix" or the cut scenes of some video game. Some of it was pretty cool, but other parts were blown out of all proportions. In one such scene, as two characters dueled on a flying plane - literally "on" it, as in stood on top of it - another plane got destroyed above them, and the battling characters managed to snag a piece of debris each, and promptly started hacking away at each other with the pieces of broken plane. Honestly, I shit you not; I'm not even exaggerating. Complaints aside, "Urda" deserves some plaudits for being as good as it is given the obvious limitations of its production. The ending is especially brilliant, but if anything made me lament even more that the show was held so far back from its potential. I would love to see it expanded into a longer series by a proper anime studio.

I am speechless. How do more people not know about this dumpster fire? It's easily one of the worst anime I have ever seen, somehow failing on every front. Though, paradoxically, I had so much more fun watching it than many of the anime immediately above it on my list, because it is hilarious. There are moments of totally unaware comedy gold that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life, and that is in and of itself an incredible feat. Beginning with the story, it is ridiculous from the start. An astronaut from 2112 is flungback into the past to 1943 Germany, where cartoonish Nazis attempt to track down her spaceship, while a scrappy team of busty anime women do everything in their power to stop them. I'm not exaggerating, it is every bit as campy and off-the-wall as it sounds. This isn't even to mention the bargain bin tropes used dozens of times in 30 minutes, or the time travel 'twists', or the snarky sidekick. However, the shoddy story is nothing compared to the 'art' that Urda puts forward. This anime, released in 2002, makes the bold decision of making a 100 percent CG anime. I don't think I even have to say more than that, but I will, because it's funny. Nothing, not a single thing, looks good in this anime, even for 2002. There are no discernible facial expressions, the characters move in stiff and unnerving ways, the 'fight scenes' only consist of their arms flailing wildly in different directions, the physics are totally nonsensical, the lighting is garbage, and the backgrounds look straight out of a PS1 game. The sound is somehow just as bad, serenading the ears with a clunky electronic synth that only serves to make literally every scene that much funnier. This is compounded by the voice acting being even worse, sounding like they recruited from and recorded on a porn set. This garbage bag is tied off with a neat bow by the characters, who are so ridiculous and paper-thin that you can't help but laugh. Overall, Urda is unadulterated bottom-of-the-barrel trash, and I highly recommend it. Best viewed with a room full of your closest friends, and possibly drunk.

Only one creator worked on URDA -- Romanov Higa. He had others handle the voice acting and music, but all of the visuals are his and his alone, using a combination of Hash: Animation Master and LightWave 3D. He self-published this work on the web in segments before distributors picked it up. So this work has more of a cult audience than guaranteed mainstream appeal. As a celshader artist, URDA inspires me on two levels. First, it contains one of the finest celshaded character models that I've seen to date: Janet Hunter. She actually looks hand-drawn, and she has a wonderful personality to boot. Second,Romanov Higa exploits the celshaded 3D medium to the fullest, from the use of the 3D camera to atmospheric and lighting effects. He's not locked down to a camera stand, and he knows it. While I strongly recommend that celshader artists view URDA at least once, casual fans may prefer something else. URDA's only 30 minutes long, and not all of the character models reach Janet Hunter's level of quality. Also, as the work of one man and not an entire studio of artists, URDA does not have the finely polished look of the high-budget ANIMATRIX shorts. For a more moving 30-minute film by a single artist, casual fans might prefer VOICES OF A DISTANT STAR. For folks intrigued by celshaded 3D animation, though, URDA is well worth a look.

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