JuJuneNephthys
November 4, 2019
Mixed Feelings
Submarine 707R immediately caught my eye, when browsing through OVAs, because (1) I’m a softcore military otaku—I have a childish wonder for things like trains, tanks, and battleships. Very similarly to *Jean Roque Lartigue and *Megane’s reasons for liking them, it isn’t a fascination for murder or war, but an appreciation for the design of the machine; the sheer love of wanting to ride in them and experience their grandeur in person. (2) There aren’t many anime series that primarily focus on submarines, the only other ones that come to mind are Blue Submarine No. 6 and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Full MetalPanic has maritime operatives in a submarine but the primary focus is on the giant robots, called Arm Slaves.
Note: An anime with trains that I particularly love is Galaxy Express 999 (the series, not the film version), for tanks—I would suggest Girls und Panzer, and Haifuri is a good series for battleships, or you can watch Kancolle if you want anthropomorphized ship girls. Jean Roque Lartigue is a bright-eyed inventor from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Megane is the military otaku from Urusei Yatsura (as well as Lum’s number one fan).
The mangaka of Submarine 707, Satoru Ozawa, is actually the creator of Blue Submarine No. 6 as well—I couldn’t dig up anything on his background, like whether or not he had served in the Navy, but the central focus of his bibliography is apparently submarines. Out of the two, I definitely prefer the anime adaptation of Submarine 707 over Blue Submarine No. 6, the 3D renderings of the animation are a lot more clean and exciting to look at. It can be said that Blue Submarine has beautiful character designs, *Range Murata drew them after all, but when the majority of the OVA is focused on the submarine battles, you MUST put more effort in the CG! I was actually quite fond of the character designs in 707, they reminded me of *Planētes—realism with subtle cartoon features—also reminiscent of *Osamu Tezuka’s style.
*Range Murata is famous for series like Last Exile and Cop Craft. Planētes is a famous manga about astronauts that was adapted in an anime. Osamu Tezuka is the ‘Father of Manga’ and is well-known for creations, such as: Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and many more.
For something that isn’t even picked up by most pirating sites, *let alone licensors, Submarine 707R is a gorgeous OVA (especially for it’s time, circa 2003) and has an all-star voice cast. Admiral Red’s seiyū is *Unshō Ishizuka, Gorō Kusaka’s is *Akira Ishida, and Yū’s (Captain Yōhei Hayami’s wife) is *Aya Hisakawa. The next segment will go into the story, so there will be spoilers! You have been warned!
*Was formerly licensed by the US branch of Geneon but is now OOP.
•Unshō Ishizuka is a veteran seiyū who is famous for his roles in Violence Jack as Violence Jack, Jet Black in Cowboy Bebop, Mr. Satan in Dragon Ball Z, Van Hohenheim in Full Metal Alchemist, Joseph Joestar in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Professor Oak (Ōkido) in Pokémon, Quent Yaiden (Wolf’s Rain), and Gōzaburō Kaiba in Yū-Gi-Ō!
•Akira Ishida is famous for voicing Kaworu Nagisa in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Xellos in Slayers, Judō in Berserk, Wizardmon in Digimon, Gaara in Naruto, Athrun Zala in Gundam SEED, Shūichi Natori in Natsume Yūjin-chō, Ryūnosuke Uryū in Fate Zero, Byakuya Togami in Danganronpa, Yūrakutei Yakumo in Shōwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū, Tōji Sōya in March Comes in Like a Lion, and Eishi Tsukasa in Shokugeki no Sōma.
•Aya Hisakawa is notable in Aa! Megami-sama as Skuld, Cardcaptor Sakura as Kero, Bishōjo Senshi Sailor Moon as Sailor Mercury, Shōjo Kakumei Utena as Miki Kaoru, Fruits Basket as Yuki Sōma, and Dragon Ball Super as Bulma.
The opening sequence is instantly eye-catching, since *Hideaki Anno was the director for that sequence. There’s a chivalrous feeling to the whole series; you might imagine that the world might be like this one if all was fair in love and war. The story takes place in the near-future, put simply, the organization led by Admiral Red (USR—Undersea/Underwater Silence Revolution) is an environmentalist organization that wants to stop the human exploitation of the seas’ resources… not much else is known about his motives, which gives him and his powerful fleet an air of mystery. The USR meets in a conference with a representative for each of the coinciding nations, colloquially known as the PKN (Peace Keeping Navy), to fight ‘terrorists.’ Admiral Red’s ideals seem to mirror first inscription of the *Georgia Guidestones: ‘Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.’ (as well as the tenth: ‘Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.’) While that IS ideal for the planet, that kind of thinking can easily go wrong from a humanitarian angle, harkening back to something that a famous villain from *Rokka no Yūsha once said, ‘We would only have to kill 500,000 citizens to maintain order!’
*Hideaki Anno is the director of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The Georgia Guidestones is a monument, obviously meant to imitate the Bible’s ten commandments, that was anonymously erected in 1980 in Elbert County, Georgia—that has strange, eugenicist engravings on it. Like, ‘guide reproduction wisely’ and ‘let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.’ And, Rokka no Yūsha is a famous light novel series that got an anime adaptation.
Admiral Red sabotages the meeting by attacking the PKN and in the old clunker (the *707), Captain Yōhei Hayami and his crew show up (fatefully) late to the meeting. The USR outnumbers the 707, 17–1, but Captain Hayami is still able to outsmart Admiral Red and sink his main ship, the *U-X. The OVA concludes with Captain reconvening with the crew, after modding the 707, to go out and take the rest of the USR’s fleet on! The 707 becomes the main flagship, representing the PKN.
*Truth be told, the 707 and the U-X were the only ships, in the OVA, that seemed as though they would realistically be hydrodynamic.
While the story of Submarine 707 is pretty solid and straight-forward, the character writing was severely lacking. I was fine with the Captain’s personality, seeing as every anime ship captain after Captain Jūzō Okita in Uchū Senkan Yamato is practically the same person. Admiral Red was an interesting character but I would have liked to know more about his motivations, I’m guessing that he’s similar to Gendo Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion because, in the first OVA, there’s a plaque in his mansion that says, ‘*God is in his Heaven/All is right with the world.’ Since the original Submarine 707 manga came out in the ‘60s, I’m guessing that Hideaki Anno borrowed from it but I haven’t read 707’s manga, so I can’t say for sure what the origin of the slogan is.
*NERV’s slogan from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
It was interesting how the series established Captain Yōhei Hayami and Admiral Red as direct foils of each other, the dynamic exemplified with their interactions among family. Admiral Red’s mansion had an enormous garden with his docile wife and three children, who have strangely uniform personalities for children, like they were bred in a cloning facility! The scene with them pans out with blue butterflies flittering around—meaning behind that: *blue roses or butterflies often indicate a step into the uncanny.
*This trend in media started because blue roses cannot grow in nature and have to be synthetically produced.
Adversely, Captain Hayami’s family is shown to live in more of a natural habitat. When second in command, Gorō Kusaka, is sent to recruit the captain to the PKN conference, Hayami is casually lounging on the couch, while his pretty wife carries in a tray of tea; so, for the most part, the captain appears to have a normal, suburban family unit. During this scene is where I get a bit iffy on the character writing. Captain Hayami’s daughter is introduced—she’s obviously elementary school age—and Gorō gawks at her, obviously checking her out.
After he leaves, it shows a scene where the child is lounging, wearing ‘revealing’ (as in ass-cheek hugging) bloomers and a tank-top that falls over her shoulders... you can almost see her nipples! Why does a show about submarines have to have random loli fanservice in it? Not to mention that a grown man, in the Navy, has been shown to have a sexual attraction to her? Why? I haven’t read any of Satoru Ozawa’s actual manga, but I assume that he likes little girls… since the most sexualized character in Blue Submarine No. 6 is Mutio, a human-fish hybrid that looks like a small girl? The weirdness continues when his daughter reads a letter that her father wrote her mother, repeating out loud that her father wants to ‘dock in her [mother’s] port.’ Obviously, the writing has a lot to be desired if the underaged girl is included in the sexy ‘MILF’ package.
In the end, I came for the submarines—writing be damned. I was impressed with how Production Reed animated the CG ships, even including small details, like the submarines losing balance during shockwaves and including the measure of buoyancy that were necessary to keep the submarines balanced. The final battle between the U-X and the 707 was really cool—Captain Hayami was even able to use a shockwave to wiggle the 707 out from underneath an underwater crater! There’s a lot more that I could go into with the mechanics of the submarines, like the specs of the 707 or how 707 was able to beat the U-X (even when the U-X was using special torpedoes to render the 707’s sonar system useless), but just watch these scenes for yourself to know what all the hype is about! Since my sole attraction to the series is based on the submarine mechanics, I rate Submarine 707R a 5/10!
