Kikaider 01 The Animation

This one is a hard one for me, since I really wanted to enjoy this, and for the first two episodes I did but after having watched the series this derives from this just fell flat to me. First off, I have to say visually and sonically the show is on par with the tv anime. Which of course means that the art, music, sound and animation are all really well done. Where this falls flat is the story, it all feels a bit half baked. There are themes and plot lines that are never fully explored. I would have liked to have spentmore time with the interactions between the robot companions for one thing. Also, this time around Professor Gill's intentions are never fully explained. In the first anime Dark was a mafia like organization and he wanted to extend his reach and become a defacto dictator. This time he just wants to build a giant robot and destroy the world for.... reasons.... we never really get to know what exactly his motivation for doing this is, last show he was a power hungry egomaniac, this time he's been reduced to generic bad guy that want's to do bad things. It also veers way too much on the side of the overly melodramatic "edgy" style anime story that was popular among anime studios around the time this was made. While the TV series did go in this direction a bit it never fully dipped it's feat in it, there was always a glimmer of hope, a feeling that everything wasn't going to end in pure desperation, that everything will be all right. You don't get that here. Gloom and doom fully takes over by the end and you are told that the meaning of being human is despair. All and all this is an anime that doesn't hold up to scrutiny or time and I feel like it's an unfitting end to a semi-modern classic.

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#5573