{"id":387,"date":"2006-05-16T16:06:18","date_gmt":"2006-05-16T21:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=387"},"modified":"2006-05-16T16:06:18","modified_gmt":"2006-05-16T21:06:18","slug":"read-or-die-ova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=387","title":{"rendered":"Read or Die OVA"},"content":{"rendered":"

This show looked really interesting in the preview, but failed to deliver once I sat down and watched it. I like bond-esque spy stories, and I even like send-ups of those sorts of stories, and the preview made this seem that way. It wasn’t. On the upside, the series is only four episodes and fits on a single disk, so at least it was over quickly.<\/p>\n

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Read Or… something else. Don’t be fooled by the opening. This is not a fan service vehicle.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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There were just too many ill-fitting elements in here. The main character is a secret agent (agent Paper) who is obsessed with books. She has a gift for manipulating paper in combat. For example, she can take a piece of looseleaf and use it like an edged weapon. She can even throw it and stick it into solid wood. This was an interesting ability, but they took it too far. <\/p>\n

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Just imagine what she could do if someone introduced her to corrugated cardboard. <\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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She goes on to make paper weapons that can cut metal in half, stop bullets, shield against explosions, and do any number of implausible things. I was even willing to accept that for the sake of the story, but they didn’t stop there. At one point she runs around in a swirl of paper and crafts a gigantic paper airplane. Another agent throws it off the roof to get it going, and from there it is able to keep up with a jet and even engage in a bit of dogfighting. <\/p>\n

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I’m sorry but I am not buying this.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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Whatever<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The enemies are strange as well. They are clones of inventors or leaders from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and they have been “given super powers”. They are called the I-Jin. This seems like a lot of trouble for the villian. His plan seems to be:<\/p>\n

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  1. Steal DNA of famous people who are now dead\n<\/li>\n
  2. Clone them\n<\/li>\n
  3. Convince them to join in his crazy destroy-the-world doomsday plan\n<\/li>\n
  4. Teach them to fight\n<\/li>\n
  5. Imbue them with super powers and super weapons\n<\/li>\n
  6. Send them to fight the good guys\n<\/li>\n
  7. Steal some rare books.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It seems like you could skip the first four steps by just using some of your henchmen instead of cloning famous people. What’s the point?<\/p>\n

    For the most part the I-Jin ride around in ridiculous ways. They have tons of technology, but still they choose to travel using giant insects and other absurd things<\/p>\n

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    Note to evil masterminds: When acquiring rare books, the lunatic-on-a-giant-friggin-grasshopper method isn’t as effective as you’d think. <\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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    The bad guy sends his army of goofy clones to collect books which should be more or less easily available. The most important one is actually for sale<\/em> in an old bookstore. He could have just bought it, but instead he sends some goofball riding a giant grasshopper to steal it. The resulting battle tips his hand to the good guys. He didin’t even need<\/em> that army of warriors – all he really needed was a library card and a photocopier. <\/p>\n

    In the opening moments of the show, an I-Jin gets on top of the white house, blows the crap out of it and sets it on fire, and then asks the President of hte United States, “You there! Is this the library?”<\/p>\n

    So his plan was to blow up a building and then<\/em> find out if it was the library? Doesn’t that seem to go against the stated goal of acquiring books from said library? Are we to believe the bad guy took the time to clone and train this I-Jin but never bothered to give him a map of Washington DC? If your supersoldiers are wandering around asking for directions to famous locations, you are doing something<\/em> wrong.<\/p>\n

    Of course, no evil plan is complete without a gigantic and heretofore secret floating fortress, and this isn’t the sort of villian to forget a detail like that. His base is many times larger than the largest aircraft carrier ever built. It has massive moving platforms and endless catwalks which are perfect for all the final showdowns that need to take place. We learn that the base is really just a launchpad for an orbital rocket. Apparently he’s also completed his own space program in secret, and plans to launch a rocket that will…<\/p>\n

    Oh, who cares? It’s gibberish.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n\n\n

    How could he afford such a thing? Must have used non-union labor. I’ll bet it doesn’t follow OSHA standards, either.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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    This show had a lot of style, the characters were interesting, and the artwork was great. But all of that wasn’t enough to carry a story full of holes and contrivances, and filled with implausibe things. There is only so much stuff you can put into one story. A movie about vampires is cool. A movie about space aliens is cool. But a movie where the Predator and the Cylons team up to fight Vampire Superman, a clone of Hercules, and Mecha Abe Lincoln is just goofy, and that’s the sort of mess we have here. Too much unrelated and ridiculous stuff to swallow.<\/p>\n

    Another note is that the writers are not<\/em> fans of America, or of George Bush in particular. The Americans march into combat time and again only to be slaughered en masse. (As far as I can tell, they are the only ones who die at the hands of the bad guy. A lot of them die. Thousands. Sometimes this seems to be almost played for laughs.) The U.S. president in the show is an obvious parody of Bush. He has a Texan accent and even mispronounces “nuclear”. He’s also a bumbling fool who pisses his pants not once, but three different times<\/em> during the show. The series is only four episodes, so they devoted a lot of time to presidential pants-wetting. Nobody is going to accuse this show of being overly subtle.<\/p>\n

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    In the end, the whole thing is a waste of time. It’s worse than a waste of time. It’s contrived and clumsy, preposterous and ill-conceived. The climax is predictable and the ending is lame. This show makes me think that an anime-themed MST3k would be a good idea.<\/p>\n

    One further note is that this show is different from the 7-disc TV series. Steven watched that and his review<\/a> suggests that the TV version has many of the same issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This show looked really interesting in the preview, but failed to deliver once I sat down and watched it. I like bond-esque spy stories, and I even like send-ups of those sorts of stories, and the preview made this seem that way. It wasn’t. On the upside, the series is only four episodes and fits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}