Planetes

Well, I’d built up such hopes for PLANETES that I bought the box-set without having seen an episode! When I finally sat down to watch it, I found that it was rather different to the image I had in my head. I had imagined a fairly grim, low-key story, with a very modern high-gloss look. It took a while to reconcile with what the show actually was…

In contrast to the cold sf I expected, PLANETES is very down-to-earth and has a lot of humour. Some have criticised so-called filler episodes, but I really liked the slice-of-life stuff, to the point of being disappointed when the plot started taking over. Chobits was a show where I thought the slice-of-life was better than the “plot”, but in the case of PLANETES the plot really added something, developing the characters in important ways, and feeling like it had a point. The ending was satisfying, for a change.

The animation is high-quality, but is definitely old-school – it looks hand-drawn as opposed to the “perfect” look of so much modern anime. Although like all modern anime it was coloured in computer, there’s not much use of fancy filters or lighting effects. If you like quality drawing like Akira etc then this is for you.

I don’t like the OP/ED or in-show songs – they were fairly banal forgettable pop. Background music was subtle but good.

The characters were very much “types”, which was a bit disappointing. Still, I ended up caring about the main characters, particularly Hachi, but Tanabe was infuriatingly stupid at times (can’t go into detail without spoilers).

The DVD sub was pretty good. The dub was the usual mediocrity, despite being directed by the guy who played Rick Hunter. The audio dramas were weak, not really worth it, but audio commentaries on 8 episode by the japanese crew were interesting and enjoyable. There are also some NASA interviews, but those are annoyingly stretched out over several volumes when they could have been edited down to 5 or 10 minutes.

Overall this is a very good anime, and I recommend it to all, bearing in mind the old-school style and a couple of annoying characters.

(I have to point out that the Western spelling of this show’s title as “Planet ES” is wrong. The title “Planetes” is one word, a Greek word meaning “wanderers”, from which the modern word “planet” was derived.)