Oban Star-Racers

Since she was 5 years old, Eva Wei has lived in a boarding school, hoping for word from her father Don, now the greatest race coordinator in the world. When she was a child, he was a loving man, but then they watched together as his wife, Eva's mother, died in a racing accident, and he turned cold and distant and sent Eva away. Just after her 15th birthday, she leaves school on a rocket bike she's assembled in her spare time, and she seeks him out, but he doesn't recognize her, and he's so snappish and demanding that she borrows a name from a pin-up poster--Molly--to introduce herself with.

When she fixes a problem with one of his vehicles, he fires an absentee mechanic and announces that she's hired, which comes in handy for her shortly thereafter, when he's ordered to assemble a team of specialists and catch an alien transport into deep space, where his team will be Earth's first representatives in the Grand Race of Oban, which pits 96 alien species against each other. Earth has recently been under attack by a powerful alien civilization, the Crog, and needs to make a strong showing in the grand race as part of its tactics against the Crog.

Eva winds up on the transport to space only accidentally, after she defends her father's chosen pilot, Rick, against a Crog sabotage attempt, but before long she's taking Rick's place temporarily after more sabotage sidelines him. She's also made a friend in the form of a weird little old man and developed a crush on a cute alien prince. Problem is, her father, still smarting over his wife's death, is passionately against letting women race. And the cute alien prince is a competitor she must defeat. And the alien who killed her mother also has a stake in the proceedings. And on top of all this, Don Wei refuses to be impressed with Eva, or even tolerant of her, no matter how much she succeeds. Before long, she's racing to show him up as much as she's racing to save Earth.

How would a noseless character smell?

Oban Star-Racers has its minor problems--for instance, the otherwise spunky, impulsive Eva reiterates her issues with her father too many times per Oban Star-Racer episode without actually doing anything about them, since she's obviously waiting for a key moment late in this 26-episode series. And it's hard to buy Don Wei as the greatest race coordinator Earth has, since he's a harsh, cranky, cruel tyrant whose idea of building team confidence is a grudging "You didn't do as badly as I expected," and whose idea of race strategy is constantly telling his pilots to bail out, give up and stop stubbornly using whatever creative, risky and generally successful tactic they're using.

But minor irritations aside, Oban Star-Racers is a really nifty series that strikes a balance between episodic adventure--practically every episode brings a new race and a new alien enemy--and an ongoing storyline that develops rapidly. Eva's relationships with her crew, her competitors, her father and even herself change over time, and those subsidiary characters change as well, occasionally even proving that they have lives of their own, not dependant on her as protagonist. The Oban Star-Racers series is animated in a unique style--it's bright and jagged, with occasional forays into slick CGI in the vehicles--and with some particularly odd character designs: The human characters are cartoony and simple and lack noses, which makes them look something like Marvel Minimates.

The Oban Star-Racers series is an international co-production, conceptualized in France but animated in Japan, which may explain the weird look and slightly muted feel, more like a French comic than a standard anime adventure. (There's just a little hint of French series like Jean David Morvan's Wake in the big, complicated universe of Oban.) Still, it has a familiar Japanese sensibility too, in the energetic, stubborn female lead, her thorny family relationship and her desire to succeed and prove herself at all cost. And the series' humor, with its sweat droplets and collapsed-character reaction shots, is pretty Japanese too. But overall, this is a solid blending of sensibilities for something that feels familiar and fresh at the same time.

I wasn't thrilled by the voice dubs in this Oban Star-Racers series--Eva is a little grating at first, but she becomes familiar, and supporting characters like Don Wei and Rick are well done, but the narration is as cheesy as something of an ADV dub from the '80s. Unfortunately, Shout! Factory doesn't include a subtitle option on these discs, so it's English dub or nothin'.

-Tasha