Aquarion Anime Reviewed

The second half of Shoji Kawamori's 26-episode series Aquarion begins both by catching viewers up a bit on the first half, and by taking a plot leap forward. In Aquarion Silvia has a dream where she lives out the life of oh-so-typical anime Chosen One Apollo, thus providing a summary of his story to date, complete with flashbacks to earlier moments in the series. Meanwhile, his Shadow Angel enemies ponder their concerns out loud. They explain yet again that feral human Apollo is actually the reincarnation of a Shadow Angel named Apollonius, who betrayed his own kind for love of a human 12,000 years ago, and paid the terrible price. And they reveal for the first time that Apollo is fast regaining Apollonius' old powers, and that he may soon have the power to "pollinate the flowers of the Tree Of Life and create a fruit that gives birth to a new world."

Nonetheless, much of the rest of the Aquarion series is composed of episodic monster-of-the-week episodes in which Shadow Angel minions show up on Earth to attack. A few of those episodes highlight specific characters among the Earth resistance, like Pierre the ladies' man, or Jun the nerdy psychic. Others are just ridiculous side stories. In "Cosplay Of The Soul," the protagonists all try to understand each other by mimicking each other's clothes and parodying each other's behavior. In "Merge To Eat," several of the rail-thin female characters decide they need to lose weight, and comically starve themselves while obsessing about stuffing themselves. Ultimately, they give birth to microscopic Shadow Angels which destroy all food for miles around. (Meanwhile, the contemptuous Angels gripe about how gross humans are with their endless eating: "Mouths are sacred and meant for breathing in energy from the air and singing the songs of the stars!")

But ultimately, in the final episodes, Aquarion returns to the large scale and becomes what Kawamori's fans learned to expect in the wake of his Vision of Escaflowne and Earth Girl Arjuna: A series of huge, cosmic revelations, full of glowing CGI mandalas, titanic battles, soaring Yoko Kanno music, big twists and big emotions.

Once more, with way too much feeling

Some of those twists in Aquarion are heavily, even clunkily foreshadowed, while others come entirely out of nowhere; Kawamori's stories are more about the surging, overwhelming emotions that people experience in moments of crisis than about plot-craft. (It's pretty easy to pick that up from the dialogue, which has people constantly repeating each other in wonder, or crying out "What is this I'm feeling?" when experiencing Merge for the umpteenth time.)

So, for instance, when it's revealed that one character is actually a vampire, virtually no time is wasted on explaining what that actually means in terms of Aquarion's world, and once the protagonists' immediate rush of horror, anger and betrayal dies out, the show never makes an issue of it again. Another Aquarion character reveals his great lost love, learns she's engaged to another man, goes spectacularly insane, deals with his issues and moves on, all in 22 minutes. The approach isn't always satisfying; many of the episodes hit and run like Pixy Stick sugar rushes.

Aquarion pulls the melodrama together via Kawamori's usual bag of tricks: Intensely elaborate, beautiful animation and music that pushes and supports all the intensity of feeling, while distracting from Aquarion's weaknesses. It remains a beautiful series. At the same time, it's easy to walk away a bit frustrated. Protagonist Apollo never does really develop a personality beyond "wild-boy who somehow almost always does the right thing." The more nuanced characters repeat themselves over and over as they explain their inner conflicts.

But at least the second half of the Aquarion series strikes out more on its own. The first half was so iconic that it sometimes felt like an AMV edited together from shows past, from Voltron through Neon Genesis Evangelion. The second half finds its own feet with Kawamori's signature style. One episode, designed and animated by influential creator Utsunomiya Satoru, even takes the characters into an entirely new world, where the animation style and movement changes radically. As lovely as the rest of the Aquarion series is, it could still use more of that experimental spirit, that willingness to do its own thing.