It is the year 5030 AD.
In a distant corner of the universe, the last of humanities world, Zion,
sits as the most precious treasure in existence. Across the stars, humanity and Zion are
threatened by monstrous aliens known as Victim.
The only defense against these monsters are the five powerful Ingrids
known as the Goddesses. Zero Enna and
Hiead Gner are two hot headed youths with special powers who have come to the
pilot training academy, GOA, to fight for the chance to become the next pilots
to inherit these powerful machines. If
they don’t kill each other along the way, they could very well be humanities
last hope to free itself from the threat of Victim.
Pilot Candidate (or The Candidate for Goddess as it’s
called in Japan) popped up on my radar a long time ago. It was one of the first show to be aired on
Adult Swim as part of its late Saturday night Anime block back in 2002. The show only aired for a short while and has
seldom been seen (if ever again at all) in rotation since the blocks creation
almost 20 years ago (jeez im old). When
it first aired, I only saw a couple of episodes in full but never the whole
series but id heard nothing but bad things from other reviewers. Well for the sake of the odd bit of nostalgia
I’m taking my own swing at Pilot Candidate.
And already I can tell, I will regret it…a lot.
Pilot Candidates problems are clear by the end of Episode
0 and continue on without much need to correct or understand it has a lot of
kinks to work out. For starters,
originality may appear on the surface with the visuals and the mechas. But underneath, this is as generic a scifi
epic as you could get, with a strong hint of Shonen Anime tropes. Zero Enna is our Naruto of the series, a loud
mouthed brat who is determined to repeat himself over and over again and
declare (over and over again) that he’ll be the next big Hokage…sorry I mean
Goddess pilot. Hiead Gner is Zero’s
Sasuke, quiet, brooding, could care less about anyone around him. We’ve also got generic drill sergent with an
obvious sad past (Hijikata), a nerdy sidekick who is the appendix for the
series (Clay), the ace pilot (Teela), and the list goes on. There’s even a cute Cat Girl with Kizna but
we don’t see too much of her outside of one episode. I haven’t gotten to the story elements yet
but trust me when I say, if the characters don’t leave much of an impression,
the main premise wont either.
Once again, we’re at the ass end of nowhere and there’s
one shiny place of salvation left for humanity.
We don’t exactly know what happened to Earth or why Victim is dead set
on killing humanity (besides the obvious they’re Kaiju and that’s what most
Kaiju do). There isn’t even any
explanation as to how the Goddesses were created and why they seem to be the
only ones capable of taking them on. Oh
and their pilots, what makes them qualified?
Special training aside, the five pilots of the Goddesses are more bland
and boring than Zero and his classmates.
How are Pilots chosen from Candidates?
Why do we need replacements for Pilots so soon when the current roster
looks fine as is? What’s the deal with
Zero and Hiead’s powers, are they Newtypes? For 4 short episodes, a lot of
questions pop up and I know there are attempts made to answer at least one of
them when Zero isn’t yammering about something and rudely yelling “WOMAN!!!”
are a hot Doctor who just saved his life.
It’s a ton of mystery but its not good mystery. Even Sherlock would shove it off and let the
end of the world come swiftly for this less than qualified tale and its cast.
Let’s talk about the animation, shall we? The CG Goddesses do look somewhat impressive,
or at least different compared to the bland Victim or standard grunt
Ingrids. However, their animation is
hardly flawless for Goddesses. Sometimes
the style reminded me of proto Beast Wars/Reboot and other times, the frame
rate dropped so bad I thought I was watching a cutscene for a video game on
Windows 95. Granted the 2D and 3D
animation gels better than you’d expect but it still feels half assed and with
little heart given to it. Much like
Silent Mobius, it feels like the production lost interest before the first
episode was completed and just did what they could to get out of the project as
scot free as possible. Even the Goddess’
move incredibly clunky and we don’t get to see them do too much fighting. Nooo we need to cut back to Zero ogling from
GOA about how awesome they look and how he desperately wants to pilot the white
Goddess. Indeed, the bad animation only
helped fuel my thoughts that I was watching a poorly rendered video game tutorial
cutscene rather than an Anime…and I wanted to sell this game back to Gamestop
ASAP.
Pilot Candidate is off to a bad start and I cant really
see it getting much better as I go forward.
I guess it’s a little bit of a blessing that the upcoming weeks will
have shorter episode numbers (3 instead of 4), so watching them should go by
quick. However, some of you should be a
little excited. I can see Pilot
Candidate coming to share a fate similar to Silent Mobius last year, where I
tear it apart week after week for an incomprehensible plot and a cast that has
potential that is never met (though in this case the cast has ZERO potential
whatsoever…no pun intended).
Sigh, at least the music isn’t terrible. The opening theme is fun, the ending theme is
pretty soothing and the score offers a better mystery than the story…that’s
kind of sad when you think about it.
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