Sixteen years after an Alien Spacecraft crashed into
Graviton Island, life goes on for the human race. A-Ko Magami and her best friend C-Ko Kotobuki
have just started at a new school and have quickly found themselves on the
radar of the beautiful B-Ko Daitokuji, who is determined to win the heart of
oddball C-Ko and crush the overly powerful A-Ko. As their unexpected war threatens to consume
their school, a threat from deep space is fast approaching Earth and has it’s
sights set on one member of this peculiar trio.
All A-Ko wants to do is be a normal school girl with her best friend. But between a crazed beautiful genius and her
entourage, an Alien invasion and the search for a missing princess from space,
that’s easier said than done.
Anime is a medium that has no ceiling and no limits. It is a sandbox of possibilities and is
capable of bringing to life any kind of premise anyone can dream of. Will it always make sense? Probably not but sometimes it doesn’t have to
so long as your having fun making it and watching it. Why open this review with that sentiment? Because it is the best way to sum up Project
A-Ko, an over the top and glorious love letter to the best elements of 70’s and
80’s Anime…that just so happened to be made during the heyday of the 80’s. That means its action packed, loaded with
beautiful girls and brought to life with some of the best looking animation in
the genre.
If you come into Project A-Ko with any kind of
expectations, you’ll either come away surprised, confused, or
disappointed. But hopefully it’s more of
the former two of those outcomes in combination, that’s the best way to look at
this movie. There is a central plot
brewing in the background but honestly, it’s meant to play second fiddle to
what amounts to a series of short skits involving the misadventures of three
beautiful high school students, each with their own likeable quirks and scene
stealing moments. The titular A-Ko is a
fun loving cutie with superhuman abilities and a penchant for being late (kind
of a mish mash of a few very familiar superheroes if you can spot the
references…and man are there a lot in general but we’ll get to that). Her best friend, C-Ko, might look like an
overbearing crybaby…and she is BUT her whinning and constant crying never comes
off as truly annoying and you love the bond she and A-Ko have, as well as her
oblivious reactions to any kind of danger around her (one such instance late in
the movie produces one of its most laugh out loud moments). And then there’s B-Ko, who is easily one of
the best and yet creepiest characters here with her beautiful and proper
attitude matched only by her hilarious obsession with C-Ko and the lengths
she’ll go to win her heart. When these
three share the screen together, you’ll almost forget that there you’re
supposed to be worried about the bigger threat heading their way. Even in the face of an alien invasion, this
is A-Ko, B-Ko and C-Ko’s world, everyone else is just living in it.
Project A-Ko could’ve just been about the three main
girls getting into various trouble around their school and that would’ve been
fine. But this movie is about blasting
away the excess and going full on crazy at the drop of a dime. Not only do we get A-Ko fighting B-Ko, who’s
sporting bikini battle armor (it’s as ridiculous and hot as it sounds), but
you’ve also got super powered masculine school girls, insectoids battle
fighters being used as projectiles during one of A-Ko’s battles, slick looking
fighters charging into battle against a miles long spaceship, missile barrages,
sword duels and a bombardment of mecha suits built by B-Ko just to kill
A-Ko…yeah there’s a lot and it always feels like steam might come out of your
head from all this crazy. It’s the best
kind of crazy though. Thanks to some
absolutely stellar animation, Project A-Ko invites you to the action that never
lets up or the absurdity that never tries to justify itself. It’s just about having fun and making jokes
at the expense of Anime classics like Macross and Fist of the North Star. All of this is done to some amazing sequences
that even more modern Anime might have trouble matching and one of the most
kick ass soundtracks I have ever heard in an Anime film and should be owned by
all fans.
Hoo boy, I feel like ive tried my best to avoid going
full blown fanboy with this film. In
truth, I could’ve just written “THIS ANIME IS EPIC AWESOME AND FUN” multiple
times and just left it at that. Project
A-Ko isn’t out to be the next great epic like Gundam, Macross or Legend of the
Galactic Heroes. It’s here to have three
totally different female leads get into trouble on a galactic scale and God
help anyone who is dumb enough to get in the way of their carnage. If you’re looking for things to make sense,
this isn’t the Anime for you. But if you
want a full blown demo of what Anime in the 80s was capable of, aka filmmaking
with no limits beyond those of the imagination, then Project A-Ko is the Anime
you’ve been waiting all of your life to see.
It’s a love letter to the fandom during one of Animes biggest and most
blossoming time periods and I think you’ll fall in love with it too if you give
I a chance. This is Anime, as Neo put
it, “Without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where
anything is possible.” So simply…this is
Anime…and a great reminder of why I love this genre so freaking much. Thanks Project A-Ko.
9.5/10
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