Aquarion Volume 3   Starring (voice): Takuma Terashima, Tomokazu Sugita and Yumi Kakazu MVM RRP: £15.99 MVD2288 Certificate: 12 Available 01 February 2010

Earth has been devastated in the Great Catastrophe. At their moment of greatest weakness and after 12000, in the Holy Genesis year 0011, the Shadows Angels of Atlandia have arisen to attack mankind. Man's only hope lays in the mecha machine ‘Angel Aquarion’ a multi-part craft that when joined together creates a powerful robot. But to make the machine work its pilots have to merge their souls with the machinery...

Aquarion: Volume 3 and the mecha show trundles on, this time with another seven episodes. There is a problem with shows like this, they are effectively techno porn, watched predominantly for the various facets of its hardware. Therefore the show’s creators are bound to put a certain percentage of the mecha’s transformations on the screen and include the obligatory fight scenes. This though leaves little room for engaging stories and so it is with Aquarion.

The two DVD set opens with episodes fourteen to twenty - Shining Shadows; Aquarion’s First Love; Black Mirror; Merge to Eat; Cosplay of the Soul; Mischief Without Malice; and Sound of an Angel’s feather. The stories are a mixed bunch. in the previous release it felt like the filler episodes were creeping up in number and there is nothing in this presentation which dispels this feeling.

So, we have stories about the loves and neurosis of the pilots, a rather spiffy story about diets, a quick hint of a swimsuit episode, before they all inevitably descend beneath the requisite number of mecha changes and battles. However, shows like this live less on their intrinsic ability to tell a story and more on their ability to create flashy techno porn. Here the show also has a problem with the visual style, lacking cohesion between the CGI elements and the 2D character animation; the bright geometries of the CGI tend to make the 2D animation flatter than it actually is.

The presentation of the disc remains the same as volume one. The show is presented in its original 1.78:1 anamorphic aspect ratio with a choice of either a pretty good English 5.1 or the original Japanese 2.0 audio track, with subtitles.

Having suffered a lack of extras in the previous release, this volume makes up for it by having a full length commentary for episode fifteen, a light and frothy affair featuring J. Michael Tatum (director and voice of Toma) and Christopher Bevins (Apollo). There is a short documentary, The Creation and Development of the Series (22 min, 43 sec) which takes a peek behind the creative process with input from the show's creator Shoji Kawamori. There is also the 2005 Stage Drama (14 min, 41 sec) where the original Japanese cast present a short film, The Search For Fudo, to a live audience, the piece is designed to amuse.

If you are a fan of Mecha shows then, in truth, this is better than most, just don’t expect a great narrative to go along with the visuals.

7

Charles Packer