Vandread DVD #1

^{(0 = Worst, 10 = Best)}

David Buckley (Society Communications Officer at time of writing)

“Women Are Monsters!” boasts the back of the DVD box. That alone was enough to get my attention when I reached into the AnimeSoc cupboard and tried to pull out something to watch. Earth sends a big colony ship out to populate space, but somewhere along their way, the men and the women fall out. The result? Two planets, one populated by women (Mejale), one by men (Tarak), seemingly in the middle of a huge war. The men are dominated by their pride, the women ruled by their vanity. We’re dropped into Vandread in the middle of a Tarak propoganda video: “Women, are monsters, and men were once their plaything. They ate our forefathers’ innards, sucking them dry of all life.”

Vandread is a mecha action/comedy/romance series made by GONZO, set in the slightly unoriginal location of “space.” It has “bounce” by the bucketload, and not of the fanservice kind - of the happy and carefree kind.

The Vandread storyline is centred around on Hibiki (a 3rd class citizen on the men’s homeworld), who sneaks into the men’s brand new battleship in order to steal one of the “Van type” powered suits. Unfortuantely for Hibiki, the ship takes off just after he finds it. To make matters worse, the ship is attacked by a female pirate ship as soon as it reaches open space. In the end, Hibiki, two other guys and the entire female pirate crew end up being warped some huge distance from either homeworld in a ship being half swallowed up by it’s own power source - and we’re into the main plot.

Vandread approaches all this in a superb light-hearted way - from the way the characters interact to the way the men and women find things out about each other. There’s some great confused lines from both the female (”I hear men have /tubes/ ...”) and male (”What do they /keep/ in there?”) sides of the ship, lots of pretty artwork and generally nice sound.

The sound overall is good - voice acting in the sub was very solid; the dub was nearing being actually /good/, too - though it’s not like Vandread was all that difficult a project to dub well. The characters in both the sub and the dub are generally pretty jovial - with a few exceptions, notably BC who’s got a rather more dark/serious personality (and who unfortunately somewhat overacts her part in the dub). I’d like to say the script was perfect, but there were a few things that irritated me - not the least all the talk of “proof of existance” (which I suspect of being an artifact of the translation not being as good as it could be) and a few lines that got changed from the sub to the dub made slightly less sense.

Music is excellent; there’s a bouncing “dance” feel throughout the disc, with more brooding music during the serious fight scenes. Certainly it’s well chosen and well-written - the OST is probably one of my favourites out of all the OSTs I have, and it never really started to bring itself forward in the series like the .hack//SIGN music did after I’d listened to the OST a few times - which I thought was brilliant: I could still watch Vandread even after knowing how it was put together!

Characters are fun and quite believable, at least in personality. There’s not much character development on this disc so a few of the characters seem to lack a little depth, but the general pace of the goings on seems to somehow swamp that out.

One of the downsides to the series is the amount of fanservice. It’s not like there’s a lot - far from it. But that just makes what little there is stand out. Otherwise, visuals are generally OK - the artwork is generally well done, whough it occasionally seems to switch styles for one or two short scenes. I adore the way the faces of some other characters move like they’re made of jelly, and the CG is fantastic. I’m still unsure why I think that. Normally, CG that stands out heavily from the non-CG stuff really gets on my nerves, but for some reason, it doesn’t here - perhaps because CG and non CG are rarely seen at the same time. The motion in the CG does occasionally look a little off (the Van-type swings it’s sword through space hitting nothing, then everything explodes), but hey, you can’t have everything.

The DVD transfer was on the whole pretty good. The only time I saw any major artifacts was on freeze-framing the massively colourful swirly intro. Menu was easy to navigate, and looked nice. The extras were the standard stuff - textless opening for each of the four episodes (Yup! They’re all different!), some production sketches and promotional videos. For some reason there’s no textless closing animation. It’s on DVD #4, though. The DVD came with an insert giving scene access, but nothing else of note. I was a little annoyed by the way all four episodes sat inside one title (I prefer each episode to be in a title on its own), but the chaptering is good - one for each of the opening, first half, second half and closing animations for each episode. The cover for the DVD is lovely and shiny, for those who like that kind of thing, and has a picture of Dita with a modified Van-type behind her.

On the whole, I loved this DVD, despite having watched it before in sub, and having to watch it twice over for this review. It’s rewatchable, it’s amusing, and while the story isn’t all that deep, it /is/ original, and that in itself is refreshing. When I recover from all the anime I bought /last/ year, Vandread will be one of the first things I buy.

4 out of 5