Overview

A couple seasons back, there was a little Gonzo series by the name of Witchblade that wound up just blowing me away. It had a particularly unique visual style, though - oh, who am I kidding? The women had racks you could have used to catch people jumping from third story windows. Still, that aside, the series was damned good, and it had an awesome ending that I never got around to mentioning in the review. Now we'll jump ahead to the beginning of the fall 2007 season, and a series named Dragonaut ~ The Resonance, also by Gonzo... It was quickly very obvious that it was being animated by the same team that did Witchblade, and that they'd... upgraded some... Somebody bring in the industrial strength over the shoulder boulder holders, please...

Review

Somewhere in the semi-near future, man has colonized both the moon and Mars, and a young boy named Jin is getting ready to go on his first space flight with his family. As it happens, his father is the pilot of that ship. After saying goodbye to his best friend Kazuki, he gets on board, and the shuttle - which has a rather unique design - is sent rocketing along a space catapult. It takes off... Only to collide a few moments into the flight, with three meteorites, completely destroying the shuttle, and killing everybody on board... except for one. You guessed who. A few years later, Jin is a bitter and angry young man, left alone in the world. ...Yadda yadda yadda, shit happens, things blow up, girl shows up...

Y'know what? I've gotta be honest here. The series had a promising start, and a promising premise... but it just didn't deliver. It's a power of love script with angst and a few psychosis and neurosis thrown in for spice. Jin spends most of the first half of the series between wallowing in self-pity and high rapture at having finally found somebody to not be alone with. In the mean time Toa - said girl - spends the same time switching between being in insta-love with him and trying to avoid him because she's afraid she'll hurt him. All that's without even getting a chance to get into what gives the series is name, the Dragonauts - a typical anime unlikely team consisting of the Calm'n'Collected Leader, Annoyingly Cute but Wicked Smart Little Girl, and The Idealist That Can't Quite Pick A Side.

Did I mention that each of these also has a pet dragon that in some way compliments them? Actually, there are so damned many dragons running around by the end of the series that I'm surprised somebody didn't slap a breeding tax on them. At the beginning of the series, the dragons are introduced as a very rare breed... by the time the series has ended, there's literally a one to one ratio of humans to dragons. I don't mean just the cast... I mean THE ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET. In fact, Jin ends up with two, a fact that makes Kazuki go bonkers because one of them was supposed to be his personal ride, Gio. But, no worries folks, just to be sure that he's not left out there's Widow who just HAPPENS to be free - her last partner died. Gee... THAT name isn't coincidental seeming, is it?

I dunno folks... the trouble here is that there is some enjoyable material here - some great action sequences, in fact, when the fucking angst is toned down a bit. But Dragonaut quickly fell into a sequence rut - Jin and Toa get together, Jin and Toa get split apart, Jin goes looking for Toa, Jin gets the credit while Gio rescues Toa, repeat ad infinitum. Splashed in there are a couple sequences of the Dragonauts kicking general ass - sometimes Jin and Gio's, sometimes other people's. One of the problems that I had with Witchblade is that they started off far too many storylines at the beginning of the series... the series was thick with them, but they were high quality... Dragonaut suffers from the same issue, but the lines just aren't up to snuff... they're shallower, and several are just sort of left to dissolve away.

Also, can I get some fucking scaffolding in here, the girls could use the extra support, especially Garnet and Machina. I mean, seriously folks... When the girl has tits BIGGER THAN HER FUCKING HEAD, things have gone a little overboard. Whoever was in charge of approving the designs should be buried under all those breasts until he suffocates. And it had to be a guy, because no self-respecting woman could have looked at those things and not had a retroactive hernia at just the thought of having to carry that much of a load around. Which is a pity, because in other respects the character design of this particular team is actually pretty damned sweet. There's some real talent latent in the fact that the characters really are unique looking overall. If not for the fact most of the female cast needed wide-load sirens and probably generated gravity wells with their chests, it would have been awesome. I will note that a couple characters looked like they were lifted straight from Witchblade, though - not to an extreme amount, mind you. I think they were probably just paying homage to themselves, as the characters in question were near clones of their Witchblade selves. The animation of the series is damned good too, and fairly seamless between the general CG animation and the 3D rendering used for the battle scenes. The settings were great - this team does an awesome job with cityscapes.

On the audio side of things, Dragonaut was... alright. Not bad, not good, but definitely watchable. The voice actors did their jobs, but honestly, I didn't really think that any of them got too deep into their roles. Well, to be fair, for a couple of the fight scenes they seemed to be getting a bit more into it, and the quality on the whole went up toward the end of the series, though not enough to save what was at best an average performance. The opening theme is the sort of cheery, hopeful muck you get out of a Power of Love series... it's pretty forgettable. The first ending theme showed a little promise but got lost in a sea of better themes, and the second was a metal-themed generic tune that came too little, too late. Again, not... a bad performance, but I'd have expected better after Witchblade.

I need a little space to complain before I wrap this review up, and it's that the writers of Dragonaut ought to be sent back to kindergarten to learn their basics. There was so much potential in the setup of Dragonaut that only complete fucking morons could have screwed the pooch as badly as it was. I saw the first couple episodes, and I was expecting the sort of ending that you get with Emperors being thrown down power shafts and big fucking star bases blowing up. Instead, what I got were episodes of domestic ménage à trois bliss and an ending that made me wanna scream flower power and start making macromae peace signs. What the fuck happened? How the hell do people screw things up like that! Even with the repetitive plot and shallow story, the series showed signs of life all the way through. Dragonaut should have been a synonym for easy mode - but the ending just fucking sucked!

Overall

Well, unfortunately for all the potential that the series had, it just plain fell flat in the end, and it can be attributed to one major factor: sloppiness. The entire plot was outright poorly handled, and the series suffered for it. Dragonaut could have been so much more than another generic acti-mance, and the only thing that saves it from being a complete loss is that there are some great action sequences and little peeks of deeper storytelling ability that keep it alive. Still, the series really dragon-and-on-and-onauts, and while the pacing was infinitely better than Shakugan no Shana II, it was still a real bore to watch at points. Too many plot lines, storytelling that was lazy and shallow, and characters that never came close to breaking out of their stereotypes...

If you're a real fiend for action, and can sit through long sequences of filler, you might get some enjoyment out of Dragonaut, but honestly, I'd suggest looking somewhere else folks... it's really not worth your bother.