FIRST LOOK: Ozuma ~ Animeshoon

Well, this is a late. As I write this post, I'm downloading the latest episode of Ozuma on torrent. I'm also downloading the second episode of A Game of Thrones S2. Do I have to tell you which one I'm more looking forward to?

Let's look on the bright side. This series apparently has only six episodes. That is very...weird. This isn't an OVA, as far as I can tell. But still, that's good news. The shorter this series is, the more palatable it is. Probably.

So what is Ozuma about? It's about a futuristic world that's been reduced to sand and sand whales and submarines and government ruled by geriatric tools and the military force peopled by clones called Ideal Children because of their supposedly superior DNA. And there's a blue-haired girl called Maya who's running away from these Ideal Children, whose leader wears a mask for no apparent reason, and an annoying boy on a hover bike of sorts who rescues her and brings her back to his submarine, which turns out to be captained by a woman who looks like a pirate. There's a chase and tense times and Maya is apparently a strange creature thing, or that's the doctor woman with the old lady's voice would want you to believe. By the third episode, Maya runs away from the boy, who is actually named Sam Coin, and gets captured by the men she has been running away from in episode 1. Full circle.

IMPRESSIONS:
The story is okay, I guess. If a bit derivative. Clones and such. Humans (the series call them 'natura' as opposed to the perfectly unnatural Ideal Children) captured so that their bodies may be used as containers for the geriatric population. Might turn out to be interesting, especially with the expected conflict that will arise when it is discovered that Sam's older brother is alive in a tank full of water, his body getting readied for its worthy function as a container. I am not in the least bit curious about Maya's true nature. Off the top of my head, she's an offspring of an Ideal Child and a Natura. That would explain her weirdness.

I don't like Sam Coin. He is annoying. But I like Captain she-Pirate. She reminds me a lot of another tough captain who held a torch for a dead guy and guy who turned out deader. I don't give a damn about Maya though. I would have been glad that she got captured by her pursuers if I didn't just know that Sam and his friends would launch a rescue. On the antagonists' side, there's a big hulking dude who has no eyebrows. He's surly and has the tendency to wax philosophical on stuff. Then, of course, there's the masked dude. Both of their outfits are more interesting than their personalities.

The one thing I do like about this series is the art. It's something new. Or rather, it's something old. At any rate, it's unique in today's standard fare. It also reminds me a lot of the old anime series I used to watch when I was a kid. There's the dramatic hair and the bad-ass eyelashes. So retro. It's no Casshern Sins but it does what it does.

The music's okay, too. The BGM is...actually, I didn't notice it. The opening theme is typical anime stuff. The ending theme sounds like Nakashima Mika though I could be wrong. It's been a while since I've heard her work in anime. Since Blood+, in fact. And that was a long time ago. I never even saw that anime. Yeesh.