So I want to make a point to go back and look at more of those old school anime movies and series that were before my time. I did this ages back with Goku Midnight Eye, and that movie was glorious. I had a few hits and misses since I started doing that, but now I've come across probably the worst old school anime movie yet. To start the review though, rather than discuss the plot in general I'm going to talk about what the villains' plan actually was, so expect spoilers. I will say it's a movie based off of a series, so there may be context missing.
A scientist of a tyrannical space emperor created a new kind of energy, however, Emperor Zuul wishes to use this energy to create an Anti-Proton Bomb strong enough to destroy a planet. Yet, for some reason, someone needs to act as a trigger for the device and wishes to send one of the scientists' kids to earth with it. The Bomb is in the shape of a giant robot mech and can be controlled by the psychic powers possessed by the kid (And seemingly anyone of this race, it isn't entirely clear in the movie). The bomb will also detonate if the kid is killed.
As the kid is clearly too young, not even a toddler at this point, the plan is to send him to earth and have him detonate the bomb in case the earth becomes too advanced and could pose a threat. The child is not given any kind of mental conditioning, no mind control tricks, no implanted memories, or anything like that and is just left to be raised as an earthling. When the time comes, Zuul will just show up and tell this guy to blow up the planet and.... just kind of hope he goes along with it? Did he just come up with this plan out of sheer boredom to see if it was going to work? Did he not consider that the only person able to control Gaia, which is the giant mech bomb, may turn against him?
Pay no attention to the fact Zuul can, at will it seems, cause natural disasters to occur on earth with his powers. Cause Volcano's to erupt, or even flood entire cities with waters so vast they can engulf skyscrapers, and this isn't even taking into account his giant space army. There is never even a given reason why he let Earth live until this point, or even why he gave them an early warning to stop exploring space when he could have just shown up and wrecked their shit without them even knowing some alien entity had it out for them.
Terrible planning aside, the animation of this film is very dated. Though being dated isn't the problem, it's how badly the scenes are put together. Visually things just seem to happen and scenes come and go with no real transition. We get a scene of our lead character on a beach sad about a death that occurs, we cut to a general of the empire sad over the same death, and the next scene they are in a space battle with each other with no real explanation for how we got to this fight. Fight scenes are cut in the same way, so it's really difficult to get into what's going on as stuff just seems to happen and move on. This isn't a problem related to the poor animation or the show's habit of constantly reusing the same animations two to three times a fight, but it's just badly put together.
This, of course, leads to the problem that no character gets developed. It's like one of those old anime movies where they try to condense an entire anime series into a single movie and cram in as much as they possibly can, only to be left with a husk of what the original was. I won't be surprised if that's actually what happened here. There isn't anything redeeming about this movie, and it lacks anything so bad it's worth watching just to experience it.
Also a reminder, 'The Anime Realm' is the new anime community I created after my dumbass lost the keys for 'The Anime Hive', so if you're seeing this post either on my feed or searching tags, feel free to join 'The Anime Realm' here.
