NoaIzumiAnime Review: Voogie's Angel
April 17th 2009 17:36
Aliens have taken the Earth’s surface, forcing the remnants of humanity under the ocean. Now, with time running out, five cyborg girls may be mankind’s only shot against the new alien superweapon.
Now, I’ll grant the problem of playing to low creative expectations when you’re dealing with something as clichéd as five-teenage-girls-with- special-powers-save-the-world -from-aliens, but Voogie’s Angel actually showed hints of unexpected promise at first. It started off with some meaty possibilities, including varied characters, rivalries amongst the Angels and the aliens, and some profound questions about humanity. And then failed to deliver on most of them. Voogie’s Angel had a lot of potential, but the only potential that it actually fulfilled was in the area of fan service.
The three-episode OVA opens with the introduction of five young women. Rebecca is the tough one, Merrybell is the feminine one, Shiori is the motherly one, Midi is the weird one (and youngest), and Voogie is the leader (and really loves samurai movies). All are cyborgs, all have lost their memories of being fully human, and they don’t always get along. Voogie and Rebecca have the most character development in general; the others are kind of left by the wayside.
As cyborgs, they face a certain amount of prejudice and uncertainty about their humanity. The questions are brought up, and the series makes an attempt to answer them, but never quite does, except in a superficial way.
The Angels’ memories are the promised pay-off to them and to the audience (they’re given back to the Angels in the climactic battle, so as to remind them why they’re fighting), and we finally get to see life for these girls when they were completely human. But Rebecca’s story is the only one that’s really satisfying, since it shows the invasion itself and explains her gung-ho attitude now. Shiori and Merrybell have certain elements explained, but they remain the two-dimensional characters they were throughout the series. Voogie’s backstory is non-existent: her flashblack is to when she was first activated as a cyborg. It could be that her story was being saved for later (the producers were obviously hoping to spin this off into a larger series), but that doesn’t help us, and it doesn’t make sense in the story either.
Also unexplained is why these girls are so important to humanity’s war in the first place. They’re superior at hand-to-hand combat, but the human forces obviously have plenty of soldiers and equipment. Why are these five so special?
The aliens (dubbed the SE: space emigrants) aren’t much better. Couldn’t they have been made to look alien, at least? And their motivations for attacking Earth are never explained (well, there is an explanation put forth, but it sounds more like a self-serving excuse). There’s a brief look at their internal rivalries and politics, but that avenue is dropped pretty quickly as well.
Geeking out: The alien invasion scene in Rebecca’s flashback is an homage to the movie Independence Day, which had come out a year previously, and Shiori’s flashback scene in the lab was most likely inspired by Tetsuo’s awakening in Akira.
Extras: none
Summary: Weak plot and characters (with the exception of Rebecca), but a halfway decent hour and a half, if you’re not looking for anything too deep. Grade: C plus
Age rating: 13 and up. As previously mentioned, there’s plenty of fan service (they don’t skimp on the skimpy outfits). Some bloody violence, including a man being shot in the head.
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