Sousei no Aquarion

Information of Anime

The human race is near extinction due to the melting of icecaps in Antarctica & the fall of Atlantis.  Monsters known as Mystical Beast come to Earth to harvest on humans for their energy called Purana.  These creatures are controlled by a human race with wings called Shadow Angels.  In order to save themselves, the humans developed Vector machines to defeat the Mystical Beasts.  Only humans with Element ability can control them.  The Vectors have the ability to combine together to form a giant robot.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a short summary of the storyline of what I seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the anime yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

From what I seen Deava, the organization that fights the Shadow Angels, are constantly looking for Element users for their organization.  They find Apollo, a poor boy that acts like a dog based on his behaviour, in a ruin city.  Initially, he refused to go but changes his mind when his best friend, Baron, gets "harvested" by a Mystical Beast.  He somehow manages to control a Vector that was empty after an injured pilot was removed & unites with the other Vectors without problems in his 1st try.  He beats the Mystical Beast, but couldn't save Baron.  People believes he is the reincarnation of the legendary Solar Wing, a hero of Atlantis from past history.

The story just goes on with Apollo doing everything he can to save Baron as quick as possible as he joins Deava.  Silvia De Alisia, a spoiled princess, has this strange love passion for her brother, Sirius De Alisia, thinking he's the real Solar Wing.  She refuses to accept Apollo as the Solar Wing.  The story mainly involves with these three characters.  Although they are quite a few supporting characters that gets some airtime, the story is more focus on that trio.

As the story progress, we learn the Shadow Angels are trying to get the Solar Wing to join their side & eliminate the human race together.  A lot of references are given about the history of the Solar Wing.  So far, we "know" that Silvia is a reincarnation of Princess Celiane.  Princess Celiane fell in love with the Solar Wing.  She fail to protect him when he said that he'll protect her.  Solar Wing died in battle against an opponent that I can't remember.  Later on in the show, we learn from a Shadow Angel named Toma that Apollonius betrayed his kind in order to love his girl who is a human.  As Silva & Apollo learns about this, they start to become more friendly to each other.  We also learned that Silvia & Sirius hold feathers of Apollonius' past life.  They are Shadow Angels.

Interesting enough, the show goes off tangent a bit.  After Silva & Apollo learn about their past lives, the show doesn't touch much on this.  Although there are still mentioning & signs of it, the series goes off course.  The fights between the Vectors & Beasts continues, but the show starts to become a comedy theme with the ecchi level going higher.  We see some backgrounds of the minor characters as well.  The story starts to pick up again when they introduce a new Shadow Angel named Futaba.

Futaba is an young Shadow Angel that doesn't know much about humans being used as Puranas.  He's innocent as a child.  During his arc, he plays with Apollonius' feather & uses it to "play" with the humans; causing destruction along the way.  Silva, Sirius, & Apollo fights him & Deava manages to capture him.  By order, Futaba is taken to the New United Nations Laguna Military Base for examination.  He dies during the examination which saddens & angers the Shadow Angels.  Toma decides to take action & bring Sirius by luring him to Atlantis, bring Vector Mars with him.  At this time, Sirius had doubts about what Deava & the human race will bring to this world.

With Sirius gone & the fact that he's the Solar Wing, the crew of Deava feels down.  With Silva feeling down about losing her brother & Sirius enjoying life on Atlantis, we learn the truth about these 2 siblings.  The royal family they belong to is Apollonius.  In other words, Silva & Sirius are descendents of Apollonius & Celiane.  We also learn that Deava is on top of the eternal city, Shangri-la.  The reason for Deava's location is the power source that Shangri-la gives to power the Aquarion.

Later, Sirius returns to Deava to launch an attack.  As Deava is in trouble, an assault type Aquarion comes down & stop Sirius.  This Aquarion is a joint project between the New United Nations & Deava.  To surprise everyone at Deava, Sirius tells them to look at what humans are doing by displaying a visual communication of the pilot in the assault Aquarion.  The pilot is Glen, the person who Reika thought of bring misfortune to him.  Glen is different now since he now has Shadow Angel feathers on him, which surprises the Deava crew.  Sirius tries to show Silva the mistakes of man & nearly joins him to go to Atlantis.  However, Apollo stops her as he tells Sirius that he can still reach that dream where both races can co-exist.

The time for has come where Deava heads to Atlantis to fight the Shadow Angels.  As people are being harvested & Silvia taken away by Sirius, Apollo & the crew head out to destroy the gate that blocks both sides.  After destroying the gate, the military Vectors appear & enter the gate.  The Aquarion Vectors follow.

At Atlantis, Toma reveals the truth.  The Solar Wing is Apollonius & Celiane is actually two people; Silvia & Sirius. Celiane split herself into two souls.  One contains the happy memories in Silvia & the other is hate that resides in Sirius.  For this, Sirius returns to Apollo & the crew after being betrayed by Toma.  Together, they attack Toma.  But little did they know that Aquarion was giving off the light of the Solar Wing to the Tree of Life.  It grew & suddenly started to wither.  The death of the Tree of Life causes a number of natural disasters to the Earth.

After Toma tells Apollo & company that the world will end, Apollo realizes that Aquarion needs the power of a Shadow Angel to achieve it's true strength.  With that, Toma forcefully teleports Reika out of one of the Vectors & flies into the Tree of Life.  Apollo & Sirius chases him & they start a battle as heads.  Siliva, with the help of the commander, that the hate of the two races is what cause the breakout 12,000 years ago & have both side realize their pains.  As a result, the three vector form as Solar Aquarion & restores the Earth with it's power.  The story ends with the sacrifices of Apollo, Toma, & Sirius to save the Earth & all the people harvested are return back to normal.

My Personal Review

Initially, I thought Sousei no Aquarion was a copy of RahXephon & offered nothing new.  I was wrong.  Although it's still not original, it had a good storyline & worked it's way to capture my attention.  Not only does it have a combination of a lot of genres, it also contains yuri & yaoi.  So you may want to prepare yourself for it, although it's not a lot.

There are quite a lot of adult situations & themes in Sousei no Aquarion.  For example, when the Vectors unite, the pilot seem to experience a sexual pleasure from it & reach their "peak".  It was really weird.  And the brotherly love is very close in becoming an incest situation.  Although there are some comedic moments, they are usually immature jokes with sexual themes.  This show is really for a mature audience.

Animation

The drawings are fairly good.  There are times where the characters faces look weird.  But the overall design isn't bad.  The background colours are really smoothing to the eyes.

The 3D CGs of the Vectors are nice.  The animation is very smooth as the Vectors uniting in Aquarion mode move beautifully.  The battles are very well animated with it's quick & surprisingly smooth movements.  It looks like a form of art or dance.

Later on in the show, the animation style changes a bit from each episodes.  For example, episode 19 has a different type of animation design.  It looks like those short art films you see at those cultural film festivals.  It was ugly, but interesting to see.  You have to see it for yourself since I don't want to spoil it.

Sound

The sound effects are above average.  It's pretty good as you can hear how crisp & clear it is; especially when the Vectors fly close to an object.

The music isn't too bad since the soundtrack is composed by Yoko Kanno, the composer for Cowboy Bebop, Wolf's Rain, & a lot of anime with good soundtracks.  The first opening song is quite catchy, but the second one sounds the same as the first.  It's more like different lyrics were used instead.

Story

The background of Silvia & Apollo's past life is quite good.  The plot is very detailed & suited for a mature audience.  Problem that the show faces is how it turns away from it when the mysteries of the Solar Wing is revealed at the middle of the show.  However, this isn't the case as a lot of the findings starts to become uncertain. 

The show goes from comedy drama to pure comedy with more ecchi stuff a lot.  Although it's very entertaining to watch, the creators should heavily focus more on Silvia & Apollo's struggle against the Shadow Angels & Sirius.  But somehow, it felt like the change in tone was smooth.  At the episode 22 mark, the show gets dark & serious.  It provided a lot of twists in the storyline & I was surprised of the results.  I would never guess the past life of Apollonius & Celiane, as well as the Solar Wing.

One thing to note is that it's deep.  It has a lot of philosophy thinking involved & they are key to Deava's success.  Some of the answers are easy & some of them are hard.  There are some of them that are quite corny.

Another thing to note is the ending.  It was pretty good, but it felt too sudden & incomplete.  Technically, I would like to see it being expanded a little bit more.  Even five minutes would be enough.  It felt like it was missing something, but I'm not sure what.

Overall Conclusion

Sousei no Aquarion isn't a bad series.  If you get past all those sex themes, it's pretty good.  Personally, I don't like it or hate it.  The characters really make the series interesting since their characteristics really play on the watcher's emotions.

On a scale of ten, Sousei no Aquarion gets a 8.5.  The storyline is interesting & contains a lot of surprises.  It kept me guessing who the Solar Wing was & a lot of evidence given in the show made it jump back & forth.  The problem of the show would be the ending.  It felt incomplete in a way that it was hard to describe.  Also, the philosophical stuff didn't make sense sometimes as they were either too complex or just too simple.

Last updated on December 19, 2007