Pale Cocoon

Information of Anime

In a world where the oceans & continents have vanished, a past history of the world have been missing.  However, some pieces remain & the Achieve Excavation Department is responsible in restoring & analyzing these data.  Ura works in this department & discovers a disturbing data carrying not only visuals, but with sounds.  In that data contains a girl.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series 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.

When Ura finds this disturbing data with sounds, he puts all other projects on hold.  He even works overtime as he believes this data will contain something important about the planet's & human history.  What interests him is the book that the girl holds.  Riko, a co-worker & friend working in a different department, is concern about Ura's obsession of putting the data together.  As he does this, Ura questions about the achieves that he has restored are facts or lies.  When the mysterious data is restored, it turns out to be a music video of a song called hito no hibiki sung by the girl named Yoko Yamaguchi.  The setting of the video takes place in the same location of where the Achieve Excavation Department is.  At the end of the video, a small interview of Yoko is played.  Here, the truth is discovered about the planet.  It turns out that the planet is the moon & the building is called the "Sea of Tranquility".  People have immigrated to the moon as the Earth started to become "rusty".  Ura discovers this truth as he reaches the surface of the moon & sees the blue Earth.

My Personal Review

Pale Cocoon looks like one of those amateur made anime series.  It's an one time shot OVA with a short story.  It's not an OVA that everyone can enjoy really.  If you like drama with a slight amount of mystery in it, you may want to watch this in your spare time.  It's not something that I would recommend.

Animation

The character designs are pretty unique.  It's on the plain side.  Simple facial features & the eyes are large in a sharp oval shape.  It's not like manga style or art.  Sometimes, they look nice & sometimes they look weird.  Yoko's face really looks weird due to her eyes.  It looks like she has a staring problem or something.

The backgrounds are pretty good as it gives off that sci-fi space feel.  A lot of it is in CGs & they aren't badly done.  They blended in well with the 2D artworks, so you don't see any clashes with the characters.  However, when there are black & white involved, the characters & backgrounds mix in too well that they are part of the background almost.

The colours are flat with dullness.  There isn't a lot of brightness with the exception of the inside of the building.  Most of the toning & shading are in the backgrounds more.  The characters are pretty much two toned with little shadowing. 

The animation movements are pretty realistic & smooth.  It's not choppy or missing any frames almost.

Sound

The sound effect are good.  No silly sound whatsoever.  Also, they are clean & clear.  The volume control level is pretty good as well.  The distance of the sounds is set up really good.

The seiyuus for this show aren't bad.  They play their characters well.  For Yoko's voice, it wasn't too good.  I'm not sure if it's because of the seiyuu or the character design.  It really didn't look right.

The music isn't too great.  It's almost a mixture of sounds played over & over again.  The insert song sung by Yoko is pretty good.  I actually enjoy it.  Too bad it's pretty short though. 

Story

It has an interesting concept, but the idea seems to be far-fetched.  Although there is some organizations that will achieve past data to look at history, the idea isn't too much of a attention grabber.  The way the people didn't know what a book is seems hard to accept.  Also, the OVA has a lot of talking involved but very little thinking involved.  It's almost a giveaway of what the planet is, but the data of revealing a music video is pretty interesting.  The OVA has a lot of interesting ideas really with some interesting surprises, but how it presents itself isn't the best.  You can lose interesting pretty easily. 

As for the ending, it feels incomplete.  Once the mystery was solved about the planet's history & Ura sees the truth with his own eyes, we don't get much of a reaction from him.  It would have been nice if the OVA spent a few extra minutes to expand on this area.  It really felt as if the story left the viewers on a cliffhanger.

Overall Conclusion

Pale Cocoon is all drama & isn't for everyone.  It has a lot of dialogue & may bore viewers easily even though it's a short OVA.  It's heavily story based on mystery & gets to the point pretty quick.  Also, it may be too predictable for some people.

Pale Cocoon gets a seven out of ten.  The story has a great idea, but fails to deliver it well in terms of presentation.  It's almost a sleeper if you can handle a lot of the narration & talking involved.  If you can bear with it, it's not a bad OVA.  However, the ending is pretty weak.

Last updated on January 14, 2008