Knights of Sidonia

The Thinkin' Good Thoughts
ROSSMAN

All I could think of while watching the anime series Knights of Sidonia was "My GOD this show looks fucking awful." It does. I just could not get over it. The entire thing is CGI (not just the space and mecha battles, but the characters and settings and, well, fucking everything), and apparently Japan is not quite to the point where it can make a nice looking anime character in 3D yet. The mecha looks decent in 3D, but they've been doing that shit for years.

Looks are important, but they're only one aspect of a series for me. I've seen lots of shows that I ended up loving that looked either so-so, or just downright fugly. So, how did the rest of Knights of Sidonia work out for me? The characters, the plot, the action?... Yaaaaaaaaaawn. All were boring. I was bored. This show bored me. The only part that didn't bore me was the talking space bear with the mechanical arm who was also the main chef on the space ship. I seriously shit you not.

Let me back up and tell you all about just what in the fuck is going on in this series. It's the far off distant as fuck future, and mankind has had to leave Earth behind because a group of intergalactic asshole species known as the Gauna has attacked and destroyed or simply made the home world uninhabitable; I don't remember why the Gauna did this, or if they even told us why, I was too bored.

So humanity has sent out a bunch of seed ships to find new worlds to populate, to find new ways to survive and flourish, and to either avoid or outright kill as many Gauna as they can whilst traversing the stars. We start off the series on the seed ship Sidonia, where only 500,000 or so humans remain, despite their cloning experiments and the ability to infuse photosynthesis into people to preserve their food supplies.

The Sidonia is guarded by a few hundred mecha units called Gardes because Japan is full of imaginative thinkers. One of these Garde pilots is a teenage boy who was raised from birth by his "grandfather," who kept him hidden in the bowels of the Sidonia with no other human contact his whole life, until he got caught pilfering food from the ship's supply room one day after his apparently fucking insane grandpa died. This kid, one Nagate Tanikaze, is a natural Garde pilot because why not? Sure he's been trained in a simulator his whole life by his weirdo gramps, but SO HAS EVERYBODY ELSE on the whole goddamn ship. The main school on board the Sidonia is a military academy for fuck's sake! But Nagate is the hero, so he's better than everyone else. Check. Got it.

And despite never seeing another human being (other than his grampy) his entire existence, Nagate adjusts reeeeeally fucking quickly to all the cute chicks (well, "cute chicks" in this show doesn't really say much, what with the shitty CGI and all) throwing their panties at him the moment he's dumped into the academy. Why? Why not! I mean Nagate is a slack-jawed mouth-breather who doesn't even know basic customs or how to comb his hair, so he's a real catch!

So through a bunch of misadventures both in the school and in the seat of his very own Garde that Nagate gets because he shows up for class, our intrepid (and lame) hero saves lives, kills Gauna, and shows up the Sephiroth clone who is one of the biggest douchebags in any series ever... Even more douchey than the original Sephiroth, if you can believe that... But in the end we don't find out jack shit about the Gauna, why they're attacking, what's going on with any other seed ship, or even why Nagato was raised like he was by his gammy-paw. Yeah, there's hints to this last one, but this short 12-episode series told us nothing to get us excited for a second season.

There is absolutely nada new in this show: no new ideas, no new characters, no new mecha battles. Even if you're a n00b to anime, let me assure you that anything in Sidonia has been done before, and done much, much better. It's not even exciting. Even through it's only 12 eps long it feels like it's 24. That's not good, people. Entertainment should make you feel like the time flew by, not that you've been strapped to a Clockwork Orange chair, forced into watching images and movies of Hitler punching and kicking non-Aryan babies for a few weeks.

Jesus, the only thing I can recommend about this thing is the opening theme song. It's not a work of auditory art or anything, but it's at least something fun. The rest of the show can't claim that.

So, what did I think of the totally CGI series known as Knights of Sidonia? It was boring. It was nothing new. It was filled with lameness. I don't like lame, boring things that I've already seen before. Therefore I give it Two Thumbs Down, and recommend that you skip it. There you go.

Sideshow BOB FROM THE
FUTURE

Get ready, ladies and gentlemen of the early 21st century! Not only will all anime soon look like this not-very-good-looking computer generated anime series, but after the Alter-Reality Catastrophe of 3290AD ALL life will look just as cheaply rendered.

It had something to do with the molecules of the known universe all getting pelted with gamma radiation from a containment field used for studying the role of the Hulk in modern day mythology, along with the mind of the chief scientist who apparently absolutely loved that ancient movie from your time, the classic Toy Story 5. See, the gamma rays permiated this scientist's brain as they all exploded at once, and the scientist was supposedly thinking about the astronaut Buzz Lightyear at the time for whatever reason. And then, before we knew it, the universe was pelted with green light and then we all looked like shoddily-constructed 3D models of ugly people and things.

Luckily the Return to Normalcy Bomb that was detonated in 3294AD set everything right again when another scientist studying the effects of Krypton... You know what, it doesn't matter.

I did not like it. This Sidonia show was kind of, well, nothing to me. There was no heart, and it looked really, how do you say, cheezy? It looked really cheezy.

Special Guest Reviewer
JOE PESCI

You fuckin' bet your fuckin' goddamn piece of worthless ass that I hated this ugly, hideous, goddamn fuckin' awful-looking piece of shit and piss Japanese thing here!

No goddamn redeaming value, you cocksucking motherfucker! Who the fuck knew that not even the fuckin' Japanese could do anything that looked good with goddamn fuckin' shitty CGI? I mean, their fuckin' record with traditional animation was soooooo fuckin' stellar before, so I mean, who'd have guessed that they wouldn't be able to fuckin' knock it out of the goddamn piss-ant park with a fully computer fuckin' generated movie featurin' the most godawful-looking fuckin' ugliest animated goddamn characters this side of the most recent Disney rip-off straight to goddamn video animated masterpiece?

I wanna fuckin' blow my goddamn brains out after watchin' this fuckin' piece of garbage. Fuck it!