Simoun
(Reviewed on 05/02/2007)
The "Gnome Be Good, Simoun
Be Bad" ROSSMAN
Zzzzzzzzzzzz....... *Snore* Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..... Zzzzzzz.... Mmmmm, ah, what a nice little nap... *YAWN.* Thank you, Simoun. I didn't know I needed that.
Anyway, who the FUCK would have thought that a TV show about a desperate war featuring a bunch of cute, lesbian, 16 and 17 year-old pilots would have put me to sleep. Honestly, that's the kind of thing I used to fantasize about back in high school! How can anything having to do with cute lesbians blowing shit up be boring?! Well, the makers of the anime Simoun accomplished this by not allowing anything truly interesting to happen during the course of this show's entire run. Nothing remotely compelling (except snitty cat fights among the girls) ever fucking happens until episode 19 (and even that's just annoyingly fascinating, and not really "good storytelling compelling"), but I'll get to that below.
So, what is Simoun about? Well, the events of this series take place on a strange planet with two suns where everybody is born female. One of the countries on this world (the country of Simulacrum) deals with this no-boner problem by having its children go to some special, funky, underground spring when they turn 17, and something happens (with the help of some really bizarre, eternal and ethereal priestess who lives there) that allows them to choose their permanent sex. If a girl chooses to remain a woman, she just keeps on trucking; if she chooses to become a man, then her internal DNA is then altered and she loses her tits and becomes THE MOST EFFEMINATE-LOOKING MAN YOU'VE EVER SEEN. Seriously, all the guys in this world look and sound like a bunch of trannies who never got the "full" operation done. Scary, scary world.
Anyway, the people of Simulacrum have built their civilization upon the use of hundreds (if not thousands) of ancient engines that they've uncovered (yet don't really understand in the least) called helical motors. These motors are like giant, circular seashells that spin and allow vehicles to fly or trains to shoot along the tracks. But apparently only Simulacrum has them, and their neighbors are very jealous. So a war breaks out (actually, we come into the show in the middle of the war), and Simulacrum is caught between several kingdoms out to conquer it and take over its amazing technology for themselves.
I just want to stop here and explain... Yes, the above does indeed sound fairly interesting. That set up along with the rest of the plot (which I will tell you shortly) is what actually got my attention and made me want to see this tedious piece of weary shit-pie in the first place. It sounds fascinating, but its execution leaves everything to be desired. Please God trust me. But anyway....
So, war breaks out, and the priestesses of The Holy Land of Simulacrum who normally fly some of the helical motored planes -- known as Simoun -- in prayers in the sky (to the gods Tempus Spatium) now find themselves to be the top guns, as it were, of their country's air force. The Simoun themselves are pretty cool; they look kind of like dual cockpitted B-Wing fighters from Jedi, and when they enter "prayer mode" they leave trails of light in the sky like those light-bikes in Tron. And when the "prayers" are executed properly the light trails go BANG -- hopefully taking out an assload of enemy planes at the same time. Also of note, the Simoun can only be piloted by girls who have yet to go to the spring and choose a final sex for themselves. This adds an interesting twist to the plot (but don't let that fool you into thinking that the plot is therefore interesting) in that there is apparently a shortage of underaged, higher-caste chicks who can pilot the Simoun for the war effort (seeing as a bunch of them left the choirs [what groups of 6 Simoun planes and their pilots are called] and ran to the sacred spring when they got their first taste of battle because, well, war sucks and they're just a bunch of children), and therefore the leaders decide to open up the ranks as it were, and let some commoners into the choirs. Some Odd Couple moments then occur between the snobs and the slobs, but not really.
Ugh, then the main girls (and there are like 12 of them) spend the rest of the show pining for each other, getting angry at each other, and ganging up on each other in an attempt to turn this thing into an all female version of Utena mixed with Iron Eagle (I would have used Top Gun as my simile here, but I already used that term above and hell, Louis Gossett Jr. rocks balls!). The rest of the show isn't really about the war, it's just about these chicks' unstable relationships.
As for the girls themselves, there's the brash, annoying, says-what's-on-her-mind blonde; the pink-haired reluctant leader; the tall, purple-headed idiot in love with pinky; the really young, green-haired wimp; the bratty sisters (one of whom -- as somebody else pointed out to me -- must be using Guld Bowman's therapist); the light blue-haired flirt; the orange-headed moron; the quiet rich girl; the dark blue-haired bitch whose family used to work for the rich girl; the other blonde who mostly stayed in the background until the very end; and the older, slutty one. Was that all of them? Eh. Beyond them there were the captains of the various carrier ships that the girls found themselves stationed on, the mechanics, and some enemy priestesses who play some roles in this bland story.... But in the end, none of it really amounted to jack shit. And the girls in Chor Tempest (the name of the main choir that we follow) were so fucking selfish and stupid! They never thought of anybody but themselves. I cannot believe that there weren't more slaps to faces in this thing than there already were.
Where was I? Well, the first episode gave me some hope for this whole thing, but there were just so many characters thrown at us, and so much spiritual and technical jargon to try and make sense of that it made my head spin -- seriously, just like Beetlejuice... Or maybe that was the vodka. Anyway, I was close to comatose by episode 14, and I started resting my eyes a bit while watching this show by 17. But then episode 19 came and things really got shaken up... By the stupidest and most POINTLESS death I have ever seen in any entertainment medium. Seriously, the chick who purposely died in this episode simply pissed her life away for absolutely no reason. Then episode 21 came, and I thought I began to see where they were trying to go with the whole storyline, but then the war ended (with 4 or 5 episodes left), and then things just dissolved into the most open-ended finale that I have ever unfortunately witnessed. Not that the ending left things open for a sequel, as it did seem to answer pretty much all of the strange questions it raised (I think), but "open-ended" in that it was GIGANTICALLY open for interpretation. Honestly, End of Eva and Angel's Egg are far less open to interpretation than this piece of harpy crap. Angel's Egg...
TAMMI WITH AN "I"
And An EYE For Them Lesbos
Oh mah Gawd! This show was so great for remindin' me of that time that Ah experimented with other women. Let's see, that was back when I was 6 or 7, and lasted till about last week. Well Ah guess technically this week, but whatever.
Oh man, there was that one time with Katie-bell, in her dad's old Ford, with her dad in the front seat taping us with his camcorder... Oh, and that other time with Rhonda James, underneath the stadium bleachers at that homecoming game with Katie-bell's daddy video taping us with his camcorder. And oh, how could Ah forget that one time that Ah fucked that dog with a strap-on... at least Ah think it was a she. Hmmm.
The Nega-MEGAPLAYBOY
Nooooooooooooo! Ugh, how the hell can something as heinous as this happen? First of all, a show about a planet filled with nothing but women should be hot, hot, HOT! Simoun was not. C'mon, G, throw me a bone here, 'cause I never got one myself while watching this crap.
All the backgrounds were these funky watercolored paintings, the tone was all private, all-girls, Catholic high school (but leaving out all the good parts), and the characters were all so stupid! Seriously, men might think with their shama-lama-ding-dongs all the time, but at least our schlongs are smarter than the average bitch brain. These big tittied teens kept making dumb decision after dumb decision, and they were still utterly surprised when only bad things came from them! Oh, man, it just totally hurt my mellon every time that re-re blonde chick with the Sailor Moon hair kept STALKING that pinky chick, and bringing up pinky chick's dead girlfriend in an attempt to get pinky to become her pair. Trust me, that never works in real life:
"Hey, toots, I know your previous lover died in that horrible street race against me last week after I pushed him into that tanker truck which then exploded, taking out 15 pedestrians in the process, but man, you ought to see me naked!"
That kind of shit just gets you a slap to the face and possibly a knifing.
The only other thing I wanted to say about this show, holmes, is that this is a very, very girly show. No, not "girly" in a "Girls Gone Wild" way, but girly in that if you try to make it sound cool or manly in the least YOU ARE EITHER A GAY MAN OR A TRANNY. There, I said it. It's like an animated Steel Magnolias, Beaches, Desperate Housewives or a Mean Girls... Or so I've heard.
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