The synopsis was right. There could be no better word to describe Kishida-sensei except for “mad.” Only in the beginning though, folks. Only in the beginning. Mad branches out into hilarity and later, Kishida-sensei will seem very endearing to you. Especially if you know how he designed his premiere robot, Ariel. In fact, characterization is one of the good key factors in this movie. Kishida-sensei’s three daughters have distinct personalities where their problems are real — how to deal with enormous school work along with responsibility to pilot Ariel. Albeit of course, not everyone has this dilemna but you can see very clearly how something as real as school work isn’t discounted as a factor in the lives of the characters.

EVA this is not. Piloting Ariel is actually like most sentai hits Bioman or Maskman where three pilots are needed simultaneously to get their grandfather’s mecha up and running. Maybe the concept of that kind of mecha is one you have seen before but Ariel is different. Even Kishida-sensei is surprised at his own invention’s abilities that discovering this along with his three amateur granddaughter pilots makes the battle scenarios fun to watch. My main complaint? There’s only one movie. Haven’t seen a lot of female looking mechas that are actually fun to watch so I was expecting the storyline to be stretched further.

Individual Rating: Art/Animation 8; Story 8; Characters 9; Sounds 8

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2001 at 9:02 am and is filed under Ariel Movie, Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.