released 07 aug 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* In the introduction to FULL METAL PANIC, we meet Sousuke, a soldier with a secret peacekeeping organization named Mithril, which is based on a huge secret submarine cruising around the western Pacific. Sousuke is a grim teenager with massive combat experience, but he is not exactly prepared to deal with his latest assignment.
There are a very small number of youngsters in the world who have a certain specific ESP talent, and one is Kaname, a pretty and maybe overly perky Japanese high-school student. Sousuke and his teammates Melinda and Kurz are assigned to protect Kaname from all the bad guys who want to get their hands on her to perform evil experiments.
This mission is complicated by the fact that Mithril is operating completely without official Japanese government knowledge, and also by the fact that Kaname has no idea she has any special talent or that bad guys might be after her. As a result, when Sousuke infiltrates her high-school class as a student, she has no idea of what to make of him, while he seems to shadow her incessantly and the teachers confiscate the endless stream of lethal weapons he seems to produce. On his part, Sousuke finds that high school ends up being a far more hazardous environment than the war zones he is used to living in.
If you have an addiction to run-of-the-mill anime, you will probably like FULL METAL PANIC. Its production values are reasonable, and as anime stories go it snaps along fairly well. There is definitely something humorous about Sousuke, who reminds me of the old saying that if all you have is a hammer then all you see is nails, and the idea of throwing this combat-oriented kid into a normal high school environment ("fish out of water") has its merits. Oddly, though he can dodge bullets in a firefight, he has trouble evading a teenage girl with a stick.
If, on the other hand, you find run-of-the-mill anime tending towards the cheesy, you are not going to care much about FULL METAL PANIC. It's too silly to be taken seriously, but it's not funny enough to be more than mildly entertaining at best, and the plot, character development, and dialogue are uninspired. Its occasional excursions into blood-spattered violence are downright baffling, since they work at cross purposes to the humor. It seems the production team wasn't working at even the level of sensibility of, say, THE A-TEAM, where the bad guys get run off a cliff in a truck and fall into a pigsty, to get out from the wreckage dirty but basically unharmed and swear vengeance on the heroes.
If you have no interest in anime or downright dislike it, FULL METAL PANIC is not likely to change your mind; in fact, it will almost certainly reinforce your prejudices. I have to add that I was particularly annoyed when I put in the DVD and not only did it present me with the usual copyright disclaimer -- no problem there -- but basically had one of the corny English-language voice actors read it off -- which felt like somebody shaking a finger in my face. "I paid for the privilege of being lectured to? Get real."
The one thing I did appreciate about FULL METAL PANIC is the scene where Kaname drops her schoolbag and a book titled SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH pops out. Anybody who is a Douglas Adams fan can't be all bad, but on the other hand it was frustrating to see so little influence from the brilliant Adams in FULL METAL PANIC.