released 27 jan 06 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of the anime DVD series PLANETES, it is the year 2075, and eager young corporate employee Tanabe has arrived on a space station to begin her company career. She isn't too upset about being assigned to "space debris collection" until she arrives in the debris team's office, to find a gang of cynical misfits. Debris collection is known as "Half Section", because it's half-paid, half-staffed, half-equipped -- and half-assed. To make the worst of things, she is assigned to assist old hand Hoshino, known as "Hachi" for his habit of wearing a headband (hachimaki), a loutish, crude loudmouth. And so a quarrelsome relationship begins.
At the outset, PLANETES seems to have good, if not awesome, production values, and the idea of coming up with a technically plausible anime space adventure -- think Arthur C. Clarke in Japanese -- is a promising one. However, PLANETES suffers from one major problem: it's a bore. All the characters and scripts are "telegraphed" -- the viewer knows what's going to happen long before it does -- and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.
It is possible that PLANETES picks up in later volumes, but I gave up on it halfway through the third episode. I wasn't about to wade through more in hopes that things would become more interesting. I've seen too many anime series that started out promising and then nosedived; this one doesn't even seem very interesting from the outset.
