Noein 1-10 (rewatched on DVD)
Fabio mentioned he was planning on watching it soon(ish) and then Luppy posted in this thread saying he'd started it. Since I'd had the series on DVD for around a year and never got around to watching them, I viewed seeing two people mention it in quick succession as some sort of hint that now would be a good time to give the DVDs some time in my player. I certainly needed a reminder of how good anime can be (but so rarely is) after going through a lot of 6-7/10 anime of late.
Noein truly is one of the best anime series out there. Beautiful, unique visuals; an amazing orchestral soundtrack that makes viewing that bit more epic; a terrific sci-fi story, blended together with also terrific slice of life and very well developed (and likeable) characters. It has pretty much everything.
It combines the lives of five likeable school kids with some of the best sci-fi around. Doing something like that and managing to create a story where the genres don't conflict is very difficult, so the studio/director of Noein deserves a lot of praise. The characters were fleshed out so well that I actually ended up caring more about Ai and Isamu than Haruka and Yuu (the main characters). It's unusual to feel more strongly for support characers in short series due to the small amount of time they get compared to more important characters, so it says a lot about the quality of the script and direction of Noein for me to care about characters that featured less.
The only flaw is that a lot of the sci-fi elements are never explained at all, which leaves questions like what exactly happened to La'cryma, why a few people from that dimension have superhuman powers, why those people can turn into gigantic monsters and how
Noein managed to get the population of an entire world to submit to him and allow him to turn them into sea horses up in the air. For a story as well written as Noein to leave so much unanswered is hard to accept... I can only assume that the people in charge thought it best to leave things they couldn't provide logical answers for up in the air in order not to ruin the story, and I view that as taking the easy way out. It's too bad because the only thing that's ever stopped me scoring Noein 10/10 is the huge amount of questions the series left me with.
In fairness, anything dealing with time travel is always difficult. If the story is too complex for the brains of average people then it's going to scare them away because we aren't all geniuses, and if too little information is provided then the story risks being attacked for being too simple (TGWLTT springs to mind). There's also the risk of smart people pointing out any scientific errors made. I suppose since Noein, despite being a little on the complex side, is still perfectly watchable by people who don't understand quantum physics it suggests that the studio behind Noein got the balance between comprehensible and complex material just right.
...Anyway. I'm very pleased that I imported the R1 box set for £15 early last year. To be able to import a 24 episode series in a full-sized box set is bargaintastic, but the value is made even more amazing when you consider the quality of the content. Even the DVD transfer and subtitles are near flawless, and there's also a 1 hour extra involving the director thrown in. It has to be the best £15 I've ever spent.
Anyone else watched this?
