Planetes, visiting an old friend deculture!

One of the very rare space animes with a realistic take on things.

Yesterday was stupidly busy, with me sitting on the pc for almost 12 to 14 hours; hence no post last night. Anyways, I watched K-ON!! ep 16 during lunch, but nothing exciting happened there, so I’m not gonna blog about that. Instead, I recently got Planetes on Blu-ray and decided that now (as in last night) was as good a time to rewatch it as any.

Summary

I’ve forgotten much of what happens in the anime, so here’s an extremely vague summary from AniDB.

It is the year 2075. In a world where travelling between Earth, Space stations and the moon has become normal.

Hachimaki (Hoshino Hachirouta) is just an ordinary salaryman. He works at a space station collecting debris. However, he has a dream of owning his very own space ship someday. And so he is spending his days collecting debris together with his colleagues Yuri, Fee and his friend Tanabe. Now it is his fourth year doing that work and he is going to be 25 years old soon, which is why he starts to think about his life.

How does Hachimaki feel? Well, today, Hachimaki is going to do the same job…

Thoughts

That’s probably one of the shittiest intro ever to such a great anime, making it sound extremely boring, but Planetes is anything but! I just watched the first episode last night, so here’s my initial thoughts and what I remember from 5 years ago. The first thing that hit me was how beautiful the animation is, and still holds up really well. The quality here is akin to GiTS!

The next thing is that it paints quite a bleak and boring picture of space exploration in the near future. This is also quite realistic, and is probably as far ahead as we’ll go, at least in our lifetimes. The cool space ships, colonised planets and wars with aliens will have to wait until our great, great grandchildren’s time.

Anyways, back to Planetes. The characters all seem to be eccentric and lively in their own unique way. I know that a more romantic relationship does develop between Hachimaki and Tanabe later on. Also, there’s some sort of conspiracy going on by the INTO (future NATO?), an organisation that holds the majority of space ventures. The first half of the anime, if memory serves correct, is a slow, but deep character development period, with things speeding up to a very epic ending in the later half.

Planetes is definitely one of the best space sci-fi animes out there which everybody (except angsty teens) will enjoy. A good anime to follow up when introducing people to animes as well. It’s simple and easy to digest, and plays a lot into human emotions and aspirations. Also a good break from any full on action/ moe anime series you’ve been watching for the past couple of years.