Hey people, and welcome again to Improper Each Time. Right this moment we’re stepping again into Sol Bianca: The Legacy, a six-episode OVA from the tail finish of the 20 th century, and the sequel to a never-concluded predecessor from the early ‘90s. Anime’s direct-to-video period is affected by such artifacts, sequence that had been reduce brief both by disappointing gross sales or employees exodus, leaving solely fragmentary segments of formidable, fantastically realized fantasy of their wake. Works had been smaller in scale but larger in implication; in an period largely given over to franchise replication, a panorama dominated by such lingering absences feels surprisingly alluring.
Anyway, context apart, Sol Bianca’s first episode launched us to the titular ship and its crew of obvious bounty hunters, on the hunt for a pistol scavenged from the ruins of Earth. Alongside the way in which, they ran afoul of the ambiguous Terra Drive, and finally picked up a younger lady named Mayo with a mysterious previous, who claims her dad and mom await on the long-lost ruins of Earth itself. Thus the stage is ready for a grand pilgrimage, one overtly framed within the context of Abraham’s journey to Canaan. No matter awaits, I’m trying ahead to extra of this manufacturing’s luxurious artwork design. Let’s get to it!
Episode 2
We open with our crew chilling in a convertible on a balmy desert day, in a letterboxed format that solely amplifies the sense we’re at the start of a cool-ass music video. Sol Bianca’s first episode demonstrated quite a lot of priorities, and certainly one of them is clearly “letting our protagonists look cool as hell in varied environments and outfits”
Oh man, utilizing the flip of the ignition as the start of your title sequence. Type for days right here, with very purposeful blocking and an emphasis on incidental, character-defining physique language
They look like exploring an historic destroy of some type, maybe Mayan in nature. Getting an fascinating mixture of variables right here, between the calls to Christian mythology, variable earth artifacts, and the Spanish UI of the Sol Bianca itself
Highly effective sense of visible continuity throughout these cuts – motion transfers from one to the following in intelligent, sleek methods, like this leap being mirrored in one other character’s shades
The OP tune additionally feels extraordinarily of its period, like one thing from .hack or Lain
Then again, I can’t in good aware assist their use of the papyrus font
The OP ends on a charged picture – our captain April discovering an egg on the seashore, which begins to crack in her hand
A recent epigraph for our second episode: “All hope abandon ye who enter right here! And when his hand he had stretch’d forth to mine, with nice appears after I was cheer’d, into the key place he led me on.” From Dante’s Divine Comedy, describing the protagonist’s assembly with Virgil and entrance into hell. Introducing some ambiguity then, as as to whether Mayo is main our get together to damnation or the promised land. What really stays of this place referred to as Earth?
“La Reminiscencia.” Persevering with with using Spanish textual content, which appears to border our leads as both cowboys or conquistadors
April reveals a solar tarot card to an informant, who warns her she’s higher off staying away from their present vacation spot
“Nobody has made it out of these ruins alive aside from me.”
“A sure man’s horrible curse haunts that space”
The character designs for this present are so distinctive! Very distinguished bone buildings, little “softness” to them, with an emphasis on how shadows would fall throughout robust, pronounced options. The Yasuomi Umetsu vibes are robust, however even Umetsu typically makes larger concessions to rounded, commonplace anime magnificence requirements, fairly than these craggy, considerably extra masculine options
With solely six episodes complete, no time is wasted on connective tissue; we’re dropped instantly into their subsequent journey, Mayo now an assumed member of the crew
They pierce via heavy environment and out above an deserted frontier-era metropolis
A basic picture: a clocktower damaged and leaning, emphasizing how time has stopped for this world
The sleek strains of their CG ship combine nicely with the background, assisted by their complimentary gray tones
Within the heart of the town we discover our egg, a large egg-shaped constructing marked “MEGASEED.” So presumably a vault of some type, maybe a seed for a renewed Earth, doubtlessly containing all of the organic samples and information wanted to delivery a brand new dwelling for humanity
The door to this egg is marked with statues of people in agony, as if this had been the seal of Pandora’s Field
Our tech professional Jun debuts her holographic assistant to open the door, named “Sancho” after Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s eternally put-upon follower. A reputation that cheekily implies our heroes are on an inherently doomed, pointless quest
Mayo briefly sees a golden-haired lady throughout the door. I’m wondering what the origin texts are for this conceit of the “star little one,” the harmless who has mysterious powers and visions of the hidden reality? I suppose a lot of it’d simply be the secularization of non secular narratives – fairly than a priest or monk, the determine of future is remodeled into a toddler representing humanity’s hopeful future
That is the genius of Dragon Ball, after all – fairly than reworking Journey to the West’s monk into an harmless little one, Toriyama remodeled him into Bulma, who opens hearth on Goku the second she meets him
Jun and Mayo stumble via the door earlier than it’s sealed
In the meantime, the previous man April consulted with seems to have been conscripted by Terra Drive, who’re chasing April to the planet of Consegra
Sancho is a nice addition. The animators are clearly having enjoyable together with his extra exaggeration-friendly options, embracing the cartoonish expression work that this manufacturing’s in any other case extremely detailed facial buildings precludes. Practical, detailed faces have their strengths and weaknesses, and one of many major belongings you’re abandoning is cartoonish elasticity
A phantom seems earlier than the trio and declares it can curse them. Sol Bianca’s life like designs work splendidly for this character – leaning into the pronounced facial shading, this ghost’s options are etched in darkness
“The Divine Comedy is a narrative which Dante created primarily based on his lifetime of disappointment.” Harsh however truthful. A good portion of Inferno is devoted to Dante describing the infernal punishments awaiting varied folks he disliked at court docket
They arrive at a spectral river, mirroring the Acheron’s function in Greek mythology (the function that Romans would assign to the river Styx)
“They certain are spoiled… a gondola only for the lifeless?” Jun has a charmingly obnoxious character
Then a large blade nearly lops off their heads. All the time gotta be prepared for Indiana Jones traps
Ooh, good pan out of depth as they attain some sort of crystal corridor. Environment friendly work right here – the dimensions of the room is giant sufficient that perspective doesn’t shift, that means simply including a couple of cel layers with particular person foreground characters creates a convincing phantasm of digicam motion
The corridor is guarded by three lasers, echoing the three heads of Cerberus. Jun is just not impressed
Terra Drive arrive, with their fighter jets swiftly operating right into a drunken Sol Bianca-piloting Feb
The core of this facility seems to carry data of the 20 th century and mankind’s eventual flight into house, ending in a promise by an unknown man to our golden-haired “Flor,” stating that his terraforming operations would finish humanity’s power disaster
Flor’s reminiscences had been transferred to this laptop. I like the form of “make-up” work they’re doing together with her face, utilizing extremely delicate shading for her lips and eyelashes to create a form of “hyper-real” depth in her look. It sorta jogs my memory of Studio Wit’s make-up unit, who embellished high-impact pictures for reveals like Kabaneri and After the Rain
The person who did all that is named Void, presumably the determine who cursed them initially
Jun hacks her method to the core whereas the opposite Sol Bianca crew dogfight with Terra Drive, including some real visible drama to her livid typing
Our spectacled scion of Terra Drive decides it’s time to destroy the MegaSeed
Jun reaches the 2 coffins on the heart of the MegaSeed, representing each Void’s finish and Dante’s ascension into heaven
Flor tells us the story of Void, how he got here right here to terraform the planet, how he was deserted by his fellow scientists and finally turned to liquor. It was Flor’s suicide that prompted his present incarnation, a curse of damaged goals that has carried on via the centuries
Flor pleads with Jun to finish his program, and she or he reluctantly agrees
I’m actually fascinated by all of the inherent gaps on this story; there’s a lot we don’t learn about Sol Bianca’s crew, greater than it looks like two previous OVAs might presumably cowl. The sense of narrative compression and lacking threads endemic to the OVA period feels uniquely alluring, like we had been solely capable of extract fragmentary relics from a lot bigger narratives, a sensation that makes these tales and worlds really feel a lot bigger than their precise operating time. I’m reminded of the pure filling-in I used to be pressured to do as a toddler, after I might solely catch staggered episodes of one thing like Outlaw Star, and thus needed to fill within the gaps with my very own creativeness. That specifically was a product of my viewing sample, however these OVAs appear to deliberately domesticate such an impact
Jun says she “hates old school girls such as you,” seemingly disgusted by Flor’s reliance on Void’s love. Extra mysteries of identification that we could by no means resolve
Some glorious layouts because the egg begins to break down; love this low-angle, super-foreshortened reduce as Jun rushes in direction of the exit, which makes it really feel as if she’s pushing off the digicam itself to run ahead
The egg begins a sequence response, and the complete planet is consumed by explosions. Void’s legacy destroyed
Ah, I see – April discovered Jun aboard the Sol Bianca itself, an android who had been left alone for hundreds of years. Thus Jun noticed herself in Flor, and hated the resemblance, abandoning her though she might have truly saved her. The loneliness of eternity breeds dependence; Jun knew precisely why Flor couldn’t go away Void
And Finished
Thus our heroes journey onwards into the huge unknown, having retrieved nothing from the planet Consegra besides the reminiscence of a misplaced love, and a reminder that we will make heaven or hell wherever we stand. A stable episode on the entire, honing in on Jun and Mayo with the intention to inform a compelling private drama with a stinger that genuinely recontextualized every little thing we’d seen earlier than. I are likely to not be a fan of “characterization via hidden data” as a rule, as I’d fairly relate to a personality’s humanity within the second than solely perceive them lengthy after the very fact, however this drama was concise sufficient to make efficient use of the idea, by primarily characterizing Jun via her response to every new revelation about Flor. That plus Sancho’s expressiveness, the motion theatrics of her associates, and the array of nefarious temple traps all mixed for a beneficiant episode that also maintained Sol Bianca’s ethereal, dreamlike tone. Onward to the celebs!
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