What They Say:
Commencement – In isolation his entire life, Nagate must adjust to life in a centuries-old space colony while training as a cadet pilot to fight an ancient threat.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga of the same name by Tsutomu Nihei, Knights of Sidonia is a fascinating first test case show that had Netflix acquiring the rights to it and bringing it to multiple territories they’re in around the world as an original series. It got a normal spring 2014 season airing in Japan, but it wasn’t simulcast anywhere else. To make things even more interesting, they worked to make it as accessible as possible in its Netflix debut by creating the dub along the way so the whole series can be viewed in either its original Japanese or the well done English language track. And like other Netflix original series, we get all thirteen episodes at once. Hopefully folks that enjoy the show will check out the manga as Vertical is releasing it in North America, and it’ll be interesting to see how this release plays out in terms of its home video potential down the line as well. With Netflix dabbling into anime, it shows another of the majors taking an interest in the genre and that could be pretty interesting to see unfold. Due to time limitations, we’ll be watching the series in episode by episode form rather than in bulk.
The show puts us into a number of interesting situations right off the bat, from a young man that’s an underdweller in the city that’s doing what he can to steal rice to survive but ends up in a nasty accident to seeing a group of young women that are training as pilots to help fight in the war. A war that’s likely been going on for a long time against an enemy known as the Gauna. The city, Sidonia, founded a thousand years earlier, is one of those tall but sprawling and complicated places where the underside that Nagate comes from is seemingly impossible to get out of once you get lost in there because of all the passages, tunnels and mazes that exist due to construction on top of construction. Amid all of this, we get to see a few touches of how the world works through the eyes of the cadets as there are anti-war protesters out there with claims about the war that’s been going on for centuries involves all sorts of secrets that even involves longevity, if not potential cloning of some sort. Throwing Nagate into the middle of all of this as it comes together is simple but amusing because it highlights the disparity between the various groups that exist.
What saves Nagate from being turned into fertilizer is that there is a benefactor out there that wants to help him. That in itself is a kind of disturbing sequence as we’re introduced to a woman in a mask that wants him to become a garde pilot in the war that they’re fighting. The more that Nagate is exposed to the world, the weirder it gets for him, including the reveal that unlike the others that exist here aboveground, he eats food rather than just photosynthesizes nutrients. Nagate’s introduction into the Garde program brings him into contact with Izana, one of the cadets that saw his escape. She provides a bit of a view into the workings of the program and the world, being our eyes to the weirdness with some of the explanations of why it works like it does. All of it ends up being in service of Nagate getting into one of the virtual simulators for being a Garde pilot which is just more advanced than the one he had access to down below. But even with that access, he still doesn’t do well here and that raises its own questions as well.
The whiplash nature of the episode is fairly typical for a lot of anime series that have a number of things to introduce, so seeing Nagate go from stealing rice at the start to piloting a legendary garde that’s several revisions behind what the others are using to go on an ice mining mission does work in its own way. it’s a kind of leap of faith that there’s a lot of blanks that aren’t being filled in directly in order to get us to this point. But there is a thrill as we see Nagate launch in that machine and get into space, revealing the world that they live in within the massive block floating in space attached to an asteroid. Naturally, the asteroid contains a gauna inside of it, the first that Sidonia has apparently encountered in a hundred years, and has been hiding inside of the ice until it can launch an attack. It’s just a tease, but what we get is similar to what we saw from Nagate at the beginning of the episode in his simulation, so it’ll be interesting to see how he really performs when given the chance in the next episode.
In Summary:
When it comes to science fiction series in the anime medium, it’s something that usually drops a whole lot of information in the first episode and makes for a chaotic and frenetic episode. Knights of Sidonia definitely has that feeling as it goes through a good bit of time in the first episode with just the highlights really in showing us how Nagate ends up going from stealing rice to piloting a legendary combat mecha. What we get is certainly intriguing and it has an old school kind of science fiction approach to it since it doesn’t involve the usual gaggle of schoolgirls and earth based silliness. It’s going for a light touch on really engaging with the characters for now, but the archetypes are pretty easy to get and digging into the details will be the fun as it goes on. It didn’t knock me out of the park at the start, but you can see a lot of tantalizing things to draw on and see where it’s going to go.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Netflix
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
Taken from the Wiki on the anime.
“An anime television series adaptation, produced by Polygon Pictures, premiered on April 10, 2014 and ended its first season on June 26, 2014, on MBS and later on TBS, CBCand BS-TBS.[27][28] The series was directed by Kobun Shizuno, assisted by Hiroyuki Seshita, with scripts by Sadayuki Murai and character design by Yuki Moriyama.[29] The series is also localized and streamed by Netflix at all its territories since July 4, 2014.[30] The opening song is “Sidonia” by Angela and the ending song is “Show” (??) by Eri Kitamura. A second season is under production.”
Someone explain to me how this can be considered a “Netflix original.”
Just wanted to point out that this title is available in a Spanish dub and sub, besides Japanese and English.
I hope this is successful for Netflix and we’ll be able to get more animated series in the future on the service. Because as Keven Spacey described, I’m a ‘binge viewer’.