Armitage III

Mars, the year 2179. A lifeless planet has been colonised by mankind. The world as we know it is now a distant memory, just like Bill Gates and Windows ‘95 (again? What a bore… – the editorial team’s note). The atmosphere on the red planet is very much like that of Blade Runner. Androids are by now part of society, and their artificial intelligence is so advanced that they hold important public offices and positions of responsibility. In this setting moves Ross Sylibus, an Earth detective who has moved to Mars to forget a heavy past. There, together with his new partner, Naomi Armitage, he is assigned to investigate the murders of a number of robots.

Robots, in fact, are not very popular with the people, especially with a certain René D’anclaude, who orders and carries out the murders. And yet the robots killed by D’anclaude do not seem to be the same as those currently on the market: they are more advanced models, completely indistinguishable from humans and equipped with tissue and blood. These robots are called “Third generation”. The population takes the news badly: it is now impossible to know whether the people walking down the street are real or robots, which causes mass psychosis.

But what is the real secret of the “Third generation”? Why does D’anclaude want to kill them? And above all, why is Armitage so interested in the fate of the “thirds”?

After this strangely serious (or almost) summary, on to a few considerations: (Goku’s first thought while watching these OVAs was: “why does Armitage go around dressed like a h….r [a lady of negotiable affections]?” That says a lot about our new deputy director on probation…) Armitage is a very fine title, but it’s not for everybody. From a technical point of view I found it slightly shaky: the character design is acceptable but not always consistent. Armitage (and some of the other characters) has the big eyes typical of the Japanese style, while Ross, D’anclaude and all the male characters have a more realistic look, and in places this jars. The animation is at times not up to the task, and the music is nice, though not very varied.

Still, Armitage will certainly delight cyberpunk fans (I confirm – Char’s note): besides the already mentioned resemblance to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, the OVAs have a perfect plot, which gives away the most obvious things straight away and keeps the twists for last, completely unexpected. It is also impossible not to notice the vulgar, coarse and raw language typical of this genre, which may scandalise the prim and proper but raises the realism enormously (congratulations to Dynamic on the adaptation, they have shown a swear-word vocabulary that is no joke; next to them I sound like a convent schoolgirl…). But then, given the considerable amount of blood and the number of deaths piling up in the OVAs, a “gosh darn it” or a “good heavens” would have been far out of place.

More big compliments to Dynamic for thinking (for once) of our wallets, putting one 50-minute OVA on the first tape and the other three, 30 minutes each, on the second, for a total of a whole 90 minutes of animation!!! Shame they’ll make up for it in December with the Evangelion tapes: two episodes at full price, enough to make you mortgage your house…