There's a genre of entertainment called the "space opera". Now, I'm not entirely clear on what, exactly a "space opera" is. It isn't that I can't find out; I'm sure a quick Google search would turn up the answers easily enough. It's just that the phrase "space opera" scares me. I mean, it scares the daylights out of me. Still, despite my ignorance, I'm pretty sure Black Heaven qualifies as a "space opera". Kind of, anyway.
Anime Anonymous has visited shows with insane plot concepts in the past... please see Midori no Hibi for an absolutely outrageous example. But while Black Heaven doesn't have any living hand puppets in it, it's still pretty left-field. I'm still surprised Gainax isn't responsible for it.
Characters:
Now, it isn't that I disliked Oji really... it's hard to not sympathize with the poor guy. It's just that he doesn't do much in the series to rouse any emotion at all. Watching a 30-something Japanese dude being bored isn't exactly exciting, and when he finally does find his calling (yeah, hit the Story section for that chewy little nugget) he doesn't do much but stand in one spot playing a guitar. He's just not the kind of guy I see being capable of filling the "hero" slot in a cartoon series, sympathetic or not. The reason Oji is so miserable is because of his evil wife Yoko. When I first saw Yoko I thought she was Oji's daughter. She's roughly half his size and has the voice and mannerisms of a 14-year-old. When Yoko isn't busy ignoring Oji, she's loading him down with menial tasks or throwing away all his music gear (the last remnants of a life he truly loved). And on top of that, she's constantly suspicious that he's off having an affair... and who could blame him? Oji and Yoko have an obnoxious son who is infatuated with the Power Rangers
Fortunately for Oji, he becomes involved with an intergalactic alien war general named Layla. We won't get into why Oji is palling around with aliens yet, but as it turns out I sort of liked Layla. In addition to being Oji's alien contact, she's fronting as a co-worker in his office. Their constant exploits cause onlookers to assume certain unmentionable innuendo, of course, to which Layla is completely oblivious and Oji is completely innocent. Still, Layla's cute and in a show like this she can get away with that as being her only good feature. The last characters worth noting are a trio of amazingly ditzy anime bimbos named Kotoko, Eriko and Rinko. I have no idea which is which, I don't care which is which, and it doesn't matter which is which. The three characters are just there for eye candy and/or comic relief, and they utterly fail at both. Every time the triplets show up you know you're going to see something retarded.
Story:
I mean, it's not like you can just have an anime about a bored middle-age geek. Well, you can but nobody would watch it. Actually, they would, but only the people who refuse to believe any anime is bad, ever. And even those people would secretly hate it, and just pretend to like it so their friends didn't disown them. So to Black Heaven's credit there is a little more to the story than that. Layla and the triplets are soldiers from a gigantic space station that is waging war against... someone. You know, the kind of generic space war made famous by George Lucas in that dumb 70s movie. However, Layla and her gang have an advantage: the ultimate weapon. See, whenever Oji is playing his guitar, the lasers coming out of Layla's ship(s) become unstoppable super-lasers, thus making her side invincible. Unfortunately for Layla, Oji is stuck in the numbing vortex of that daily grind called "life". So it's her job to go to Earth, pretend to be human, and get him to play his guitar any time her superiors need some extra firepower. The triplets are delegated to the task of occupying Yoko so she doesn't get suspicious (a job they inevitably screw up).
The point the series constantly drives home is simple: life sucks and fantasy rules. But hey, I already knew that; I didn't need a bad anime to spell it out for me.
Animation:
It's really no fun having an average animation score. Raving about killer animation is a lot of fun because I get to use cool adjectives like "vivid" or "explosive" or "magical". On the other hand, picking on bad animation is fun too because I get to make comparisons to vomit or dog excrement. But what can you say about strictly average animation? Oh, I know; I'll compare the animation in the series to the animation in the intro. First impression of the intro: this animation is horrible, but at least it's different. It's psychedelic and colorful and... well, ugly. But it fits perfectly with the rock star motif Black Heaven wants to portray. After the intro is over (and the godawful song is washed away from your ears) you're stuck in a world that, for all you know, could be any random episode of Love Hina or what-have-you. This is one of those series that, rather than give its characters defining visual traits, just gives them differently colored pastel hair. The interesting conundrum here is this: if the entire series used the strange trippy animation from the intro, which is less visually appealing but more interesting than the series itself, would the animation score be below average? I didn't really want to picture an entire series with that kind of animation, so I just assumed "yes" and bumped Black Heaven's score down to one notch below blatantly average. One aggravation the series constantly throws out there is that while the animation is pretty standard as far as choppiness goes, the "camera" pans around smoothly. Sometimes there will be background movement and character movement on the screen at the same time; the background moves fluidly and smoothly while you can almost count the framerate for the characters on one hand. This is a very disorienting effect and I'm surprised I haven't come across anything like it before. So in
Culture Shock:
The culture you really have to know to fully enjoy Black Heaven, I guess, would be that of 80s metal music. That's just an assumption really; it's not like the series is overflowing with band trivia, and to my knowledge there aren't any music cameos for trainspotters to pick out. Really what it comes down to is that I'm just extremely disinterested in music of this nature, so when Oji whips out his "Flying V" I yawn and go look for something more interesting to do. A safe bet might be, if you actually were into the type of music Black Heaven supposedly spotlights, you'd just be infuriated at how watered down and "wrong" the series gets it. Of course, fans of that nature are just as rabid and dangerous as your typical anime fan, and I doubt there'd be very much overlap. (If there is overlap, and you fit into that category, hi! Please don't attack me with a jackhammer! Kthxbye!) One last quick tidbit: Oji's English voice actor is the same guy who does Jet in Cowboy Bebop, so every time he talked something in my subconscious clicked and said, "Hmm... I could be watching Bebop right now instead." This little intangible just made me hate the series even more.
It really does seem like they had the opportunity to make a kooky niche anime that really spotlighted the music, accenting it with trippy animation (especially considering at least part of each episode is an outer space laser light show). Instead what we got was a boring guy playing watered down "metal" while some generic anime girls fall over themselves in the background. Sure something nuts like that would appeal to only a small audience, but hey, there isn't a lot of competition out there in the
Black Heaven is just another typical anime with a wild story premise, but not a wild story. Lots of potential to go in lots of directions, but instead stays the course. Menial, generic, same-old-same-old. You can pass this one up.
Overall Rating:
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"If I had a gun, there'd be no tomorrow."
"Look, honey! Space idiots!"
For once, this really isn't what it looks like.
I wonder if the Death Star had any guitar-powered artillery.
There just... aren't... words.
