Trava: Fist Planet

STORY: 6
Well, the story is quite basic, we start off with two characters, Trava and Shinkai, on board of a spaceship. They are freelancers, and their current job is to travel and survey an unknown planet. They find an object drifting in space, and locate a girl inside of it who seems to have lost her memories. Sound familiar?
The story doesn't start off partcularly exciting, but it's enough to keep you interested. Eventually, the trio ends up landing on the planet and realise that there are some crazy things going on there. The problem is, the story does seem random, while that can work, ... like in FLCL, here it feels a bit awkward. The show explains that Trava and Shikai hope to collect money to be able to enter a sort of mecha suit battle tournament, but the anime ends before any of that takes place. It seems like they had more story to show us, but ended up just wrapping up the show in 4 short episodes.

ART: 8
Best part of the anime. The art is really creative and different, kind of a mix of a Aeon Flux and Mind Game. This will turn off some people, but if you value art and like creative applications of it, this OVA is for you. The character designs are very funky and sometime silly(the female character's huge hips) but i found them very interesting. Overall, i found it to be stylish and eye catching.

SOUND: 6
Fair for the most part. Nothing really memorable here, but it works and none of the music felt out of place. Pretty solid overall. The voice acting was very good and fit the funkyness of the characters.

CHARACTER: 7
Well, this one was hard to judge. There is no character development here, but in some cases that can be a good thing. We are introduced to several eccentric characters and, in the end, it is fun to observe their actions and mannerisms, so i decided to go with a positive score.

ENJOYMENT: 6
I liked this overall, but it could have been much more, it's simply too short to be impressive. Now, short anime can be wonderful, but here it felt like a 12 episode anime cropped into a tiny 4 episodes of 13 minutes each. If you don't care about art, or don't like this kind of animation/character design, subtract two points here.

Overall score: 7

Not as good as the poster would suggest, and nowhere close to its sequel Redline, but Trava: Fist Planet is pretty good, and very goofy. I love just how strange the sci-fi world in Redline was, and we get to see even more of it here, even if it isn't nearly as entertaining. I'm not normally a fan of this very "Adult Swim"-esque risque and racy sci-fi world, but for some reason Redline, and Trava by extension, work very well for me.

I feel like I'd have enjoyed this way more, except that this only had Hungarian subtitles, and the English ones refused to load. Some ... of these characters were real big mumblers, I'll tell ya that. Very hard to understand mumbling. Speak up!

I watched this completely blind with no knowledge of Redline or really anything about it. This anime frustrates me because while alot of aspects aren't that great, it is *just* slightly away from being 'so bad it's good', ending up in this weird void between 'What the hell did I just watch?' and 'What the hell was the point?'

I really struggled to find any cohesive story or plot while watching, it's a complete mess of criss-crossing plotlines that just don't go anywhere or feel at all compelling. I can acknowledge that OVAs often have to cut back plot but this one just spews lore at ... you like a machine gun, with most of it only ever being explained at the end. Alot of it is cliche at best, and at the end there doesn't feel like any sort of resolution because nothing's been established properly. It feels like an attempt to imitate the style of FLCL or Project A-Ko, but without understanding why those work.

The audio just isn't anything really. I can't remember a single piece of music after watching and the voice actors seem to either emote in an apathetic mumble or while screaming at the top of their lungs which just makes them annoying. Characters also seem to cut eachother off constantly which while funny a few times, just completely breaks the flow of conversations making them feel awkward.

The only real reason I carried on was the animation, which really is superb though not surprising considered it's Madhouse. All of the environments are hand-drawn which makes them look retro but still very detailed. The smoothness of movement transitions is really strong and clearly alot of work went into them. While I appreciated the dramatic use of foreshortening and strange character designs, in alot of cuts they just end up looking awkward or hard to interpret. The princess character's pelvis in particular just makes her look aesthetically unappealing when viewed at any angle other than straight-on.