Dragon's Heaven

If you love that style of gritty, garage, 80's mecha anime, this lost, unpolished gem might be right up your alley.
It's clear that they only had the production budget for a short one-shot, so the story seems to be very condensed. Still, I love this kind of stuff.

The live-action opening breaks the animation fourth wall, but years later it still sticks in my mind.

There's really only one reason you would want to watch this one-shot OVA: The artwork. It's like nothing else you are going to see anywhere else in anime or manga (with, maybe the exception of some of the ancient tech of Hayao Miyazaki in the Nausicaa manga). The art style is much more reminiscent of eighties European comics. More in the tradition of Heavy Metal or Epic Illustrated, heavily leaning on Jean Giraud or Pepe Moreno.

All of the artwork, that is, except for the main female character. Which is designed in a much more standard stereotypical ... anime design. The juxtaposition between the two is very, very jarring, and because the running length of this is less than 30 minutes, you never have the time to get over it. It's annoying all the way through.

The story is nothing worth writing home about - a post apocalyptic grudge match between two sentient giant mecha in the far, far distant future. But really, forget the story, it's meaningless anyway. Just soak in the gritty art instead.

Somewhere out there has to be an artbook that is far more interesting to read than this is to watch. Given that the first few minutes of the show are shots of their human-sized, model robot articulating, the priority of the OVA is almost exclusively on the mechs to the detriment of everything else.

Honestly, the biggest criticism of Dragon's Heaven I have is that there just isn't anything to it. It's a post-apocalyptic setting, but it boils down to a desert that is a featureless Tatooine (and that isn't the only thing that looks ripped off from Star Wars). Our protagonist is a ... cute, spunky, 80's anime girl, and the most important thing about her character is... hold on, I'm sure there was something... she takes a bath? She's out in the desert and wakes up a robot. The robot follows her home, and she decides to keep it. Now she and her pet robot become the only force to stop invaders, for some reason. They win and mecha-fido doesn't even have to die.

Then there is the art that rides the line between being highly detailed and being messy. A lot of the shading was done in the lineart, and sometimes without any color, so there might be times you only see four or five solid colors. There will also be times where a liberal airbrushing puts colors everywhere, so it ends up feeling like it's lacking coherent art direction. Did I mention the four minutes of filmed footage?

If you have started to exhaust all of 80's mecha anime, then give it a shot. Otherwise, no one is missing anything that hasn't been done better elsewhere.