Simoun

The verdant, peaceful country of Simulacrum resides on the planet of Daikuuriku. The country owes its existence to flying machines called Simoun and their holy Sibylla pilots. Powered by ancient artifacts, these ships can utilize Ri Maajon, frighteningly powerful abilities that can tear the very sky apart.

Aaeru is a wilful girl who joins the ranks of the Sibylla priestesses at Chor Tempest in hopes of being able to pilot a Simoun one day. But soon after she enlists, Simulacrum is plunged into a war, as hostile nations desperately try to claim the technology for themselves. Hoping to save their respective lands from doom, these nations at peril believe the Simoun are the key to preventing disaster.

Now struggling against their enemies and dealing with personal losses, the girls of Chor Tempest have no choice but to adapt to their situation if they are to have any chance at unraveling the mysteries that lie at the heart of their country: the Simoun and the Ri Maajon.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Aaeru Main

Niino, Michi Japanese

Mamiina Main

Morinaga, Rika Japanese

Neviril Main

Takahashi, Rieko Japanese

Paraietta Main

Koshimizu, Ami Japanese

Yun Main

Nazuka, Kaori Japanese

Morinas Main

Mizuki, Nana Japanese

Limone Main

Noto, Mamiko Japanese

Dominura Main

Yukana Japanese

Alti Main

Toyoguchi, Megumi Japanese

Rodoreamon Main

Takahashi, Mikako Japanese

Matsuda, Keiichi Producer

Nishimura, Junji Director, Episode Director, Script, Storyboard

Tsujitani, Kouji Sound Director

Jinbo, Masato Episode Director

Reviews

Aug 4, 2024

Jose_Cruz

Recommended

Simoun is, without a doubt, the best anime I have ever watched, and I have seen about a thousand. You might wonder why this is the case. It's simple: Simoun takes all the familiar tropes of anime—cute girls, warfare, science fiction/fantasy world building, ludicrous costumes, pastel-colored backgrounds, lesbian romance, intensely dramatic dialogue, and dramatic operatic music—and presents them with a rather unique execution: I don't know anything else that is quite like Simoun.

From reading other reviews, I noticed that many recent critics don't fully grasp what makes this show special. To appreciate Simoun, you need an open mind. Yes, it doesn't look like a show ... from 2024 because it's from 2006! Most anime from 2006 now appear dated (the visual quality of anime began significantly improving around 2008-2009 with shows like Clannad: After Story and K-On!, which set higher standards for the industry). However, despite its dated visuals, Simoun excels in delivering its narrative in a way that few other titles have managed.

If I were to compare Simoun to other shows, I'd liken it to Evangelion: a 26-episode dramatic sci-fi anime featuring warfare and teenagers piloting war machines, but with a much better-structured plot. Simoun has a clear beginning, development, and ending, with an excellent and consistently executed narrative structure that surpasses 95% of anime produced today. This is quite unlike Evangelion, which struggles with plot structure throughout the series. Additionally, Simoun shares similarities with Madoka, but with more character development. Madoka was my favorite anime before I watched Simoun. Both are "pseudo-yuri" with intense drama between the two main characters. However, Madoka feels a bit rushed in comparison, so I now rate Simoun slightly higher.

Highly recommended, but only for those who can watch anime made differently from the latest shows.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Apr 11, 2024

Quaggy

Mixed Feelings

Simoun is a perplexing anime. It's a political war anime with a heavy focus on character drama, usually relating to their relationships with each other.

At the start, the anime throws a lot of terminology and such at you very fast, and it feels as though it's starting in the middle of a story instead of the start. That isn't an inherently bad thing, it can be done in a way to throw the viewer into an interesting situation immediately, but I found it a little jarring and hard to follow for the first few episodes. Eventually you do start to understand what these words ... mean and what's going on, but it took me a few episodes.

While this anime is about a war between two factions, the heavy focus on character drama made what the opposing side was fighting for kinda vague. A few episodes early on focus on the enemy side, but it feels as though their motivations were given less focus to give more room for drama between characters. I don't mind this focus on character drama, but I feel as though that had the consequence of making it very hard for me to get invested in this war when we really only see one side's conflict. Another thing about the enemy faction is that they speak a language the characters cant speak, which they portray with reversed Japanese. I guess this decision gets across that the characters are unable to understand them, but every time I heard the enemy soldiers talk it sounded awful ;/

Speaking of the characters along with the drama, at the start it felt like there was too much of both. Starting with like 10 main characters, and ending with like 13, it became hard for me to get invested and as a result I felt quite bored and confused. But as I stuck with the anime I grew to understand these character's dynamics and became quite invested in most of their drama, especially Aeru and Neviril. They're both deeply flawed people with intriguingly similar yet repellent personalities. Seeing them come together feels quite engaging and very interesting. I think my favorite characters were Rodoreamon and Mamiina. The themes of class disparity and the discrimination Mamiina went through for being lower class made their relationship my favorite. I would have really loved to see more of it TvT.

The anime also has a focus on gender, everyone starting off as a girl and being able to chose your gender once you turn 17. This was the main factor that indulged me into watching Simoun since it's so rare to see any anime with something so overtly transgender, especially from 2006. How is Simoun when viewed from a trans lens? It's intriguing, I think the mere concept alone is a great vessel to tell a story about gender. Early on in the story, it's shown that gender dysphoria is a thing that can seriously harm someone psychologically, but it doesn't really go very deep with that. There are also a few characters in the main cast that don't want to decide a gender, I find acknowledging that possibility at all feels ahead of its time for this anime. It's a shame that the anime doesn't really feel as though being agender as much of a main focus.

Although this anime can also come off as weirdly essentialist when it comes to gender and portrays choosing a gender as an inevitability. Men in this world get better jobs, if a character becomes a man they have to have short hair and boyish clothes and vice versa. Multiple times, characters will say they want to become a man to be in a relationship with someone. As if the show feels two women can't be in a relationship, and that one person must always be a man and one a woman. Which is especially jarring for this anime! The Simoun are literally yuri powered, like they literally kiss and use their connection to each other to make the ship fly properly xD. It's a very odd double standard.

As flawed as the commentary on gender is in this anime, I would have liked to see more of a focus on it within the story. I think even more of a focus on these characters' gender identity and how that meshes with their psyche would have been fascinating, adding an extra layer to these characters and their interactions. Alas, the anime somewhat does this, but it never feels like a main focus.;/ Even then, for 2006 this anime tackles the topic in an interesting and not immediately hateful and stereotypical way and I respect that a lot.

Artistically, Simoun is very apparently low budget and the visual style can be slightly inconsistent. Characters will usually stand around or sit in place, not moving much, and most of the action is shown through extremely dated 3D models of the simoun flying around and drawing symbols in the sky. Despite that I do quite like the look of the characters, especially when they're given varying line weights in their line art, that kinda thing is very appealing to me! The character designs were all around solid, and I grew to appreciate the dated 3D models. As much as they stand out from the hand drawn backgrounds, the ships are well modeled for the time, and I think there's a charm to the slightly shitty mid 2000s CG look!

I also took note of the soundtrack. In many of the fights or preludes to fights, they use these accordion and piano tracks instead of a more traditional battle music. Some have said that this is unfitting and took them out of the fights, but I found this really caught my attention as a unique directing choice. It's as if the simoun are dancing in the sky as they draw patterns in battle, cool stuff imo.;3

In the end, I was very mixed on Simoun. It could have been a lot better in quite a few ways, but I think that there was an okay story and I don't regret my time watching this anime. I wish I could have liked it more

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jan 22, 2021

Ernacram

Not Recommended

Simoun is a 2006 version of Darling in the Franxx with lesbian romance and bad production quality. It involves a war where young girls have to fight against an enemy by pairing up and piloting technologically-advanced war machines, but the story is centered on the relationships between these characters rather than on the war itself.


THE STORY IS UNIQUE

The story takes place in some sort of lesbian transgender world where people are born females and can choose their sex at the age of 17. Most of the characters are Sibyllae, i.e. girls who haven’t chosen their sex yet and act as priestesses who perform “prayers” ... that can destroy their country’s enemies by piloting CGI flying machines called Simoun. The Simoun can only be piloted by a pair of Sibyllae, and they have to kiss before getting in the machine, so the series has a lot of lesbian romance. Although it does sound like a weird p*rn plot, it is a unique setting that could have provided the basis for an interesting story.


UNFORTUNATELY …

The story line focuses on boring relationships and romance between the characters rather than on world-building and more interesting themes such as politics and war.

The plot is confusing from the start to the ending of the series. At several moments in the first episode, the story is told from an enemy soldier’s perspective, which makes it hard to follow. The terminology is also confusing and it takes a lot of episodes to fully understand what each term means: Sibyllae are the girls who fly the Simoun; a Simoun squadron is called a Chor; to kill their enemies they draw magical shapes known as Ri Maajon in the sky with their Simoun. Then you have all the names of the different types of Ri Maajon, the weird names of their religion and their country, and the fact that the Sibyllae are called “priestesses” who perform “prayers” when it’s obvious that they are soldiers. The consequence of this is that the first episodes are confusing and it is complicated to understand what they are trying to do with their machines.

In this world, people are born females and at the age of 17 they are supposed to choose their sex. If they choose to be male their body will slowly change and their voice will become deeper. However, male characters are all dubbed by female voice actors who try to imitate a male voice, which is very unsettling and makes the dialogues extremely weird.

The enemies from the nation of Argentum speak a different language. How did the anime choose to portray this? They recorded normal Japanese voice acting and put it in reverse, which, as you could have guessed, sounds like shit. The characters’ names are also completely random: Neviril, Dominuura, Paraietta, Wapourif, Anubituf… This makes the dialogues sound even more ridiculous.

Then you have the fact that most of the first seven episodes consist in the protagonist yelling at another character and harassing her by repeatedly knocking at her door so that she becomes her partner.


PEDOPHILIA

Yet another anime that depicts a romantic relationship between an adult and a child – between a 12-year old girl and 19-year old woman to be precise, as something completely acceptable. It is almost a running gag at this point. Some people apparently think that an adult woman kissing a child on the lips is cute and wholesome. It seems as though the whole medium of anime and a significant part of the anime community is committed to normalizing pedophilia. Sad!


WHAT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS, THEN?

They are bad and they don’t make any sense. The protagonist is a dumbass whose motivations and objectives are never explained. The only thing we know about her is that she really wants to partner with the Sibylla Neviril, and for that reason she will harass her for more than one fourth of the show. There is few character development for her except from boring flashbacks about her grandfather. Her voice-acting is also very annoying, which doesn’t really help.

The other characters aren’t better. You have boring and predictable relationships such as the “master-servant relationship but they are actually childhood friends” or the incestuous sisters – how original!
You also have the young girl that can only complain and yell all the time with her high-pitched voice, the useless characters such as Morinas and Vyura (oh god, the names!) and the character that is never properly introduced, doesn’t get any character development or evolution but is, for some reason, suddenly given an important role towards the end of the series.

Then you have Mamina (another weird name), who is introduced as some sort of rival for the protagonist because she too, wants to partner with Neviril. But instead of a proper opposition with the protagonist, she has a childish dispute with her and gets the whole squadron punished and then turns into a useless secondary character whose only purpose in life is doing the cooking and the cleaning.


RANDOM MUSIC PLACEMENT

It’s rare to see an anime fail so hard in terms of background music. Well, the background music in itself isn’t that bad, there are even some tracks that could be considered good in a different context. The main problem is that the music placement is completely random and doesn’t fit the situation at all. In the air battles and fight scenes, the BGM sounds like tango music (with an accordion-like instrument), which feels completely out of place and makes all these scenes that are supposed to be tragic and serious look extremely ridiculous. The lip-sync is also bad, and the voice intonation of the characters don’t correspond to the faces they make.


IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT

Most of the time, bad anime is bad not because it has bad animation, but because it has a bad plot and cliché characters. Simoun manages to be a failure both in terms of story and in terms of production quality, and it looks so bad it feels like a fan-made amateur anime.

The flying machines and other vehicles are all CGI, but to be frank, it doesn’t look that bad once you get used to it. The backgrounds, however, look like unfinished hand-drawings and feel completely out of place. But the worst thing is the 2D animation. The 2D animation is very poor and a lot of static images are used. Something as simple as a character walking in a hall will look bad, with the character’s movements being inconsistent with their speed. Even the lighting is bad, and the shadows don’t make sense. The characters’ faces are inconsistent and look very ugly 90% of the time, which makes most of the frames look like complete shit. It is sad because in the rare moments where the characters’ faces don’t look bad there’s actually a lot of detail in their eyes, which is the most important part of the face.


CONCLUSION

Although it is unique in its weirdness, Simoun fails in every category. Its story is boring. It focuses on the relationships between bad characters. But the worst thing is that it isn’t even entertaining. The ugly animation, the weird voice-acting and the random music placement makes it a painful experience. Avoid this show at all costs.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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