Review for Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing Part 2

Introduction

After having suffered the indignity of watching Part 1 of Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing on DVD, the PR company finally deigns to offer Blu-rays with which to take in Part 2 of the show. I ask you! In this day and age... This first world grumble is brought to you by a reviewer who is at a loss for how to start this review, and is plunging on ahead regardless, hoping that the momentum of the inane first few sentences will quickly congeal into something of substance. But there is something to be said for experiencing the Last Exile sequel in high definition, as it is a show that thrives on the visual experience, from a company that has made its mark in developing fantastic, and expansive future worlds for anime, experimenting with different visual styles, and unafraid of pushing the boundaries.

Fam Fan Fan is an eager young Sky Pirate. The Sky Pirates make a living in the distant future Earth by going after and capturing the gargantuan Sky Fish that sail the skies, town sized vessels, both military and civilian of the various nations. The first Sky Pirate to land a harpoon on a target ship gets to choose its disposition, and Fam has dreams of amassing her own pirate fleet with her navigator Giselle, as well as taking part in a Grand Race of vanships. But this future world is not the friendliest of places, especially for returnees. Years ago, when the world faced an ecological crisis, various groups of people left as Exiles, trying to escape the devastation. Those who stayed behind were the ones to rebuild the world. But once peace and prosperity had been restored to the Earth, the Exiles returned and resettled, establishing various nations, and their now vacant Exile ships light up the night skies as artificial moons.

For the Ades Federation, this is an unthinkable state of affairs. The world belongs to those who stayed behind, not the cowardly Exiles that ran, and they launch a campaign to retake the land that was usurped, and return it to those who deserve it. They start by launching a war of annihilation on the kingdom of Turan. Fam and the pirate fleet are looking for targets of opportunity when they fly straight into the middle of a battle. They wind up ‘capturing’ the Turan flagship and with it the two princesses of Turan, Lily and Millia, coincidentally rescuing them from certain death.


At the end of the previous instalment, The Ades Federation had turned full force against the returnees, striking out against all in an effort to reclaim the various countries for the original inhabitants. In this, their military commander Luscinia is motivated by the tragic events of the last Grand Race, when the previous Augusta of Ades was assassinated. And not even the Sky Pirates are safe from his eagerness to obtain justice. As his attention turns to the powerful nation of Glacies, this coincides with the return of the Anatoray and Disith exiles, heralded by the sky ship Silvius, and the flagship Urbanus. But at the last, and wholly unexpected, Millia’s sister Liliana revealed her allegiance to Luscinia, declared Millia’s attempt to restore Turan a crime, and disowned her sister.

This second collection of Last Exile: Fam, The Silver Wing collects 12 episodes across two discs. This time I get to take a look at the Blu-ray release of the show.

Disc 1
12. Block
13. Bad Move
14. Smothered Mate
15. Triangulation
15.5 Second Adjournment
16. Automaton
17. Dynamic Possibilities
18. Transposition

Disc 2
19. Queening Square
20. Triple Rook
21. Grand Master

Picture

Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing is most definitely a show for HD. The Blu-ray presents the anime at 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p, and the image is clear and sharp, with rich colours, smooth animation, and vivid and intricate detail in terms of the world design, costumes and backgrounds. It looks stupendous, and seeing the various action sequences, the giant sky ships and vespa flyers on the big screen in HD detail is worlds apart from the DVD presentation. The CG most certainly looks better on Blu-ray, and you can now see the added detail and complexity compared to the first series. There is still that perennial bugbear of digital banding on large expanses of similar colour, most noticeable during fade-ins and fade-outs, but other than that, this is a very appealing transfer.


Incidentally, episode 15.5, the second recap episode in the series may make you blink, as this is a recap of the first Last Exile (now there’s an oxymoron). This episode up-scales most of its footage from the first series, which was animated in SD, and suddenly the image is softer, detail is prone to shimmer and moiré, and there is a whole lot of jerkiness in the pans and scrolls. If ever the original series was to be up-scaled to Blu-ray in the way of Samurai Champloo and Baccano!, it will need a lot more in the way of work.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR and aren’t necessarily representative of the retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English and 2.0 Japanese, with player locked translated subtitles for the Japanese audio and a signs (and Russian dialogue translation) only track for the English audio. I went with the Japanese audio, and wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with aural intensity. For one thing it’s on the quiet side, requiring me to nudge up the volume close to halfway. The audio bitrate also hovers around the 1Mbps mark for the Japanese stereo, which doesn’t seem quite as dynamic as other Blu-ray stereo tracks. The audio experience is adequate if nothing more. I tried the dub, and it too requires the assistance of the volume control to get a decent response.

There’s a lot more in the way of Russian dialogue in this half of the show, and for once, the Japanese audio doesn’t do a great job in convincing a layperson that these are genuine Russian speakers. The English voice actors do a much better job in that regard, and they also have the advantage of casting a native Russian speaker to voice the most vocal of the Russian characters in the show. I might have been convinced to give the dub another chance, but then, Cor Blimey Guvnor, a Turan native showed up with that Dick van Dyke accent, and I’d take broken Japanese Russian over that any day. This being Blu-ray, there are none of the issues with pitch correction that I noted on the DVD release of Part 1.

Extras

Both discs present their content with animated menus.

The sole extra on disc 1 is an audio commentary on episode 17. In it, ADR Engineer Chris George joins Caitlin Glass (Magnolia), and Gwendolyn Lau (Vasant), for another bright, chirpy, and mostly pointless chinwag. I say mostly, as there is some interesting information about the Russian dialogue recording in this commentary, Make sure to watch it after completing the series, as there are a couple of whopping and irresponsible spoilers at the end of the commentary track.

Disc 2 has the rest of the extras. I could take about 60 seconds of the Funimation Gigglefest that masquerades as a commentary for episode 21. It features Monica Rial (who else) who played Sara in the show, Leah Clark (Giselle), and Jad Saxton (Fam).

The Spin-Off Anime CM series Friday Night #8-13 offers 3 minutes of those funny adverts for the show, continuing on in the same vein as those on the first set. There are 3 minutes of trailers in the Promotional Videos.

The Anime Expo 2011 Part 2 lasts 7 minutes, and has an interview with the show’s production designer Makoto Kobayashi.

You get 2 of the textless openings, and four textless endings, although with the Blu-ray’s locked subtitles, they aren’t exactly textless anymore.

You get the US Trailer for the show and Madman trailers for Evangelion 2.22, Eden of the East Movie 2, and the K-On! Movie, following an Aussie anti-piracy thank you.

Conclusion

Episode 15.5 is the litmus test for this show. If you’ve been enjoying Fam, The Silver Wing to this point, watch 15.5, think little of it and move on to the rest of the series, then you’re good to go with Last Exile: Fam, The Silver Wing. I on the other hand had an almost irrepressible urge to eject the disc, grab the original series DVDs, and watch them through instead. Then, like me you’ll be comparing this sequel to the original series, and comparing it unfavourably. You’ll be wondering what went wrong, and your dismay will grow as this show’s trainwreck conclusion unfolds. You do not want to compare the two, as Fam, The Silver Wing isn’t a patch on that original series, and I found that coloured my experience of it drastically.

Technically, Fam, the Silver Wing isn’t that bad. The animation is top notch, the story does hold the attention, and it does epic and grand in a way that few anime attempt these days. It’s just that it caters for today’s modern mainstream fanbase with fan service and clichéd characters, it ditches development for archetypes, and its simplistic story is dumbed down to the point of ridiculousness. It’s also a show where the plot dictates the characters, and when the plot heads off into absurd tangents, so the characters behave more and more idiotically.


So it seems that Fam saves the world with platitudes, until it transpires that the villain’s plan would have failed anyway, and all the people killing each other in that last ditch battle needn’t have bothered. And there’s the princess who turns genocidal maniac because of some ill-explained infatuation with the villain, who’s roundly condemned by all and sundry for her actions, but who then turns around and saves said villain’s life in an assassination attempt, sacrificing her own, and everyone, including the survivors of her actions, mourn her like the world has ended. Why! Why is the show doing this? The problem with Last Exile was that in a complex and engaging show, with deep and layered characters, the side was let down by a single moustache twirling villain in the form of Maestro Delphine. The whole of Fam, The Silver Wing is populated by vacuous characters like this, and the story is thin and pointless.

Don’t get me started on the original series characters that show up, merely to tick off a checklist of cameos, with little to do to actually advance the plot. And I still don’t know how Dio survived to be in this show, and this second part adds the further mystery of Claus in a wheelchair. It’s probably plugging the manga to fill in those narrative gaps.


If Last Exile didn’t exist, I’d be more forgiving of this show, as it sits comfortably alongside the current crop of dumbed down sci-fi action anime made to cater for an otaku’s sensibilities, sacrificing intelligence and depth for a quick hit of moe and fanservice. It tells its story without any missteps and drop offs in quality. It does what it sets out to do, present some thrilling animated aviation action, some big explosions, and a fair bit of sci-fi, all wrapped up in a girly-squee. By itself it’s fine. It’s just that after the original Last Exile, Fam, The Silver Wing is just one big misstep in and of itself.