Review of Blue Gender The Movie

Introduction

Yuji is an average high-school student, forced into cryogenic sleep after suffering from an incurable condition. 22 years after going into suspended animation, Yuji awakes to find humankind on the brink of extinction and waging a losing battle against giant insect-like species called `Blue`. Entrusted to a small team of soldiers, including the tomboy Marlene, by a set of army orders from higher up, Yuji must battle to stay alive in a nightmare future where humans are making their last stand.

The Blue Gender movie is a condensed version of the 26 episode anime series into one movie.

Video

The video quality is excellent - strong colours and high detail are prominent throughout. As for the quality of the animation, I would place it as strong, yet not superb: considering the series was made five years ago now, it has well-drawn characters and decent battle scenes, even compared to today`s animation.

Audio

The original Japanese track is presented in 2.0 stereo with English subtitles. The music and sound effects came through clearly without background noise, and the subtitles were in a readable format.

The English dub is remixed into DD 5.1, and gives an expected extra kick when explosions occur, whilst the entire soundstage was utilized effectively. Overall a good choice of sound formats with both providing a good audio experience.

Features

A bare minimum of extras, including a set of anime trailers only.

Conclusion

At first I thought the idea of fitting 650 minutes of programming into the standard 90mins of movie action to be a terrible idea - but whilst the Blue Gender movie does have its faults, overall it works better than I thought it would.

Whilst the character development - primarily the growing relationship has taken a back seat in the movie, and a few of the subplots removed (mostly from the second half of the series), there is a strong enough balance of plot and action to keep this vaguely true to the series whilst being able to stand alone as a separate movie.

I personally am not too much of a fan of these kinds of experiments as I feel lose out on a lot of the nuances and development that a 26-show series can take you through, and after watching a movie of the series I wouldn`t watch the series as it would have spoiled most of the surprise. However, who I would recommend this DVD for are people who would like an accessible route into anime if they have never watched a full series before. In that case, this DVD presents a decent attempt at capturing both the plot and the feel of the actual series itself.