Review for Freedom: The Complete Collection - Collector's Edition

Introduction

There are a whole lot of firsts with this disc. It's not the first anime licence rescued in the UK, but that's a rare enough occurrence to count on the fingers of one hand. But it is the first Blu-ray anime to be licence rescued, indeed back in 2009, it was practically the first anime series to be released in high definition in the West. That happened so long ago, that it was initially released on HD-DVD, before making the jump to the eventual winner of the format wars, Blu-ray. It was Bandai Visual who released it in the US, the boutique brand releasing anime directly from Japan, films like Akira, The Wings of Honneamise, and Gunbuster, which all made their HD debuts on that label and at usually exorbitant prices. The Freedom OVA was released one episode per disc on six HD-DVD discs (The double length episode 7 was never released on HD-DVD) including the last ever HD-DVD ever commercially released in the US, and then went for something of a Dolby TrueHD sonic upgrade when all seven episodes were re-released on 4 dual layer Blu-ray discs with copious extras. The US also saw a DVD release much later, but Freedom has the notable distinction of being the first high definition anime released in the UK, when Beez brought the boxset across here, retailing back then for £70. The downside was that being a Bandai Visual product, it was strictly limited in numbers, while the Blu-ray market for anime back then was almost non-existent. Not a lot of people saw Freedom.

Manga Entertainment have licence rescued Freedom, now that more people are hi-def capable, and are giving it a second chance. After all, with none other than Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame associated with the production, it really ought to be seen by as many anime fans as possible, and at a budget price of £34.99, half what the original boxset retailed for, and with the Collector's Edition Blu-ray also including the DVD release on 2 discs, as well as a bonus set of art cards, you certainly are getting your money's worth. The cause for concern is that while the original release was on four dual layer discs, Manga Entertainment and Australia's Madman Entertainment, from where these discs are sourced, have found room for all seven episodes, three and a half hours worth of high definition video, plus copious extra features all on a single dual-layer Blu-ray disc. Something had to give for the economy, and I'm almost dreading to find out just what.

It's the 23rd Century. Man was about to embark on his grandest adventure, having left the confines of Earth, established bases in orbit and on the Moon, and about to terraform Mars. Then in 2101, the Freeport space station fell from orbit, crashing into Earth, devastating the environment and wrecking the climate. The people that survived the accident practically wiped each other out in the subsequent wars, fighting over what few resources remained. The terraforming project was abandoned, and man retreated to the far side of the moon, where the Eden base was. Since then it has become the last surviving bastion of mankind, millions of inhabitants living and prospering peacefully in carefully regulated domes, following constructive, organised, and carefully regulated lives.


That's the ideal of course, but for some, such strictures are a little too stifling, and as usual it's the teenagers. Takeru wants to race bikes in order to impress girls, and with his friends Kazuma and Bismarck, he's souping up a battered old tricycle to take on his archrival Taira. Of course over-exuberance gets him into trouble, and he winds up doing community service outside the domes. He happens to be there when what looks like a meteorite impacts nearby, but examining it he finds a collection of manmade objects, a message in a bottle, a picture of a girl and a couple of lines stating that Earth is safe, and asking if anyone is out there. The government of Eden has been lying to them. To learn the truth, Takeru and his friends will need a little Freedom. Fortunately there is still some in Eden, literally, a small part of the base called Freedom where those who don't conform to societal ideals are tolerated to live. An old astronaut friend of Bismarck's named Alan runs the settlement, and he may know how to get the boys to a world that everyone has been telling them has been dead for a hundred years.

All seven episodes of Freedom are presented on a single dual layer Blu-ray disc from Manga Entertainment. The dual play collection also contains the series on DVD, the episodes on one disc, and the extras on another.

Picture

Freedom gets a 1080p 1.78:1 widescreen transfer onto this Blu-ray disc. This is where I thought that I would see some effect of having squeezed four discs worth of material onto just one, and I did read up on the technical reviews of the original release to get some idea of what to expect. One review on AnimeonDVD mentioned that the video bitrate for the show hovered around the low 30s, and sure enough when I switched on the player's bitrate meter, this encode of Freedom offered around half that. Of course numbers don't necessarily equate to what is on screen, but I did notice some digital banding and more annoying was the aliasing around fine detail. There was some nauseating shimmer around a vertical pan in the prologue, but thereafter it was only the finest of line detail that would suffer aliasing. This I thought was a further indication of compression, but reading reviews like that on Home Cinema Digest revealed that reviewers had noted these issues on the original release as well. I guess that has more to it being an early anime Blu-ray with the encoders yet to work out their art. So it seems that this single disc Blu-ray offers a similar visual experience to that offered by the first set, although I'll let someone who gets hold of both releases have the final say on that.


The anime itself is stupendous quite frankly. It takes a leaf from films like Vexille and Appleseed and delivers computer generated, cel shaded characters, but Freedom's cel shaded characters blows those of the other films away. It's because they adhere much more closely to the anime style, look more like traditional 2D characters, and you see that the CG animation has really only been used to get them moving and interacting with their environments. Otherwise, this may as well be a traditional 2D animation. The character designs may be traditional, but the richness and complexity of the world design is astounding. Again, comparing it a recent CG space anime epic, Fumihiko Sori's TO, it may lack the attention to detail and the sci-fi grandiosity, but Freedom offers a lived in, appealing and very tactile universe. Its technological creations and environments may be simpler, but somewhat perversely, this makes them feel more real. It's because they help you forget the technicalities of the animation and let you appreciate the story.

Sound

So here's how you find the room for all that HD footage on one disc. You ditch the soundtracks. The original Freedom OVA release had three Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. The menu for this disc mistakenly lists the choice between DTS-HD MA English and Japanese. In reality, what you get is DTS 5.1 English and Japanese, with optional translated English subtitles. Of all possible lossy soundtracks, a full 1.5Mb bitrate DTS audio track is probably the best to have, but those with discerning ears and suitable audio equipment are going to miss the lossless audio. I have to say though that the DTS was powerful enough and impressive enough to have my ears grinning during the action sequences. The race sequences were astounding, and the launch scenes really managed to invigorate my subwoofer.

I opted as always for the Japanese audio, and it was here that I came across the collection's biggest flaw. The Japanese audio is out of sync on episode 4. It lags behind the animation by a significant fraction of a second. If that isn't all, the audio in both English and Japanese is out of sync in the double length episode 7. It isn't as immediately apparent as the flaw in episode 4, but it's just as annoying. In case it's a player specific/firmware issue, I watched it on a Panasonic SC-BT330, but since the Japanese and English audio remained in sync for the other episodes, I tend to doubt that. It was distracting enough for me to eject the disc, and watch the DVD episode instead. It's the sort of technical glitch that really annoys.


Other than this whopping great elephant in the room of a problem, the original language audio is just fine, with the characters appropriately cast and performed. I sampled the English dub as well, and found that too to be of a high standard, although with the technical quality of the animation so much higher than that of traditional 2D animation, I found that lip sync, even when the audio was correctly in step with the visuals, wasn't as easy to match as conventional lip flaps. The subtitles are timed accurately and free of error.

Extras

The Blu-ray disc gets some very nicely animated menus, although with so many options, especially in the extras menu, it can be a little cumbersome to navigate. You can play each episode separately, and there is also a play all option.

All of the extra features on Freedom are presented in SD PAL format, with 1.5 Mb LPCM stereo audio.

There are a whole lot of trailers, promo videos and commercials on this disc, running to about 90 seconds apiece. There is an Introduction Trailer to the series, the 7 Freedom Digests offer quick summaries of the episodes, and there are the Next Episode Trailers.

Other short clippettes worth watching include the Another Vehicle Race segment that combines the animation with real world footage, an LTV race on modern Japanese streets. The Nissin Cup Noodle TV Commercial Digests offer 90 seconds worth of promo footage for the show. This really is worth watching, as most of it is made up of deleted or rather alternate footage that doesn't appear in the actual story.

Freedom: The Hope is another 90-second bike race scene, which offers a fantastic coda. Messages From The Characters last 2½ minutes, and has the show's animated cast thanking you for watching the show, in their own personal styles.


The meaty stuff is almost hidden amongst all the promo footage, but is well worth seeking out. Talking About Freedom Session 1 (17½ mins), and Session 2 (21 mins) sees director Shuhei Morita, series planner Dai Sato, and scenario support Gichi Ohtsuka getting together first to talk about how the story came together, and what the ideas behind Freedom were, and then in the second segment to take a look back at the first three episodes, and talk a bit about the fourth episode which had just been released at that point, as well as to talk about the show's characters.

Freedom in the USA 1 lasts 11 minutes, and sees Dai Sato and Shuhei Morita pay a visit to Los Angeles and the 2007 Anime Expo, where they were promoting the HD-DVD release of the series. They also get to be totally underwhelmed when they go location spotting for the iconic route 66, which plays a part in episode 4.

Freedom in the USA 2 offers more location spotting, but this time is much more rewarding when they pay a visit to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and come face to face with the real history of space exploration that inspired the series. This lasts 13½ minutes.

Fly Me To The Moon 1 (The Apollo's Journey), and Fly Me To The Moon 2 (From Apollo to Freedom) together last 24 minutes, and offer a potted history of manned spaceflight, with significant emphasis on the Apollo programme that put man on the moon. It's an odd experience to hear a Japanese commentator almost get patriotic and proud for the US space programme.

The DVDs

This Blu-ray Collector's Edition comes with the show on DVD as well, for when someone else is hogging the home cinema, and you really need a fix of space sci-fi anime. Naturally I didn't watch the whole thing, but I can tell you that disc 1 offers you all seven episodes, while the extras are repeated on disc 2. The downer is that unlike most modern anime shows, The Freedom episodes get NTSC-PAL standards conversions, which aren't the smoothest I have ever seen. The plus side is that there are no audio synchronisation problems here.

Conclusion

Freedom is a classic sci-fi tale, albeit one subsidised heavily by product placement. You have to train your brains to accept cup noodles in every other shot, and that despite the story's insistence that the Earth and the Moon have been isolated from each other for over a hundred years, that the same company is still selling its hot water snack on both worlds. Little things like that would be called plot-holes in another reality, but here it's just advertising. After all, it was the thirtieth birthday of the snack manufacturer that financed this OVA series, gathering the best and brightest in the anime business to create an epic anime show. After all, character design from Katsuhiro Otomo, writers like Dai Sato, studio Sunrise behind the visuals, and a catchy theme song from Hikaru Utada, Freedom is the cream of the crop when it comes to production values and scope.


It's hardly an original set up though. Catastrophe and war destroys the Earth, with mankind surviving only on a lunar base, set up using the technology that was meant to be used to terraform Mars, for which the original base was meant to be a waystation. For the last hundred years, the people of Eden have been living strictly regimented and controlled lives, conforming to an ideal society, burdened by the knowledge that they are the last humans in the universe, and it's down to them to keep history alive. Of course against such strictures, some will rebel, and as usual it's the teenagers, so Eden has something of a safety valve for them to let off steam, a little organised rebellion that if it goes too far is punished by community service.

In true James Dean style, it's all about speed, about being reckless, and about racing. Takeru's the young boy who is trying to impress a girl by building a fast bike, and gazing up wistfully at the dead Earth (which in true Truman Show style is actually an image projected on the roof of the dome, as Eden is actually on the far side of the moon). It's when he gets punished for one of his transgressions with community service, working outside of the dome, that he learns that Eden has been lying to him, lying to them all. He finds a message in a bottle, the remains of a capsule that he witnesses impacting with the lunar surface, a few fragments of seashell, and a photo, a greeting from Earth. For the Eden government, it's a threat to their utopia, and a truth that must be stifled. For Takeru, who has instantly fallen in love with the girl in the photo, the teenage rebellion becomes real, as he decides that the truth has to be known, and that he needs to go to Earth to find out what really happened.

Secrets and lies, teenage rebellion against authority, and a whole bunch of sci-fi concepts and ideas that really appeal, make up Freedom. We follow Takeru and his friends on their quest to uncover the truth, which with the aid of the old astronaut Alan actually gets them as far as Earth itself. For the lunar visitors, it's like exploring an alien world, no dome, scary weather, weird animals, and even weirder humans. What starts off as an act of teenage defiance of authority, becomes a quest to reunite two worlds, the sundered halves of humanity, and by doing so bring back hope and ambition to both Earth and the Moon. But there's resistance to change on both worlds.

The story in Freedom is great; it's the sort of classic, sci-fi escapade that I grew up on, devouring novels like it from my local library. Its twists and turns, surprises and secrets do much to hold the attention. If that isn't enough, the animation is excellent, with the world design living up to the epic nature of the story, and the action sequences really appeal. The characters are fairly generic though, and their narrative journeys aren't exactly deep or meaningful. The teenagers act like typical teenagers, the authority figures are suitably draconian, the quirkier characters serve as comic relief, it's all pretty standard for an anime story. The downside is the length of the show, which at just seven episodes, eight if you count the final one as two, just hasn't the space to properly develop the characters and tell its story at the same time. Key events have to be hit on schedule, and if subtler little character moments fall by the wayside as a result, then so be it. Freedom would have worked much better as a full length story, or maybe even as a thirteen episode series, to properly develop the characters and show their growth and the adversities they face. Too often, important potential storyline was glossed over by a '2-years later' caption.


Well, the Blu-ray is a bust for me. It may be my player and/or its firmware, in which case it's just the people with the same hardware that need to be wary. So often I have seen sound sync errors on cheaper Blu-ray players solved by a firmware update. The fact that the issue was selective, limited to certain episodes and not the entire disc, makes me more suspicious that the problem is down to the disc, and not the hardware. I don't know about you, but I can't watch video out of sync with sound at all. For me, 5/16ths of this disc is worthless. I had to watch those episodes on the DVD part of the collection instead. If it is a player issue, then you ought to make sure that your Blu-ray player plays the disc before you spend any money on it. If it is a disc issue then unless and until Manga Entertainment address the problem, the Blu-ray release of Freedom, attractive though it looks, ought to be avoided. Until then, the only way to watch Freedom in the UK, unfortunate though it is, is with the standards converted DVDs.

If the Blu-ray is essential, I have noticed that the original 4-disc collection is still available by importing from the US via a certain, South American river of an internet retailer, but you will be looking to lay down at least £100 for the privilege.