Summary: >

Kimball who had turned 18 not so long ago was itching to get off his farming planet and go out to see the universe. His opportunity arrived when he made arrangements to hitch a ride with one of his dad's old friends. That's when this big ship arrived and threatened to crash into the planet. Kimball boards the ship and manages to land it safely, but as he was attending to the wounded pilot; he ends up with this weird device attached to the back of his hand.

It appears that this ship was part of the Galactic Patrol and its pilot was a Lensman: the core of the Patrol. But lenses are not supposed to be transferable. In the lens is the key to finally finding the Devil Planet, something the Galactic Patrol has been searching for, for a long time. In fact finding this planet may be the only hope for the galaxy. Kimball not only has a responsibility to get the Patrol, but to learn the way of the Lensman as well. While most people have to train for years to be accepted as a Lensman, in this case the lens chose him.

Thoughts: >

My first foray into anime was a feature of 3 anime titles. Initially I only liked Vampire Hunter D. But after all these years I gave Robot Carnival another chance. And I found that I rather liked it. So how about Lensman? Well why not? I mean by now I'm known as an avid fan of old school anime like Captain Harlock among others. And you know what? I still hate Lensman.

If you don't know what Lensman is, it's actually got an interesting history to it. You see many of the things we see in sci-fi today that we would view as cliché are all present in Lensman. This is because these things were all STARTED by Lensman back in serials in the late 1930's (yes 1930's). But even so, Lensman was so innovative for its time that you'd think there would be a lot of interesting things to mine in that treasure trove. It's funny how this anime managed to obtain the rights to the Lensman name, then do something totally unrelated to the franchise.

Well lets start with the animation. Most animated parts were alright and correctly detailed, but quite surprisingly uninteresting. Designs were also actually extremely dull. Worst of all were the computer generated sequences which did not age well AT ALL. I guess in modern times this may be harder to explain to newer generations, but there was a time when some things were rendered with computers because... they could. And it was amazing because people would think "wow, they did that with computers?", despite the fact that an animation team in the 80s could far exceed the visuals made by any computer of the day. In a sort of ironic twist, now that everything is done with computers, it's the old meticulous artistic visuals done by hand which are probably the thing most revered in classic anime.

So anyway after that there is the soundtrack which is equally uninteresting. Aside from that the characters are all rather drab. And that is sort of strange in that the production of such an anime in such a rich environment would yield characters that just seem completely uninspired. And horrible dubbing doesn't help! Well I shouldn't say it's horrible, it's just not very emotional.

The thing that is supposed to pull all of this along is of course the plot. But you basically have this Lensman who finds the Devil Planet, then gives his lens to a kid, and they run away from the bad guys here and there... Yeah, it's extremely linear.

So lets tally all of this up shall we? Mediocre animation, bad characters, bad soundtrack, boring plot... Need I say more?

Screen Caps: >