Summary: >

The alien invasion force came from beyond Jupiter. Mars quickly fell in the onslaught, and the only survivor lives on Earth as a cook. And actually Akito doesn't even remember how he managed to escape, but is quite defensive about not fighting against the aliens. The Earth found itself in a bad situation since earth weapons were basically in-effective against the aliens. One commercial company decided that the destruction of humanity would probably hurt their profits and thus decided to build their own battleship to combat the aliens.

Nergal industries didn't just go to the best military people to do the job, they actually went for anyone who could do the job best, regardless of their experience or former occupation. Akito ends up accidental attached to the crew. Also rather unfortunate that the Nadesico hadn't received it's pilots yet before it was forced to launch, so Akito ends up being a part time pilot in addition to being a cook.

So how can this crew of oddballs do better than the military? That sort of depends on the way you define better, but they do usually get the job done...

Thoughts: >

So there are the initial impressions of Nadesico. First of all it's a mecha anime, and as such goes through the usual gyrations of giant robots fighting. As far as animation goes, Nadesico fairs quite well although it never gets mind blowing. Character development was actually quite good in this series. Although many of the characters (Yurika in particular) are rather silly, others like Akito have a deeper perspective on things. And actually all the characters were actually pretty likable, and offered a wide variety personality wise. As far as the story goes it unravels fairly well, although it starts to get a bit too caught up in itself towards the very end. But even then it was quite well thought out.

That is the initial impression, there is another side to Nadesico. You see it's a mecha anime that is often funny because it goes directly in the line of being a mecha anime, yet fully pointint out just how ridiculous that actually is. In this way Nadesico may be one of the most ingenious anime titles ever created.

For instance, in one instance Akito tries to block missiles with his mecha when he is informed that "You can't do that. Everyone knows giant robots are only good for fighting other giant robots!" - Which obviously brings up the point of why someone would START creating giant robots for fighting in the first place. Aside from that many of the female crew take a liking to Akito, who in the tradition of mecha anime is totally oblivious to this. The rest of the male crew however actually does understand that he's an idiot and often point out that they'd be plenty happy to have all these women chasing them.

In other ways there are actually other rather sly yet quite insightful elements of the show. For instance modern ships have such advanced computer systems that the outcome of any given battle is already pre-determined with the crew of the ship being pretty much irrelevant. As such the captain is basically worthless. So ship captains have evolved from old geezers to more youthful attractive heads of the ship, but are basically just symbolic. Thus having such a ditsy captain like Yurika who scored good on simulations makes honest to God sense!

To tell you the truth Nadesico is a rather fun title, but it is not for everyone. And actually most anime fans probably aren't going to get the extremely clever parody points of this anime, but you don't really need to get that deep into the parady aspects to enjoy it either - it stands perfectly well as an anime just being a fun sort of anime. As such it's a must watch for any mecha fan. I'd recommend it to just about all other anime fans as well . Nadesico came out soon after Evangelion and was thus playing second fiddle to it, especially as they were both mecha anime. But Nadesico certainly deserves credit on it's own as the two titles follow very different approaches.

Honestly I'd say this is one of my favorite titles because of the fun and sly wit.