Anime: Kenran Butou Sai: The Mars Daybreak

Once in a while one must kick back, stretch a bit and enjoy the lighter side of anime, setting aside the critic eye and simply going with the flow of the series. Perhaps my opinion of this series would've been worse had I watched it some other time, but for the present moment...it just hit the spot.

The Mars Daybreak (MD for short) is almost a run of the mill mecha series, tickling my soft spot: journeys.
Set in a more original setting, MD is not intent on doing something grand or awe-inspiring. It set its purpose on being entertaining and, in all due honesty, it achieved it with great ease. It's hard to get mad at a series that is this honest with its goals and that shows such efficiency in conveying to its viewers the light-hearted feel that the pirate life is supposed to entail.

Animation
Being set in an underwater environment, MD tackled quite the challenge in trying to present the under-water world of terraformed Mars. In quite a number of ways, it looks stunning through the way it's drawn, the way the mechs move (called Round Bucklers in this anime), the way the explosions are made to look. One sequence that I found to be absolutely awe-inspiring was the Ship of Aurora surfacing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but that scene stuck with me.
However, all is not fine and dandy. Mars is a terraformed planet now, able to sustain life in the vast oceans covering the surface yet most of the time there are no creatures in the ocean to grace our eyes. I understand it's about the budget so I'm not going to be harsh about this. But I will call it a damn pity as the moments when there actually is some life in those dark waters are created absolutely beautifully.

Heading a bit farther from the barren background of MD one must admit to the aspect of the battles. This anime is not a very action oriented one and, as such, serious battle moments are pretty rare although there are quite a number of confrontations between the pirates and the army, but things usually get settled terribly fast. When the story demands a battle in greater detail...well, things chance. The movement is fluid as it would be expected in a series of its year, the action is dynamic and the overall feeling image that the fight leaves behind is a good one.

All of the above and the somewhat generic character designs make MD into a visually soothing anime to watch. As in other aspects, it's not grand, but it is fine.

Sound
And another anime receives a saving grace from a well thought out musical score. The series takes full advantage of its great choral sequences as well as the overall awesome battle music. It is an anime about pirates and the music manages to be a bit more than the generic sound in the background and pulls the viewer into the anime. As I said: a saving grace.

The opening song is somewhat forgettable and the ending is more than forgettable since those are songs that you'd find in almost any mecha anime, the exact kind of music.
Aside from this, all that's left are the voices and those are done great since the VAs fit their characters and it's all done very well.

Moving on...

Story
As I've said earlier, this anime does not try to do anything grand but instead, it just tries to be entertaining. If I were to make a comparison, I'd probably compare it to an underwater Vandread lacking the harem element.
In case you haven't seen Vandread, I'll enlighten you as to what I meant by this: pretty soon into the whole thing, the characters of MD are engulfed in a mission to search for some treasure simply for the fun of it. Oh that pirate life...so carefree that I'm almost jealous of the characters.
So, with little information, a lot of mysteries and quite some lack of logics...the search for the treasure begins. And, conveniently, the clues are quite easy to find and acquire. As the so called story progresses, the viewer is treated to even more mysteries typical of a pirate life.
But in the end it just feels like the producers decided to lift their middle finger at all the viewers and simply end the anime with almost no explanations for anything.
Ok...so we have a treasure that seems wanted by quite a number of parties...what's it good for? Why should we find out? We're simple viewers...we're not important.
There's a robot appearing out of nowhere in the first episode. Hellooo...what's with that guy? Nobody's curious about it?
"Oh, so you found it...that makes our robot not unique anymore...ok, we'll keep you on-board and we won't bother with the details." I'd say those are pretty big details to be omitted. And the story just keeps on omitting such details like why we have a talking, super genius cat. Eh, who wants to know?

Another problem I had and somehow chose to ignore was the complete lack of logic behind the background story. As they presented the history of Mars and the first colonists it made them sound as if, from a race of people that could fly to other planets, they reverted back to the early stages of cultural evolution. Pirates hoarding gold and gems in submarines? Some kind of Indian customs? Secret technology of old? Weird...I don't know if the producers realized just how ridiculous this would seem in the end but one can overlook it if you view the anime as a simple SF comedy show.

From what I'm saying, the anime should be a chore to watch, right?
Wrong! MD has its bad parts but it makes up for them through the light-hearted feel and the simple take on all the things that would make an anime serious.

Character
One thing that I can say about the characters first hand is the fact that they lack any and all signs of development. Gram, as the main character, is developed to some degree but that's a thousand times more than I could say about the others.
Ok...there's a girl that can hear the silent voices of all living things. Ok, she's interesting, kind of generic but she's interesting. That's enough...
We have a guy that is said to have a destructive behavior. I always watched to observe this but it never happened. Too bad...at least he proves to be something more than what he is initially portrayed as.
There is a talking cat and some kind of dolphin...ooook, next.
A loud kid? A rash captain? Some super-strong ship navigator? A generic pretty boy? A gay looking pirate? The usual girl with "Oni-chan" always on top of her lips?
Any of these sound familiar? They did to me but I chose to overlook it simply because of the main character and the bad guy, both of which are characters that are impossible to not like simply because they're charismatic. I would go as far as to say that Gram carries the whole show on his shoulders. He can switch from goofy to serious, from unaffected to concern...Gram is a humane character and it's one of the best I've seen in anime.

Value
All in all, this is an anime simply to be enjoyed. It's not a mind-bender, it's not an adrenaline rush and it most certainly it's not a full comedy or a drama. It's little bit of each and can only be enjoyed as such.
Personally, I liked it because of my general liking towards anime that present a journey of sorts, adventure anime. I admit that I am quite biased to such things and this came straight down my alley.
You can live without it, you can live with it...I repeat: this is an anime with no high ambitions and it should be treated as such. Mercifully...

This is about Gram, this one dude that has a mysterious necklace and finds a water-based "RB" (yay for mecha) in the waters of Mars.... Most of the series takes place in the water, and almost all of the mecha-based scenes are also in the water. He becomes a pirate, and thus commence the pirating shenanigans with the crew he finds himself part of!

The action is quite well done and the animation is very nice (BONES!!!) The tone is usually rather bright, and the storyline is generally playful to compliment this. It does get serious at many points, however, but this is in no way a dark story. Character animations are usually consistent, though sometimes not-so, but overall, the facial expressions are very clear.

The characters, themselves, are mostly all neat. Most of them hardly develop, but then, there are quite a few characters. The main ones develop nicely and mostly-interestingly, though, so that's a plus. Thankfully, none of the characters managed to annoy me. They were all fun to watch, as were all of the episodes.

The voice acting is fine... didn't notice anything spectacular, though it fit perfectly. Excellent cast, just nothing "astounding." The background music is not memorable in the least bit, though I do remember at a few points thing "Hmm... cool background music." However, the ending theme song to this is absolutely fantastic. Aoi Tabibito = yay. Almost every episode, I would watch the ending theme song... reading the lyrics along with the imagery = awesome. Unfortunately, this ending song is probably the most spectacular thing about the series, as most other elements fall short a bit, while still remaining enjoyable.

It's really easy to watch through this, though it's not what I would call "super awesome." Nonetheless, I felt it worth watching, as it was thoroughly enjoyable and ended well. ;]

The story isn't really complex. Most of it ties in with the rest (as in the various elements and characters eventually "having something to do" with the culmination), so that's thumbs-uppy. A lot of it centers around following dreams, friendship, and... pirating :O!! ;] Well-done and nothing spectacular.

So I recommend this if you're just looking for something that's easy, fun, and enjoyable to watch. :)

The title Kenran Butoh Sai: The Mars Daybreak has its roots in the series, the first part means translated "Gorgeous Tango", the second part is an attack performed by the submarine "Ship of Aurora (latin for dawn, fits somehow in the context)". Together it stands for all the ideals and the future of Mars, which should've played a great role in the series. I say "should" because it didn't play such a large part in the end. But I'll come back on this point oncemore later.

Despite everything said in all the synopses you can find on the net this series has the least to do with politics etc., for most of the time it's about the main characters and their dreams and the life as pirates.

The animation is most of the times good, though the battles could've been better animated. There are often reused scenes, some of the "stunts" the Ship of Aurora and other submarines in the series are doing are just ridiculous and look exactly the same way. The character designs are ok, a bit strange was Vess' hairstyle, but it changed during the series. Special effects can't compare with other series from this date, but all in all they're above average.

A very important part in a show, whatever it may be - anime, movie, dorama, etc. -, is the music. Without good music, background music, opening, ending, vocal tracks, etc., the show feels less enjoable for me and loses a lot. Bad or non-existing music most of the time indicate a bad anime as well.
While the music in KBS wasn't bad or non-existing, it simply wasn't something affecting.
An interesting fact was that both, opening - Take Back by G B Shelter and ending - Aoi Tabibito (Blue Travelers) by Takashi Tsumabuki, were sung by male singers. But other than that they weren't very captivating. Sure, they were ok to listen to once an episode, but they are nothing I would put in my winamp playlist.
Same appeals to the background-music. A lot of scenes didn't even have some and some other scenes had some blank music which didn't feel right. The most remarkable music piece in the whole anime was the music during the "daybreak".

What saves the rating of the music and helps the characters a lot are the seiyuus. A lot of well-known seiyuus play roles in this anime.
The main characters, Gram River and Vess Lauren, are dubbed by Tomokazu Seki (Toya Kinomoto - Card Captor Sakura, Sousuke Sagara - Full Metal Panic, Yzak Joule - Gundam Seed, Rumina Asagi - Tokyo Underground and many more) and Houko Kuwashima (Kirika Yumura - Noir, Margaret Burton - Madlax, Flay Allster - Gundam Seed, Maron Kusakabe - Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and many more).
Both already voiced a lot of characters I really liked and they do an excellent job on giving their characters feelings and making them appealing for the viewer. Though I recognized them both at an instant I was still impressed by the change they've undergone for these characters. Especially Vess' had a lot of development and every one of her changes was made believable and realistic. While Gram was most of the time passionate about everything, he also made a large development in the background. In the last episodes he was much different and finally was able to speak out his dreams and thoughts.
But the other characters were good as well, most of them got a background and gained development, especially towards their dream. Especially Enora (Akino Murata), Megumi Higashibara (Yui Horie), Junior (Daisuke Sakaguchi) and Yagami (Jin Yamanoi).

But there were also some downs, you could even say there were some more downs.
A lot of the other minor characters seemed to have no special assignment. They were just there for the comical elements or as a possible "villain".
The story began interesting, but lost itself somewhere between the many strands and filler episodes. In the end, the most important thing wasn't the politics, the mars and his freedom. It were the dreams of the main characters and the life and ideals of pirates (which were too idealistic in my opinion).
A lot of the episodes lost their meaning, or didn't even have one to begin with in the progress of the series. There were also too many questions left unanswered in the end. The whole thing with the first mars settlers, the key to the treasure and why Gram did have it, the RB he gained in the first episode, the background on Gram and Vess and many many more. It's most of the time a good thing to leave some questions unanswered/to the imagination of the viewers. But in KBS basically all of the important questions haven't been resolved at all.

Still, not all of the filler episodes were bad and perhaps this series would've been better without all those questions and the background story about the treasure and the mars daybreak.
The episodes 12 and 17 were really good and made me laugh a lot and I wouldn't have anything against some more such episodes.
The end was a happy end, kinda reminded me of VanDread. Well there's not much more to say. After seeing it once, it loses of course most tension and I doubt people would like to see ~26 filler episodes oncemore.

Overall the series was enjoyable, especially the characters made it for me. And I'm sure you would enjoy it too, you just shouldn't expect too much for it. As for a recommendation to who this series would be interesting: If you liked VanDread you could perhaps take a look on it, some elements in KBS reminded me somehow of it.