...Aaand we're back.
Today I'll watch the two last eps. (of 26) of
"Planetes" and I already miss it. It quickly became one of my top 5 animes (granted, I'm not a hardcore aficionado nor a connoisseur, just a dude who likes to watch animation stoned once in a while, so my perspective might be a bit off. I tend to prefer animes drawn closer to the realist style, as I'm a big sucker for both mechanical and biological design).
Summary: "2001: A Space Odyssey" without aliens. The plot concerns the day-to-day experiences of a group of space workers while showing the political and economical consequences of space exploration (it' not pretty, both in the personal and social levels).
The series is about the lives of a rather large cast of characters who live and work in space during the year 2076, from the bottom of the corporate ladder to the top of the global political chain of command (represented by an expy of NATO called "INTO"). The main cast is comprised of blue-collar workers, unglamourized astronauts tasked with the tedious job of removing space debris from the Earth's orbit. Despite their work being essential for the continuation of space exploration, a janitor is still a janitor and, being at the bottom of the corporate ladder, they don't get any respect from the rest of the company.
Of course there are...
shenanigans, since space is a pretty unforgiving place, but they're mostly subdued. If you go into it expecting nonstop action you1'll be disappointed, but if you tag along the series long enough, you'll see shit hitting the fan with unparalleled gusto from half the series onwards, and the last eps are groin-grabbingly tense (What? What do
you do when you get tense?), as the Debris Section (our half-assed "heroes") inadvertently gets caught in a major political struggle between a terrorist group who wants to stop the space program (which has bled Earth's resources dry, leaving the place a hotbed of political instability with a lot of piss-poor countries ravaged by wars) and the series' version of NATO, who wants to continue space exploration. There's a lot more going on, though, and despite all its technical brilliance, its near flawless script, the focus throughout the series is really the interpersonal drama and how it reflects big questions about human values under extreme duress. A big theme is idealism vs. cynicism, for instance; another is altruistic love vs. self-interest. Yet another is the soul-crushing solitude that comes with space-related work.
One of the many plot threads concerns the protagonist, Hoshino Hachirōta, who always dreamed of having his own spaceship, but never really did much to accomplish that. He has gone soft, working as a junk jockey for some 6 years already without a lot to show for it. Then along comes an opportunity to work EVA in the first mission to Jupiter - but that means 7 years away from family, friends and the romantic interest he just met. Add to that the fact that prolonged stays in space will most likely give you cancer and almost literally will eat your bones away, shortening your life expectancy by a whole lot, and soon Hoshino realizes the scope of the sacrifice one has to be prepared to make in order to take part in History. And so on.
So if you like your sci-fi hard, this one's for you, because I can count in the fingers of one hand the times when I saw such a realistic depiction of life in space. There's lots of human drama, the characters are interesting and the scenes in space are, well... otherworldly.
5/5
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