3 Episode Taste Test: Dragonaut

Dragonaut’s first epis­ode is full of breasts. The second epis­ode is full of dragons. The third epis­ode has breasts and dragons. This is of course entirely unsur­pris­ing given the char­ac­ter designer’s pre­vi­ous works: Love Hina, Gra­vion and recently Witchblade; the sem­inal Stellvia of the Uni­verse seem­ingly an excep­tion to Makoto Uno’s oth­er­wise top-heavy résumé. Abnor­mally buoy­ant female append­ages aside, Dragonaut’s open­ing epis­odes are filled with con­fus­ing events, ter­rible CG wyrms and a slow-but-steady intro­duc­tion to the cold-clinical world the series inhabits.

“sup­posed secret labs and bust­ling com­mand centres are rendered with a yawn rather than any flair”

» Gal­lery

“Com­pet­ent” is the best way to describe the series. It bears all the hall­marks of a two sea­son show that isn’t pre­pared to tip its hand at the out­set. The hook centres on a trio of creatures that came to earth from outer-space, des­troy­ing the protagonist’s space­craft and fam­ily along the way. Modi operandi set, time jumps sev­eral years into the future when Earth is threatened, people actualise/synchronise/ride mech­an­ical dragons and the once young prot­ag­on­ist now has a bar­rel full of angst to carry around. Ter­min­o­logy such as “Album”, “Drago­naut”, “D-Project” and “ISDA” are scattered lib­er­ally through­out the dia­logue to inject a kind of faux mys­ti­cism to the pro­ceed­ings but fun­da­ment­ally, noth­ing is meritorious.

That’s not to say that the series is slip­shod, it simply lacks the poise to elev­ate it above aver­age­ness. The story, while undoubtedly new, tries to cover up for its mediocrity with jar­gon and afore­men­tioned volup­tu­ous female cast. As if to drive home the point that it is fan-service prime, it has a need­lessly friendly trans­form­a­tion sequence between a young girl and her thrall as well as bit-characters voicing the next-episode pre­views, spout­ing puerile com­ments about les­bi­an­ism. This is noth­ing more than tit­il­la­tion for the tar­get demo­graphic of pubes­cent boys how­ever it’s dif­fi­cult not to think the story could be told in half the time and twice as well if it wasn’t so con­cerned with female char­ac­ters bend­ing over all the time.

Creature design is con­tinu­ally unim­press­ive, the angu­lar metal of the Dragonaut’s steeds falls short of what could have been iconic while the smooth curves of Toa’s sex­ist pink-and-white altern­ate form are emo­tion­less in more than one sense of the word. The CG is blatant and detracts rather than enhances the action, cre­at­ing a mena­gerie of Gouraud-shaded blurs. The anim­a­tion is sur­pris­ingly good in places even past the first epis­ode budget burn; iron­ic­ally how­ever, for a show that sup­posedly deals with extra­ter­restrial invaders and threats, the design feels sur­gical and almost her­met­ic­ally sealed. Back­grounds, bey­ond the mono­lithic launch plat­form, are bland and unin­spir­ing; sup­posed secret labs and bust­ling com­mand centres are rendered with a yawn rather than any flair.

In all, Drago­naut is lacklustre and unre­ward­ing; never offer­ing any­thing bey­ond sed­ate, face-value stim­u­la­tion while bludgeon­ing you with buxom females and unsubtle char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. The pos­sib­il­ity of dragons in anime is the only draw this series has and it man­ages to strip any kind of joy from that, leav­ing a stand­ard, paint-by-numbers shounen show. For those of short atten­tion spans or simple tastes there is much to keep your eye­balls occu­pied, but those seek­ing some­thing enga­ging or remotely dif­fer­ent, there is little that won’t cause eye-rolling here. ¶