Anime: Submarine 707R

Before I started watching Submarine 707R, I expected it to be a nice action anime, with a nice animation. And that's pretty much what I got.

The animation department was at the same time very impressive and quite dissapointing. The backgrounds all the way trough the anime are beautiful, very detailed with sharp and vibrant colors. The water effects, which can be deemed to be very important for an anime about submarines, are the nicest i have yet seen. The boat and submarine designs are very nice, most of them are rendered in CG and are detailed as well as immaginative, without looking too unrealistic. They found a real balance in the ship designs. However, the animation and design of the characters is somewhat sub-par. Captain Hayami looks like a character which could have been designed in the early 90s, but that's fine since it makes him look more friendly. While most of the time the ships are beautifully rendered, there are a few times where they look too smooth(not textured enough), and thus leave you with a light "bad CG" aftertaster (I kept having flashbacks of the eyes painted on the 707 while writing this part). I also loved the opening and ending sequences, which are a slideshow with small amount of animation of pencil drawings. They look very classy.

The sound is nothing really special, the opening and ending themes are just some nice classical pieces. Most of the music is intrumental and unnoticeable. The seiyu cast did an adequate job, here again there is nothing specially good, but there is nothing particularily bad either.

Most of the story can be found in the synopsis on the main aniDB page for this anime.It is brought in in a terrible way. The whole anime feels like you're dropped in the middle of a fight, which you don't know when, where and even why it started. There really is no story whatsoever in this anime, everything lies in the action. They tried to introduce some military strategy as a substitute for a story, but just the same, you are suddenly dropped on a scene with the Admiral of the Peacekeeping Navy, talking with other admirals, and you have strictly no clue what they are actually talking about. They are planning some tactical moves, but the previous moves as well as the future ones are thrown in and you are left without any explanation. The only thing that makes some sense are the actual battles between the submarines. But as we will see later, there are also some weird things in this area. One last word about the ending, it really doesn't look like an ending, it looks more like the end of the 2 introductory episodes of a 26 episodes anime series. It leaves everything open (and I do mean everything... nothing is closed).

During all of this anime, there are lots of characters that are introduced, but most of them have insignificant screen time, and are absolutely no use to the story (well... there is no story... but those characters are just... useless). Characters such as Captain Hayami's wife and daughter as well as 2 out of the 3 juniors abord the 707 just don't do anything interesting except taking up screen time... Then, there seems to be some kind of a relation between Captain Hayani, and Red, since they are able to somewhat predict each other's moves, but again, we are never hinted towards why this happens. To sum it up, characters are the usual cliché of the kind of characters they represent, are never really given any proper background, and never get any kind of developement.

Since with 1h40 this anime is quite short and does have nice action scenes as well as beautiful animation, it is definitely worth rewatching. For some reason, even with it's blatant flaws, Submarine 707 really is enjoyable.

Had this anime taken one or two more hours to refine it's plot and fill the holes (aka: taking more time, and not trying to fill too much action is such a short time)

Actually, while writing this review I realised how much I was annoyed about the enormous amount of undeveloped potential this anime has. I mean everything they introduced can be a basis for a very interesting and original story, here are a few of the questions you are left with at the end: What the hell really is this "undersea silent revolution" (aka U), and what is their goal? What's the relation between Red and Captain Hayami? Why does Red live in the north pole along with his otherwise perfectly healthy family? Why does the baby Makoto seem so important to Red's wife? Why is Makoto's first word "U", and what does it imply? Where does the technology behind the artificial brains come from, and what are their flaws?

Doesn't this sound as a perfect basis for a longer anime to you? It surely does for me. I would love to see another longer OVA, or maybe even a full fledged 13-26 episodes series to tie the loose ends of all this potential.

Arrgghh, I'd hate it if such a great potential went to waste!! *bangs head into wall repeatedly*