This is a database of older and less well known anime and manga | Menu |
Shoujo & General Anime Detail

-Help-

Back | Anime titles | anime in romaji order | Shoujo | W.M.T | Old Anime | Manga titles | Blog Home
Information
Title (English) Gene Shaft
Title (Japanese) Gene Shaft
Advertising

book cover

Fantasy Novel

Notes
Classification -
Synopsis
Review Gene Shaft is a new, full CG, heavily advertised space opera anime on the Wowow satellite channel in Japan. The folks at Wowow have left nothing to chance in their attempt to make this an otaku favorite:
- It has a rock guitar opening theme and BGM
- It is a girl gang show about battling security squads
- It postulates a future in which through genetic engineering, mishap or crass opportunism, there are only a few men and all the girls are babes ( and all the women are mothers ) - There are all sorts of full CG spaceships, space stations and mechas ( very reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop, but taking full advantage of the advances in CG S/W tools in the past three years )
So if the above items strike your fancy, and you were a fan of the recent Vandread, this is probably a sci-fi series for you. ( However, if your main interest in Vandread was the fan service, youll be disappointed at the opening episode of Gene Shaft, since the girls all wear full body suits all of the time. )
On the other hand, if you like a series in which the characters have more than one-dimensional characterization, and do something more than talk to each other in boring tones about boring topics for the first three quarters of the first episode, you might want to look elsewhere. Also, if it bothers you that the climactic battle involves bunches of totally indistinguishable girls in identical white space suits, shooting at each other in vacuum and weightlessness with handguns ( and hitting each other at several hundred meters distance! ) you might also want to take a pass on this show.
My major problem with this show is that it is unapologetically derivative and aimed solely at some advertiser-driven demographic. Despite the few and feeble attempts at some humor, the show has no sense of irony to it, which only adds to the difficulty in caring at all about the characters. It wont be long at all before all the trendy CG and bio-babble will grow old as did so many equivalent trendy series and OAVs in the 1980s.
So what happens in the first episode? Well, in the 24th Century, womankind is spread out throughout the Solar System and building big, cool-looking space stations and stuff. A squad of specialist security girls get together at a space station to chat about old times and ask dumb questions of one of the two guys ( the Captain and the substitute Captain ) on the station. The girls also spend time chatting with their mothers via TV, but considering that the bio-engineered dog does the same thing ( in the only unintentionally hilarious part, the dog is a whiz at typing kanji ), this isnt much of an accomplishment. Then in the last five minutes a bunch of girl terrorists in spacesuits attack a giant space ring and cause it to blast one of the giant space stations.
What more can I say? (Dave Baranyi)
Credits Dir: Kazuki Akane
Episodes 13
Release US:DVD
TV Showing See the whole series for free? This series may be syndicated to regional cable, satellite or terrestial TV stations. For Europe click here.
Date 2001 April 5 - 2001 June 28
Production Satellite
Broadcaster Wowow
Animation
References & Help Look up the latest data on this title at:
Richard Llewellyn's Animated Divots, or
Anime News Network (see Encyclopedia section) ,
or in "The Anime Encyclopedia" (Clements & McCarthy, Stone Bridge Press, 2001).
Help & further information.

 

Back

Skin design by DivxDB