Galvanized by the news that Discotek is releasing a new 2k upscale of Photon: The Idiot Adventures, I found myself rewatching this for the first time in a few years. I recalled being fairly disappointed in my first watch through. What was it I had written in my watch log notes? “Never has so much high quality 90s ova animation been drawn in service of such a bad show.”
Oof. That was pretty rude, past me. I guess we’ll see how I feel about it today.
Well, I think I was perhaps overly harsh. There’s a lot of recommend this show! AIC has provided suitably slick animation, as one might expect. The design work, from Tenchi Muyo veteran Watanabe Koji is great, giving the world a distinct atmosphere with Tenchi-adjacent organic-looking ships, great design cues for the Aho Energy “spells”, and a fun setting to romp through. Kajishima Masaki turns in characteristically excellent work on the original character designs and they are most excellently adapted for animation by Takahashi Shinya. The music fits well and mostly failed to engage me much, though the [opening ]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvmDRqLdZ7E) and main theme get caught in my head regularly. I liked the ending, too - a song called "Pinch!" by Yui Horie.
And the writing and story? Well…
Photon is the story of a group of total idiots. I mean serious morons. On the one hand you have Photon, a child barely capable of stringing two words together, who is kind and loyal and strong and so stupid that he mistakes balloons for loved ones twice. Joining him is Aun, a moron with stasis powers who catches herself in them more often than she uses them on others and just wants to run away from home and find a hot beau; Keyne, a rebel whose mission to overthrow the emperor is basically immediately derailed by excitement over the chance to play newlyweds with Photon; and a bunch of other idiots big and small to round out the cast.
The three main characters travel across the ruined Sandy Planet in search of a macguffin and are chased along the way by the malevolent Count Papacha Nanandan and his army of identical helpers, the Pochini… siblings? Clan? That part’s never too clear. An imperial princess, a long-lost sister, and a few other players get entangled here and there, but the core of the series is the friction between our 3 idiotic protagonists and their equally imbecilic foe.
Slapstick abounds. Visual gags galore! Characters pull faces and poison each other, get mangled and undergo horrific violence with nice cartoony resilience and quick recovery. While the violence is frequently bloody, the blood is usually played for laughs. It's much more Beat-to-Death Angel than MD Geist.
And, ultimately, I think your own enjoyment of this show rests pretty much entirely on whether or not the comedy lands for you. Do you love four idiots struggling against one another? Is nothing funnier to you than a guy getting so mad that his comical bulging vein literally starts spraying blood? Do you like to argue in discord that hot springs episodes are Good, Actually? Fan of lots of boobs and boob-related humor, and particularly classic 90s anime ova cleavage, complete with nipples? Do you not mind a weird 20 minute diversion into Serious Sci Fi and Tenchi Muyo style familial politics midway through the last episode? Then this is a show you’re gonna like!
For me? Sometimes it landed. Sometimes it didn’t. But I was usually having fun, and when the comedy wasn’t working for me, there are some very pretty animation scenes to watch too – especially if you are watching the upscale, which will hopefully make those colors and character designs really pop!
So if you like Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard, or … I dunno. Virigin Fleet? Some other mid-90s anime with lots of nudity, cartoony violence, and sci-fantasy trappings, anyways… give this a shot. You might like it more than I did!
Not Recommended (unless…)
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