Earth, the distant future. After engaging in centuries of interplanetary warfare, the once dominant and plentiful species of humanity has been reduced to a fraction of its former might, and at best one fifth of its once massive population. Pushed to the brink of extinction, they continue to thrive on their wasteland of a planet, though not without struggle, with resources scarce and a few new forces holding them down. First is The Third, a new race of people... Nay, a new evolution of humanity... Marked by the presence of a third eye on their foreheads, they employ special powers that normal humans don’t. Second is Blue Breaker, a race of machines built by the Third to keep humanity in line and prevent them from growing too strong or building up too much technology of their own. Third, and much more rare, are actual extraterrestrials, who don’t show up often, but have their own interests to pursue when they do. As a mercenary in this crazy world, Honoka must deal with all three of these entities as she takes whatever jobs she can to survive.

The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye was produced by Studio Xebec, and while I’ve derided them plenty of times before, I’ve also never been shy about calling out titles of theirs that actually looked better than most of their output, and I’m pleased to say The Third is one of them. It is true that Xebec never showered any anime with an overabundance of resources, but they have on occasion worked with directors who knew how to operate under such restrictions while still turning in a quality product. For director Jun Kamiya, I’m not personally familiar with much of his main directorial work, as impressive a resume as he has, but he did direct the final two feature length episodes of Key the Metal Idol, and I remember those looking perfectly fine, as long as we don’t blame him for episode 14 being one long, boring exposition dump. Most of his experience did come about through storyboarding work and occasional episodic director roles, but that also means he had a ton of experience at the time, and I think it shows.

It’s immediately apparent that The Third was a low budget anime... The character artwork is often a bit rough, animation can be stilted and sometimes a little janky, characters faces can sometimes be off-model, but none of this happens often enough to be distracting or to take you out of the moment. There are also just several basic reasons that these visual weaknesses aren’t as prevalent as they could have been, and we’ll start with the fact that they’re at their most obvious in daytime shots, especially outside in the daylight, and most of the series takes place either at night, inside a building or vehicle, or both. Another helpful aspect is that while the artwork and animation of human characters can be spotty, the background and environmental artwork is absolutely stunning. Admittedly, there's not a lot that’s exciting about the sea of sand dunes that most of the series takes place in, but it is still really well drawn, pleasantly filling up the landscape when keeping to itself in the background, and it can be surprisingly versatile when it needs to serve as a distraction.

It blends well with both the blazing sun and the night sky, complementing both in different ways, while also acting as a literal sandbox for the story. The interiors are also highly detailed and immersive, making the sparsely populated cities feel both ancient in their personality and precious to those struggling to survive in them. The interior of Honoka’s ship feels alive as well, making good use of its space, and the background artists put a ton of detail into the little intricate swirls of shadows inside of it. Most importantly, though, cheap animation goes towards a good cause, as a considerable amount of money is clearly saved for all of the action scenes in the series, and holy hell is the action cool. Honoka has to fight aliens, robots, and several other bizarre entities, and this is where the animation quality truly shines, as well as where Jun Kamiya was probably having the most fun. No matter how bland a desert wasteland might look, it’ll always be a cool backdrop for a well executed fight sequence.

The character designs are a bit on the generic side, with several of The Third just looking like your stereotypical overly tall, angular, unemotional characters with long white hair that usually wind up being villains in most other shows, with their third eyes really being the only detail about them that stands out. Honoka looks pretty badass, her friend Milly has a fun and memorable design, but honestly, nobody else really stands out visually. You don’t even get any really creative animal designs outside of some sand worms that you only see out in the distance and a couple of giant queen ants that barely move. Technology is mostly limited to armored tank vehicles and unmanned mech soldiers, but these both do look cool for what they are. There’s very little CG, but when it does show up, it’s integrated into the 2D well enough to not stand out awkwardly. It’s by no means a visual marvel, but this series does look better than most of Xebec’s output, and speaking on behalf of my own personal tastes, I’d rather see an anime that thrived under a low budget with smart direction than an anime with a lavish budget that it takes for granted any day of the week.

The English dub was produced by Nozomi Entertainment, and I wish I could be nicer about it, but it’s honestly not very good. It’s by no means the worst English dub I’ve ever heard, but it is overall pretty bland. Starting off with Honoka, she’s voiced by Christie Moreau, AKA Anna Morrow, and if you haven't heard of her, that means you haven’t seen Yugioh GX(neither have I), where she’s had a fruitful career as something called Alexis Rhodes. Aside from that most of her work has been behind the camera, which I can’t consider a bad thing, because if her performance here is anything to goby, she’s a very limited actor who barely emotes outside of raising and lowering the volume of her voice, and there’s almost no variety in her delivery. She sounds like Carrie Savage trying to do an impression of Zoey Deschanel from The Happening. It’s hard to judge the other actors, as most of them were giving monotonous deliveries for monotoned characters, but Jamieson Price did an outstanding job as Honoka’s over-protective yet mentor-like ship computer Bogie. Otherwise, it’s a hard dub to recommend. If you’re a hardcore dub guy like me, it’s fine. It’s not gonna piss you off. For anyone else, maybe go sub.

If you’ve heard of The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye before today, there’s a very strong chance you were collecting the Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs as they were releasing stateside, because from what I remember, Bang Zoom were advertising the hell out of this show on those DVDs. Instead of being told anything about the series, however, all we saw in those old promos was clips from the show, out of context, played to the tune of the opening song. The only real information we were presented with, as such, was “This show looks really cool, and it has really pretty music.” As it turns out, both of these details wound up being more or less correct, but none of that said anything about the actual writing, story or characters, which you pretty much had to buy the DVDs to find out more about. Or pirate the series, that’s up to you. I realize I might have just described a very small demographic, as I legitimately might have been the only person at the time buying Haruhi DVDs... Or even buying DVDs in general... But I did eventually get around to checking out the series.

I don’t have anything especially deep or meaningful to say about the writing of this anime, because there’s nothing really special about how it’s written... That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. The Third isn’t some life-changing masterpiece or some hidden gem of underappreciated writing. The Third is a pure genre piece. You don’t watch it because you’ve heard how amazing it is, you watch it because you’re specifically interested in the kind of story it’s telling. If you like slower-paced stories about lone badasses travelling across dystopian wastelands trying to survive, fighting enemies while forming bonds with temporary companions, then you’d like The Third. I’ll be honest, I’m not fully into that style of story, but I am standing off to the side, willing to jump on the bandwagon if it looks like it’ll be a fun ride. What I like even more are stories where the main character is a rejected member of the ruling class who winds up fighting them for revenge or to protect humanity from their nefarious deeds... Kill La Kill, Alita, Vampire Hunter D, and yeah, that kind of story is in here too.

So all of that is already promising, and things only get better when you look at the cast and plot a little closer. Honoka is an awesome main character. She’s tough and capable, scrappy and courageous, but she’s also compassionate and principled. Maybe even too principled at some points, like where she lets herself stay stranded in the middle of nowhere all night so a giant queen ant can spread its wings and take flight... I don’t know if I would be that generous, but I understand why she would, which is what’s important. She has a revolving supporting cast of friends and allies, all of whom are unique and interesting, yet none of whom are always with her, so none of them ever wear out their welcome. You have Milly, whom she develops a sisterly bond with, and whom she connects with on an emotional level. You have Ikus, who is generally friendly and well meaning, if mysterious in nature. You have Phyfe, a teacher and school nurse who is also skilled with a gun and knows how to hold her own in tough situations, and who may or may not harbor an unrequited attraction towards Honoka. Any mission Honoka goes on will likely feature some combination of these characters, creating different dynamics each time.

On top of that you have the ever evolving threat of the desert itself, plus the gradually unraveling conspiracy involving The Third and their laws against humanity hoarding technology, and the Blue Breaker they enforce it with, all of which Honoka gets drawn further and further into as the series progresses, and it sounds like you’ve hit the gold mine. For all intents and purposes, this should be a smash hit, one of the coolest anime to ever exist within the dystopian sci-fi genre. And yet, it never made much of an impact, disappearing from the anime zeitgeist before it ever really managed to take off, so why is that? With so many factors working in its favor, what went wrong?

Well, I can definitely think of a few things. First off, going back to the visuals, this series might look good by Xebec standards, but that’s a low fucking bar, and nobody’s going to settle for ‘competant’ and ‘slightly above average’ when there are much better looking anime out there to choose from. Second, while this series may excel when it comes to fight scenes, and while it may have several outstanding action set pieces to brag about, and hell, it also hits a powerful dramatic note once in a while, there’s one element of storytelling it can never seem to successfully hit... Comedy. This show is absolutely incapable of being funny. The comedy in this series tends to follow a very specific formula... Step 1, Someone greets Honoka. Step 2, they make a comment about her chest size, or suggest she’s dating Ikus. Step 3, she overreacts. She gets embarrassed or pissed off, and then step 4, she goes SD chibi for a sight gag. If that sounds like the same damn formula you’ve gotten tired of seeing beaten into the ground by a million different anime, yes, you’re right.

I have a hard time imagining anybody who’s watched even the smallest amount of anime prior to this series actually laughing at the ‘jokes’ in The Third, but I can’t for the life of me make sense out of why they would. Thankfully, this kind of material only really exists in the first few episodes, which makes them a bit of a climb, but on the other hand, things do get better. At least with that problem, anyway. The next problem I’d like to point out is that there’s a voice over narrator in this show, and he is just the worst. He’s the worst narrator, he’s the worst thing about the show, he’s the worst presence in the show, he’s just the worst. He’s always showing up whenever there’s a quiet moment to dump exposition relating to the inner turmoil of the characters, or details about the world-building. In one scene, you see some human workers transporting illegal technology, talking about how the penalty could be a couple years in jail, but then Blue Breaker shows up to slaughter them. Now, to an astute viewer, this could mean that the laws are getting harsher, or that Breaker is starting to go rogue and make its own decisions. And that’s exactly what the narrator stops the show dead in its tracks to tell you afterwards. And it’s always like that.

There is not one single thing he tells you during the series that needed to be said, he just constantly robs the show of depth, nuance and ambiguity. Oh, that’s except for the one time he leaves it up to us, being like “Who could know what Honoka is feeling now?” You could. Literally, specifically you, because that's like half of your job here. His narrations should either be completely removed so the audience can actually be allowed to think about what we’re seeing, or be very easily rewritten as character dialogue, and there’s no inbetween. Fuck this narrator, he personally makes the series both harder to watch and a worse series over-all. What makes this especially bad is my next issue with the series, its length. This show did not need to be 24 episodes. No, wait, I take that back... Art isn’t about necessity, it’s about expression. It’s not a bad thing that this series didn’t NEED to be 24 episodes long, it’s a bad thing that this series didn’t have the depth or substance to support a 24 episode run time. I don’t consider this show to be boring, but at 24 episodes it does occasionally come off as bloated and tedious.

What makes matters worse is the fact that the writing doesn’t put all of that extra time to good use. We do get some world-building, and what we get is good, this is an interesting world that you’d want to know more about, but we don’t get an amount of it that feels like it would justify 24 whole episodes. There are a ton of details about the history of this world and how it came to be that could be really fascinating and could make the setting feel more immersive, and while none of it really feels necessary per se, there’s just so much information left on the table that could have been utilized to fill out some of the empty space in this series. I can’t think of any material from the story that I would want to straight up cut out, but I also don’t think it would have been that hard to tighten things up and cut the episode count down to about 13 or 14. This would improve the pacing dramatically, making them easier to pay attention to without drifting off. Which I am ashamed to admit, I did, a couple of times. I don't know, maybe that's on me for binging it? Maybe it would hit better if I watched it weekly?

The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye is out of print from Rightstuf, but can be found pretty cheap online. The original light novel, and a two volume manga adaptation, both by Ryo Oshino, are not available stateside.

We can discuss could haves and should haves all we want, and there’s certainly a lot of What Ifs associated with this title, but at the end of the day, that kind of speculation is kind of meaningless. There are plenty of Hunchback fans that say the movie would have been so much better without the Gargoyles, but they still love the movie, Gargoyles and all. I don't believe for a second that this series would have actually become an all time classic with half the length, a different lead actress and no narrator, these are just details I lament about an anime I mostly enjoy. For what it is, The Third is a pretty cool little curiosity from the mid-2000s that it’s nice to hear people talk about once in a while, but it’s in no way a series I’d recommend going out of your way to see. If you like dystopian science fiction stories like Dune or Sands of Destruction, or if you like seeing an extremely likeable main character battle the oppressors at the top levels of society, you’d probably get a kick out of it. Probably.

I give The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye a 6/10