Space Dandy

Space☆Dandy is a middle of the road anime. It tells the story of the daily lives of Dandy and his crew traveling through space searching for rare species of aliens for good money so they can go expend some time in BooBies, a intergalactic restaurant chain full of beautifully barmaids. Even with some incredible animation throughout it and an excellent soundtrack that accompanies the most memorable scenes couldn't make me love the show. But how Space☆Dandy manage to fail at engaging me in it’s story and characters?

First of let’s take a look in the characters: The protagonist which is in the name of the anime is Dandy, he is the eccentric, pervert and lazy captain of Aloha Oe. He's also a bad alien hunter who wants to visit all the BooBies restaurants and dreams to buy the chain. On top of that he’s overconfident and have little consideration for the lives of his friends. Dandy is basically that, he has little to no development throughout the course of the show. He doesn’t change at all. His dream, passion and profession, besides supposedly have the key of the whole universe are all we know about him. Aside from that he’s your good-looking shallow action hero.The only time he does something that show us a bit more of his personality is in the only really good episode, but we’ll get to that. Now let’s take a look to the other members of the crew.

QT is Dandy’s outdated vacuum cleaner robot. It’s main purpose in the show is to clean the crew’s trash, be the mechanic of the spaceship and make comic relief scenes. It doesn't help much in the field because it isn't made to fight, so it spends the majority of the time taking care of the ship when the place they land is dangerous, communicating with the others via the bracelet that Dandy and Meow have. Aside from the cute design and voice, QT also doesn’t have much to offer in terms of development. It gets the entire last episode for that end but have little impact on me because the episode isn't that interesting and throughout the series i couldn’t care for the robot enough to like the ending and be confident to say that QT changed as a character, even with facing its difficulties and losses in that episode.

Lastly we have Meow, my least favorite character of the trio. He’s a Betelgeusian, the only alien of the crew. He’s introduced right after the beginning of the first episode and is as pervert and lazy as Dandy. He claims to have information about the rare aliens and join them in the hunt. Meow stays with Dandy the majority of the time outside of the spaceship but he doesn’t add much to the series. Like QT, he serves as comic relief and not much aside. His backstory episode develops his character a bit more than QT’s but even with that i couldn’t care about him. He just doesn’t do enough, he's kind of just there to have another character in the show.

Before continuing to the next part i will quickly speak about some minor aspects of the anime.

I believe that the Aloha Oe deserves a quick mention in this review because it's hawaiian decoration is memorable and unique, besides the spaceship with its colorful and inviting design helps with Dandy's characterization, and his room exemplifies even more so.

Also, something that bother me in the course of the series is the insertion of a narrator. Apart from a joke here and there and the breaking of the fourth wall that happens a few times, his inclusion is just plain stupid and adds nothing to enhance the series.

Lastly, speaking of breaks of the fourth wall, in some episodes the narrator and characters makes jokes about the situation the crew is in using this feature for good effect. It's a small detail and show up very little but it's an interesting nonetheless.

So with all that out of the way we can talk about the plot. Well, there is no plot. This is a episodic series and the closest it gets to introduce a plot is with it's terrible villains, Dr. Gel and admiral Perry. They are members of the useless Gogol empire, one of the two great powers fighting for the control of the universe. Aside from the cool spaceship designs the empire is a joke throughout the show. Admiral Perry sends Dr. Gel to chase Dandy because he states as I said before that Dandy has the key of the Universe. All the scenes that involve this guys are useless.They serve as another source of comic relief but none of your jokes are fun, nothing they do works and nothing they say is interesting or meaningful. They could be removed entirely from the show and nothing that matters would be affected.

One more thing about this plot issue is that some of the episodes don't matter. For example, in the first episode something happens that would affect the anime permanently, but in the next one that fact is ignored. Same thing happens in episode four, which brings me to question if there’s tension at all in the series. In an interview, director Watanabe Shinichiro said he wanted his team to be free to do whatever they wanted without being limited so they could be free to use their imagination and create something unique. I understand the intentions of the team but even if the anime is more of an experimental project and so we as an audience aren't supposed to take the show seriously, the vast majority of boring and uninteresting episodes indicated to me a failure of execution and undermined my enjoyment of the series.

Now let’s talk about some of the episodes, i humbly ask of you to forgive my preferences in this segment, you may had enjoyed other episodes and that's fine. If you want to avoid as many SPOILERS as possible feel free to skip through to the conclusion. The best episode for me is five, where Dandy goes out alone to capture a rare alien, whose name is Adélie. Her species has the ability to transfer the minds of their target into dolls they carry with them. It’s a fun little adventure episode in which we, together with Dandy, get to know more about Adélie. We see the progression of their friendship while they have fun together and we discover the serious and kind side of Dandy. The other interesting episode is the ninth. It's a different experience from the rest of the show, the visuals and music are interesting and the epilogue, the way it is directed, might get you to think for a moment, but not too much. Likewise episode eleven is visually interesting but tells another boring story. We have some fun episodes like episode six, ten and twelve, the potentially emocional ⅔ of episode eight and episodes like the first which delivers fantastic animation worth to seeing just for that fact alone, but really that’s about it. Space☆Dandy isn't particularly bad but it isn’t consistently good or fun either.

Space☆Dandy is a middle of the road anime, it has some good moments but overall there’s nothing special about the first season. Although i look forward to see if the second season manages to deal with the problems of the first, expand the world as the setting needs some work, and to develop their characters.