Aria the Animation (ep01)

10:21 AM 10/24/2005

I think I may have stumbled upon this season's most disengaged anime. The setup is quite grand, though. The planet Mars, now renamed planet Aqua, has been terraformed into a water planet. That is, there's a whole lot of water and not so much land. The main character, Akari, has come from Earth to Aqua in order to become, get this, a professional Gondolier. The great city of Neo-Venezia (which is mangled English for New Venice) is where she comes to reside. It is a city comprised of old buildings and lots of water. I can only assume that the architects were going for some kind of tourist asthetic when they built it, since, if they've figured how to terraform planets, I think they would have advanced their masonry skills a bit further than this. She is taken in as an apprentice (somehow) to the unquestioned best gondolier on the planet, Alicia Florence.

At this point, my interest in the series is trying to guess which Italian city is going to be referenced next. Despite the obvious inaccuracies, I'm hoping for a superhero named Captain Vatican.

So, what of the episode's actual content? Akari goes to practice rowing the gondola and a creepy-looking girl is in the boat. She decides to give her a free ride, since she isn't able to take customers during her apprenticeship. They talk about the girl's life, run into another apprentice gondolier, eat some baked potatos, and then watch a dog (or something resembling a dog) get rescued by Alicia. It all ends with a forced dialogue between Akari and Alicia about sibling harmony (or so it was translated).

If not for the forced moral at the end, this really wouldn't have been too bad. I don't mind if there's a moral, but I don't need a dialogue at the end explaining the moral to me. The storytelling is good enough as it is and didn't need this kind of clarification. I'll definately watch the second episode, though.