Fly me to the Earth
Freedom has a face that launched a ship. And then another, and then seven more. Funny how there are seven episodes in all. Still, there's a sense of scale, even if the quantity is two orders of magnitude less than 103. Rocket engines are kind of a big deal, igniting them moreso.
There's also a bit of grandeur in general about the whole thing, a characteristic indispensable to any good adventure. And road trip. Not an episode goes by without a hefty amount of wheels spinning. Rest assured that it's productive rotation; people are going places, in 3D CG style with a Planetes palette. The downside is the exaggerated but lackadaisical character movements.
Is the story the point? I'm not so sure. More like the story, like most adventure threads, is a vehicle, hopefully to new experiences. Or old experiences run through some novel filter. Normally the Earth shot follows the Moon shot, so at least that's new.
What's maybe not so new is running the world through the post-apocalypse transform. Las Vegas hasn't been destroyed nearly as many times as, say, Tokyo, but seeing things wrecked is old regardless. Paradoxically, wrecking stuff never gets old.
Imagining how things look after we've wrecked it all will always fascinate the people doing the wrecking, so pretty much everyone. It's kind of comforting to know that in the future, Vegas is as chaotic and messed up as it always was, just with less people.
If on a road trip, might as well take pictures, especially one that is as picturesque as the fourth episode. It's an optimistic post-apocalyptic world not unlike YKK but with a pace of progress that is anti-slice of life.
Going back to this sense of scale thing, it works on at least two levels. The moon bumpkins have none, at least at first. Pick up a radio station? Must be close by! If by close you mean 2577 miles. I suppose they could be forgiven since thinking big was something totally alien to them up till recently. It's interesting to link the expansion of their horizons with the size of the rockets launched.
In that regard the message rocket is a bit of an anomaly. Saving it in the face of a weather anomaly was also a bit of an … never mind. As a symbol of selfishness, though, it works, reinforced by Takeru's own admission of his small thoughts, that somehow landed him on a pretty big planet.
On and off, I try to wrap my head around the fact that an OVA about oppression and space flight was funded by purchases of Cup Noodles. I'm a Nong Shim person myself It's so orthogonal, like Microsoft deciding to host the Feynman lectures for free. Wait, they did what?
At any rate, (the) Nissin has landed, I walked away with a bunch of pretty pictures. Let's call it even.
Lest I forget, Freedom has a ripping OP. We knew that Utada Hikaru is geeky, but fancy her on something very much of a classical lineage (Akira). I seem to be forgetting something. I swear she's also done something similar, maybe around the same time.
