Stop me is this sounds familiar. Kazuki is a high school boy on Tatsumiyajima, a small Japanese possession somewhere in the Pacific. Life is peaceful but a bit boring on an island where everybody knows everybody. That is until — just as his childhood friend Soshi has returned from a trip to Tokyo — the island comes under attack from enigmatic aliens called Festum. Turns out the peaceful world Kazuki and his friends knew is a lie, most of the world has been overrun by the Festum and now Kazuki has to pilot the only thing that can defeat them: the Fafner mecha. Mysterious all powerful alien monsters that cannot be reasoned with, giant robots as the only way to defeat them and reluctant child soldiers drafted into a secret war as part of a worldspanning conspiracy their parents are involved in. Yes, Soukyuu no Fafner: Dead Agressor does own a lot to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not just plot wise, thematically too, with its innocent teens being dragged into the conspiracy filled adult world where nothing is what it seems, accompanied by lashings and lashings of angst.
Soukyuu no Fafner was a hard series to like. First aired in 2004, it’s smack in the middle of anime’s ugliest period. Anime was transitioning from traditional, physical cell based animation towards computer based cell animation, which led to a general loss of quality across the industry in my view that only improved once the animators got to grip with the new technology. Fafner also features the then current trends in character design, which again I find some of the ugliest to have existed in anime. Combine that with the ‘brown equals realism” colour palette trendy at the time and you get a series that isn’t that visually appealing to look at. This may explain why it took me three tries to finish this series. I first started watching this in 2016 and got to episode 11 before abandoning it. Retried two years ago and got to episode 14. Finally on the third try I decided to restart where I left off and binged the last eleven episodes in a day.
Sometimes you have these sort of series. It takes a couple of times for it to click; ironically I had the same issue with Evangelion. In Soukyuu no Fafner‘s case once I persisted I rather liked it, the second half especially once the true scope of the story was revealed mand some of the Evangelion influences dissappated. I wouldn’t call it a classic but I understand why it became somewhat of a cult favourite. There would a television special prequel in 2005, a movie in 2010, another tv series in 2014 and a series of movies only last year; it has a following at least. Not sure if I’m eager to see any of these follow ups, but I don’t feel like I wasted my time watching this either.
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