Daryl Surat
December 27, 2007 Recently, Japanese film and anime companies have been establishing their own US branches in the hopes of making more profit than they would from just licensing the show to a US publisher. The problem is that more often than not, they churn out substandard releases thinking that we’ll pay for anything. Seriously, can someone please give me a competent DVD release of Air Master, maybe even get a second season made? What, they’ll make a second season of Ikkitousen but not Air Master? Thankfully, Kadokawa Pictures USA appears to be the exception to this trend, having produced excellent releases of Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid with ADV Films as well as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with Bandai Entertainment. Now Kadokawa brings us The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye, in conjunction with Right Stuf’s Nozomi Entertainment label. (Perhaps someone over there fancies Tsuji Nozomi from Morning Musume, even though Ayaka’s Surprise English Lessons defeated her time and again.)
Based on a series of seinen light novels by Ryou Hoshino, The Third is a 24-episode TV series set on a desert-covered Earth in the wake of a global apocalypse (hey, it’s the 80s all over again!) focusing on Honoka, a teenage girl who fancies herself a “jack-of-all-trades” freelancer. But when you’re gifted with extraordinary speed and strength that effectively makes your quick-draw skill with a katana or pistol practically unmatched (I still say Gundoh Musashi could take her), most of the jobs you get hired for consist of cutting worthless objects—wait, not THAT The Third—shooting things, or both. In an absolutely shocking deviation from the unwritten code of anime, despite being a female anime sword/gun fighter Honoka does NOT have enormous bazooms or fight in a bikini. Perhaps now we can finally forget about Fandora.
Trained by a legendary master named Walken (regrettably, the English dub missed a golden opportunity to capitalize on this), “Sword Dancer” Honoka and Bogie, her talking robot tank, find themselves tasked with fighting various post-apocalyptic pests. The generic Fist of the North Star-style thugs contractually obliged to appear in all such stories finally catch a break for once because of Honoka’s refusal to kill humans, but the giant ants, spiders, and robots aren’t so lucky. The robots are mostly manufactured by an organization known as The Third, which rules over the remnants of humanity. They’re clearly evil since not only do they all wear cloaks, but they also hoard all the high technology to themselves. THIS is what will happen in the absence of Net neutrality. In addition to their villainous fashion sense, members of The Third all have a solid red third eye situated in their forehead, which grants them unspecified powers. Considering that the show name is The Girl with the Blue Eye, it isn’t hard to figure out why Honoka wears that headband.
Honoka quickly encounters a tall, handsome man named Iks, whose dashing good looks cause her to immediately swoon. Much like how there are female characters such as Belldandy from Ah! My Goddess who are unrealistically patient, attractive, and more docile than a doormat such that otaku consider them the “ideal girlfriend” as they chant “MOE FOR THE MOE GOD” in deference of that vile specter, Iks is the male equivalent, having effectively fallen from out of the sky into our socially inept heroine’s life. There’s another guy unfortunately named Joey Toy (no, he’s not a member of “Gasp”) who’s obviously smitten by Honoka’s tomboyish charms, only she doesn’t notice. I’d root for Joey, but in reality he wouldn’t stand a chance; after all, in addition to the looks, Iks is just so sickeningly sweet and gentle that he won’t even harm a bug. His mere touch heals wounds and his past is a mystery, but all he wants to do is join Honoka in her travels because she’s a beautiful and unique snowflake. He’s rich too, so put down your Harlequin pink-paper comics now! The Third is after Iks for mysterious reasons no doubt tied into his mysterious past; I’d lay 75% odds on that past turning out to be “he’s actually an ultimate weapon of death.” I’m sick of seeing this character type in anime, regardless of gender.
It all sounds terribly serious, but The Third was originally published along with Full Metal Panic and Slayers, and as such the series is largely comedic. Honoka is a motor mouth who is constantly at odds with Bogie and every guy around her (except Iks!), and the default anime comedy exaggerations are out in full force here. The knowledge that this is originally a series for older men casts a sinister light upon the fact that there’s a great deal of jokes about Honoka’s lack of, erm, development. I really don’t want to think about what sorts of people that rearview shower scene was put in to appeal to, but I think Honoka’s doctor speaks on their behalf. An old man that’s got himself a large-chested robot nurse clad in pink that he professes to be the ideal of womanhood, when confronted with the observation that she’s just an android, he responds, “Dreams don’t distinguish between humans and machines.” And yet, I simply can’t hate the guy since saké-drinking doctors in anime are automatically awesome, for without them we’d never get a lot of our giant robots from the 1970s. Note: Dr. Sane from Star Blazers drank spring water. Dubs wouldn’t lie about such things!
Since I’d rather not think about why the reversible DVD cover containing the Japanese cover art prominently features the obligatory useless little girl character even more than Honaka, the series also has giant robots in it known as “PSPs,” which presumably have poor battery life. They’re mainly an excuse to get Honoka into a skin-tight outfit so she can act embarrassed, though. Curse you, Japan! We don’t really get more than a brief glimpse of what these machines can do in Volume 1 though, and in an age where there’s so much available anime that many fans evaluate shows by a “one-episode test,” this somewhat decompressed style of storytelling may prove detrimental. Still, The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye is off to an okay start.
As someone who knows no Japanese, other than one or two minor misspellings the subtitle track appears to be handled well. People often talk about dub quality, but as someone who prefers to watch anime subtitled the font, color, and overall readability-a detail often neglected by major movie studios or many of the newly created US branches of Japanese publishers-is much more important to me. Volume 1 of the US release appears to contain the extras from Volumes 1 and 2 of the Japanese DVD release and then some, most notably the extended interviews with the Japanese voice actors. The only downside is that some of these extras, especially the second of the two included music videos, effectively spoil much of what happens in the next few episodes to come. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip on watching that music video as well as the next episode previews, which all show what happens right at the end of the next episode you’re about to watch. At least they aren’t using Fist of the North Star/Dragon Ball Z-style episode titles, e.g.,
“Next time on The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye: THE DEATH OF IKS.”
Actually, if that was a real episode title, I’d be looking forward to seeing that one.
