By all rights, an anime OVA series made for the anniversary of Cup Noodle feels like it should be bad. However, while Katsuhiro Otomo didn’t write Freedom, the fact that he got involved enough to get into character and mechanical designs should be a sign that this show could actually be pretty good. It turns out that not only is it good, but it’s good enough that I’d consider this something of a hidden gem.
Freedom is set in the 23rd century, after the Earth has been devastated by a massive natural catastrophe. The lunar city of Eden, built to prepare for a planned colonization and terraforming mission to Mars, has become, seemingly, the last bastion of Humanity. I say seemingly, because as juvenile delinquent Takeru finds out – the Earth has recovered, and has been sending rockets as a sort of message in a bottle to the moon to let them know. When Takeru, his friend Bismark, and the other racers learn the truth, they put a plan together to send Takeru and another of their number to the Earth, to make contact.
The animation of this is a little weird. Sunrise animated this with CGI characters and vehicles but conventionally animated backgrounds and other environments. It takes some time to get into it, but eventually I was able to roll with it – the animation of the characters isn’t quite as good as the animation of characters in, say, Trigun Stampede or Beastars, but it’s watchable. In all, it’s dated CGI in a lot of respects (there’s a few bits where close-ups are clearly zooms on the character models), but I was able to go with it.
The writing in particular is the series strong suits. This is a series that takes cues from Megazone 23 and Dallos – but as a much lighter series than either of those – no sudden outbursts of ultraviolence here. There is still sense of darkness to the series, but doesn’t have the sort of grimness those series had. The darkness is societal – with the society of Eden being something of a surveillance state with a sense of oppression permeating through it. However, it does also feel like there’s a light touch going on nonetheless.
Where I feel like it can stumble is in some of the action sequences. There can be a bit of what feels like a loss of geography in how the vehicle action sequences are choreographed. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of them are set in what look like effectively featureless tunnels.
Also, the Cup Noodle connection comes through a lot of extremely hamfisted product placement. I was able to roll with it, but it did feel jarring in a lot of respects.
All of that said, I really enjoyed watching Freedom – this was something I’d had sitting on my shelf for years, and I’m really glad I got around to finally watching it.
For purposes of this review I watched the version from Bandai Visual’s Honeammise line, but it’s since been license rescued by Discotek Media – however, their past release was a Blu-Ray/DVD Combo release, and they’ve taken all their DVD releases out of print. Hopefully this will get a Blu-Ray only release in the not-too-distant future, so new audiences can enjoy this series.
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