Genre: Sci-Fi
Publisher: Studio Pierrot
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Producer: Yuji Nunokawa
Screenplay: Hisayuki Toriumi
Music: Hiroyuki Naba, Ichiro Nitta
Generally speaking, when it comes to recognizable and well known directors in the anime industry, there’s not a lot out there that a majority know about. Mamoru Oshii happens to be one of those figures that a majority do know about, from his work directing Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura, to the Patlabor franchise, to Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. Dallos, however, is the first work of his that I’ve watched, and in viewing the OVA, I can see early inklings of how good he is when it comes to scenes and also the nice visual touches in this work. However, Dallos simply jumps from one plot point to the next, and with only 4 episodes to actually tell a story, it doesn’t. And while some battles are cool and the soundtrack is pleasing, it’s drowned by information and situations I can’t care for.
The story revolves around two factions: Earthlings and Lunarians. Due to the population increase on Earth some had to move away from the planet and onto the Moon. This ends up posing a problem since the work is hard and they can’t freely return to Earth. So this creates a Lunarian rebellion force, and their fight for equal rights. The character we follow embroiled in this mess is Shin Nonomuya, a young man who has to eventually decide whether to follow in his brother’s footsteps and become a rebel or choose to accept life on the Moon, and near the strange machine worshipped by the Lunarians called Dallos.
In watching the OVA, Dallos kept my attention because of its highly detailed backgrounds and some really cool battles. From its design of Dallos to the attack of the highly trained but rabid looking pack of dogs, I found them for the most part well executed and cool. The music also manages to stand out, from the very opening of the first episode (which is a BGM not an OP), to the end. Not every track stood out, but there were a few that really worked in certain scenes, with one notable example being the Earthlings infiltrating Lunarian territory and the fighting that occurred in Episode 2. The visuals, while looking old in parts, can really stand up well today because of how well detailed and conceived they are.
However, the problem with Dallos is it being an OVA. In watching this OVA, I felt that it lacked in trying to explain why I should care about what’s happening to the two factions, and topped it off by giving us too many characters to care about. They’re interesting enough, from the clueless but mindful Shun (voiced by Hideki Sasaki), Rachel (Rumiko Ukai), who clearly has a thing for Shun but ends up growing up and deciding things by herself, to Melinda (Yoshiko Sakakibara), an Earthling that Shun finds himself attracted to, and to Alex (Shuuichi Ikeda), a sharp and seemingly cunning man yet not everyone aligned with him don’t think too highly of his skills. But then you throw on top of that the terrorist group and then throw on that a small forbidden love between an Earthling and Lunarian and then you throw in Dallos and its powers in just 120 minutes, somewhere along the way, motivations get lost, following information gets inconsistent, and all that’s left is wondering just what really happened in this story.
It doesn’t help that it seems to cut away scene wise in some spots, and then also introduce characters that then ultimately don’t matter in the end. So it doesn’t do enough to catch my interest, and then when it does, it then gives us something unnecessary or doesn’t build on it properly. The events just don’t flow naturally, and that’s a shame since this is nice to look at and it has some interesting elements. The obvious differences between Earthlings and Lunarians fuel the story, but only one perspective really drove everything. We then have a potential romance that evolved drastically by episode 2, and one that then doesn’t get explored for most of the OVA. It’s stuff like this that makes everything else fail to hold up, and that’s what happened here — Dallos just has too much going on that isn’t explored more because it’s only 4 episodes. Unless you want to see Oshii’s early works or want to see more of the designs, this isn’t something I can recommend you seek and watch.