My vacations are finished but I can now start counting the days before Japan Expo!
The title, The Pilot’s Love Song, pretty much gives away what this anime is all about: It talks about Kal-el, a young boy studying to become a pilot and how and whom he fell in love with. It all happens on a flying island and people are at war with each other and out students try to live a normal life in this setting.
I liked it because it helped give a sense that the anime is real. It is war and people die during war, whether they’re students or not, whether they’re young or not. This was definitely a good thing. But on the other hand, it had the problem of making me a bit emotional at times.
Aside from this little fact, well, it was boring. I honestly don’t know how I managed to finish it. Things were completely obvious. There were a bit too many love stories for my taste, so many that a lot of it felt forced. There were a lot of pointless episodes too. You could argue that it was all for the sake of character development but in the end we didn’t learn a lot about the characters. The focus was almost always on the same ones anyway. You could argue that this is what a school life anime is, but even then it was boring.
I won’t even start talking about it from a war anime point of view. The fight scenes were great, or at least I liked them a lot. But that’s about it. The whole behind the scenes aspect and politics were a bit blurry too, which didn’t help very much. I am very disappointed about that. This is always something I find essential in a war anime. If you don’t understand why people are at war with each other, it’s a bit meaningless. Either way, following this for its story is clearly a bad idea. I cannot say it is a good idea to watch this for the characters either. The hero was annoying at best. He might have some secrets, and his flashback episode was the one I enjoyed the most of all the anime, but he still was boring. I found him flat, not even his love for Claire could give him more depth. He was voiced by Hanae Natsuki, a young boy who had a lot of leading roles the past season (Zvezda, Nagi no Asukara, Outbreak Company), sadly, while he definitely isn’t bad, he has the distinctive characteristic of being forgettable. I didn’t even care enough to notice he was in all these shows. Same goes for Claire, she is supposed to be strong but she’s probably as flat as Kal-El if not more. It doesn’t help that she is the quiet type of character. She was voiced by Yuki Aoi, a rather more well-known girl seiyuu (she’s Madoka!) and while I recognize her talent, I still think the same about her I think about most girls seiyuu, mainly that her voice sounds generic. I could repeat this for pretty much everyone in the series. Everyone or nearly was very bland and definitely not interesting, and their seiyuu couldn’t save them. Except maybe Shouichirou Hoshi but I’m biased so it doesn’t really count. In the end, I honestly don’t know how I managed to finish this. I have spent the whole anime looking for something to like and only found one thing. Definitely not recommended.
