Film Reviews:

Odin

(Takeshi Shirato, Toshio Masuda & Eiichi Yamamoto, Japan, 1985)

[Odin - Oh dear] The anime fan network is pretty sharp at picking up on good films. Word of mouth ensures that any decent anime will usually rapidly appear in Britain - for example, copies of the Silent Möbius movie appeared here about two weeks after its Japanese video release. Given this, it says a lot about Odin that, despite being nine years old, I could find no-one who'd ever seen it before Manga Video released it. Maybe Odin was an undiscovered gem that fandom somehow missed. Well, to quote the great philosophers Wayne and Garth, "NOT!".

Odin gets my vote as the worst anime yet inflicted on us. Even Fist of the North Star while soddily dubbed and poorly animated, at least had a gleefully enthusiastic eye for splatter. Odin lacks even that, being a tired space opera which looks perhaps ten years older that it is, and it was well past its sell-by date to begin with. It starts off on the wrong foot with some dodgy pseudo scientific waffle about starships powered by light, and it rapidly goes downhill as we meet all the characters.

The storyline singularly failed to capture my interest. At the first attempt, I fell asleep after ninteen minutes, and even after a rerun, I can't remember much aboutit. Read the box, if you must, I'm sure DSO has better things to do with its space! It's good to see Manga Video demonstrating the breadth of anime. Like films or television, it runs from the excellent to the very poor, and the only possible reason I can think of why they released Odin was as an example of the latter. Avoid, most definitely. 2/10

Jim McLennan