- Gall Force: Eternal Story (1986: Artmic, AIC, Animate Film) 1/1 ep.
Gall Force is one of those fairly large, in terms of numbers of entries, franchises that basically no one remembers today outside of the old timers. Quite how it got to be so large I’m not sure because its beginnings are sub-par. Actually, I lie a bit because Eternal Story wasn’t where the franchise began, instead it began with model kits and a photo novel. But that doesn’t matter because the canon story of the franchise begins with Eternal Story. This is a movie length OAV released in 1986 that was the brain child of multiple people. There was Katsuhito Akiyama (Bubblegum Crisis, Inazuma 11, and Pumpkin Scissors) directing. Then there was Sukehiro Tomita (Sailor Moon, Ideon, Mospeada, Kimagure Orange Road, and Do You Remember Love) doing the scripting. Finally there was Hideki Kakanuma (Detonator Orgun), who was the original creator. This is a pretty damn good line up so the results should have been good right? Well they weren’t.
Gall Force tells the story of a space war where Solnoids (human looking race of women) and Paranoids (alien looking aliens) have been fighting for hundreds of years. We follow one Solnoid starship, the Star Leaf, and its crew into an opening battle that so full of fantastic space action. But soon the ship has to make hyper jump, along with the rest of the fleet, to protect a planet Chaos from the Paranoids. The problem is that things go wrong, the Star Leaf drops out of warp early, they get attacked, and now the film is Alien (just without everything made Alien good). Later on, we get another genre shift which feels just as out of place and jarring. There is actually a decent story here though and it has some interesting twists along the way. Unfortunately, there are two big problems.
The first problem is that it is stuck halfway between being a movie and a series. The multiple different genre twists and the sheer amount of story it goes through would probably be best served by breaking it up into multiple episodes with a longer running time, hell even just breaking it up into three distinct episodes (with the same total running time) would likely have improved it. But on the other hand, the level of detail to which it actually goes into is more suited to a shorter running time. To be honest, you could probably cut a lot from Eternal Story, the various musical montages and long sequences of characters not ding a whole lot could all go, giving us a much tighter production. Like so many anime Eternal Story would have been better by being shorter or longer, the version we got was stuck in the middle and ended up feeling confused as a result. It was incredibly slow and dull but at the same time was galloping through the narrative with massive jarring genre shifts. Instead of getting the best of both worlds it got the worst.
The second major problem are the characters. Kenichi Sonoda’s character designs were spot on as per usual but that was the only thing good about them. The characters all fell into one of two characters: dull as cardboard in sensory deprivation tank or intensely annoying high pitch screaming/crying. The only exception was Lufy who had a bomb ass design and was a bit different, being the loose cannon/rough and ready type. She is basically punk Priss (from Bubblegum Crisis) in space. The problems with the tone and pacing could have been a far smaller issue if the characters were actually interesting as those slower moments would have been held up with fun character interactions. As it is we instead get boredom punctuated by irritation, not exactly the best viewing experience.
What else is there to say really? I suppose the OAV itself looks pretty good with some great fight scenes and excellent mecha designs but that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Eternal Story just ends up being another one of those really frustrating productions where you can see how it could have been really good but instead what we got was massively flawed. I think the biggest indicator I have of the problems that this show has is that it took m roughly three weeks and about 6 different sessions to finally get through it all, and even then I was bored to tears the entire time.
Final Score: 3F
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