English Dub Series Review: Clockwork Planet

This is me being nice. Or trying to be.

Spoilers Below

Okay, sit down, I’ve got news for you. The world is busted. So busted, some dude named Y thinks the only way we can save it is if we somehow convert it into a giant clockwork mechanism. Sound good? Stick around, kid. I think I can dissuade you of that thought. Meet Naoto Miura. He’s a kid. Where’s his family? We don’t know. Is he an orphan? Was it even discussed? I don’t think so. Anyways, he spends his free time in the ruins of some old building, surrounded by busted clockwork mechanisms. He desperately wants to fix them, but doesn’t know how. Then, a coffin drops into his lap, containing a female android. Yes, I know that’s technically a gynoid, but everybody looks at me funny when I say that word. This fembot is one of a series made by Y, and is insanely impossible to understand, let alone fix and… oh, look. He fixed it. By turning one screw. Oh, boy. Yes, apparently his lack of skill in mechanics is made up for by giving him supernatural hearing, which he can use to locate the problem. The gynoid registers him as her master, says her name is RyuZU, and the story kicks off from there. The actual owner comes looking for her, a girl by the name of Marie Bell Breguet and her bodyguard Vainney Halter. There isn’t much time for pleasantries, because the entire city is about to fall into the abyss under the clockwork planet. This is all the work of the military, attempting to cover something up. Working together, the quartet defeats the evil military and saves the city by repairing the clockwork mechanism that drives it. Yay.

I hear you ask, what was the military trying to cover up? Look to your left there. That’s the Yatsukahagi. It’s a weapon of mass magnetization. Why is this a problem? Because while he made gears that were impervious to wear and tear, kept perfectly lubricated, and seem to be repaired by simply screwing them back into place, Y made all of the clockwork planet out of ferrous metal. So, if they all get magnetized, they stop functioning. The Japanese government built the Yatsukahagi, but the experiment went wrong, causing a chain reaction that damaged the city. Oh, and now it’s fallen into the hands of a psychopath who wants to destroy the world and everyone in it because… I’m still not clear on that point, honestly. Because the planet isn’t in its natural form, he thinks it’s a good idea to kill everyone? Our heroes meet up with more gynoids with superpowers, and work together to stop the Yatsukahagi and reverse the damage it has done.

See, if you look at it from this broad perspective without any details, this sounds like a fun anime romp with gears and robot girls that has the occasional Rule of Cool trope going on. Once you actually get into the series, however, the truth is far, far less attractive. The characters don’t behave logically. It’s rather common for the characters to do stupid things that are outside of their personality. Why? The show uses fanservice in place of character development. The laws of physics? Thrown out the window. And not in your typical anime fashion of people doing epic acts. Physics like clockwork mechanisms acting as cell phones and clockwork androids somehow heating themselves up when all their gears are stopped. Oh, and flat screen monitors that supposedly don’t use electromagnetic technology. Why? Because this show likes gears. Gears for everything. Gears in places where they have no function. Gears where they already stated those gears shouldn’t work. Remember that. If the character is acting incoherently, the answer is boobs. If the universe is acting incoherently, the answer is gears. What makes this worse is as you get further into the series, character abilities and motivations are not even explained! There is a whole conversation that Naoto has with the big villain at one part of the show. It gets referenced multiple times afterwards as part of how the characters act, and the villain keeps having flashbacks to it. WE NEVER SEE IT. We know it happened. We know a line from it. The rest is only for the other to know.

So what is the answer when the animation is acting incoherently? Our very first shot in this show is a plane flying over the city. This one shot is loaded with animation errors. And it only continues from there. Tons of lazy animation throughout, and even things that should have amazing direction and animation only gives us shots of RyuZU floating in the air while scythes blur around her. In fact, the ending credits have better animation than the rest of the series, and they’re done in Adobe Flash. I can tell. But… I see CG there, you say, isn’t that good at least? That depends. You either have static objects that are CG only because drawing it would mean the animators would have to work, or you have moving clockwork pieces that… don’t do much. They turn. Sometimes two sets of gears fly together, there’s a flash of light, and now they’re a mechanism that doesn’t even look like it was made from those parts.

I would also like to address something in the character design. Take a look at these two characters. The only humans in the main cast. We are supposed to believe they are in their late teens. I get this off the official wiki for the show. Do they look like late teens to you? No. Those characters are pre-pubescent. Which is why I’m a bit disturbed by the amount of time the director had the camera ogle Marie, and put her in fan service situations. Yes, first episode, this girl (who is an established businesswoman and head of a company all about up keeping the mechanisms of the city) walks out into a public hall naked. Why? Why does she sleep naked in the first place? It isn’t of character for her… oh yeah. Character acting incoherently. The answer is fan service. From a child. Good job.

Voice acting? Well, to be honest, I felt sorry for the voice actors. The writing in this show was so terrible, it felt like even they gave up on the final episode. The characters spend most of their time yelling. For no reason. Typically at each other. And with a plot and script that make little to no sense most of the time, you too would be saying “Wow. Yeah, I’m just gonna do my job, get paid, and forget I was ever here.” A good amount of the lines felt forced, in scripting and in delivery.

So, incomprehensible characters, terrible scripts, writers and directors focused on fanservice, and a voice crew that didn’t want to do this in the first place. What was good about this series, you ask? There was some things. At two points, the show actually whipped out some theoretical physics explaining what exactly the character was doing to stop time or something of that sort. The theories they used were very real. They just weren’t well explained because they had to be rattled off in a very short frame of time. Other than that? Um… Oh yeah, I had the opportunity to figure out exactly how a giant energy gun worked in this series, only to prove that there was no way that it would actually work by the laws of physics, and I used actual calculations of the piezoelectric effect to do it. Don’t go looking for it. My editor was kind enough to spare you the tedium of the giant math lesson. But I feel good about myself having done it, and that’s the important thing.