When I first heard of it, I wasn’t sure what to make of the six-episode OVA known as Melty Lancer: The Animation. It’s based on a line of graphic adventure games (in other words, digital comics) so obscure that Bandai didn’t even mention them in the box copy for the anime, and, as many could tell you, game-spawned animated series are rarely good. Still, it had some nice character art and a bizarre title that stuck in my head.
The thing is, I’ve now watched the entirety of the series, and I still don’t know what to make of it.
The eponymous Melty Lancer is actually a six-woman team of detectives from the space-patrolling Galaxy Police Organization (so that wasn’t trademarked by Tenchi Muyo?). Though the unit was once disbanded, the GPO directors inexplicably see fit to recruit a prisoner named Collins and assign him as the commander of the newly re-conscripted Melty Lancer. They also dispatch a sniveling, bespectacled guy who resembles an even more pathetic version of Love Hina’s Keitaro to gather the former members of the team. This, of course, provides an ideal method of introducing them.
Former group leader Melvina MacGarlen is an dignified, pseudo-aristocratic fencer who wears a concerned frown ninety percent of the time; the brash tomboy Jun Kamishiro fights in a suit of combat armor, hates math (‘cause she’s a jock, you know), and kind of likes Collins; the blond, methodical investigator Sylvia Nimrod (There’s a name I’d have romanized differently) has a family history with the GPO; the soft-spoken and optimistic Sakuya Lansaihe is a priestess from the Church of St. Archanest; the staff-wielding, furry-eared Angela is a genetically engineered girl soldier; and the bratty Nana is a pre-pubescent magician from a parallel dimension. That last fact is straight from the DVD’s glossary, believe it or not.
Collins, a complete asshole, assigns Melty Lancer to trivial tasks at first, but the unit eventually notices a number of crimes leading back to the name “Iyonesco.” Whatever Iyonesco is, it’s able to direct an efficient terrorist cell known as Defiant as well as a group of goofball criminals who dub themselves the Vanessars in honor of their highly annoying boss, Vanessa. While facing off against Defiant, the women of Melty Lancer also run across a cute gerbil-fox named Mou Mou, a slimy bubble-creature, and a lot of perplexing clues about Iyonesco.
Director Takeshi Mori (Ruin Explorers, Gunsmith Cats) tried to make a lightweight action-comedy out of Melty Lancer, but he's stymied at every turn by a ridiculously convoluted script. The first three episodes leap from mystery to mystery, throwing out disjointed events and ominous dialogue for no real reason. The second half of the series is even denser, as writer Hiroshi Yamaguchi (Evangelion, Argentosoma) has the characters run a gauntlet of space-collapsing doomsday weapons, conspiracies within the GPO, the reconciliation of the Defiant and its old leaders, the stolen genes of endangered species, a crackpot religion that abducts Melty Lancer’s sad-sack aide, teleportation experiments, a beast-boy who befriends Angela, a computerized girl straight out of Serial Experiments Lain, and a massive climax that involves bizarre psychological abstraction and the Melty Lancer team’s ersatz affirmation of the importance of giving one’s life meaning. And it all makes perfect fucking sense.
No, wait. It doesn’t. Melty Lancer makes sense only in a marginal, metaphysical, and thoroughly unsatisfying way. I’ve nothing against obliquely told space epics, but there’s little in Melty Lancer that makes the unclear storyline worthwhile. Nothing is ever explained well enough to be interesting, and some plot twists, such as the disclosure of Iyonesco’s true identity, come out of nowhere and are subsequently buried beneath even less sensible revelations. Perhaps everything comes into focus if you’re familiar with the preceding line of video games, but I doubt it. And even if the storyline became coherent, it still wouldn’t be anything special. The Melty Lancer crew and the rest of the cast are talking heads, unrefined archetypes, or vapid annoyances. The only memorable personality is Jun, who at least gets a few good lines and a funny throwaway scene or two.
Crafted by GONZO a short while before Vandread and GateKeepers gave the studio its reputation for awkward flash, Melty Lancer is a mix of solid OVA-grade animation and occasionally ugly CG. The mechanical and character designs are unremarkable, though Mori sometimes sticks a joke or two into the confusing mess of the script. Then again, if you're taking potshots at those 40-year-old men who dress up as Sailor Mercury at conventions, it helps not to play to that same crowd by showing underage magical girls turning into shirt-bursting adult women.
For its dub, Melty Lancer gets nice performances from Ocean regulars such as Kelly Sheridan (Hitomi in Escaflowne) as Sylvia and Lisa Ann Beley (Relena in Gundam Wing) as Melvina. Chantal Strand and Alexandra Carter do well with Angela and Nana, respectively, and I grew to like Maggie Blue O’Hara’s Jun quite a bit. Some of the peripheral performances are annoying, though, so I preferred the Japanese track, which includes Junko Iwao as Sakuya and Megumi Ogata as Melvina. On a surprising note, Ogata once placed Melvina alongside Evangelion’s Shinji and Yu Yu Hakusho’s Kurama as one of her favorite roles, which leads me to wonder if the Melty Lancer games might actually be better than this anime off-shoot implies.
In a way, I know what to make of Melty Lancer: The Animation: It’s the result of Dissociative Anime Disorder. The series tries to be both a colorful adventure and complex, straight-faced science fantasy, yet it doesn't go far enough in either direction. It ends up somewhere in the middle, with a painfully confusing story and nothing to truly attach itself to viewers. Should they exist, U.S. fans of the Melty Lancer games might want to check this out for curiosity’s sake, but there's nothing here other than wearisome and unrewarding drivel.
D+
