Review of Astra Lost in Space

tl;dr: A mostly lighthearted story about a group of high school student’s journey through space that does well when character focused but stumbles when it becomes focused on larger scale elements. Kanata no Astra is an anime that I consider as having two core aspects to it. The plot is centered around a group of high school students that due to mysterious circumstances end up on a space ship far away from their home planet and need to make their way home, having to stop at multiple planets along the way in order to gather resources to continue the trip. Thus a core aspect of thisanime is journeying through space, but it is generally a pretty lighthearted affair than with no real sense of the loneliness of space that is often found in such works beyond some minor flashes. There’s also very little in terms of even somewhat hard sci-fi aspects and although there are alien creatures on all the planets they stop on, there isn’t anything like an alien civilizations or any life comparable to humans. The primary use of such a setting is to allow each step in their journey to be very different. Some planets they go to are legitimately dangerous and intense plot events occur. But other planets are incredibly relaxed and allow for things like beach episodes. There is a lot of effort put into emphasizing how each planet is different and how enjoyable it is just to experience and see new things. Thus, it feels much more like a standard fantasy adventure than a sci-fi one.

Though there is an ultimately goal, this is very much a journey story with an emphasis on just showing off the cast. The cast is quite varied with various personalities and abilities, and though none of them are all that complex, this works well with a decent sized cast that all get focused on in just a single cour anime. Almost all of them share some core elements when it comes to their backgrounds, but that ends up being a crucial element of what allows them to connect with each other so well. There’s a lot of good character and relationship development for such a short anime. To a degree this all feels pretty unrealistic in that the progress just work out incredibly well really quickly without much mess or roughness to it at all. There are a lot of moments where things escalate incredibly quickly and then deescalate just as quickly, often involving convenient external plot elements centered around the planet they’re on. Still, despite that, I think it managed to do a good job of using the interplanetary nature of the setting to show off all the characters and the bonds between them incredibly well, with the end result being that I found pretty much all of them likable and holistically I was incredibly invested in their journey succeeding.

The other core aspect is the mystery surrounding how and why they ended up instantly teleported to a planet so far away, which was impossible based on the level of technology their home planet possessed as far as they knew, and furthermore why there was an empty but functional ship awaiting them there. This is a story that’s built up over time which ties into their backgrounds and thus their character arcs as well, but also heavily involves a decent amount of intrigue as information is slowly put together to discover the truth about their entire civilization. I felt this was a decently told story. The writing in this is the type where it is incredibly clear that a minor detail being thrown out in the background is actually foreshadowing for a major plot point, and thus pretty much every major twist or is obvious long before it explicitly occurs and the plot overall is incredibly predictable. Still, for the most part, the plot doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be overtly complex, and simple plots manage to do quite well even if they are predictable, so most of the plot of the anime I thought was handled well and really interesting.

There were major issues with the plot towards the end though. The plot gets a lot more complicated really quickly, and relies on twists and plot devices that were ridiculous beyond my suspension of disbelief. Also, while the buildup begins early on in the anime, the majority of the plot is still heavily character focused, and only at the end does it really go all in on major events that relate to the history of humanity in that universe. This is meant to relate to larger overarching themes such as the value of false peace and whether information control can be necessary, but it largely felt like these themes were just kind of glossed over with the anime stating a perspective without establishing any support for it. It tries to connect that perspective to lessons that the cast learned through their journey, but it felt both incredibly heavy handed and forced. Still, with all that said, these issues didn’t end up having too much of a negative impact on the ending due to the presence of the extended character focused epilogue, which made for a reasonably satisfying ending. I would also like to note that I liked how the first and last episode were double length, wherein it feels like both flowed much better than having two separate episodes for each would.

The art and animation are pretty great. The character designs are pretty solid, and I liked how in order to give them all different looking designs the script established that at this point in the future space suits were something that you could get from different fashion brands. The sci-fi designs of ships and such was pretty basic and not especially notable. The world design was really interesting though and made every planet kind of pop out. I should also note that the majority of the show has a 21:9 aspect ratio, but flashbacks are in the standard 16:9, and recorded video is sometimes in 4:3, which was kind of weird. The OP and ED were both solid in terms of visuals and audio and fit the tone and atmosphere of the show really well, though overall both the OP and ED were played pretty rarely. I also liked how the ED was essentially a slideshow of pictures taken on their trip with each episode’s being different. The soundtrack wasn’t particularly memorable outside of how the ED was played during key moments.