Review of Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut
Recommendation: A cute love story filled with nostalgia and old Soviet aesthetics, it's nothing revolutionary but a very pleasant watch overall. Story: The Soviet Union analogue USZR is going to be the first to send a person to space, but desperately wants to avoid international embarrassment by having them die in an accident with the world watching. Their solution is to send a vampire prisoner, Test Subject N44 AKA Irina Luminesk, into space first as an experiment, since she is near-human in physiology but considered closer to a dog than a human, so no one will miss her if something goes wrong. Lev Leps,a cosmonaut candidate who was demoted for righteously hitting a superior officer, is assigned as her handler and trainer. Irina hates and distrusts humans for very understandable reasons, but eventually opens up because of Lev's pure heart and their mutual love of space and the moon, and thus begins their romance.
It follows a predictable-but-not-in-a-bad-way path, there really aren't a lot of surprises here, but the story is well told and Lev and Irina's romance is sweet and you'll be rooting for them to overcome the obstacles in their path. The romance in particular has an almost fairy tale quality to it. It's prone more to big, romantic set pieces, like ice skating under the aurora borealis while love songs play in the background, than a more grounded or typical romance series. If you're allergic to corniness, you might roll your eyes at some of these scenes, especially the ending, but it's a treat for pure romance lovers.
Audio/Visual: The music is absolutely wonderful. The ED is one of the best of the season, the soundtrack is nice and jazzy in a comfortably nostalgic way, and the insert song selection is always perfect for the scene it's highlighting. The VA work is strong throughout as well, especially Hayashibara Megumi's work as Irina.
Visually, inconsistent would probably be the best way to describe it. The direction is nice, if a bit *much* at times (Yokoyama Akitoshi really loves unnecessary camera rotations for dramatic effect apparently). The character design is mostly strong and the show looks decent, but it's very apparent that they were struggling with the budget. The CGI Earth when they're in space does not look good, and there's a lack of attention to detail that leads to embarrassing mistakes in some parts, like a scene where Lev rides off in a motorcycle but leaves his mouth floating in the air behind him. It's not as though it looks awful and many of the errors are small little easter eggs that you won't even notice unless you're looking for them, but it definitely could have been better.
Characters: Lev and Irina are the main focus here, and their dynamic is very sweet and makes show work as well as it does. It's much easier to tolerate the corniness when these two are so perfect for each other. Lev's boyish naivete is his defining trait, he's just a big kid who wants to go to space, and he sees Irina simply as a fellow space lover and bonds with her over that while everyone else in Laika, the secret military town where the space program is being developed, is afraid of her or hates her. He quickly gets over his fear of vampires based on the propaganda he's heard and treats her as a human even after explicitly being ordered not to because he's simply incapable of treating her coldly. Irina, by contrast, is a full on tsundere. She talks often about how she hates humans and is only going along with this because she wants to beat them to space and tries to keep Lev at a distance at first, with little success. She's the good kind of tsundere though, where the gap between what she says and how she acts only serves to highlight her cuteness. An example is a scene where Lev gives her a bouquet of flowers, and Irina criticizes him for including too many different kinds and overwhelming her sense of smell, all while being unable to stop smiling in delight.
In terms of the characters, there are only 2 real critiques I have here. One is the lack of focus on Lev's fellow cosmonaut candidates. What we get of them is good, and it feels like there is a lot left on the table in terms of developing them and getting to see them interact with Lev. At times it can feel like the focus on Lev and Irina is so powerful that the rest of the cast gets left behind. The other issue is Anya, who is fine for the role she serves in the story, but including a pink haired loli scientist with twintails in an otherwise pretty realistic setting feels incredibly out of place, and some scenes with her that are meant to be dramatic end up feeling kind of slapstick instead, like when a soldier slaps a pair of ice cream cones out of her hands.