Review of Fena: Pirate Princess

You could say I was fished by the clips on Crunchyroll's YouTube channel. You can tell there is serious money invested in this production. While I would probably give the visual edge to Kyoto or Shaft, this is seriously impressive animation quality and dedication. Every character is well-designed, and animated without the usual shortcuts like "just the mouths but not the jaws", resulting in a cast that has emotional depth and movements you'd expect from a Ghibli feature film. Some of the firearms used by the characters are intricate and display a level of artistic creativity rarely seen in anime. Likewise, the audio is fantastically produced. Thesoundtrack teleports us to a fantasy world where El Dorado and Eden are real places, where the line between divinity and magic are blurred in this quasi-historical fantasy (more on that in a bit). The acting performances are likewise great, especially recurring villain actor Toshiyuki Morikawa.

Alas, this is a production that in my opinion threw a lot of money on a weak story and characterization. Turn this into a novel without any of the flashy visuals and audio, and I'm sure it's not much different than any dime-a-dozen novel that tried to mash together a pirate adventure with Indiana Jones and a rather tortured interpretation of Bible stories that came out of a mind that only read The Da Vinci Code. There's no real theme to the work other than, I dunno, a weak "friendship" or "camaraderie" undercurrent that might have been better fleshed out over 2 cours rather than a 2-minute montage in one episode. And the characters, oh, where to begin. First of all, what exactly is the point of the lady pirate crew if the Royal Navy was plenty barbaric and evil in the show? Our "heroine" is a damsel in distress mashed with a hero of destiny, constantly getting herself captured and her comrades hurt. Her raison d'etre and the villain's motivation are, like the plot, a messy melodrama that reads like an adult manga artist's fantasy of how the life of Jeanne d'Arc went. This killed the "adventure" aspect of the show right off, it's honestly mildly infuriating and I'm not even French; it's like the premise of the show are the trumped-up charges the English brought against Joan of Arc. You get the impression that at least one of the production committee members wanted to see that fantasy in all its lurid detail for pure shock value and to titillate the young men in the audience, and frankly that kind of manipulative buzz inducement is everything wrong with recent anime production.

My advice to these guys: If you're going to make another season, focus on the submarine crew and their captain.