Anime Film Review: Planzet

Very Average Joe
Oct 30
3 min read

English Title: Planzet

Japanese Title: プランゼット

Director(s): Awazu Jun

Writer(s): Awazu Jun

Studio: CoMix Wave & Media Factory

Released: 2010

Runtime: 50m

Starring: Miyano Mamoru, Ishihara Kaori, Terasaki Yuka, Tsuda Kenjirou, Takeuchi Junko

The film opens to Akejima Taishi being told off by his father and younger sister, Koyomi, to study harder so that he can qualify to go to Mars. The Earth apparently is not doing well. His father, who is a soldier, is then called in for some emergency and doesn’t come back because it’s an alien invasion, the type that wipes out most of humanity.

Jump forward six years to 2053 and Taishi is a soldier at a military base inside Mt Fuji. The aliens, dubbed the FOS, arrived in a planetoid which remains in proximity to Earth. The base commander has a plan to fire a special cannon but it requires the deactivation of the “diffuser”, the planetary shield that has so far stopped the FOS from finishing off Earth. So, Taishi pilots a mech to protect the base while the cannon charges…

The alien-invasion premise is overdone but that in itself wouldn’t be a problem if the specifics of the setting and plot were better thought out.

Firstly, Earth somehow conveniently came up with the planetary shield after the initial devastating invasion.

Secondly, the audience is told that of the small number of survivors, they are either military living in bases or they struggle outside. However, Koyomi clearly does not live at the base and although privileged as a relative of the military, it is not clear where she lives. On a related note, Mars is mentioned as a colony; it is presumably safe despite the aliens remaining in the system because?

Thirdly, despite the excuse that Earth’s population has been significantly reduced, the narrative practically shows no more than the five main speaking parts. When Taishi is deployed, it is just mechs piloted by him, Tazaki and Sagawa; there are no other vehicles or even weapons fire. In other words, it feels like Earth only has five people going up against aliens.

The characters are all cardboard cutouts, which is fine as a starting point, but nothing else is done with them. Taishi is the former-teenager-loser with Koyomi being one of those family-member-who-refuses-to-escape-to-safety-alone. Yoshizawa, the base commander, is the no-nonsense-sexy-woman-in-a-uniform. Meanwhile, Taishi is part of a three-man team with Tazaki being the drunk commander and Sagawa wears a tank top and shorts. It may be anime but it doesn’t quite match the visual tone.

There are other problems but the abovementioned are the most apparent.

Visually, it goes for dark and gritty. The environment looks excellent, as does the mecha design and action. The characters could be better but are generally not bad for its time. The alien designs are cheap in the sense that their crafts are merely discs even though the rendering is good.

The sound and sound editing are solid. The music, whilst technically composed and mixed well, comes across as dated, like the score for an epic video game a decade earlier. It doesn’t make the film worse than it already is but it is noticeable.

Obviously, this is a CG short film that aims to look good rather than for storytelling. Nonetheless, there are easy ways to avoid coming across as a B-grade film that feels like there are only a few people on Earth.

If resources are limited such that hints of other people living on the planet and other military cannot be shown, then narrow the scope of the premise and setting; for example, an outpost in space that only has a few people responding to an alien offensive. Hints of a bigger world or a bigger battle can be shown on their computer screens to provide a context. Since details on computer screens can be brief and need not be good quality, such sequences can be produced relatively cheaply.

Either way, the film mostly looks good, but the storytelling tries to be way bigger than it is and so comes across as cheap.