Customer Reviews

Babel II - Perfect Collection

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Following the manga from Metsuteru Yokoyama(the creator of GIGANTOR)BABEL II is not a sequal to something. The "II" indicates the main character is Babel the 2nd. Koichi is a seemingly normal young man who keeps getting dreams about a tall tower in the desert. It turns out to be the very Tower of Babel from the Bible. He is saught out by Juju, a beautiful pink-haired psychic who tries to recruit him for her group of revolutionary psychics lead by the maniacal Magnus. Koichi decides to use the special powers that awaken in him to help defend humanity from this band of superhuman revolutionaries. With his comrades, the shapechanging panther, a giant robot, and a Rodan clone, he might just win. Adopting the new name of Babel II, Koichi tries to assist a group of authorities with bringing down Magnus' plans for world domination. Many characters from this series were later reused for the GIANT ROBO anime which was an almagamation of several of Yokoyama's titles, where Babel II is actually the secret main bad guy who only appears at the very end of the series. BABEL II-PERFECT COLLECTION has all 4 episodes of the original OVA series as released through Streamline Pictures which is now owned by Image Entertainment. This is not the new series however: BABEL II-BEYOND INFINITY. People sometimes confuse this with the remake. But still the animation is fair and has lots of super action for your generic X-Men fan!

WARNING WARNING WARNING!! This is a four episode, Reader's Digest style condensed version of the 13 episode original video animation from Japan! They took out all the good stuff and the good music and you can't even follow the story! Get the imported stuff from eBay or the new three volume DVDs from Amazon! The bottom line is... WATCH THE ORIGINAL FULL 13 EPISODES AND NOT THIS SLICED AND DICED AND BUTCHERED VERSION!

Wow the story behind this was way past kewl. The characters were intruiging. Especially the realtionship between Babel II and the leader of the bad guys. Quite kewl. There were only two things that were off with this anime. First the animation is dated. You can tell that this anime was made a while ago. The images are slightly blurry with stock images being used over and over. Also the way the story went made it seem more of a complete tv series turned into a quick movie. There seemed to be missing time gaps that we never saw. Scenes change at the drop of hat with no explanation. Aside from this the anime was great! I had lots of fun viewing this one though! Reminded me a lot like Mai the Psychic Girl^_^

Most Anime seen in the United States will eventually leave you cold with it's half naked babes and overly innocent teenage male stars but for once that has changed. In this fantasy tale we find the young male hero to still be very much the innocent at first but over time he becomes the wiser then his age superhuman hero that we all know he's going to be. With a plot that sometimes seems to turn back in on itself this particular anime can confuse some newer viewers of Japanese Anime. Then again, with it's odd plot progression and sometimes disconcerting visual images, maybe we could all get a little confused. Either way this isn't a bad movie, just a little out of date.