Review: AQUARION EVOL

Alas, the anime-to-manga adaptations for mecha anime didn't get much better over the years, even when looking far beyond the confines of Gundam.

AQUARION EVOL (Akuerion Evoru), based on the series by Shoji Kawamori with art by Aogiri.  First published in 2012 and first published in North America in 2015.

PLOT:

Amata Sora spends his days working in a movie theater, pining for the hopeful heroine of "The Signs of Aquaria."  It's there that he meets Mikono Suzushiro, whose beauty and sensitivity reminds him of that film.  Just as the two of them start to get close, strange robots invade the city and begin abducting people.  It's up to Amata to protect Mikono by revealing his own secret powers.  While he manages to save Mikono, the two of them are now separated at a school for future robot pilots, uncertain of what the future might hold for them.

STORY:

Aquarion has always been some of an odd duck when it comes to mecha anime.  It's Shoji Kawamori's other notable mecha franchise, one that's forever been in the giant shadow of Macross.  Aquarion Evol is an adaptation of the second Aquarion series, and it's gotten a tiny bit of notoriety over the years for how much of it is built around one big metaphor for sex.  Pilots are segregated by sex, held back by things like "purity walls" (along with literal walls), yet when the pilots unite their hearts (with imagery that suggest even more), they can literally possess the power of a god.  It's heady stuff to be sure, and it's nice that it's framed as more of a spiritual, sweeping, romantic thing than the clumsy horniness of something like Darling in the Franxx, but by the midpoint I will be damned if I could tell what in the hell was going on.

All the Aquarion shows are technically part of the same continuity, with a history and mythology spanning thousands of years involving lots of reincarnation and the occasional bit of dimension.  Unfortunately, this manga delivers this information in the clumsiest fashion possible.  It starts with Amata making a bunch of "as you know" style statements to Mikono, but it's at the midpoint where this book just devolves into chaos.  Nameless robot pilots start shouting at Amata with zero context. Officers in far away stations speak cryptically, lobbing the audience with terminology like so many tomatoes.  There are visions of a dark future as well as of Amata's dream heroine from his favorite film.  Then all of a sudden, Amata wakes up at mecha pilot school, where is the talk of the campus for having done the Aquarion equivalent of doing it.

Maybe I would be able to stomach this confusion better if the cast of the characters were strong enough to anchor the audience, but that's simply not the case here.  Amata and Mikono are perfectly pleasant kids but they are both deep as puddles and that undercuts what is clearly meant to be a remarkable romance.  The rest of the cast might as well be 2x4s with faces drawn on them for all the impression they make.  Hell, I don't think half of them have even been named yet!  Perhaps that's for the best, considering the exceedingly goofy names we do get such are ones like "Cayenne Suzushiro" and "Andy W. Hole."  I realize that it's hard to condense multiple episodes' of story into a single volume, but surely it could have been better handled than this.

ART:

The most I can say for Aogiri's art is that it is unobjectionable.  After all, most of the big artistic decisions here stem from the show's staff, not the mangaka.  The character designs are pleasant if mostly unmemorable and Aogiri translates them to the page with little in the way of alteration.  I do wish they had been able to do something about the overdesigned mecha school uniforms, particularly for the girls who look more like idols in training than mecha pilots.  

The Aquaria themselves look fine on the few occasions we can see them clearly, but their designs clearly favor function over style.  The biggest problem is that Aogiri is absolutely lousy at drawing and laying out action sequences.  Every panel during them is too close, too reliant on speed lines, with little spatial awareness of where people are in proximity to one another.  It aggravates the chaos of their moments in a way that makes this book even more of a chore to read.

PRESENTATION:

It seems that issues with lettering have been a long-standing issue at One Peace Books.  While it's not as bad nor omnipresent as it was with Tales of the Tendo Family, this book also has regular problems with text that's too compact for the speech bubbles, and in one case a scream that was left unaltered with an awkwardly plain translation left next to it.

RATING:

Aquarion Evol's manga has very little to love about it.  It's ponderous, shallow, rushed, and visually uninspired.  I can't speak to how it fares as an adaptation, but I can confidently call it a failure at convincing me to check out its parent anime.

This manga was published by One Peace Books.  This series is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available.  All 5 have been released and are currently out of print.