Appleseed XIII: Complete Series Collection [DVD]

Oh, Appleseed, what have they done to you?I have been a big fan of this franchise ever since I was a kid when I saw the original 1988 movie (still just available on DVD only). The John Woo reboot in 2004 and it's 2007 sequel were a right step in a modern direction and the Appleseed: Alpha movie from a few years ago was...okay. This TV series however is just awful!The animation quality is poor, for the most part looking like Transformers: Beast Wars with mild traditionally animated textures. It was so ugly to look at, the 1988 version honestly looked far superior and had a nicer, cartoonish atmosphere. I can only assume that many of the nuances and SENSE was lost in translation as the English dub features consistently horrendous dialogue.The story hasn't changed. Set in the future Utopian city of Olympus after a great cataclysm human beings and "bioroids" (robot copies of human created to fill out the needed population) live together in peace as the outside world struggles with post-apocalypse misery. Tiny Deunan Knute and her giant, rabbit-eared half-robot boyfriend Briareos work for E-SWAT (not the Sega game) and find themselves in the midst of various high-octane missions. I love the iconic image of Deunan cradled in Briareos' arms as he flies through the sky.While the previous incarnations of Appleseed were exciting and engaging, this one is such a dull, plodding bore that getting through a mere 13 episodes was agonizing. The BRICK-IN-THE-FACE allusions to Greek mythology are so heavy handed that every time that they attempt some pretentious allegory the whole thing just grinds to a halt and dies. There was one episode were literally N-O-T-H-I-N-G happened and was all about Greek statues. Who is this made for?On top of this the timeline is so outrageously convoluted and muddled that making sense of what you are looking at will give you a nosebleed. This is not fun to watch. This is inhumane punishment and torture. How could they fail Appleseed so badly? Not one minute of this garbage entertained me.Even the opening credits will send you to sleep. Think of all the best opening credits from cartoons over the years. Thundercats, He-Man, MASK, even Garfield or The Simpsons. These classic tunes get you excited and ready for 22 fun-filled minutes. No such excitement here. What were they thinking???The Blu-ray is in 1.78:1 1080p with original Japanese or nonsense English audio. There are a slight amount of features I do not care about. My Blu-ray player couldn't spit this out fast enough and it has felt violated ever since.

OK. At its core, Appleseed (pun not intended) XIII is quite an interesting series, composed of an 'intro' episode, the first story arc, a random one-off about a young girl and a new 'cop' robot, a new story arc that is basically a sequel to the first, and then a (fairly) random final episode.As the title suggests, it felt like two decent films had been stretched into a series. To fill the time, they added a *lot* of unnecessary silences and repeated (admittedly quite good) animations of various statues of Hercules completing his 12 tasks or stained glass frescos - there was also a sort of the-last-two-minutes-of-the-last-episode as the first two minutes of the new episode which really grated when the episodes themselves are 20 minutes long with a long intro. All this filibustering lowered the overall quality of the production.Animation was a bit strange - like a hyper-real graphic novel turned into 3D. The animations in the first few episodes are quite jerky but this seemed to improve over time. Some brilliant backdrops that reminded me of Studio IG (who had some hand in this series) occasionally appeared too. I found the animation style felt like it was made 15 year ago - but then again the last anime I watched was Ghost In The Shell: Arise.Overall I found this a reasonable time-pass. The films are much, much better with similar themes. If you do watch this series, skip the intros/credits and get at the meat of the stories. Sadly I think you'll be 'Meh' to 'slightly disappointed' if you're a fan of the source Manga or have come from watching Ghost In The Shell.Having just checked the series out online a bit more, apparently they released the series in two parts as films (or did they in fact do the opposite?) might be better to watch Appleseed XIII: Tartaros and Appleseed XIII: Ouranos.

not as good as one of the movies but deffently a nice one for sure

Contains one full story arc, I think one book from the original comics, but not sure.It's okay, but heavily focused on the swat action, not so much on the freetime.Some of the episodes are real good and worth watching the series for.Animation and artwork is kind of passable, not bad enough to drive me away.

Love the anima

Received as expected, easy and fast. Good service

Excellent anime a must for lovers of anime

Came a few days earlier than I expected and in immaculate condition really happy now