Uchū no Senshi: Starship Troopers (1988)

	Also Known As: Starship Troopers OVA
	Year of first release: 1988
	Director: Tetsurô Animo (two episodes of the City Hunter TV-series)
	Actors (voices): Yasunori Matsumoto, Shûichi Ikeda, Kazuhiko Inoue
	Country: J
	Genre: Animation, SF
	Conditions of visioning: June 2013, SD Laserdisk rip, 4" Smartphone & Home cinema.
Synopsis: Young Johnny Rico enlists in the army of the Federation and start his training, while an alien race slowly enters to war with humans.
Review: I learned about this series when writing a post on the Starship Troopers saga. I really wanted to see what it was about so that I even started to watch it on Youtube in Japanese with Portuguese subtitles! Fortunately I could rapidely find the six episodes with English subtitles. The series is said to be the closest to the original book (I have now started to read it again to forge my own opinion on this) and this may be true or maybe it is said so because the series feature the armored suits. Actually I found that the series ressembles in many aspects the Starship Troopers film by Paul Verhoeven, I wonder if he got some inspiration from it. The series start with introduction of the characters and the background love story between Rico and Carmen. Then they enlist and Rico starts training on the Moon. After that, some aliens land on Earth while Rico is training on Mars and makes his first contact with the ennemy. Back to Earth, he learns his mother died in the attack, Carmen's ship has been destroyed and he brings the fight to another alien planet. The series abruptly end after six episodes, maybe because it didn't meet the expected success. Indeed I found that the drawings were not too sexy (Carmen looks like an old lady!) and the music is often cheesy and only sometimes a bit more rock. The behavior of the young soldiers is irrational: they always freeze to think, while in the book they were always "on the bounce". The design of the armored suits is quite nice, but rather standart for Japanese animes of that period. The one thing I liked in the series is the design of the aliens. They are not humanoid and not looking like bugs as we know them, but look rather like some pink blobs, sometimes growing beaks from which they throw lethal balls of energy. The Federation itself confesses that they don't know what the ennemies are or want.
Rating: 4 /10