Review: OH! EDO ROCKET

Title	Oh! Edo Rocket: Season One, Part One
Director	Tyler Walker
Actors	Jonathan Brooks, Greg Ayres, Brina Palencia
Release date	2010-11-02
Theatrical release date
List price	$49.98
ASIN	B00403194E
Genre
Manufacturer	Funimation Prod
Running time	325minutes
Studio	Funimation Prod
Purchase	Buy it now!

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As a pyrotechnic-loving kid who grew up in a state where fireworks were banned by law, I can sympathize with Seikichi Tamaya, the protagonist of Madhouse’s 2007 series OH! EDO ROCKET.  Seikichi's need for roman candles and bottle rockets can't be satisfied by a mere trip to the Alabama border to load up on sparklers, M-80s, and skyrockets - it's 1842, Edo-period time, and he's got to make fireworks himself while avoiding the long arm of the austerity-minded law. Again, as somebody whose borderline-psychotic love of a good bottlerocket fight has attracted the attention of local law enforcement on more than one occasion, I feel his pain. 

OH! EDO ROCKET is a quirky fairy tale of youthful exuberance clashing with municipal red tape, of rebels and iconoclasts struggling against an oppressive social system, of the very Japanese schism between sober public order and boiling private emotion that comes to the surface every time a drunken salaryman grabs a karaoke microphone. Seikichi’s illegal pyrotechnics are aided and abetted by the residents of the Furai Row-House, a ramshackle apartment block of blue-collar laborers and shady characters like Ginjiro the locksmith; whose slacker exterior hides inhuman talent. Moral order is enforced by the diminutive O-Nui, the girl who acts like a puppy. Ballistics equations are provided by Seikichi’s long-suffering brother Shunpei. And everybody is constantly under suspicion from Akai Nishinosuke, the local cop, who takes the enforcement of the Tenpo reforms of Tokugawa Shogunate senior councillor Mizuno Tadakuni very seriously, specificially in regards to Seikichi’s  fireworks exhibitions. Loaning everybody what they need is  (for a price) is O-Ise, the femme fatale who runs the Shirahamaya Pawn Shop and shares a secret past with Ginjiro. 

As the show opens, the colorful explosion of one of Seikichi’s ballistics experiments has unwittingly announced the arrival of Sora, a mysterious girl who claims to have come from the sky and needs the assistance of Seikichi’s launch-capabilities in returning to the moon.  Is there a connection between Sora and the savage beast that has been ravaging the Edo countryside? Can the Furai residents keep Sora’s special abilities hidden from the local authorities? Is is appropriate for two unmarried young people to share a tatami room –even if one of them sleeps on the ceiling? And is Sora any relation to the 1966 TCJ anime character Space Boy Soran? (Yes, we know “sora” means “sky”).

Manga, video games, and incidents on trains involving nerds and drunks have all been the basis for Japanese cartoons, but how many series are based on stage plays? OH! EDO ROCKET was originally written for the Gekidan Shinkansen theater troupe by the award-winning “action theater playwright” Kazuki Nakashima, whose works frequently combine mytho-historical characters and fantasy concepts. Nakashima was a big manga fan as a child, particularly Go Nagai’s “Devilman”.  This 2007 anime series is the last in a long line of media adaptations of OH! EDO ROCKET – the story has been told as a manga series, a TV drama, and a novel, and it reflects strongly an earlier (1988) Nakashima work, “Hoshi No Ninja”, a period story of samurai-ninja struggle and a mysterious girl from the stars trying to return home. 

There are, in fact, a few too many characters in this show, which is a 26 episode series that honestly could have been told in 13. The extraneous material is not unentertaining, but there’s a point at which a new wacky character is introduced and you know that you’re going to have to sit through the backstory of this character and make it all the way through the character’s story arc – which may or may not have anything to do with Oh! Edo Rocket-Launching – until this character’s fate is wrapped up somewhere around episode 20. And it’s a pleasant enough diversion, dealing with this crowd of magistrates, out of work travelling entertainers, goofy tradespeople, and girls who are actually dogs and cross dressing math geniuses who turn into birds. But vital it’s not.

More attractive are the wonderful jazzy hand-inked backgrounds, casually slapped down with a bamboo pen to blot and run a bit and give the more outlandish elements of the show a homey, rough-hewn base. The soundtrack freely wanders through the musical landscape picking up salsa, big band jazz, up-tempo ska, and old school Warner Brothers/Hanna Barbera sound effects. OH! EDO ROCKET’s theme song, an international collaboration between Swedish songwriters The Merrymakers and the “Puffy” half of Puffy Ami Yumi, is a bouncy dance-hall tune that really sets the tone for the series.  

OH! EDO ROCKET gleefully watches itself on anachronistic televisions, sometimes yanking these TVs out of canals at the end of a fishing line. Characters sport wrist watches, calculators, and cell phones and regularly break the fourth wall to assure the audience of the historical accuracy of a character's backstory. There’s a healthy and refreshing failure on the part of this show to take itself seriously. Starting life as a stage play, it’s only natural that OH! EDO ROCKET would speak directly to its audience – hey, it worked for Shakespeare – and it gives the production a casual, confident air. If only more anime series would use this kind of performance-based mindset! 

The show’s lightweight fun is marred somewhat by the subplot involving deadly fur-beasts from outer space versus super ninjas. There’s a dark Stephen King style turn as weedy cop Akai gets involved with Sora’s opposite number, a fellow star-beast known only as “The Blue Girl”.  In return for companionship she wants only one thing… blood, and lots of it. Every time there’s a blood-harvest murder or some karate death duel, you can see OH! EDO ROCKET’s gears grinding as it attempts to downshift from comedy to drama or horror or whatever you call it when super ninjas fight space furries.  I might also point out at this juncture that Seikichi’s design is absolutely terrible; a round-headed YuGiOh-haired atavism in a show full of otherwise reasonable and attractive characters.  Luckily OH! EDO ROCKET can’t stay serious for long, and before you know it crazy love potions are affecting all the girls, people are changing into cats and/or dogs, a giant slide is being iced down for use as a rocket ramp, and a stage drama is performed about a girl from the moon who falls in love with a fireworks maker.

The series wraps with a satisfying conclusion; and while things don’t work out exactly as planned, our heroes reach their happy place, our historical characters move on towards their history-book destinies, and even our villains find a little redemption. And there’s a big rocket launch, too.  

Funimation’s dub is serviceable, though for period shows I prefer the original Japanese dialog. Actually unless you’re working for Fred Ladd or Peter Fernandez or Westchester Films and it’s 30+ years ago, I always prefer the original Japanese dialog.  But there’s something jarring about the 21st century American slang the localizers can’t resist shoehorning into the OH! EDO ROCKET script. What does “buzzmeister” even mean, anyway?

The show is available for online viewing at Hulu, on your cable system at the Funimation Channel, and two DVD sets (2 discs each) from Funimation. Extras on the DVDs are slim; textless OP and ED, and that’s about it, which isn’t much considering the MRSP of $45 for each 2-disc set.

As a historical drama/comedy interweaving real events and fiction both science and otherwise, OH! EDO ROCKET is fun and fascinating, but I can’t help but wonder how well American audiences grasp the subtler nuances of the premise. To most Western viewers the actual history and the crazy anachronisms must all be equally bizarre. Without the educational groundwork laid down by years of history class in school, it could be American anime fans aren’t getting all they could out of the show. I mean, who here is gonna get the ROSE OF VERSAILLES reference?  But that’s not OH! EDO ROCKET’s fault. Witness episode #20 when the play’s author shows up in a cameo, burrowing out of the earth with his drill-hands hollering about how he’s the “demon playwright.”  Moments of outstanding nonsense like this are the fireworks that OH! EDO ROCKET is all about.