Men Are from Mars Tarak, Women Are from Venus Mejale

Introduction

Apply a literal interpretation to the trope "Battle of the Sexes," infuse it with mechs, jiggling boobs and rampant sexual metaphors, and you have the foundation for Vandread, a callow and unrepentant cocktease that should manage to win you over eventually if you give it a chance. Funimation has packaged both the original 13-episode Vandread and 13-episode follow-up Vandread: Second Stage together with the OVAs "Integral" and "Turbulence" to present the complete Vandread experience in a single DVD package. Don't be fooled by the "Second Stage" moniker though; both "seasons" are essentially one continuous plot inexplicably (though I'm sure there's a reason) broken up into two thirteen-episode parcels. The two OVAs are more or less musical montages of the two seasons, "Integral" covering the first thirteen episodes and "Turbulence" covering the second thirteen and neither offering much in the way of extra scenes or other critical information. The total package is a no-frills, down-to-business  but thorough presentation of a flawed anime series whose charms will likely grow on you after a while.

Vandread is something of a victim of its own marketing. The promotional materials and packaging set the tone, putting the show's more prurient elements front and center, like prominently featuring Dread pilot Jura's cleavage and describing a cast struggling with "raging hormones." But when the rubber meets the road Takeshi Mori's mildly sexy sci-fi comedy is mostly talk and little walk. The fan service is of the more puerile, wink-wink-nudge-nudge variety that resorts to Jello-chested females and the occasional crotch shot for its titillation. Sexual metaphors are everywhere; male and female mecha combine, or mate, to transform into more powerful forms, while the pilots sit in each other's laps; mech designs purposefully suggest male and female sex organs; the male navigator inserts himself, naked (and eventually bald) and fetus-like, into an amorphous womb-like chamber to steer the ship, and so-on. The consequence of all this pandering is that it starts your relationship with the show off on the wrong foot and it is only by virtue of the genuinely like-able characters that it ever manages to win you back.

In the universe of Vandread, Earth has sent colonization ships into the depths of space to settle new worlds. For reasons never adequately explained, a schism develops between the men and women on these ships. Eventually, two worlds in the same solar system are colonized, the males inhabiting Tarak and the females colonizing Mejale. The story of Vandread begins two generations later where we find men and women locked in bitter war, time and propaganda having erased all memory that men and women ever existed together. Hibiki Tokai is a male 3rd-class citizen of Tarak chafing under the oppression of his caste and longing to prove he is meant for greater things. On a dare, he embarks on a mission to sneak into the new flagship of the male fleet Ikazuchi and steal a Vanguard, a giant powered exoskeleton, before the ship departs to do battle against the females. The ship launches early and Hibiki is trapped aboard, thrown into the fray when the ship is immediately set upon by a female pirate ship. When the female pirates succeed in capturing the ship, the male fleet decides to destroy the Ikazuchi rather than let it fall into the hands of the females. Sensing its imminent destruction, the Paksis Pragma, a sentient energy source at the heart of the Ikazuchi, creates a wormhole that pulls the female pirates, their ship, Hibiki, and two other male stowaways far across the galaxy. And that's just how it starts. Ultimately the story is about the three men, Hibiki, Duelo McFile and Bart Garsus, and a ship full of women (no harem fetish stuff here) rediscovering the forgotten dynamics of male-female relationships while fighting the Harvesters, a machine race "harvesting" humans for body parts wherever they find them for reasons revealed later in the story. 

Highlights

Once you realize Vandread as lurid spectacle is mainly marketing hype, it is possible to find the pulse of this show. The funny and sometimes sweet back-and-forth between Hibiki and the rabidly affectionate Dread pilot Dita Liebely; the mutual respect and caring between winsome doctor Duelo McFile and the nerdy, bespectacled chief engineer Parfet Balblair; even the contentious and often unrequited tango between navigator Bart Garsus and first officer BC; these are all examples of a soul at the heart of a story cloaked in mildly bawdy humor and tepid fan service, all packaged and sold as something else entirely. I'm struck with the impression that everyone from show creator GONZO to Japanese distributor Bandai and finally to American distributor Funimation had so little faith in the basic premise of the series that a calculated decision was made to hedge their bet and tart it up. Had Mori and GONZO spent a little more time smithing the story to imbue it with more logic and consistency and less time on clumsy innuendo, Vandread may have been memorable. Lurid elements aside, it is a sometimes tender and thoughtful exploration of human relationships that often trips over incomplete plot elements and head-scratching story developments. Okay, two men can have a baby but what if it's a girl? What if Ezra's baby had been boy? It would have shot the story right in the foot. Vulnerabilities big to small are all over the place, but I guess as long as Jura keeps shaking her tits everything will be okay.

Technically speaking, the animation is decent, particularly in Second Stage, but the ship and mecha designs follow no logic in particular beyond the guiding principle that they follow the thematic male/female paradigm. The colors don't pop, but the transfer is clean despite the heavy compression it must have taken to pack twenty-six episodes onto four discs. The menus are simple and static, with no extras beyond some trailers here and there. That they managed to squeeze five discs into the standard DVD case form factor is quite an achievement and makes you wonder involuntarily why twenty-six episodes of something else requires a seven-disc box set costing more than a hundred bucks to cover the same ground as Funimation has with Vandread. The English voice dub is better than some but worst than most. Watch it in Japanese, which I always do for comedies anyway since somehow what makes it funny in Japanese gets lost in translation. There is no English dub for the OVAs, just subtitles.

Overview

Vandread has problems, but it's worth checking out. Never mind the pervy image presented by the marketing. There is a nice love story and some decent action. The finale of Second Stage is great fun if you can stick it out that long. The show is funny, despite the harrowing plot, but only because the interplay between the characters and some of the situations can be a pleasure to watch. On balance, Vandread: The Ultimate Collection is a flawed yet fun series and Funimation, despite some cheeky marketing, has succeeded at offering a fair-to-middling product at a fair-to-middling value.

Rating

ComicsOnline rates Vandread: The Ultimate Collection 3 jiggling mammaries out 5.

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