Hello folks! This is where I review animated shows. This will generally be limited to shows that are built around story arcs, so a fair chunk of Western animation may well be excluded. For rather long anime series that re subdivided,I will review them by arc, as one can't really write a single comprehensive review of 200+ episode series that cover a number of different storylines over their runs.
Let's get this show on the road.
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Exosquad
Original run: 1993-1994
Native language: EN
Genre: Action Sci-fi
Episodes: 52
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Exosquad was part of the great boom in American animated storytelling that was kicked off in the early '90s by Batman: The Animated Series. The show itself was created by Will Meugniot, an animation writer and director who had previously worked on the excellent The Real Ghostbusters, and who was also largely familiar with the Gundam franchise before it made it big in the US with the advent of Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network's Toonami block- as early as 1995 he said that if the original Gundam was about WWII's Pacific theater, Exosquad was about the European theater of the same war. The real question is- how does it hold up now?
So, the basic plot is as follows. It's near the end of the 22nd century. Venus an Mars were terraformed, Earth was prosperous, but all was not well. The prosperity of Earth and the inner worlds was built on the backs of the Neosapiens, an artificial race of physically and mentally impressive slaves who were bred and created to be used as slaves in the terraforming of Venus and the mining on Mars, and fifty years prior to the start of the show they launched a massive rebellion against their human masters. While the rebellion was crushed in a large part to the creation of the ExoFrame, which is basically what you get when you take a Power Loader from Aliens and make it hulk out and grow guns and missiles, the Neosapiens were given their freedom and the planet Mars as a homeland, and are represented in the homeworlds senate by their Governor-General Phaeton, a veteran of the rebellion.
However, old resentments still linger, and Phaeton has been secretly re-arming deep under the surface of Mars- and when the Exofleet is sent away to battle space pirates at Saturn, Phaeton musters his fleets and armies, and launches a war against the inner planets, taking all of them by surprise and placing them under his control. It falls to Exofleet to undertake the Herculean task of defeating Phaeton's vast forces and liberating the inner planets- and to the Exoframe pilots of Able Squad operating out of the Exocarrier Resolute, who, by accident or design, find themselves smack in the middle of just about all of the most pivotal battles of the war.
The first of the strong points of the series is that all of the members of Able Squad are not only properly characterized but are also quite capable- at no point does the show become about a main character with the rest ending up effectively being cheerleaders as the main does his own sort of thing. Character development and behavior in this series, on both sides of the war- while characters do change over the course of the series, no one suffers a sudden hard right turn. The two sides are hardly monolithic- the Earth Resistance and Exofleet at times seem to be rife with human spies and collaborators, and a few of the supporting characters are outright racist against the Neosapiens. On the other side many of the Neosapien leaders are hijacking the cause for the purpose of attaining great personal power, and over time we encounter Neosapiens that believe in the cause of redressing old grievances, but become ever more disillusioned with a leader who seems to be slowly descending into utter madness. And then there's the matter of the Neosapiens that have stayed loyal to Earth and the Exofleet, such as Marsala, the leader of the first Neosapien rebellion. It's these sorts of complexities that elevate the show.
In terms of the actual storywriting, the show is hardly shy about taking the viewer into some pretty dark places, even if it does sometimes only rely on the viewer's imagination to connect the dots. The show will rarely have a character explicitly say that something is horrific, but generally prefers to lead by implication with the dialogue so that the viewer is free to imagine the worst- and with lines like "There aren't any dogs left on Venus anymore- not after the famine.", it's hardly difficult.
One think that can be rather shocking is that the art design can tend towards the garish. Exosquad did have a rather strongly pushed associated toy line, and some of the designs are built towards being toyetic. The design tends to be extremely '90s (if that makes any sense at all). This is mainly geared towards the E-Frame and character designs, and the actual landscapes and backgrounds are as bleak or colorful as could realistically be expected, depending on the location. The animation can be a bit clunky at times, but it is generally held to at least a reasonable standard for television animation.
Which does bring me to a bit of a sub-section of the above- the actual major battle sequences in the series are fantastic, not just in their placement or effects in the story, but they generally take an "all hands on deck" approach, as I call it. While E-frames are powerful, they don't dominate every aspect of warfare with impunity to anything but each other- the different service arms of the Exofleet often have to rely on each other to get the job done. In the episode The Price of Courage, Exofleet's E-Frames can't break a powerful Neosapien fleet, so they have to rely on supporting warships to make a fusion torpedo attack to force the Neo fleet to disperse so that they can attack with any hope of success. Regular powered-armor infantry are needed to fight in cramped indoor facilities, and warship support is vital as some targets are just too tough to crack- and it helps that the ship gunners in this show are capable of reliably hitting targets smaller than an apartment building.
If the series does have any limitations, it's actually in the show's soundtrack. There aren't that many pieces of music used throughout the whole of the series- for example, there's really only one piece of battle music in the whole series, which does double duty as the series's main theme.
It is a show that should be watched, and it is currently all up on hulu. The story of the Neosapien war is concluded in the run of the show, even, but unfortunately the last episode is an unintentional cliffhanger, as it was meant to be the beginning of a second story arc. Still, even incomplete, it is a show worth checking out.