Someday’s Dreamers 2 – Power of Love
Picture: C+ Sound: B- Extras: C- Episodes: C-
One of
the most unexplored aspects of Japanese Anime is the way women are
portrayed. The only roads to empowerment
are either through being rendered masculine or thorough some strange bow &
scrape situation that may come with passive feminine-based powers. Someday’s
Dreamers 2 – The Power of Love is the second set of four episodes to come
out on DVD and epitomizes the latter approach.
While
boys get to “collect them all” in the obnoxious world of Pokemon, the goal for lead character Yame is to become an expert
licensed slave-like Mage. Japanese
culture is irrelevant here and a poor excuse to hide behind in dealing with the
issues and politics at hand. Mages have
powers, but for whom? The characters
have an unhealthy amount of self-doubt to the point that it seems to want to
use appeal to pity to bring down the viewer to a neurotic level. The shows themselves are also boring and in
the now-clichéd “touch of white” look that seems to be attempting to conjure
some dream-like status, something more suspect when you are dealing with kids
in any kind of slavery. Check out these
titles:
5) An Apron and Champagne
6) I Want to be a Mage
7) The Mage Who Couldn’t Become a Mage [one
of the lucky ones?]
8) Enormous Power in the Name of Love
You can
see the amount of investment into this that viewers, especially young ones,
have to make and it is imported dysfunctional behavior all the way, yet that is
the tip of the champagne bottle. This is
for ages 13 and up, so what is alcohol doing here?
If the
material is not disturbingly infantile enough, the artwork just adds to the
misery. The soft-white syndrome
notwithstanding, the full frame image is barely above average, with color
poorness throughout. Fine detail is also
problematic, or is that supposed to be dreamlike? Either way, it is lame! The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has Pro Logic
surrounds and once again, the Japanese language track has better fidelity than
the English version, which has dubbing that is weak. The few extras include trailers for other,
better Anime DVDs from Geneon, an interview with Japanese voice actress Aoi
Miyazaki who obviously does not realize (or wants to admit) what is going on
here, and three different brief telespots from Japan called TV CMs on the
box. They are also lame.
My
favorite moment (yes, just one) is when the voice actress admits she did not
know what she was getting into. If I
could see her now, I would say “sister, you’re telling me!”
- Nicholas Sheffo
