Overall Review: Eureka Seven AO

For all its flaws and rushed conclusion, I think Astral Ocean did an admirable job at what is traditionally very hard to do: pulling off a decent but vastly different sequel.

I'm not deluded enough to think AO is a masterpiece, especially not when it's compared to its sublime predecessor, but Bones did well to try something new and the end result was enjoyable and special in its own right. The number one term I've heard people describe the series with is "trainwreck", but I just can't see eye to eye with that. For one thing, while the plot may be confusing, it isn't impossible to figure out (check timeline below), and I'm not the only one who more or less accurately predicted most of the backstory before the finale aired. For another, the series may have had a much different focus from the original Eureka Seven, but it was still an intelligent show with its own take on the classic themes.

Even so, I do think the series suffered commercially from its risk-taking, and it also suffered artistically from the loss of Dai Sato as head writer of the Eureka Project. When people heard about a sequel to Eureka Seven, they expected Renton, Eureka, Holland, Anemone, and all the rest of the characters we came to know and love. They wanted to see how the Land of Kanan (the planet in the original series) had changed since the Second Summer of Love, and they wanted to have another atmospherically and philosophically rich adventure. Instead, the head writer on the project, Aikawa Shou (Fullmetal Alchemist, Un-Go), gave us a whole new world (literally), a new set of characters, a new plot, and a new protagonist in the fantastic Ao Fukai (newcomer Yuutaro Honjou, in a riveting performance). Everything is different, more political and down-to-Earth than the flowery Eureka Seven, and it can be difficult to tie them together instinctively. As it is, there doesn't seem to be much of a link to the original series at first, but then we learn that Ao is Eureka and Renton's biological son, and that his parents seem to have come from another world entirely (a separate dimension, to be precise, connected to the Land of Kanan by the Scub Coral's Quartz). Dig a little deeper, and you realize that everything in Ao's world is the way it is as a direct result of the end of Kōkyōshihen, and that there was no happily ever after, after all.

Before I get to that though, here's a quick run down on what Astral Ocean is about. Ao is born in 2012 without a father, on an Earth eerily similar to our own but for the mysterious phenomenons known as Scub Bursts, where Scub Coral mysteriously appears out of thin air, followed by huge black monsters known as Secrets which then destroy the Scub and everything around it. When Ao is two years old, his mother, Eureka (still the amazing Kaori Nazuka), mysteriously disappears during a Scub Burst on his home island of Iwato Jima in Okinawa. Left alone with his adoptive grandfather, Ao grows up lonely and angry, snubbed by the islanders, who blame him and his mother for the Burst because they are foreigners and rumored to be aliens. Ten years after Eureka goes missing, the island is once again attacked by a Secret, and through a series of events in which he finds himself a Nirvash, Ao is invited to join the anti-Secret corporation, Generation Bleu. Hoping to find clues to his mother's whereabouts, Ao voluntarily signs up, and he's wrapped up in an adult world so complex and dizzying that he all but loses himself and his values in it.

The new characters, excepting Ao, are perhaps the single largest flaw in the entire series. Every single character had the potential to become great and interesting, but their development was always cut a little short for the sake of time constraints and plot, leaving us with a somewhat bland set of people who we want to like but can't quite bring ourselves to do so. Ao's teammates in Team Pied Piper, Elena Peoples and Fleur Blanc are the closest to being truly interesting, but in the very end, all the new characters are completely ignored anyway, and not even the girls get any closure. It's a shame, and I think, a waste, but in exchange we were given Ao, and perhaps that's a decent trade after all.

When you think "mecha protagonist" you normally conjure up the image of a normal boy (occasionally a girl) who gets thrown into chaos and has to pilot a mecha to save everyone. You also normally think that the protagonist must have some sort of issues or sad background to make him/her want to fight, and that he/she has some sort of special quality that makes him/her suitable for the job. Well, Ao Fukai is every single one of these things: he is a normal kid thrown into war, he has an understandable mother complex and is searching for a place to belong in a world that won't take him, and he's half Coralian, which makes him the only person in his world capable of piloting his Nirvash. Yet Ao is way more than just a normal mecha hero; he has what most of them, including his own father, lack: he has a backbone.

It's clear that Ao is Eureka's child, because no other mother could leave such a strong impression of mental fortitude and courage on such a young boy. He does what he must, even if it means putting his own life on the line and being as scared as anyone else, and he does it without ever complaining to anyone but himself. Yet he's also Renton's (now voiced by the almost inappropriate Keiji Fujiwara, who played Holland) son, a boy with high ideals despite having a bleak outlook on people and the world from his own experiences. He's a selfless and kind child, and you will be hard pressed to find a son so dedicated that he'd sacrifice himself for his parents anywhere else. Watching him struggle and fight, and ultimately find his way, in a world full of pessimistic and selfish adults is truly awe-inspiring, and Honjou does a wonderful job bringing him to life.

The story is another place where AO struggled, but this was mostly due to bad pacing and lack of time. The story is too complex to be wrapped up in 24 episodes (it involves some very convoluted time and dimensional travel), and while the first half of the series developed at an almost leisure pace, the second half rushed and ended without giving us time to digest what it was we had seen. A lot of time was also spent on political intrigue, which while highly interesting, severely limited the time used on actual plot. In any case, there is at least one huge plot hole left open which concerns the various Nirvashes in the series, one of which has no explanation for where it came from. However, the story itself is actually a very good one. It's interesting, it's sad, and it's in line thematically with the original; it just wasn't told as effectively as it could have been.

If there's one area (other than the soundtrack, which is composed by Koji Nakamura, and amazing, end of story) I think that Astral Ocean excelled at, it's in the themes. Initially, it's easy to dismiss the series as having little to do with the themes of acceptance, love, growing up, and responsibility that the original so painstakingly integrated into Renton's story. Eureka Seven ended so hopefully that it seemed Eureka and Renton had finally come to resolution, a happy ending to the tragic lives they led up to that point. In metaphorical terms, Kōkyōshihen is a teenager at the cusp of maturity, someone who's learned about the beauty of idealism and sees the world at their fingertips. If that's the case, then AO is a young adult who's realized that idealism can't solve everything, but that giving up those ideals is worse than struggling to the limit in order to try and make them happen. There isn't a real happy ending in Astral Ocean; Eureka and Renton have lost a daughter and their idealism as they grow older, and they lose their son when their own lack of moral authority isn't able to stop him from making his decision to halt their plans against the Scub. Ao sacrifices his entire identity and all his human relationships to save his world the only way he knew how, and also to send his precious parents back to where they belong, finally free of the curse they'd brought upon themselves, though at the cost of their biological children. It's a story about love, in a different sense than the original, but it's also a continuing story about growing up; life is an endless cycle of mistakes and struggle, but at the end you can always reach a turning point where you can start anew.

Ao's story may not be an epic, but it's certainly a powerful message about life, and it's also a tragedy about what happens when adults forget the hope and wonder of being children. The series wasn't perfect or well-received, but I don't care. I enjoyed my time with Astral Ocean and I was sad to see it go, and heartbroken to see my last of courageous little Ao Fukai.

Episode 24 Screencaps: "The Gates of Summer"