Infinite Stratos: Complete Collection Blu-ray Review
Infinite might be stretching it just a little. . .
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 23, 2012
Infinite Stratos gets off to a literal bang, with an incredibly noisy and visually impressive
mecha battle
spilling out across pink hued clouds. Screams, punches, lasers and all assortment of sonic bombast greets this opening
battle, and one might think the series was a traditional battle outing with kids piloting huge robotic "skins". Well, that's
part of the story with
Infinite Stratos, but rather surprisingly, it's not the whole story, and even the
battle element turns out to have a couple of surprising twists.
Infinite Stratos actually combines two standard
operating tropes in the world of anime, the harem show with the
mecha show, to variously entertaining results.
Our hero is one Ichika Orimura, a shy young man who is the only known male who has been shown to be competent in
mecha piloting, a skill which in the universe of
Infinite Stratos is a female-centric career. That posits
Ichika in an all-female (save for him) academy for
mecha training, hence the harem aspect of the show. What's
kind of interesting from the battle side of things is these young operators are not in fact fighting bad guys or aliens, and
indeed wartime uses of the
mechas has been outlawed. No, these battles are solely for sport, a sort of athletic
contest that pits the best against the best to see who will come out on top. The title of the series refers to the
mechas, here referred to as exoskeletons with the name Infinite Stratos (or IS). The series plays out with the
expected "battle of the week" showdowns between various characters, while the harem aspect plays out with regard
to several of Ichika's classmates (all of them females, obviously) who have romantic feelings for the young man, feelings
about which he is, in typical anime harem fashion, largely unaware.
Though I'm absolutely loathe to admit it, I started to wonder if
Infinite Stratos's creative team had perhaps
caught
a midnight television airing of the hugely lamentable
Boeing, Boeing, the tired and kind of smarmy 1965 "comedy" starring Tony Curtis and
Jerry Lewis as womanizers involved with a coterie of international stewardesses. Much as in that film,
Infinite
Stratos features a handful of supporting female characters who all come from different countries. Charlotte is
French,
Cecilia is English, Huang is Chinese, Laura is German and Ichika's childhood friend, now like Ichika all grown up, is the
Japanese woman Houki. Unlike the nationalistic ciphers that populate
Boeing, Boeing, however, the girls of
Infinite Stratos actually have backstories and at least a couple of them tie into Ichika's story in sometimes
unexpected ways.
There's a grating inconsistency at the heart of
Infinite Stratos that goes beyond the weird mash up of
mecha and harem idioms. The series posits a world of female superiority, where only women are deemed
qualified to operate the IS exoskeletons, and yet what does
Infinite Stratos also involve? A gaggle of girls who
are crazy in love with one insanely shy young man, and crazy enough to fight each other over him. If this is future "girl
power", it's strangely archaic. But that is one of the clichés of the harem genre, and it points out one of the overall
weakenesses of
Infinite Stratos: despite its attempts to blend disparate elements, it too often exploits well
worn ruts of those very elements, whether they be the fighting scenes of the
mecha angle or the interpersonal
shenanigans of the harem angle.
The schizoid quality of
Infinite Stratos has both pluses and minuses for the average anime fan. Having both
mecha and harem elements means that fans of either genre will find at least
something to like about
parts of the series. But of course the flip side of that equation is that when the series veers from their preferred idiom,
they'll find an equal (and opposite) amount to
dislike. The harem aspect also has its own schizoid issues, where
characters are introduced and then disappear just as quickly as they've arrived, meaning that when the entire season
is looked at as a whole, it has a weird kind of lurching quality as it stumbles from mini-plot arc to mini-plot arc.
Infinite Stratos may indeed leave something to be desired in terms of story and character, but it's also
undeniably enjoyable within its own limited ambitions. Ichika is occasionally maddening (okay, maybe more than
occasionally), but he's an appealing enough hero, and several of the supporting characters, though stereotypical
(especially some of the "national" females), also have their moments. What ultimately saves this series is its really
astoundingly beautiful animation, some of the nicest looking in recent memory. Both 2D and 3D CGI are interwoven
very well into the overall animation, and the series offers a really sleek appearance that keeps the visual interest high,
even if actual storyline interest flags elsewhere.
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