![]() ![]() Kyoto Animation could probably make an exciting show out of your local Yellow Pages and, on a purely technical level, this is still one of the studio's best efforts. There's always something happening here, and more often than not it looks great. Second Raid has plenty of the tightly-directed action that, once again, the original series badly needed - there aren't any awkward moments where you sit back and wonder why nothing's happening. Along the way, we get to enjoy a couple of good laughs at Sousuke's expense, and he gets to get his own back in more than a few classic shootouts. The plot never drags or spins its wheels - it just builds and builds to the kind of blow-off that Japanese cartoons so rarely get quite right. It's based on just one of Shoji Gatoh's original prose stories, a novel-length piece that fits neatly into 13 episodes, and that was definitely the right choice of material. By comparison, the sequel moves perfectly smoothly. Gonzo's show, for instance, had a lot of pacing problems - some storylines dragged on too long, others quit as soon as they started to get interesting, and the whole works simply drifted to an ending that wasn't much of a resolution. Nearly everything that the original series did wrong, Second Raid gets exactly right. Second Raid is a more conventional action-adventure story, but it's at least as entertaining in its own way. The first time Kyoto Animation got hold of that basic concept, it made Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, a comedy spin-off that squeezed a mother lode of laughs out of Sousuke's nearly-fatal lack of social graces. ![]() On top of that, he has to work undercover - this means living with her, going to school with her, and otherwise leading the kind of normal life he knows almost nothing about. For various reasons, his bosses have assigned him to protect a young Japanese girl named Kaname Chidori. ![]() He's very good at killing people and breaking their stuff, and those skills turn out to be totally useless on his latest assignment. Sousuke is a commando-slash-big-robot-pilot for one of those super-secret high-tech mercenary groups that only make sense in cartoon science fiction. Sousuke Sagara is the result of someone saying, alright, if a teenage boy really did become some kind of veteran bad-ass super-soldier, then soldiering would have to be the only thing in the world he was any good at. At the core of the show, though, there was a pretty good idea, and that idea gave rise to a pretty interesting main character. The original series more or less defined mediocrity in Japanese animation - it was about half mediocre robot action and half mediocre high-school comedy. Full Metal Panic! - The Second Raid is the good stuff - better than the Studio Gonzo-produced original in just about every possible way. The way to appreciate the franchise at large is to find a basic grounding in the characters and setting, and then proceed full steam ahead into the second TV show. ![]()
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