Shangri-la
| Shangri-la | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original Light Novel | Eiichi Ikegami |
| Director/Artist | Makoto Bessho/Range Murata |
| Format | Anime (TV) |
| Made By | Gonzo |
| Episode Length | 24 minutes |
| # of Episodes | 24 |
Contents
Genre
Sum it up in a Sentence
Can boomerang girl save Japankind?
Main Description
Shangri-la, or Sam The Gorilla depending on your grasp of katakana, is a roller coaster ride through a lurid dystopian vision of glorious Nihon at some unspecified point in the future.
Sit back and let the token transsexuals guide you through a world in which the enviroment has come so close to the brink of collapse that sea levels are apparently now controlled in real time by a global carbon credit stock market and the country is ruled by an ice queen dominatrix with a penchant for lounging around in various states of undress.
That's about as close to fan service as you're going to get though, this series takes it's rehashing of the old crazed technology chestnut pretty seriously.
Tokyo has become some kind of jungle and the government's final hope for salvation rests with the completion of a giant floating city called Atlas but so far only a fraction of the populace have been admitted, the rest are stuck outside in the cold eating dirt and rubbing rocks toegther.
Against this backdrop the story plays out between a few groups vying for control of the city and the markets:
The carbonistas - disappointingly stingy with their carbon based beverages - are a group of anonymous leet hacksaws gathering in cyberspace to descend on the carbon market like jonesing crack whores on Hollywood stars while muttering incoherently about head leases.
The denizens of Atlas on the other hand are a cheery lot including the aforementioned dominatrix prime minister ultra-bitch and a sickly kid with heterochromia that kills anybody who tells a lie in her presence.
Finally there's our heroine, a precocious pink-haired teen and her band of merry men who go by the name of Metal Age. These lovable scamps are waging a Robin Hood campaign against the government. Whether or not they spend their spare time composing dark guitar dirges in granny's basement is lamentably never fully explored.
The plot proceeds at a fair pace with plenty of revelations and twists peppered with self conscious otaku fun poking and sassy trannies culminating in a lumbering double episode ocd loose end tying meltdown of a finale which, to be brutally frank, dragged like a seal's ass.
Nobody would argue Gonzo are breaking new ground here but it makes for an enjoyable diversion nonetheless.
