The Armchair Empire - Anime: Brigadoon Volume 1


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Brigadoon Volume 1

Surprised. Yep, that was my reaction to Brigadoon. A good surprised or a I-can’t-believe-I’m-watching-this surprised? After five minutes I thought it was the latter.

We’re introduced to a bunch of misfits who live in a tenement house: an elderly grandma; a trio of identical sisters bent on making the perfect food; an inventor and his American intern; a young nurse and her alcoholic father; and a silent, meditative guy that I’m still trying to figure out. But the star of the show is a young girl, Marin Asagi, which is probably why I groaned five minutes in. (The last thing I want to watch is a Sailor Moon clone.)

Enter Brigadoon.

Things get a mite more complicated when the sky is nearly blotted out by a shimmering matrix of multi-colored machinery. From the opening credits you know there’s some kind of connection between Brigadoon, Marin, and her missing parents. One of the connections comes in the form of Melan Blue, a self-repairing, living weapon – a gun for one hand, a sword for the other – with the sole mission to

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protect Marin (usually by killing the opposition). But a very tall blue robot would be hard-pressed to blend in so in his inactive state he turns into a small ampoule. When Marin gets in trouble or is pursued by assassins sent from Brigadoon, she calls him out with a screamed, “Mulan!” and usually tossing the amulet.

This works great for Marin when she’s in big time danger. But at school she get bullied mercilessly by a group of three girls. The first

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encounter she has with the bullies Marin reaches for Melan’s ampoule but stops short. Things go badly next time around. Melan appears and absolutely terrifies the girls – and I couldn’t stop laughing. Of course, after this appearance there’s little Marin can do to deny to the authorities that she is somehow connected to Brigadoon, the blue robot and the various baddies he has been fighting (bad Monomakia), causing lots of property damage in the process.

The subplots fit nicely into the structure of the overall story. Marin makes a few friends (which conveniently have interesting back stories); the misfits at the tenement adjust to living with a big blue robot (that can suck down massive amounts of rice) and a girl that has been targeted by the thing in the sky for reasons unknown.

The masterstroke of Brigadoon is that you know what elements are connected to each other but you still have no clear picture of how they’re connected. The first five episodes barely scratches the surface but the setup for the next disc -- Marin faces a platoon of riot cops -- leaves you hanging with a good amount of anticipation.

Brigadoon’s technical merits in terms of animation are right along the lines of other anime series from Toykopop, like GTO, but with more stylish action and fight scenes.

This first volume of Brigadoon may just hook you on the series. Brigadoon proves to be an interesting sci-fi mix of story, action, character development and humor (witness an evil Monomakia that looks like a child's toy but packs a huge punch) – even after my initial skepticism.

- Omni

(June 15, 2003)