Monday, November 24, 2008

Through the Stargate with Dominion Tank Police

I watched the first 4-episode OVA of Dominion Tank Police. A 2-volume manga written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed) and turned into 3 OVA's.

Set in the fictional city of Newport, Japan (I partly grew up in Newport, Belgium ;p), in a future in which bacterial air pollution has become so severe that people must wear gas masks when outdoors (more about this later in the post), the series follows a police squadron that uses tanks.

Here is a shot of Leona and her boss in her little tank on the left, made from the scraps of her boss' tank which she wrecked ;p, and futuristic Newport on the right, Mushroom building and everything.

The first OVA was funny, action-packed and as usual in anime you barely know wtf is going on! (in a great way!) Without spoiling everything (barely), and after checking out this White Stripes Music vid set to some cool animation from the series, let's check out how we go through the stargate in this story:


Domnion Tank Police: 7 Nation Army AMV

Buaku, "We're Mad" is written at the place of the sleeping third eye.

Buaku is the super criminal the Tank Police was formed to fight, specializing in bank robbery and general mayhem. He leads a gang, but appears to be backed by unknown individuals. In the OVA Buaku's true origins are revealed in that he was a "prototype test dummy" for the Greenpeace Crolis project, who escaped destruction when government agents raided the lab and destroyed everything except for encoded data disguised as a nude portrait of himself.


Doctor talking about the Greenpeace Project: "The world is contaminated by the bacterial cloud, so this project is assumed national, no international, not to say global importance. We have already succeeded in creating a prototype lifeform capable of surviving in bacterially contaminated air, on the physical side then the project is incontestably a total success. The challenge we now face is to create a mental framework, completely human in form. At the moment the brains in our specimens exist, but they exist up till now only in a state I would term cognitive sterility... What we call their brains are made of microchips, replicas of adult human brains. We shall have the privilige of imprinting experience on them. 'Till now only God has known what it is to create human intellect from nothing. That's our task here, to create human intellect from nothing."

Buaku is helped by the Puma Twins, Anna Puma & Uni Puma who are a pair of tall, beautiful android catgirls (;p) who were created as "love dolls" to be marketed for profit, but they developed beyond this superficial programming and became criminals, joining forces with Buaku.

At the end of the first OVA, Buaku and the girls come upon a place where Buaku is led by his consciousness after having dreams featuring this:

Buaku's "dream" leads him to an abandoned lab...

"I was right, I knew I was right! The feeling was so strong it wasn't a dream.
Up there, that gentle green sea... peace." Buaku


Buaku climes it instinctively and reaches inside the stargate

The stargate activates

"Neither shame, nor anger, nor pain, nor bitterness." Buaku

and Greenpeace Crolis(/Chloris) appears

A mysterious green-skinned girl with wings (and I found out from the wiki: who's content as long as she's in a place with plenty of light. She was originally developed to counteract the bacteria-laden smog that covers the Earth: a humanoid "air purifier.") Can't wait to check out the rest of this series!

2 comments:

Michael Skaggs said...

Man, Anime' is so foreign to me!

Thanks for presenting this as its caught my interest bro.

Guess what..I also lived and went to school in a town called Newport!

*twilight music inserted here*

Love dolls, go figure. Peace bro!

Dedroidify said...

LOL, awesome. My favorite café in my going out days was called the "twilight" ;p what music to play now?!

The awesomeness of anime is what keeps me bothering with this realm :p

peace dude