The Humanoid Anime Review

Quick Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2002-06-06 (updated 2011-02-08)
• 0.5 stars out of 5 (?)

Take a rudimentary sci-fi story and pair it with a hurried 45-minute run time, weak directing, uninteresting storytelling, shallow characters, and generally poor visuals, and you've got anime so mediocre it's not even particularly worth making fun of. That's not all; the visuals are impressively inconsistent swinging between dated-but-decent and flat-out terrible, the music is annoying, and even the Japanese acting is overblown. The only high points are a couple of surprisingly good action scenes and that it's over mercifully quickly.

The concept isn't totally devoid of potential, but the execution is. Unless you're really desperate for material to heckle or want to have a field day analyzing how not to make a movie, don't waste your time.

Read the full-length review...

Full Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2002-06-06 (updated 2011-02-08)
• 0.5 stars out of 5 (?)

I'm always on the lookout for old anime good enough to surprise me--from classics like Venus Wars to little-known gems like They Were 11. The Humanoid is not in either of those categories. It is, rather, among the worst anime I've had the dubious privilege of seeing. The sad part is, it's not even Go Nagai bad--it's not offensive, or terribly ugly, or incredibly cheesy. Just unengaging, very poorly made, and for the most part flat-out boring. That's all you need to know to avoid it, but for the curious, here's the lowdown.

The story is rudimentary sci-fi stuff involving some bad people trying to conquer something, some innocent good people trying to stop them, and a robot learning to be human. Take that less-than-stellar foundation and pair it with a hurried 45-minute run time, weak directing, uninteresting storytelling, shallow characters, and generally poor visuals, and you've got anime so mediocre it's not even particularly worth making fun of.

There are only three positive things about The Humanoid worth mentioning:

1. It's over mercifully quickly.
2. The main characters are all strangely obsessed with coffee (it seems to be some sort of metaphor).
3. There are a couple of decent action scenes, including a surprisingly engaging treetop air chase.

And no, there's nowhere near enough of #3 to be worth sitting through the rest for.

The visuals are impressively inconsistent. Paired with the two dated-but-relatively-cool action sequences is a whole bunch of very crude animation--awkward, choppy, and occasionally so bad it looks downright strange. Elsewhere, the heroes' ship is a huge craft drawn with a nice sense of scale, but it's paired with bland background art and scenes with so little sense of space that the characters' actions don't even make sense; I kept thinking, "Um... why is nobody moving again?" And the character designs run from the 1930s-sci-fi-styled, metallic-sexy and relatively realistic-looking Antoinette to characters that are so generic they probably didn't even need a character designer (then there's Sheri, whose eyes are positively immense). Some parts might be interesting if you're really looking, but basically it's very, very ugly.

The acting in Japanese is overblown, but at least it's not painful. The exception is veteran Sakakibara Yoshiko, who gives Antoinette a mature, pleasant voice. The music consists of bad '80s-era J-pop that sounds rather out of place to boot.

If you're even bothering to read this far, maybe you should try to find a copy of The Humanoid for the sake of morbid curiosity. But unless you're really desperate for material to heckle or want to have a field day analyzing how not to make a movie, don't waste your time.

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Related Recommendations

This sort of story has been told a hundred times, and just about all of those are better--if you actually liked it, it's time to improve your standards: For the robot-learning-to-be-human angle, Metropolis is a good place to start, and there are other series as varied as Key The Metal Idol and Astroboy. For old-school sci-fi, Garaga isn't good, but better and similar; also check out Votoms, Gall Force, the original Macross, and for some real quality The Venus Wars.