Anime: Last Exile (w/ sound!)

This week I’ve been watching Last Exile. Originally, I ran across it via an AMV I saw at NYAF 2008 and finally I got around to raising it in my Netflix queue.

In my opinion, the story started out slow. It’s about two vanship partners. A vanship is a sort of airplane. Claus is the pilot and Lavie, his best friend from forever, is the navigator. We follow them around learning about the world they live in. It is science fiction fantasy and steampunk-ish. The art is beautiful, but the story doesn’t really pick up until the team encounters the Silvana, a non-Guild ship roaming the skies, and its Captain, Alex Rowe. The two get pulled in the war that is happening in the skies.

After a while it feels like a World War II anime, though it is obviously not. If the fuel called “Claudia” didn’t give it away, or the fact that there are no props on the ‘planes’ didn’t hint at it, they are in fact on a different planet than the one we know. Where our heroes have been living, they have to live on filthy water and any amount of clean water is extremely valuable. As a matter of fact, at one point they go to a floating tavern at one point and try to buy a pint of water and nearly fall over at the cost of the freshest and cleanest in the world.

Lady Delphine, the Maestro of the Guild, the people who control almost all flight in the world, lowers herself to chase down her brother, who all this time has been hiding on the Silvana because of his obsession with Claus’ flying ability. By the time we are finally brought into Lady Delphine’s world, we are well aware of the difficulties of being a land dweller, and the unique problems of being land dwellers who desire to fly. When she brings her brother ‘home’, she invites Claus and he learns how she and the Guild live.

I have been thinking about it and the theme song keeps playing in my head, so I thought I would share. For those who can’t or won’t play the widget, one of the first things you hear on this is the sound of bagpipes, and then it goes into song, mostly Japanese but with English thrown in off course. The TV version is shorter, but I think I like this version better.

Tags: Last Exile, music, soundtrack