Now And Then, Here And There (DVD)

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This first volume of "Now and Then, Here and There" comes with five episodes- "A Girl Admiring the Sunset", "A Boy and a Mad King", "A Feast in the Dark", "Discord", and "Murder". Every episode starts with the message "Because ten billion year´s time is so fragile, so ephemeral. . .it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness."

The show centers around an overly-enthusiastic boy, Shu. At his kendo practice, he blindly attacks his more sophisticated opponent. The fight is representative of Shu´s simplistic outlook- attack the immediate problem headlong with all that you´ve got. On the way home, Shu sees a blue-haired girl sitting on top of a smoke stack in a construction site. The ladder on the side of her smoke stack is broken, so Shu climbs up the smoke stack next to hers. When he tries to engage her in conversation, she remains silent.

Suddenly, a light flashes all around them, and two dragon-like robots appear, along with a woman. The woman tries to take the girl, named Lala Ru, so Shu tries to save her. In the following battle, Shu seems to get the upper hand for a while, until the woman teleports them all away. Shu has no idea where they are, but Lala Ru finally says one word to Shu- "Hellywood."

Hellywood is the name of the military center Shu finds himself in. Soon, he and Lala Ru are captured. Shu is forced to join Hellywood´s army, while the mad ruler of Hellywood, Hamdo, demands that Lala Ru tell him where her pendant is. Shu is put in a company of other children in the army, all of whom were snatched from surrounding villages. The main characters in that group are Nabuca, the children´s leader, Boo, his young sidekick, and Tabool, an increasingly disturbed boy from Nabuca´s village. Shu cannot give up on his quest to save Lala Ru, as he was asked to do so on Earth. Nabuca stands in Shu´s way, as he knows that his superiors will indiscriminately punish all of the children for Shu´s actions.

The only other person from Earth is a girl named Sara, whom Shu met while imprisoned in Hellywood. Her fate is, if possible, worse than Shu´s. She was originally kidnapped from Earth because she was mistaken for Lala Ru. Now, her fate is to be impregnated by whichever soldier succeeds in doing so on any given night. The child will be pressed into Hamdo´s army. Hamdo´s objective is to subjugate the entire world under his rule. His immediate subordinate, Abelia, is a beautiful but resolute woman. One of the mysteries in the series to me is why such a seemingly normal person would obey the mad wishes of Hamdo. The only external group standing up to Hamdo in any organized fashion is a village of refugees, called Zari Bars.