Oban Star-Racers: Volume One - The Alwas Cycle (DVD)

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"Oban Star-Racers" is the brainchild of Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, founder of France's independent animation studio Sav! The World Productions, and is a direct descendent of his award-winning short film, "Molly, Star-Racer." The futuristic adventure series took an incredible nine long years and an eventual partnership with Hal FilmMaker studio in Japan to finally come to life. The combined forces of the companies' two distinct styles of standard anime and CGI animation merge into a unique and imaginative display of brilliance.

The setting takes place in the year 2082, and the opening episode, "A Fresh Start," lays the groundwork for Earth's involvement in the Great Race of Oban. Twenty-five years prior, a mysterious being called the Avatar thwarted an invasion of the planet by the wicked alien race known as the Crogs, and all that the Avatar asked for in return was Earth's participation in an intergalactic race that occurs once every 10,000 years. The President of the Earth Coalition agrees, assigning the task to Don Wei, who has become the best racing manager of the world. Don in turn recruits minor league racing champion Rick Thunderbolt to pilot Earth's Star-Racer, the Whizzing Arrow, and also enlists gunner Jordan Wilde to man the ship's defense systems. A pair of mechanics, Stan and Koji, round out the team.

The plot thickens, however, when Eva, the 15-year-old star of the show, busts out of her boarding school determined to reunite with her estranged father. Right off the bat, we see that Eva is hotheaded and rebellious, all stemming from her tragic past. When Eva was five, her family life shattered to pieces after her mother, who was one of the top racers of all time, is horrifically killed during her last race. Maya's death had such a traumatic impact on her husband that he dropped his daughter off at private school and buried himself into his work without looking back.

Eva tracks down and confronts her father, who happens to be Don Wei, but her mending heart crumbles again when he doesn't even recognize his own daughter. Unable to muster up the strength to tell him the truth about who she is, she takes the guise of "Molly" and works her way into the racing team using her mechanical know-how and clever thinking.

The interactions between Eva and her father create a dramatic tension that keeps things shaky throughout the race preliminaries that are held on the planet Alwas in the first volume, and add a layer of emotion that normally doesn't exist in most animated programs. We get to see Eva's frustration towards her father slowly come to a boil, and more drama ensues when Rick Thunderbolt becomes seriously injured in the first race and it's uncertain if he'll be able to continue. All of this keeps the story rolling along at a decent pace, and helps fend off any dull or dragging moments.

I also particularly enjoyed how the little subplots veer off into a variety of different directions and styles of storytelling. Molly meets a prince also participating in the race that triggers the onset of a budding romance, but my favorite was when Rick Thunderbolt goes off on his own to investigate his crash after finding evidence of sabotage. This story arc wove in a darker undertone on the same level as a thriller and just had a completely different feel from the rest of the series.

I'd say that the anime in "Oban Star-Racers" is above average, and I loved the attention to detail attributed to the weather so that some days were full of sunshine and others were in the midst of a thunderstorm. The three-dimensional parts added another layer of detail and definitely can be called the cherry on top. The racers have a fluidic movement that is almost hypnotic, and the action during the race at times was like being on a roller coaster. Sometimes it was as if I was in the driver's seat of the cockpit and I could feel the twists and turns on the course. It's just too bad that they didn't use more of this technique, but I can see that they probably didn't want to overdo it.