Masamune Shirow is best known to North Americans, and really, world audiences for the ground-breaking manga and anime GHOST IN THE SHELL. A complex treatise on the nature of the human soul, GHOST found acclaim for it's strong characters, philosophically-driven plot, and fully-realized world. Not to mention the animation was gorgeous for it. Reading ORION it's easy to see the similarities between the two works, to see his development between the projects and the maturity in GHOST that isn't present here. It's also easy to see why ORION wasn't made into an animated feature, and GHOST and APPLESEED and DOMINION and BLACK MAGIC (basically the rest of Shirow's work) were; ORION isn't very good.

That's not to say that it doesn't have it's strengths. Shirow builds a complex and internally consistent world here, melding technology and magic and gods and manga idioms into something mad and beautiful and real. His art is exceptionally strong here as well, switching between hyper-realism, "traditional" manga stylings, and deformation with ease, and always to the benefit of the story. And it really is a non-stop thrill ride, the 250 page story literally comprising about an hour or two of real-time, perhaps one of the most "decompressed" works I've ever read. So if it has all of these factors in it's favor, how can I so callously say that it "isn't very good"? Quite simply, it's entirely uncompelling.

Not one of the characters is interesting on more than a surface level, and this is largely because Shirow never makes any attempt to make them interesting, instead using them as differently-voiced ciphers, moving us at a frenetic pace through the world he's developed. The lead character is Seska, typical anime girl (TAG, for short). TAG is in love with a dashing commander, who secretly likes her but can never express his feelings. TAG has a wise father who berates her for her insolence. TAG is impetuous and youthful, and does funny things. TAG is ultimately tough and resourceful, but still enough of a screw-up to remain amusing to us. Essentially, TAG is a TAG. Then, she, and an impetuous and boastful God of Destruction fight. They fight each other, they fight a rouge-doctor type, they fight some soldiers, they fight other Gods. They chew an awful lot of pretty scenery in the process, and they talk about a lot of really fascinating magical, metaphysical, and physical theories, and in the end they live happily ever after.

I'm not making this up.

ORION is a thrill-ride on the best roller-coaster in the world, as viewed through someone else's video camera. Sure, it looks like a hell of a lot of fun, but you can't bring yourself to care because it doesn't feel like you're really there.

A comic artist friend of mine once said that Shirow was a talented world-builder. He could create these beautiful, functioning, fascinating universes. He could draw and describe them in incredible detail. But he couldn't write characters worth a damn, and he couldn't make us care either way about how his stories ended. After reading ORION I understand his point of view quite clearly, I think I share it too.

In the end, if all you're looking for is a madcap adventure with lots of pretty scenery and no character development (or really, character at all), then ORION is a perfectly serviceable read. ORION is the sort of story that you appreciate, not one that you enjoy.

Neutral.

PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.