The Garbage Man Can

Review: PlanetES
Updated: 04/07/04

Manga/Anime

Reviewed by: Bad Jew

Title rating: PG-13; some swearing and space-related violence. It also has physics.

-4 (or more) manga volumes, available in English from Tokyopop (2003-present), still running
-26-episode anime episodes (2003-2004), complete

It may surprise at least seven of you, but I was a bit of a science nerd before anime grabbed me with its disturbing tentacles. Until tenth grade--when I realized I was pretty bad at math--I wanted to be one of America's glorious astro-men, sent to heroically conquer the untamed riches of the moon. Even though I've given up my dreams of sitting on top of twelve stories of highly explosive rocket fuel, I still enjoy the occasional yarn about space. That's why I like PlanetES (I'll avoid the annoying Japanese use of cAPitaL letters in random places from now on). It's about space, plain and simple, and it serves to remind countless adults that the furthest point in their most idealistic dreams resided in that great black nothing. Get back to your roots with a little space nausea, a little cosmic radiation, and a lot of heart. But especially deadly cosmic radiation.

Manga

The manga is great. "Pure" is the word I would use to describe it, with the phrase "as driven snow" following directly after. It has a story and it sticks to it, as seinen (older-boy shounen) tends to do, and it works as a dramadey--two parts comedy, one part drama, and a dash of pepper. There's no love story. Actually, there technically is, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it with my large, flammable bag of mixed metaphors. Planetes is also hard sci-fi, which has been lacking as of late. Hard sci-fi is science fiction with the emphasis on the science, not the fiction; if you've read a bit of science fiction before, Planetes would fall into the "old school" region featuring Asimov or Clarke, not all that new "Hey, let's go faster than light" stuff. In Planetes, you're less likely to hear a General complain about the new tychyon beam cannon, but you might hear the line "Oh dear God, if we don't exert 167 Newtons of force in the direction of the Lagrange point, we'll fall out of geosynchronous orbit and into the Van Allen belt in fifty years. May God save us all!"

In the futuristic time of Planetes, there's a lot of trash in outer space, and that trash goes around the Earth very, very quickly. Let's say you're in a nice little space shuttle, throwing mice out into space to see if you can hear them scream (yah, I said it). But all of a sudden, you get hit by a 3-kilogram scrap of metal traveling at 8 kilometers a second, which is about the speed of something in low orbit. That's like being hit with an SUV traveling at 75 kilometers an hour. (Ed note: I'm taking his word on the math of that one.) When you factor in the relative force as a result of the surface area, speed, and mass of whatever's hurtling toward you, I would have to use buttons on my calculator that I can't possibly be expected to understand. So, to summarize, when traveling in the cold, unfeeling vacuum of space--where accidentally falling in will cause you to simultaneously freeze, burn, implode, and explode--the last thing you want is a McDonald's cup hitting you with the force of a Mac Truck.

Anyway, with that little skip down the confetti-strewn path of numbers behind us, someone has to get that trash out of space. There's no one better to do that than a team of spunky space garbage collectors, working for a giant corporation as the bottom of the barrel Half-Division. The Half-Division can just barely stay in the black--bad ships, bad equipment, and bad food all combine to create a group of blue-collar workers trying to keep space clean despite the odds.

The manga focuses on Hachimaki Hoshino, a loud, boisterous son of a gun with one goal in mind: buying his own spaceship. Buying a spaceship is hard; it's like buying a 747, you don't. Hachimaki's plan is to get on board an experimental ship headed for Jupiter, and let his pay accumulate over the four year mission. But no matter how you slice it, Hachimaki has the same chance of getting on this mission as a garbage man has of owning his own space shuttle. In order to train, he spends as much time as he can doing EVAs (not the gigantic robots, Extra Vehicular Activities--space walks to you and me) and getting bashed, broken, and sterilized by interstellar radiation more times than you can count...though the last one doesn't hurt as much anymore. When the mangaka Makoto Yukimura wanted to quit writing early for a day and drink, he threw in a quick chapter about someone being stuck outside during a meteor shower/solar flare/pirate attack. This doesn't happen as often in the manga as it does in the anime, and is a sure sign that someone is propping up the Sake industry.

Other characters include Fee, the pilot of their space dumptruck and a swearing, chain-smoking woman who's saved the Earth on more than one occasion, a feat for which she got two weeks paid vacation. Yuri is the brooding Russian who cleans up space as a testament to his wife (who was killed in a space-debris-related accident). Hachimaki's dad, Goro, also comes into play in the second and subsequent volumes as a sort of Buzz Aldrin who's less famous than that Aldrin fellow. When Goro's not apologizing to his wife for not retiring yet, he's fending off terrorist attacks and making fun of Hachimaki's large head.

And finally, the love interest. What's a seinen space manga with out a little Zero-G loving? (That's actually a joke, since as far as I can tell the manga is clean as driven snow.) The Girl Tanabe enters the manga in the second volume as a new garbage collector who's to be trained by Hachimaki. She's moralistic, self-righteous, and very, very stubborn. She's one of those people who moralizes everything, such as "Why should we dispose of this floating casket, despite its grave navigational risk? There's someone's body inside!" or "Why should we kill those space-terrorists, they're people, too!" See? How are you supposed to do anything with a girl like her around! However, no matter how annoying she is in the manga, she's ten times worse in the anime.

I found this picture while doing a Google image search for "PlanetES." I think it says "I surrender."

The plot of Planetes is very well done. The overall arc seems to be about Hachimaki trying to get on that Jupiter ship, but it allows sufficient room for everyone else to have their own little side arcs and growth. However, it should be noted that while Yukimura-sensei is great at making you care about the characters in small doses, he's very bad at overarching plots. Take, for example, the stupid hippie space terrorists who every once in a while blow something up. They're a major feature throughout volume two of the manga, but suddenly with the line "After that, SDL [the terrorist group] activity ceased abruptly," that entire plot arc ends. Don't come into this manga expecting a space opera like Gundam--this is garbage men making it in a world they don't understand.

But beyond the satisfying story, I just like how this manga did its research. I'm not sure if it's the original author or the amazing English adaptation by Anna Wenger, but the Tokyopop manga just flows. All the science terms are correct, such as the Kessler Syndrome (where space debris creates more debris exponentially) when Fee saves the geosynchronous orbit, or the fact that the experimental spaceship is called the Von Braun, named either after the inventor of the V2 rocket or the spaceship from System Shock 2. I suspect that it's the former, but I hope it's the latter. A search on Google turns up references to Kessler from the University of Colorado and Atlantic Magazine, so it's the real thing. This manga also features the ghost of Yuri Gagarn, the first man in space, and thus demands your reading.

Anime

I like to think of the Planetes anime as something like a hot dog: 5% original content, 90% filler, and 5% raccoon. It's like an animation company bought the rights to the manga and said "Hey, I like the idea of space garbage men, and I like the names, but let's change everything else!" Then they ritualistically killed a dog, because that's what evil people do.

The show is almost completely different from the manga. A slew of new side characters are introduced (whether or not they actually show up later in the manga is currently unknown to me)--new office workers and management people, Arvind the fat manager, Chenshin the office magician/assistant manager, Claire the space-temp, and people who create unneeded love stress between Hachimaki and Tanabe. The budding romance between Tanabe and Hachimaki is a large part of the anime and takes up a majority of the first 13 episodes. Unlike in the manga, where Tanabe is introduced in the second volume, she's front and center in the first episode of the anime. I can't say I like the unoriginal romance, as it's a simple case of Hachimaki going from "I hate girls like they killed my dog" to "Girls can do things to me that feel...nice." Pretty boring if you've ever seen a Hugh Grant movie.

While the manga has its funny moments, the anime tries far harder to be a comedy. If the jokes were funny, this would be good, but they're not. Most of the humor revolves around Hachimaki being bad around girls and "hilarious" corporate politics. I've watched up to episode 17 at this point, and only a few of the better chapters from the manga are appearing. The anime is a very episodic thing that doesn't work well with the continuos plot of the manga--that means filler, and lots of it. That doesn't mean the show is completely bad, since there are some good filler episodes (especially the space ninjas from the moon who make life better), but there are also absolutely horrendous fillers, like the episode where Claire goes after her former pimp. The show averages out to be mediocre.

One little thing that I did like about the anime is that they don't do sound in the space scenes. See, in this whole real world thing, sound doesn't travel well in space due to the lack of a medium for it to travel in. Most sci-fi shows will have sound effects like lasers, engines, and ships flying by, basically because they sound cool. The Planetes anime just has music, which adds a bit of realism to the show. At least the anime keeps the same hard science fiction as the manga. No giant robots fighting it out with lasers here, just delta V force and stirring the oxygen tank.

The Planetes anime also suffers from the common failure to introduce plot until two thirds of the way through the show that I've been bemoaning recently. Only by episode 17 have they finally gotten on track for the Jupiter mission. Before this it seemed like they were toying with the idea of a conflict between the space police (or as I like to call them, Pigs in Spaaaace!) and one of the head office workers who's from a country being repressed by them, but so far nothing has come of that. If they just took the manga and animated it, ala Kare Kano, the show would be great. But they didn't so it's not, case closed.

Overall

Buy the manga, it's good. We need to convince Tokyopop to buy more non-gothic manga, and giving them money for other genres is the only way to do so. If you like futuristic waste management policy as much as I do, watch the show, but don't go out of your way to see it. The raw anime is also good for our readers who can't read.

Manga: 4 out of 5 Stars

Anime: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

These are the space ninjas. They are different from you and me.