Space Brothers has the best portrayal of an adult sibling relationship I’ve ever seen in anime. Most of the anime isn’t about that.
Space Brothers has the best portrayal of a realistic space mission I’ve ever seen in anime. Most of the anime isn’t about that.
What’s Space Brothers really about? Trolling. Space Brothers is an anime about the apparent trollfest that is astronaut training. It has some excellent moments, but given the length of the show and its repeated troll-based plot devices, I can’t say it’s great overall.
Space Brothers has a large cast of good characters but few great ones. I’d say there are four great characters: the Nanba brothers, Kenji, and Sharon (she made me care more about ALS than the ice bucket challenge ever could’ve). Everyone else is basically a personality quirk/racial stereotype plus an emotional backstory. Once again, it’s not bad, but it’s too simple and repetitive a formula to keep you excited.
I usually like long anime, but I can’t say the same for slow anime. Despite having many excellent moments, the show takes too long to get to them. If the pace had been a bit faster, or if the construction of the plot and characters had been more varied, the show could’ve been great. Instead, it was just pretty good.
I watched about 20 episodes before I dropped this series. The first episode is one of the best first episodes I have ever seen. I really wanted to see Mutta’s journey to the space. I just got bored with it because how slow it was moving forward. Maybe I should try to rewatch it someday because many people have said great things about it. When I have time to watch long anime like this.
Spoiler: Mutta still hasn’t gotten to space after 99 episodes. And it didn’t look like he’d be going anytime soon.
Spoiler: In the manga, he’s on the moon somewhere after chapter 200.
So it’s safe to assume the anime was moving at less than 2 manga chapters per episode. Not surprising.
Long anime is synonymous with slow anime, generally.
I’ve rarely found that to be the case, unless the anime is intentionally fillerized. There was some of that feeling with Space Brothers. Recaps at the beginning of every episode are usually a bad sign. I’d have to read the manga to know for sure.
People have been telling me to watch this. I always have a reservation with starting long shows because I will lose interest soon. Today, I finished the old Hunter x Hunter series that had aired on TV. That was 62 episodes. There is more 30 episodes of sequel OVA. I’m going to get on that. It’s hard finding a long anime that really retains my attention. When you watch short anime, you can always get something good, but also you can quickly move along to something else before you’re bored. That was how I decided to watch Planetes, an anime usually mentioned in the same breath as Space Brothers.
Old HxH was great. New HxH was even better during Greed Island. Long, sure, but easily held my attention.
I’ll be watching Planetes soon. Had it downloaded a while ago but didn’t want to watch it at the same time as Space Brothers.