#shinohara sensei had a tweet saying 'wow I'm surprised did I write this'?

[astra-storm]

Astra Lost in Space Review - Ep 01: Welp, there Goes My Feels

As you can probably tell from my username, I am a huge fan of this series. I can’t count the number of times I’ve reread this manga. Not too hard to do since it’s relatively short, but still. I was looking forward to watching the anime adaptation and it did not disappoint! That said, this will be kept spoiler-free from future parts of the manga, of course. 

The Good Stuff

I really like how they started off with Aries floating in space, because it just adds to a lot of the tension, thinking ‘oh hey how did she get up to space’. Then when you finally get to the strange sphere you think ‘oh. shoot. so that’s how’. 

Voice acting - excellent! I loved everyone’s voices! Whenever I read Astra previously I always had Kanata’s voice as the guy who voices Bossun from Sket Dance, purely because of having the same mangaka and they look kinda similar. Am definitely down with Kanata’s voice though, as well as everyone else’s.

Music/sound direction - oooooooof I love the opening. The soundtrack seems excellent too so far, and I like how they played around with the sound effects for the space scenes. Especially, when Aries’ comms malfunction. 

Visuals - Am a fan of the look. I remember being slightly worried because Kenta Shinohara’s art has so much quirkiness to it when it comes to the characters’ expressions, that it wouldn’t translate well to anime visuals, but I think that so far they’re doing an okay job. 

Characters/plot - uhhhhhhhhhh I’m too big of a fan to have anything but good words about this because of my hindsight. I just want to thank Shinohara-sensei for gifting us with Astra. I suppose I think the anime makes Aries and Kanata very likeable from the get-go (though I felt that from the manga too). What the anime did do was give the other characters a bit more spotlight so you do get attached to them too. FUNI IS SO CUTE. 

Worldbuilding - the background detail, especially in the airport, was really nice. I saw some things that made me go ‘oho, I see, I see’. I see what you did there. 

Humour: so uhh I have that sket dance sense of humour so I found it funny anyway but I thought that they executed the jokes well too. I credit the voice actors a lot for that.

The New Stuff

Ohohoho, so they put in the info from the volumes about the suits, which made me smile, I do love having those and maybe they’ll have more of that in the future.

Having Kanata’s anti-grav shoes break when they arrive on McPa...a nice small additional detail that works 

Expansion on the backstory Kanata has with his teacher was another excellent addition - it gives the watchers such a clear understanding of the motivations behind Kanata’s actions oof. I love the visuals for those flashback scenes and how strongly it works for tying into the rescue.

Kanata getting back Ulgar’s bag...a nice little additional interaction which is appreciated from me. I love all of them.

The hand holding scene for when Kanata and Aries come back, ooh, that was a scene. Teamwork makes the dreamwork. And I only realised that it was a nod towards the volume covers later (despite owning them lol). This works for me emotionally. 

Oh and Funi grabbing hold of Quitterie’s hand beforehand AHHHHH. I loved seeing more of the crew’s reaction a lot, it’s just....they deserve that screentime, they really do. 

The other hand-holding scene....uhh, again, I love all of them and seeing them all hold hands was great. Especially that part where Ulgar was going to go emo by himself and Funi was being her cute self and the other kids were like ‘you can’t say no to this 10 year old’ and Ulgar’s like fineeee okay. 

The Slightly Less Good Stuff (though mostly ignorable)

The black bars/panelling is...a bit weird. I think I’ll get used to it but it did seem unfitting at some points. It does make some scenes more dramatic and cinematic though.

UHHHHH. THE HAND HOLDING SCENE FOR RESCUING ARIES MEANS SHE LEFT ALL HER STUFF FLOATING IN SPACE. So what clothes are she going to wear then? Is she just going to borrow stuff from the other two girls (aka Quitterie cause Yun-Hua’s too tall)?  

ISo the holding hand scene works emotionally but not so much logically...because if the cable floated too far away, someone could have reeled it back it and gone out to grab the two as they approached closer, which would be safer than the human-chain. lmao okay fine leaving her stuff just bothers me, I’ll admit it.

This is also a slight manga issue, but uh...Zack could’ve...maybe...piloted the ship closer to Aries. Though we can also argue maybe Aries had a limited air supply so there would not be enough time to get it running and all that and they didn’t know if they could fly it at the time. Just a tiny thing I thought about, but it’s fine since they’re in a panicked situation.

Maybe we’ll get a small line saying how Zack did pilot it closer to retrieve Aries’ stuff (though we saw Kanata’s.tablet left floating so uh...maybe we won’t). 

Again while the 2nd hand holding scene works emotionally (I did gif it and all, and I do like it...enough to have tears lol), I don’t like how it kinda takes away how going to the planets was Aries’ idea. That part of the manga emphasises a bit more that though Aries is a bit ditzy, she’s also good with coming up with ideas. though looking at the opening, I think we’ll get something for Aries in that aspect later   

They also missed that bit where they had to expand the parameters for planets they could go to...which made it seem a bit easy...though I suppose Zack could again just have another line later saying he allowed for harsher parameters to complete the route. 

Okay last nit-pick but that scene where Ulgar was like ‘huh why is Kanata so strong’ could have been nice to keep but fine fine.

Overall

Huh. Well my negative section was slightly longer than I thought, even though I actually loved this first episode a whole lot. Guess this is what happens when you’ve read these panels a bunch of times. The different things are very easy for me to notice, I suppose and I think this probably goes the same for fellow manga-readers. Though I do think if I watched this anime-only the changes would pull me in a bit more, as the pacing would fit the medium easier, whereas when you’re reading, you’ll blast through the chapters and get the development quicker. I’ve already rewatched the first episodes a few times so when I say I did love it, I do mean it, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the anime develops. Thanks for reading!