Children of the Whales Review — C

Children go on an adventure and die on their sand ship.

I liked this a lot, but at the same time, it was pretty bad.

First of all, the setting is super cool. It’s set in a sea of sand with a bunch of kids and a few adults trapped on a ship, and with most of the kids living extremely short lives. There’s an evil empire that exiled them now trying to kill them all. And the visual style and also the music are amazing. The art has this watercolor look to it. The characters are meh but the backgrounds are amazing.

With that said, the way the story is told frankly sucks. None of the characters come together coherently. A lot of their actions often don’t make much sense. (Especially the villains… Jesus.) Others are just walking stereotypes. Like Green, who is a fucking saint. He just walks around the whole time feeling guilty and praying. Or Purple. He’s supposed to be emotionless, but he laughs maniacally and immensely enjoys killing people. He very clearly has… emotions. In general, most of the characters don’t arouse much interest. And when they do have the slightest inklings of potential (i.e., Ougi and Lykos) the way they are developed is hamfisted and arduous.

Similarly, the show keeps trying to force an emotional impact by having characters die off. It sort of worked the first time, since I was surprised, but after that it just had me rolling my eyes. Especially since these characters who died tragically are random nobodies.

And… the insert songs. My god they were stupid. We’d be in the middle of an intense battle (ok, actually, it was pretty lame) and then we’d jump to several minutes of a music video of a girl dancing with some butterflies. Like what the fuck guys.

So, yeah, it was terrible. I still liked it though.