In Japan, straight to video releases for anime movies and shows started in the mid 80's.  One of the first shows to take this distribution route was 1985's Birth.  Harmony Gold licensed this movie and unsuccessfully tried to sell a heavily edited and dubbed version to TV, and this version was released on VHS under the title Planet Busters.  Now for the first time Region 1 gets an unedited version of this unique humorous movie, thanks to ADV.  This 85 minute movie has a lot of  fast paced fights and chases, but doesn't seem to hold up after all these years.

Nam is a young man who lives on Aquanoid.  His planet was once a lush paradise, but 200 years ago the inorganics arrived from space and attacked.  The intervening war turned Aquanoid into a desert wasteland.

Now Nam has found a mysterious weapon at the bottom of a crater.  This item turns out to be Shade, a mystical sword with the power to destroy the entire inorganic race.  But the inorganics are not about to just sit by while Nam destroys them.  They send all their resources after the young man and his sister Rasa.

This is definitely a unique movie.  The animators were trying something new and different, and it only partially worked.  A lot of this movie is set to music, with long chase and fight scenes being choreographed to coincide with the music.  Unfortunately, all of the money and effort went into this choreography and the rest of the animation isn't very impressive.

Some of the backgrounds are very textured and detailed, but the foreground animation isn't.  The character designs are very rudimentary, with man of the characters looking like they came out of The Point or some other inexpensive show.  (Which is probalby the reason that ADV wisely didn't include many images from the movie on the cover to the DVD.)  Most of the animation looks flat and two dimensional also.  To make matters worse, the mouth movements didn't match up with the Japanese dialog.  I don't mean that it was off a little, it was off by a lot.  In the opening scene Rasa's mouth opens and closes for a couple of seconds before the dialog starts.

I could stand the poor animation and mismatched dialog if the movie was good, but it really isn't.  It is more a series of chases set to music than a full blown plot.  Oh, sure, they do have something of a plot, but that's not really what drives the action.  The chases and fights do, and they seem endless.  They finally do end, of course, but that just brings us to the conclusion of the movie that was just plain horrible.  A bad ending to a fairly senseless show.

Audio:

This DVD has both an English dub in 5.1 and a stereo Japanese track.  The English track was more forceful than the stereo Japanese audio, which isn't too surprising since the Japanese track is only stereo.  Neither soundtrack had any hiss or distortion, and both sounded clean.  Since the dialog is scant, and even the Japanese soundtrack doesn't match mouth movement up, I think the English dub is the superior track.

Video:

The fullscreen image quality is very good.  There aren't any signs of aliasing, or cross coloration though there is some light banding in the scenes with big patches of sky.  The colors were not faded, although they were primarily flat with little shading.  This looks very good for an anime program from 1985.

Extras:

There aren't too many extras on this disc, just an art gallery with stills from the movie.  There are trailers for .

Final Thoughts:

Going from one chase to the next with little in the way of plot to connect them makes this show seem incredibly long.  In reality it's only 85 minutes, it just seems a lot longer.  This early OVA experiment is historically interesting because of the unique animation style and music, but it wouldn't stand up to repeat viewings.  I was proud that I managed to veiw the whole thing without hititng the fast forward button. I kept up hope that the show would get better, but the end was worse than the movie itself.  Even die hard fans should skip it don't even bother wasting your time.