Was headed out of the library last week and saw a Marvel Anime of the X-Men on the shelf, so checked it out. Just finished watching it this am – and had some interesting reactions.

First, I’m not an X-Men expert by any means. I’ve seen the movies, and recently read an anthology reprint of some very old X-Men comics I read as a kid, but otherwise nada mucho. As far as the movies went, I liked the first two better than the third one, which I felt kind of squandered things to a degree character-wise into just action and mayhem (maybe due to different director, not sure). Then the X-Men First Class movie came out – which I liked more, although Kevin Bacon’s villain was fairly ridiculous (while entertaining, to be sure).

I guess one of the challenges in following any of these comic stories, characters, ‘teams’, etc. at this point is that so many of the plots, counter-plots, stories, etc. have been either done so many times or sent in one direction, then another, then another new writer steps in and takes it in a different direction (thinking of the recent Marvel Knights X-Men series I watched, in addition to the JJ Abrams ‘redo’ of Star Trek in the two recent movies, etc.) at some point you have to simply give up on a linear history of *any* character and just enjoy the story for what it is or tries to do.

So in talking about this X-Men anime – I liked the fact that they had yet another team of obscure weirdos to battle (the ‘U-Men’) and that ultimately there was another team of ‘evil’ Mutants – the Inner Circle – to deal with too. The animation is very well done, and there are obvious nods to the movies in some of the presentation and implied plot points (at least to me). However, there are also a number of times where there’s either too much mindless violence that transitions to a plot stoppage where everyone sits and ‘monologues’ too much, and at least two to three key points where characters who have certain knowledge don’t say anything, don’t act as you’d expect them to, and then the plot moves forward irrespective (this is otherwise known as a ‘plot hole’ :(). And yet again, certain X-Men seem far weaker here than otherwise implied – most notably Storm (who got her a** kicked far too many times in the movies too vs. her implied power?) – so that’s a problem. Am I reading too much into this? Probably. Another gripe (although this is anime, after all so not a complete surprise) is that nearly every woman in this thing is drawn as if she was first seen in Ghost in the Shell – and if you’ve seen that movie or series, you know what I’m talking about. It just doesn’t work here, guys.

I guess to sum up, if you like X-Men and have more nerdy knowledge about all the myriad characters and history of same, you will probably like this too. I liked it, but didn’t like it as much as I *should* have, which is disappointing. If I had to choose, I’d pick the Marvel Knights series…..

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