Search - Solty Rei, Vol. 2 on DVD

FOCUS ON ROSE

Sesho | Pasadena, TX USA | 01/02/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Things are getting shaken up in the Roy Revant household as the outlaw Rose moves in after her hideout is raided by the authorities. Roy has already had a difficult enough time adjusting to living with Solty so to put it mildly, he's not overjoyed at the prospect of a new guest. In fact he tells Rose that he never agreed to let her stay and wants her out. It turns out that Rose is there for an ulterior motive. She wants Solty to join her criminal gang. Ok, they're really not that bad because like Robin Hood, Rose and her two brothers steal to pay for medicine for the poor. If Rose gets a kick out of as well, who's to say whether she's bad or not? But she does have a bit of a dark past that is revealed when she passes the man that murdered her family on the street. It's not all bad news for Rose though as she hooks up romantically with a handsome RUC agent, complete with a silver plate covering part of his face Phantom of the Opera-style.

A big complaint I have about this show is that its characters are design challenged. For example, Rose has a big hunk of hair that falls in front of her face that looks like a plastic electric circuit. Her boots are too big and look like they would fly off the first time she ran. Solty's large green substitute cat/goat ears look like someone stuck a steel bar through her head. Roy Revant goes the opposite way and is probably one of the most boring looking anime characters of all time. The second volume of Solty Rei finds the show a bit adrift as Roy's job as a bounty hunter seems to have taken a back seat to the drama that is Rose's life. We hardly even see him battle one Resemble thug and that's not all bad. The writers seemed to want to focus more on the relationships and the personalities of the characters, mainly Rose. Sadly, Solty suffers the most within this focus because she has the mind of a elementary school kid and is playing the "blank slate" stereotype. Still, this second volume was entertaining in its own way if you were getting tired of all the tough guy posing from the first volume. The animation is decent, but the CG can be jarring at times, and the character's faces lack a lot in the expression department.
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