Video Backlog: "Fantastic Children"

Publisher: Bandai Entertainment (USA)
Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles
Length: 26 Episodes x 25 minutes
Production Date: 2004 – 2005
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

I find that Takashi Nakamura’s anime films are a real mixed bag. I really enjoyed his 1995 children’s film released as “Catnapped!” in the US. However his second film, “A Tree of Palme” really frustrated me. I saw that film at a festival and it broke down around three times, leading me to believe there were sections missing from the film. Certainly that made sense as there seemed to inexplicable jumps in the film’s narrative. I had heard of this TV series and I was really wary about purchasing it. “Palme” had really soured my relationship with this film maker. However a couple of years ago I decided I really should buy up the Bandai Entertainment shows I was vaguely interested in as they seemed to be going out of print at quite a fast rate. That was probably a good idea on my part.

The story follows a group of white haired children known colloquially as the Befort Children. In the year 2012, a police detective named Cooks accidently comes across this mysterious case while searching for a missing 12 year old girl, Flo. A number of children, all with white hair and blue eyes like Flo, have gone missing in the same area (a fictional country that sort of resembles Cambodia or Thailand). Curiously all of the children are dead ringers of children taken in a mysterious photograph taken by his grandfather a hundred years ago. Investigating further he discovers that a scientist of some note, Dr Radcliffe, had befriended his grandfather and had attempted to investigate the mystery of Befort Children. His work leads him to discover that the Befort Children have made appearances all over Europe and Asia since at least the 15th century and have all regularly disappeared at the age of 12. Cooks investigation into the children leads him to discover that everything seems to be tied to a mysterious research company called the GED Organization.

Close by on Papin Island, a 12 year old boy named Tohma, discovers a girl his age named Helga and a younger boy named Chitto. Both of them have run away from a state run orphanage on a nearby island. However both are soon captured and forced back into the care of the state. While searching for Helga and Chitto, completely unaware that both have been captured, Tohma comes across Tarlant, one of the Befort Children. After fighting with him and the other Befort Children, the tell Tohma that they wish to speak with Helga, whom they call Tina, urgently. A plan is hatched to rescue Helga form the island, however at the same time as the rescue, the GED Organization locks down the island the orphanage due to an escaped criminal, however not is all that it seems. The escaped criminal turns out to be a woman who looks like she is in her 80’s and claims to be someone 50 years younger.

Certainly this series is filled with many mysteries during the first half of the show. It did make for very intriguing viewing. However most, if not all, of the mysteries are revealed to the audience in one or two episodes before mid-way through the series. Some of the answers to these mysteries are rather unsatisfactory in my opinion and require a lot of a large degree of suspension of disbelief. I noticed that the core elements of this show are very similar to “Please Save My Earth”. Not wanted to spoil the plot of this show too much, I will say that the elements are handled in a much more believable way “Please Save My Earth”, whereas in “Fantastic Children” the continued existence of the children is a little too hard to swallow. I’m not really a spiritual person, so perhaps it was because of that, that I found it really hard to accept the explanation, though I can accept the storyline in “Please Save My Earth” quite easily. The character designs and the feel of the show really make it seem like a children’s adventure show in the same vein as “Future Boy Conan”, “Mysterious Cities of Gold” or “Nadia of the Mysterious Seas”, especially because of the future technology in a time period that looks much older (yet it’s meant to be 2012). I question why the show is set 8 years into the future. There are no technological or any other markers to indicate that it is indeed 2012, nor is there any real need to place the show in this year. In fact due to the technology and clothing, it could easily pass for any year within the last two decades.

When the Befort Children, detective Cooks or those working for GED are out of the picture (i.e. it’s Tohma, Helga and Chitto), I found it a little slow moving and uninteresting. Luckily this only happens for two or so episodes. After the big reveal early on, we see in flashbacks, the real origin of the Befort Children (trying not to give away spoilers here) and this changes the tone of the story to a large degree. However it doesn’t quite explain the children’s behaviour and survival skills over the last 500 or so years. For me at least, I thought there were some really large leaps in logic concerning their movements and survival tactics. The gap between their technology (and also them constructing from scratch now or several centuries ago is also problematic) and them being able to find Tina also didn’t quite gel for me. Surely it would have been easier to find her, say 400 years ago with futuristic technology and a much, much smaller world population than several hundred years later with several billion more people on the planet. The version I have comes with a bonus soundtrack, which is odd as the packaging doesn’t mention it at all. Still, it was quite a nice surprise. In the end however I found this to be quite an enjoyable show. There are some rather big leaps of logic which narked me off a bit, but I can forgive this. The ending too was a bit overly sentimental and sort of flew in the face of what the Befort Children wanted to do in the first place. Overall the show is quite entertaining, but not an underrated classic as the DVD slick copy says it is. 7 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: 26 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).