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Liam in Ireland recently

Here's a show I've been watching on the side without mentioning. This is Galilei Donna - an A-1 Pictures original anime that I'd literally never heard of and which turned 10 years old while I watched it. I came across it because my friend was watching anime he found using the random button on anidb, this turned up, he reacted to the first episode for a youtube channel we semi-unseriously run, I thought it actually looked kind of awesome, and then I watched the rest of the show myself. So let's talk about it!

Galilei Donna is a cool original action show in which three sisters descended from Galileo Galilei are framed by a multinational corporation and a corrupt police force and are forced on the run, branded as international criminals, and being hunted by said corporation, the law, and even air pirates for good measure. It exists in a setting which seems like a near-future but largely contemporary version of modern day earth, although as the series continues it becomes clear that it's almost better considered a different timeline version of earth altogether, using different energy sources which have resulted in different versions of transport including armoured metal airships which see civilian use (strangely normal cars exist but are all just destroyed and abandoned on the streets?), and also this earth is downright pre-apocalyptic, with the show calling attention to a sort of global freezing suggesting a new fucking ice age. The show's moment-to-moment largely consists of our main characters going from place to place seeking the treasures of Galileo to potentially avert their global energy crisis, all the while escaping from their would-be-captors. And of course during all this we laugh and we cry and we meet new people and say tragic farewells, the characters learn a little bit more about each other and a little bit more about themselves, all that good stuff.

I'd fully say that if all that sounds good to you, then just go and watch the show. The series by and large follows through on the majority of the good you'd expect from that premise, and in terms of sheer fun, yeah it's all there. But here's where we get to the caveats. The buts. The if only this was differents. The biggest and kind of just the main one, plain and simple, is that the show absolutely doesn't have enough time for how ambitious it is. The cast is big, the show has a lot of moving pieces in the plot, there's multiple villain factions, the future of the world is questionable and yet pieces of the past are relevant too, there's a global travel aspect in there, there's a criticism and takedown of capitalism and the elements comprising it, thematically it's going for a lot of stuff, there's just a lot here. And it has 11 episodes to do all of that. 13 episodes would've been a bit more breathing room, ideally it could have an entire additional cour - but the 11 that it's left with is downright suffocating. The show doesn't really attempt to downsize its narrative to fit within the final episode count, so we end up with even main characters having little to no development whatsoever, and majorly significant pieces of the plot happening completely off-screen, only becoming relevant in the final episode, itself a courtroom drama episode of all things? Every single aspect of this series is begging to be fleshed out and explored more and the overwhelming majority of it just isn't given that chance. Eldest sister Hazuki's worldview is majorly challenged only to be relegated to a background gag argument. Middle sister Kazuki is defined by a love interest who doesn't even have a name. Youngest sister Hozuki takes until the semi-final episode to have any development whereby she acknowledges herself as socially out of step with other people despite the events of the rest of the show suggesting otherwise. And that's for the literal main protagonists of the show! Once you move onto supporting there's a major recurring anti-villain into anti-hero whose name I don't even remember the show telling me at any point, I just know it because of MAL! Like all in all this is a show that desperately wishes it could be more, and it just wasn't given that opportunity.

Also this one doesn't fit into the last paragraph anywhere but this show's music is Scooby Doo-core and the tonal whiplash is cracked.

This is one of those shows where I watched it, I liked it, and when it was all said and done I was bummed out that there wasn't more of it. And I think that was probably true of Aniplex as well - whom I am singularly attributing the production of the show to for the sake of brevity, but obviously more companies and people were evolved, yadda yadda, just ignore me. But a quick glance at the series' still-alive website reveals a series attempting to push a solid amount of goods out for a random original series, and a look at the twitter seemingly suggests there was even a life-size statue of Hozuki on display for some Noitamina Shop thing? Which is like, kind of a big deal, to some degree. Certainly this was a show that I have to assume had some pretty heavy marketing push if it's getting stuff like that. And yet for all that, absolutely no western presence or even really awareness of the series, and total blu-ray sales under 1000 volumes. Galilei Donna is a flop, a flop that wanted more and wasn't given it. A flop that several companies wanted to make them a gajillion dollars while themselves not pouring enough resources into the series to let it see its artistic vision through to the end. Maybe. That part's absolutely just speculation and I'd need to do a deeper dive into whatever knowledge of the production is public - although even saying that I have to assume if anything like that exists it's purely in Japanese and I don't speak that language soooooooo

But hey, all in all, if you asked me "how was Galilei Donna?", I'd respond by saying that it was just