Pailsen Files: Assaulting Monad

The first three minutes of the eleventh episode of the Pailsen Files portray an assault, but they also are an assault – on the viewer. Vast troopships (VOTOMS‘s spaceships are essentially brick-shaped) loom over the machine planet Monad. (Incidentally(?), ‘monad’ may or may not have been a Pythagorean name for God.) The transports which aren’t blown up (in suitably massive explosions) by the defenders disgorge swarms of Armoured Troopers.

Fire fills the screen. Waves of ATs come charging out of it. They hurl themselves into a chasm. Our heroes hurled themselves into a similar chasm at the close of the previous episode – which quoted the Death Star trench sequence from Star Wars, except with men in robots instead of proton torpedoes – and the ‘camera’ sweeps down into Monad’s depths to join them.

This wasn’t in any way a profound scene, but it was a moment when the OVA was absolutely in touch with its essence: an impressive blend of 2D and 3D animation bringing a great mecha action scene to life. The music was unremarkable, but well-integrated, repeatedly promising to reach a climax and then refusing to actually do so as if echoing the Melkian assault’s relentlessness. One or two (only one or two) elements of the story’s finale were only really comprehensible in the context of the original ATV, but the opening scene of the eleventh episode established that the story’s resolution would be fun for everyone.

Well, fun for everyone who likes robots.