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Spacewarship Yamamoto Yohko(6 OAVs)

Yamamoto Yohko, Starship Girl looked like another fun series with a bunch of girls in space having a grand time trying to blow each other up and learning some lessons about themselves in the process. That's essentially what it is, except it had about as much substance as cotton candy and the only lesson anybody learns is that the future is stupid. Very, very stupid. It had its moments, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to.
For one thing, although I hardly expected a story about a bloodless war fought by high school girls yanked 1000 years into the future to be deep, this series was positively vaccuous. The story wasn't random or pointless--it was essentially non existant. There was a grand total of two episodes featuring anythng even resembling character development, and the cast of characers had all the depth of your average bathtub. It was pretty well summed up by Yohko's transformation from high school girl to combat pilot ten centuries in the future: her indoctrination took about four minutes, one of which was spent insulting another pilot's forehead, and another filling out registration forms--she didn't so much as raise an eyebrow at the concept. Damn the set up, action away! The second episode had even less plot and much more preposterous action (space billiards!), and although the third one gave the illusion that one of the villians had some meaningful backstory or personality... it was only an illusion.
Yamamoto Yohko is actually two seperate OAV series (three episodes each) put together, and the theme does change ever so slightly in the second half of the "story" (I use that term loosely), where they tried to add at least a bit of meaning to the action. Not that it really amounted to much until the last episode, where we're treated to a touch of romance and drama, and since the series was so empty up till that point that I really didn't care, it ended on a vaguely disappointing note. (The end wasn't, incidentally, any sort of overall conclusion--just a stopping point.) When you put it all together, it felt like something was missing--kind of like the beginning, end, and character development had all been completely left out, leaving us only with some side stories of the sort that usually fill out the middle of a series and maybe one or two fragments of drama. The drama didn't seem to fit at all, and I would have enjoyed the rest of it more if there had been some time spent establishing the characters, but at least it was simple-minded fun.
Another thing that was a bit disappointing was the humor. As silly as the series was, it didn't turn out to be nearly as wacky as I was expecting. There were a few very funny concepts--one of the characters making an anime-style costume to get in the mood for combat, a planetary system as the prize in the Claw Game, and a haunted house gone wrong--but there weren't as many of these moments as the begining got me fired up for. It was also surprisingly clean--the obligatory hot springs episode only had a couple of mildly off-color jokes, and in place of the standard breast jokes were constant references to one character's big, shiny forehead. (I have a feeling that the boring hotsprings were a subtle parody of the usually racous things that take place in those, but if so it was too subtle for my taste.) Most of the fun in the series ended up coming from the chacter interaction--lots of not-so-friendly banter and watching them antagonize and make fun of each other. Incidentally, I kept looking for this to be a parody of its own genre, ala Tenamonya Voyagers, but although there were a number of in-jokes (including the title), that didn't seem to be the point of the exercise, and at the least it wasn't as silly as Tenamonya Voyagers (and the in-jokes were much easier to get). I will say that, as silly and nonsensical as the world was, it thankfully felt reasonably solid, and did seem to follow some sort of internal logic (or consistant lack thereof, I should say).
The characters were the one strong point of the series. Well, not exactly strong point, but the girls' constant bickering (both among friends and enemies) was the most fun part of it for me, and they were definitely a distinctive lot. Yohko was the most noteworthy, and far from your average high school cutie--good looking, yes, but Yohko is a cocky (and rightfully so), slightly aloof, video-game obsessed modern girl with an attitute, and she never really took anything seriously. A refreshing change from the norm, definitely, but I also found her somewhat annoying. The other pilots, though less distinctive, each had their share of fun personality, from the stuck-up enemy pilot Rouge to her empty-headed sister Lote. Empty-headed doesn't come close, actually--if the other chacaters were about as deep as a wading pool, she barely qualified as a puddle. Still, as much as I'm usually annoyed by bubbleheaded characters, her absolutely unfazable, good-natured idiocy made her my personal favorite character of the bunch--stupid to the core, but she seemed to really enjoy it. That may not say much for the rest of them, but I was laughing in spite of myself.
Visually, this series is great--very attractive art, cute (if mostly standard) character designs in something like the style of Pioneer's newest series, and lots of smoothly animated action. The space action, which accounted for a good chunk of the series, was fast paced, varied, and in addition to a few nice little artistic touches was meaty and slickly-animated all around. The character animation was of a similar calibre, and Yohko's face was particularly expressive. There were a few nice touches elsewhere--arty flair in some locations, the cocpits of the fighters had some realistic glitches with their wrap-around viewscreens, and there were a variety of attractive and unusual outfits throughout the series. That last point was a lot of fun, in fact--the girls just wore streetclothes in their fighters (why not?), and Yohko had some particularly distinctive modern fashions, including a pair of slightly edgy, eyebrow-raising ripped jeans.
The acting in Japanese was very good, featuring a wide variety of properly cast and distinctive voices. From Yohko's confident, slightly dry tone and healthy helping of nonchalant attitude, to Hayashibara Megumi's turn as Yohko's perpetually annoyed and shiny-foreheaded teammate, to the (almost) likably ditzy Lote, this was a cast that you couldn't help but love. No drama to speak of, but they were fun anyway, and their sharp timing made the banter work as well as it did. The subtitling was accurate, but considering that this is a RightStuf release I was surprised to see the lack of suffixes in the titles (particularly Lote, whose dialogue would have been smoother had they used "-chan"). The music is unremarkable, but a generally lively score with a few appropriately overdramatic themes.
The English dub was well cast and well acted in most of the main characters (particularly Madoka), but the timing in the banter wasn't quite as sharp, and although most of the girls' dialogue was well written some of it was just a bit akward (not all the humor was the sort that translates well). Lote wasn't as funny, but although Yohko didn't have quite the attitude of the original (now that's rare for a dub) she was also a bit less annoying. And, surprisingly enough, they can actually pronounce each others' names (except for "Lote", but her name doesn't really matter). (Funny side note: Lawson's bit of garbled dialogue in the first episode is an exacly linguistically inverted version of what he said in the Japanese version.)
All in all, I didn't dislike Yamamoto Yohko, but I can't say that I enjoyed it all that much either. It started out so outrageously pointless that I had trouble getting into the characters, and by the time I started to, it spent one episode trying ineffectively to be slightly more serious, then ended. It also never got as wacky as I expected (or wanted) it to, but there were some very funny parts, and the characters were another group of loveably distinctive and enjoyable folks with plenty to yell at each other about. Yamamoto Yohko made for a nice diversion, and although it didn't stick with me any more than the cotton candy that the story is apparently based on, I'm sure that some fans of light space action will thoroughly enjoy it.

-Akemi's Anime World