Gate Keepers

Gate Keepers belongs squarely within the category of anime I wish I’d never seen. Scratch that, I wish no one were inflicted with this tripe. It’s not even bad enough that you can make fun of it and share stories about it with its other victims – it just fails to do things right, or be interesting in any way at all whatsoever.

Shun Uekia is a normal high school student who loves his family very much, but despises his late father for failing to attend some graduation ceremony the day that he died. While returning home, he runs into some people fighting a giant black ball, made of invaders – aliens that look like MIB rejects, led by someone who looks exactly like them in a red suit. Shun soon learns that he is a Gate Keeper, someone with special power, and uses it to defeat the invaders. He discovers that the people who were under attack belonged to the organization known as AEGIS, and include a childhood friend of his, who he calls, to her chagrin, Ruipee.

The characters are cardboard stereotypes. The plot, silly and inconsistent. I still love the way one of the “alien” invaders says that he works to create chaos. I’m sorry, somehow hundreds of people lined up in marching formation in the most conservative suits ever designed, albeit with some weird embellishments, in a strict unimind is not what I associate with chaos. Oh, and most of the invader’s plans are silly or stupid or some combination of both.

I thought, for just a moment, that maybe I didn’t like this show because it’s aimed at a younger audience. Then I remembered that I cut my teeth on Ronin Warriors before going to school as a preteen, and Tenchi Muyo after school some years later. These are not top ten anime by any means, but they tower above Gate Keepers in creativity.

Finally, I’ve never been overly critical of so-called “production-value” – if a show puts forth a really good effort for plot and characters, I’ll almost completely overlook frame reuse, lazy animation, and less then stellar technicals in the DVDs. But it has to be said: Gate Keepers is cheap. Dirt cheap. I think a few of the episodes in the middle of the show must have been contracted out to Malawi, because the original Record of Lodoss War can beat them on frame rate alone. The sound, while not as bad, in uninspired. In short, Gate Keepers sucks.