Éden

A dystopian terminator for the little ones. A mature, existential idea gets a naive, childish facade, the philosophy of the subject matter just tickles the surface and, most importantly, doesn't get a chance to sell the mission adequately in such a short space of time. I sense a bit of topical Vivy in this, it vaguely leaves me with memories of Robinson's melancholy Shelter series or any other allegory where man is the main malevolent entity. As the series is aimed at the tadpoles, unfortunately we don't get any fuller substance, the ideas are brief and the twists and turns poorly explained by logic; all so that we can be happy-go-lucky. Simplicity and straightforwardness is the alpha and omega, playing on emotions reaches its lowest effectiveness – the attempts to teach robots feelings are endearing, but at the same time too rushed. Because of the moderate pace, I liked the "wholesome" 1st episode the best, but from there on it went increasingly downhill in quality. I wasn't impressed at all by the simple CGI visuals, which made the action very simple, so the brightest point was Penkin's music, which I still had honestly expected a bit more from. If I were to consider the target audience, subjectively my rating would be around 3.5 stars, objectively it's the weakest possible 3 stars. (2021.05.27)

This TV show is ecological propaganda, which is well-executed because it at least worked on me on an emotional level, however, the message is incredibly transparent and I was able to accurately work out and predict the biggest twist of the whole miniseries from the second episode. I think that all the messages they wanted to convey are clear to everyone. In other words, I did not find anything really surprising! On the other hand, I liked the main female protagonist and her robofamily. I can easily understand the main villain's view on the matter, after all, this is not the first time I have felt some sympathy for such a radical perspective deep in my soul (e.g. my sympathy for Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War). Animation-wise it is nothing special. Once again I am going to reiterate that I am not a fan of mixing 3D CGI and traditional style animation, as this combination rarely looks natural to me. Likewise, I find some of the backgrounds (like the battle of the giant robots) to be just hollow and generic (without any detail), which really I do not like. I only noticed, or rather was pleasantly intrigued by, the soundtrack in the last episode. There was one moment where it really fit the mood of the story. Anyway, for me in general, I probably would say it is a little better than average. 5.5/10. (2021.05.27)