Review: Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta

"Hurry up, moron! We have plot to rush through!"

3ET: Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta

Review Scale

Warning: The following review contains SPOILERS and how do I pace show?


I strongly believe that the most valuable resource that any anime has is time. That's because each show has around twenty minutes of useful time an episode (the running time minus the OP and ED songs), as well as a hard limit on the number of episodes in its production. Therefore, there should be an understanding of how much time any show has to tell its story from the start. This means that in order to effectively tell this story, a show needs to make hard decisions on what to keep in and what to leave out. Or they can end up like Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta (Koiuta), which just throws as much stuff as it can into its runtime, which makes the mess of a story much less effective than it could have been.

Even I have to admit that this is kind of adorable.

At its core, I think the story of Koiuta has a lot of potential. There's the large plot of a people searching their world for something called the End of the Sky, complete with a conflict against a mysterious enemy trying to stop them. On their way aboard their giant floating island, the love story of an ex-prince (Kalel) and a girl he meets at the pilot academy (Claire) has some compelling moments. And then there's the small plots of all of the students at the pilot academy, who come together from different countries to become fighter pilots. The big problem is the non-love stories took a backseat, and weren't given enough time so that when they reached their high point, they didn't have as much of an impact as they could have. Yes, I realize what the show is titled, but that doesn't mean it had to be exclusively about two people falling in love.

I found the lack of impact with the student pilots to be especially tragic. The time spent with the pilots scratched the surface of their personalities and I wanted to get to know them more. Sadly, before that happened, it was time to start killing off the boys (and only the boys, because girls can fly planes in this show, but they can't die) for dramatic effect. It's not that these scenes were completely ineffective, some of them were decent. It's that I needed to know and like these characters more to really be effected by their deaths. Would it have killed them to spend some time telling some backstories for these kids (and not the cheap trick where a character gets a backstory and dies in the same episode, fuck that)? Apparently, it would have, because they needed time to spend on Kalel and Claire's love story.

Also, not a enough time to explore tall, pale, and angsty here.

And said love story is a mix of cute and cheesy. The beginnings of Kalel and Claire's romance was cute, and the idea that the lower class students were discouraged from mixing with the noble class was just the right amount of drama. The cheesy part comes from the fact that the person Kalel wants revenge on, Nina Viento, a wind witch who is responsible for his royal family being killed, is actually Claire. Angst ensues. Kalel then has to forgive Claire/Nina, which he does right after a climatic battle with the mysterious enemy. And then their story moves back towards the good, where in a scene reminiscent of the "airport confessions" I've seen in several movies. Claire is off to be a hostage in exchange for safe passage through the Sky Clan's territory and the two are proclaiming their feelings for each other. This scene worked pretty well, and would have served a good stopping point for the series.

The problem is, that scene happened with two episodes to go in the series. And instead of finding a good stopping point that would make the viewers want more, the rest of the story was a rushed through over the last two episodes. That meant it was time for lots of telling, and not a lot of showing, which as any good writer knows, is not a good thing. As a result, the sudden timeskip to finding the End of the Sky doesn't feel as important as it should have. Neither did the return home for Kalel and his adoptive sister, Ari. And at the end of the series, when Kalel is flying to rescue Claire, it doesn't feel like they've been apart that long. Because, from the audience's perspective, they haven't.

And Ari, no. He's not blood related, but he is still your brother. 

Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta is a prime example of how poor pacing can ruin a show. It has a decent story, and if it was told well, I think this could be a good show. Unfortunately, it wasn't and it isn't. And I chalk that up entirely to the pacing. The smart way to do this was to take those two episodes at the end, spend that time on the pilots, and end with the scene of Kalel and Claire saying good-bye on the runway. Sure, there is a chance that they wouldn't have gotten a second season to finish telling the story, but it would have been better than what was produced instead.

Final Score: 4/10