Blue Submarine 6 (Ao no roku gô)-Volume 2 (1998)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-Creator's Eyes
Rating	?
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	70:03
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Mahiro Maeda
Studio Distributor	Shock Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Scanavo-Opaque
RPI	$29.95	Music	The Thrill

    Here's the second, and final, volume of Blue Submarine No 6. You'll find my review of the first volume here.

    I hadn't realised when I reviewed the first disc that this was a four episode OAV. These two volumes are all there are. That's a shame, as I was enjoying it, and it felt like it had more potential than this.

    This disc has rather more on it than the first one. The first had just the two episodes, clocking in at under 30 minutes apiece. The two episodes on this disc are 30 and 40 minutes in length, and there's the featurette, too. A bit better value, but they could easily have fitted the whole lot onto a single disc. Still, it's worse in R1 - they have to put up with one episode per disc, and a higher price per disc, too.

    I must say that I really like this style of animation. The hand-drawn cels for the characters work well - we're familiar with that stuff. And the CGI for the explosions and the underwater sequences works really well, too. It's a good combination, and I hope we see more like this in the future.

    The plot continues from where it left off in Volume 1 (a bit slowly, but that's under the credits), and the story ends reasonably, but it does feel a little bit rushed. Maybe an extra episode might have helped, or something like that. I don't want to say much about it, because you're likely to want to buy and watch both volumes together.

    The case, by the way, is a horrible thing - it's hard to get the disc out, and you feel like you're going to snap the disc as you do so.

    By the way, if you like whales, you may like the Musaca...

Video

    The DVD is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and is therefore not 16x9 enhanced. That's the original aspect ratio.

    The picture is very good, even perhaps a touch better than the first volume. There's no low-level noise.

    Colours are very attractive, with good subtle colours (and nothing too garish). There is no oversaturation nor colour bleed.

    There are no film artefacts. There's a little bit of aliasing, but not a whole lot. There's some dot-crawl around the logo, and on some of the edges of the drawings, but it is not particularly annoying.

    There are no subtitles. This is the criminal mistake of the R4 version - the English subtitle track has been omitted.

    The disc is single sided and single layered. Even with the additional content over Volume 1, that single layer is adequate.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Once again there are two soundtracks. The English soundtrack is Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, at 224kbps. For no apparent reason, the Japanese soundtrack this time is Dolby Digital 2.0, also not surround encoded, at 224kbps. I listened to the English soundtrack, and sampled the Japanese. The English soundtrack is much better than on the first volume, but falls far short of the Japanese soundtrack on the first volume - this time, however, they've reduced the Japanese soundtrack to the same level (perhaps so I won't complain about the missing subtitles? Won't work!).

    The dialogue is clear, and almost always comprehensible (at least the English dialogue is - I can't comment on the Japanese dialogue as I am unfamiliar with the language). There are no audio sync problems.

    The music is credited to The Thrill. It's a very good jazz-like score with some excellent bass content (not overdone, but it will test the accuracy of your main speakers' low frequency response). It sounds equally good on both soundtracks, but not as good as the first volume's Japanese soundtrack.

    Neither soundtrack uses the surrounds or subwoofer.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is animated with music - very pretty, and easy to operate.

Featurette - Creator's Eyes (17:11)

    This is an interesting making-of. There's quite a bit of footage of Mahiro Maeda (the director). Irritatingly, this is subtitled! Well worth watching.

    The Region 4 version of this DVD is missing:

• the vital English subtitle track

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• the second episode per disc

    I feel compelled to recommend the Region 1 version because it has the wonderful 5.1 soundtrack, and subtitles. What a shame it costs so much more!

    Blue Submarine No. 6 is an unusual anime series, visually attractive.

    The video quality is very good.

    The audio quality is fair on both soundtracks. They are better than the English soundtrack on the first volume, but not as good as the Japanese soundtrack on that disc.

    The extra is interesting, but it's not huge.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall