At some point, I have to question what I’m expecting out of Azur Lane. To an extent, this is a question for any show, as you attempt to determine what the ambition of the creators was. It would be pure madness to try to hold everything to the same standards. For Azur Lane, I think the evidence is mounting that there is at least some real desire to tell a war story, even surrounded as it is by a lot of fanservice of every kind.

That’s in part because the real ‘meat’ of this episode is all about Enterprise. My concerns from the first episode seem to have been addressed, and while she’s still a stern and powerful warrior (which is totally fine) the writing is at least showing us that she has a fallible, human side. It tells us too, in some of the episode’s least effective moments, but when she throws herself into battle to relieve her sister despite being obviously unwell and unready there’s at least the background to read it as an emotional choice.

On the other hand, my issue with the first episode regarding Ayanami and the crew seems to be just something that’s going to bug me through the show. Again, they barely interacted but the show is treating it as a powerful connection that causes the characters to question why they should have to fight, and if they really have to fight.

While on the subject of the “starter squad”, I guess it’s as good a time as any to talk about the fanservice, when it works and when it doesn’t work. When talking about expectations, given the nature of the show and the material it’s based on, having some fanservice in there (by which I mean the occassional upskirt shot and the like) was somewhere between inevitable and actually welcome. I know not everybody is going to like that existing at all, but if Azur Lane was going to embrace its brand with pride, some of that fanservice was going to be a thing. It had to be.

And in the first episode, I thought it was done rather smartly. The animations were generally fast and fluid and just slipped a ‘questionable’ angle in there. Cleveland’s transformation scene is a good example: she jumps into a low-angle shot with predictable results but the show keeps going, it’s only there for a second. This works not because it minimizes the incident, but because it allows the character and story to retain their dignity by shooting scenes more or less naturally rather than drawing attention to the matter with a scene of its own. Which is, to an extent, exactly what Episode 2 does at a point: there’s a painfully slow fanservice-comedy routine with Laffey and Javelin involving a few wardrobe malfunctions, most notably Javelin’s top getting pulled down to her waist in front of her superiors. Because this is the funny aftermath of a devastating battle.

Which brings me to my other quibble with the show – the battle with the 5th Carrier Division didn’t feel nearly as dramatic as the attack by the 1st Carrier Division in episode 1, and at the start a big component of that was using a nearly-sunk Hammann for laughs. It’s hard to regard the fighting as deadly serious when there’s a cut to a character giving the comedy-typical swirly-eyes-and-groan of “I’ve been knocked out”. I want to compare this to the treatment Unicorn gets in the first episode when she’s on the ropes, where it feels like she’s really in danger of losing her life.

On the other hand, there was still a lot of good stuff this episode, even improvements over what the first episode had to offer. I’ve already touched on the treatment of Enterprise as a character rather than a plot device, and have a lot of hope that we might actually delve into her psyche going forward. Probably not too much, since I don’t think that’s exactly the show’s ambition, but enough to be interesting. The intro narration, which I know is a weird thing to focus on, was actually really interesting. The animations may have been reused from the first episode’s intro (which is fine given that it seems to be just part of the ‘lead in’) but it quickly and cleanly addressed new material. I actually really like this as an alternative to having a big info dump all at once, or Haruhi forbid a draggy “as you know” speech.

In general, I feel like the script moved up in the world. Now, granted, most of the episode is spent shooting this way and that so you’re not going to be admiring the soliloquies or anything like that, but there’s a lot of character communicated in the few lines. For instance, I feel like even for someone who doesn’t know the game, you’d have a sense of who Prinz Eugen is based on her lines, line reads, and the visual storytelling of her appearance and movements. For a show with as overwhelmingly many characters as Azur Lane seems determined to include, this is both a very good thing and an extremely important thing.

On that subject, there is also the “other” fanservice – that is, things thrown in for the fans of the game, who will already know and ‘get’ the material. And good god, it’s everywhere. Most of it, I feel, is pretty subtle, like Helena getting to use her radar, Laffey’s drunk moments, or Shoukaku’s grudge against her seniors… but I do wonder what an uninitiated viewer thinks when seeing what look like giant marshamallow peeps helping with the reconstruction efforts

The action is also still quite good. It’s not perfect (in some spots, the cuts aren’t framed so as to communicate cause and effect as well as they could), but it is largely fast and fluid, with only a few static moments worked in. Characters seem inexplicably capable of flight now and again or are magically caught mid-leap every time, but for an action show there are far worse sins than disregarding physics in favor of dynamism.

Complete aside, but it feels a little weird to have USS Arizona in this episode’s ‘away team’ rather than at the port attacked by Akagi and Kaga. Compared to the game’s chapters the anime only has an extremely loose connection with historical events, so it’s fine, but this is a time when that’s particularly striking.

In any case, the episode cuts roughly in the middle of the action: Z23 and Ayanami are staring down Laffey and Javelin while Belfast (a serious fan favorite who had not been introduced up to this point) has arrived to relieve a badly damaged Enterprise. There’s only so much that I can say with the episode’s main conflict still rolling on into the next one

One last thing I want to address is an interesting choice the anime seems to be making: for the time being, at least, we haven’t seen any humans in the show. The shipgirls talk about humanity, but on screen it’s just them and their manjuu-bird helpers. This means that, and I don’t see any reason to believe this will change, there is no Commander character in the show. This is a tactic that other tie-in media has taken (Commander never appears in Slow Ahead and is quickly written out of Queen’s Order, as discussed in my roundup of the game lore), but is one more point of diversion between the anime and the game. The reason this is notable here, as opposed to in the manga tie-ins, is that the manga series with no commander are comedic, slice of life affairs that focus on the ships at port, while the anime seems to be, for the most part, a serious war story like the chapter and event storylines in the game, the latter of which can rely heavily on the Commander character. It will be interesting to see how ships like Queen Elizabeth (sighted as of Episode 2 here) step up in a more dramatic work.

On the whole, I’m still enjoying the show. It’s at least fun so far and has the possibility of being legitimately good. Probably never amazing as the body of all anime goes, but entertaining in its own right.

Enterprise “Owari da” Count: 1

Game Lore: https://harperanimereviews.com/how-much-lore-does-it-take-to-justify-cute-ship-girls-a-prelude-to-azur-lane/

Episode 1: https://harperanimereviews.com/seasonal-selection-azur-lane-episode-1/