REIGN: The Conqueror - series

Historical anime. Strange. In the days of cute monsters, cyber-knights and extraterrestrial kids with super powers, highly destinguished team of Peter Cheung (Aeon Flux), Rintaro (Metropolis, Astro Boy) and Masao Murayama (Trigun, Cardcaptor Sakura) revived a life/legend of Alexander the Great. They needed a great animation team – Madhouse (Vampire Hunter D, Trigun). The rest is history.

Futuristic, elongated figures of characters will be your first surprise. Architecture, machinery, clothing and weird Pythagoreans add to amazement and/or confusion. Famous horse, Bucephalos, well… it has red eyes and very strange diet.

That was an intention of producers – to make a revolutionary anime. Different but excellent. They agreed with Mr. Cheung’s approach – mixed past and future, history and fiction, humans and… others, standard and 3D animation. It is very hard to objectively grade work that contains so many contrasts, so I will be subjective: I liked it a lot. Doesn’t mean you will, but also does not mean you won’t.
I read Plutarch’s collection on Alexander’s life ages ago and loosely remembered the story (so I read it again), but if you plan to make a revolutionary piece of historical recount, you can hardly find more suitable person than young leader of Macedon. Rose to the throne after a blurry murder of his father Phillip, he shifted his army’s speed into fifth gear and rolled to India. Tough? Imagine going on conquest of Canada from south of Mexico.On foot, with some major obstacles in your way :) He almost succeded.

Animation is very good. I didn’t like the 3D inputs, they ruin the flow of animation and were unnecessary. Overall character design is phenomenal so as battle scenes – there are no grand clashes of thousands of soldiers – usually just group versus the other, ending in Alexander cutting through a couple of Persians with a single swing :) View angle and colouring is excellent, but scene selection can sometimes confuse and make following of the story difficult. And names require additional research… but that is better than Disney’s modernized nicknames for ‘certain’ characters.

There are many things in the series that will demand brain exercise, but it is worth it. It is intended to be hardcore stuff. So use your library card and your DVD players. I enjoy that combination. To continue with subjectivity, I will give a grade to “Reign”, but it is personal. Judge by yourself whether you’ll like this anime or not. Names do mean quality but it is a strange piece of work. Choice is yours, and drop me a couple of lines if I was right or wrong.