The Dragonauts are humans who have undergone Resonance, or bonding, with their dragon compatriots. These dragon allies can take on a human form and blend in with society. While the Dragonauts were once in unison tracking down Jin and his two dragon allies Toa and Gio, now they're all on the run as the world turns on them. The evil alien planetoid, Thanatos, is getting closer to Earth, and it's up to these heroes and villains to join forces and stop Armageddon from making a deep impact.
Yes, it's that repetitive.
Dragonaut, as part one showed, is nothing outstanding. Everything feels forced or redundant. Characters like Jin and Toa are supposed to have this deep connection, but nothing has really made that evident. Outside of the fact that Jin doesn't apparently care that Toa is the one that killed his family (even if it was an accident, she's the one who took out the plane that he, his sister, and his mom were on), their relationship is all sorts of bland and more than a little creepy, just on the basis that Toa is technically an alien dragon. Factor in that the male dragon, Gio, apparently wants nothing more than to hang out with Jin and Toa. Kazuki, who was supposed to be Gio's partner, has this absurd amount of man-hate against his former friend Jin, and an absurd amount of man-love for Gio. That's pretty much all you need to know from the first half of the series.
Over thirteen episodes, Dragonaut refuses to supply anything new to the action/love story genre. A pair of deaths early on in the second half of the series, while monetarily jarring, are almost inevitable in retrospect because of the sheer number of characters—which is another problem with the series. With each Dragonaut having a dragon partner that has a human form, you end up with nearly a dozen characters that all blur into nothingness. Combine it with the stock plot of "the hunter becomes the hunted" and the "quiet, masked antagonist," and it all adds up to a zero series.
Not all of it is horrible; some of the characters do have little moments that make them . . . not memorable, but at least individual. But even then, they follow too many tropes. The spoiled rich girl is really going to be nice at the end, but for the most part, she ends up tsundere throughout the whole series. At least her butler has his moments of butling the hell out of enemies, though not as much as an Alfred Pennyworth, to be honest.
Episode 16 gets a commentary, which, while always appreciated, tends to boil down to FUNimation's usual "commentary that actually doesn't include any real insights, but instead focuses on the career of being a voice actress". The second disc has nothing worth noting (trailers are trailers), except for a final, direct-to-DVD episode set after the final episode. It features a "trailer" for a fictionalized version of the events set in a high school, followed by an oddly funny story where the dragon's personalities are changed.
Is it sad that a comedy episode at the end is the best thing in the series? When it takes a laugh at itself, instead of taking everything absurdly seriously, it manages to be interesting. Let it be known that the last real conversation in the series has Jin manning up/fetishing up and asking Toa to meow like a cat. It supersedes the incredibly disappointing climax of the main storyline, which, despite having things like the Earth being invaded by six billion-plus monsters, or shooting at something from across the galaxy via a warp, is neither threatening nor satisfying.
Dragonaut has a plot, yet it's uninteresting. Dragonauthas a cast of characters, but they have no defining characteristics. Dragonaut, while not audaciously badly produced, is still an affront to the genre: an animated series, when it is this stale, hurts the medium as a whole. It's The Jay Leno Show of anime: bland, outdated, and taking up space when it should be making way for better and brighter things.
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