Faibu Sutâ Sutôrîzu

"The Five Star Stories" is a well created Japanese anime film. I found it at a local bargain bin and picked it up and I was very impressed. Although its only in Japanese I still thought it was very powerful, but I would still like to see it with an English audio track. The DVD comes with a booklet that describes the timeline of this film and a character bio for most of the cast. The movie itself maybe considered boring and hard to understand but its still entertaining. I strongly recommend this movie to anyone who likes older anime and other series such as GUNDAM or ESCAFLOWNE. You will not be disappointed with "The Five Star Stories".

I am no big expert of anime, just watch it when feel like that, so this is a "lay person's comments" on The Five Star Stories.

The Five Stars are stars in a far away galaxy in the future, where fairytale conditions rule. The story is about Fatimas, artificially made androids. They are similar to humans in looks, have feelings and thinking, but they are still artificial and made to be under the control of a human Master, that they choose at the Preview. Details are revealed only drop by drop on Fatimas, which is part of the magic of the film - I keep it for you to get surprised. Let's say that the story of main character, Sopp and the Fatima, Lochesis, is between romantic and ironic.

The images, the music and the overall atmosphere of the movie is just excellent. It brought me back to times when I was a small kid and read fairy tales. Everyone is either good or evil, beautiful or ugly, weak or powerful. The storyline however jumps many times a big step ahead or back to the past and then it was quite hard for me to keep track of what's really happening, what is what and who is who. Maybe if I had read the comic series, I would have been familiar with all this.

I can give 7 out of 10, as the drawings, the colors, the pictures are excellent, but the story does not flow as it should. You get a nice 65 minutes, if you find this movie - it's not easy!

What a tease! One of the most magnificent anime films I've seen, and that's it, no more. I believe there was supposed to be a television series to follow up, but it never happened. Either way, it's based on a large series of manga (which has never been translated) so at least Japanese fans had something to sate them. The highlight of this one is the giant mecha, or "mortar heads", very cool stuff indeed!