Sol Bianca: The Legacy

Sol Bianca: The Legacy is an impressive Japanese animated miniseries about five women embarking upon a journey of self-discovery. The story is set in a fascinating universe imbued with a Spanish flavour, and is punctuated both by grand technology and mythology. The series has a clear focus on ambitious production values and demonstrates the growth of Japanese animation in plot development, and audio and visual style.

You need not have watched the 1991 series in order to understand the story. However, it is written such that the overarching plot is revealed indirectly. Needless to say, the story is powerful and entrancing, if somewhat concealed. Due to its short length of six episodes it is necessary to watch the series at least twice in order to understand the depth of the plot fully. This is the main failing of the anime: that it requires the viewer to piece together the backstory from oblique implications and sometimes seemingly-unrelated events that occur throughout the episodes. Nevertheless, the first viewing is valuable in understanding the intimate stories and relationships of each of the leading characters and their maturation and development.

The series is notable in that it places much weight on the importance of our history and the uniqueness of our planet, with each episode commencing with a quote from a piece of historic literature. Furthermore, the most sought-after items in Sol Bianca's galaxy are artifacts from Earth – even our space-faring pirate heroines are after them. The environmental and social messages are powerful and ring true. The series also shows great conceptual creativity, with impressive displays of holographic goddesses and a blossoming computer system. These alone, shown in the first episode, were impressive enough to hook me in to watch the rest of the anime.

This miniseries is well worth watching for its high visual quality, beautiful soundtrack and voice acting, impressive character design and its masterful and contemporary plot. Highly recommended.

This is the story of the pirate ship Sol Bianca and her all-female crew named after months of the year. As you may know Sol Bianca was intended to be a three-part series in 1991 but only two episodes were produced. In 1999 they restarted the series but the characters and spaceship look much the same as before. For some reason our lead character April looks kind of ugly in some scenes. Perhaps it is because she frowns a lot.

The show opens with a dramatic musical theme which I like. The visuals are pretty cool. It looks like computer graphics were used for the ship's flying sequences. One nice scene is the AI's boot-up procedure where you see a woman's face and a tree blooming (which I assume is a graphical representation of ship's commands and controls).

There are six episodes in the Legacy series and I found the stories moody and underexplained. For instance in the original series they gave you enough hints to figure out June's secret but in The Legacy you had to look carefully to figure out what it was. A freeze frame was useful in one key flashback. When the crew was taken hostage I got confused about which scenes were flashback and which scenes were now. There were other points that I missed that my brother had to explain like the significance of the terraforming project.

I wonder if this show was Pioneer's answer to Bandai's Cowboy Bebop? If you liked the original series then you will probably like The Legacy as well.

It's horrible!! The animation doesn't exist in it.There is camera moving recording a stop picture. The plot is confused, of bad taste, and far, so far, you can put far in it, to be good or acceptable to see. Don't see it, you will loose your time and will forget what is a good anime. Your life will be worst after this experience. One of the things that is trash is the unexpected appearence of the enemies, like a RPG video game. The villains and secondary characters appear in the middle of the episode without explanation. It's really bad. If you don't agree you must be sick. ARRRRRRRGHHHHHH!!!!