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One of Funimation's best-looking and narratively brain-dead anime releases of recent months.....
Funimation / 350 Minutes / 2009-2010 / Unrated / Street Date: December 20, 2011
Attempting to gauge exactly what the folks behind movies or TV shows are like in real life is an endeavor that viewers hardly ever get right (or should get right, for that matter), but upon watching Heaven' Lost Property, my initial response was: "Whoever made this thing needs to get laid." Again, it's none of my business and there's a grand likelihood that this impression is libelously off the mark, but this Complete Series set is so woefully hampered by strained, masturbatory sexuality that it reeks of a sort of emotional desperation.
Once Ikaros shows up - she's an angel with pink wings, enormous funbags, and Grace Jones' wardrobe - she quickly becomes an enamored, idolized Playboy pin-up, a subservient, meek alien of sorts who has no trouble calling our protagonist Tomoki "master". The only thing that would be better is if she was also an expert in secret Skyrim codes, too, right?
Anyway, aside from the bosomy archangel who falls out of a black hole in Heaven's Lost Property (yeah, I know), the series follows the introspective and angsty young Tomoki as he searches not for a forbidden dream or an unreachable goal, but... peace and quiet. There are science-minded classmates of his that help with the whole black-hole-on-Earth issue that busies up the show's opening episodes painfully, as well as perhaps a girl or two who might be able to look past Tomoki's simplistic navel-gazing and go on a date with him, but mostly the thing is about this miserly child and the sex-crazed fembot angel who serves him.
I'll say this: The show looks gorgeous. Heaven's Lost Property: The Complete Series is a bona fide turkey in terms of story structure and any kind of emotional authenticity, but of Funimation's late-2011 releases, it has a punchy, impressionistic feel to it that this Blu-ray Disc edition nails. It's enough to buoy the series for a single viewing, but when it comes to long-term rewatchability, this thing is milquetoast all the way.