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Planetes is a… complicated series.

I don’t think it’d be appropriate to write about Planetes without mentioning its setting. The story takes place in a 2075, in which mankind has successfully colonized the Moon, and travel from Earth to there and to space stations is considered mundane. The science fiction is on the “hard” side of things and most of it is believable. Planetes doesn’t spend a whole lot of time world-building, opting instead to let the features of this world come out naturally through the course of the story, and it works. Overall, this is a fun, compelling near-future world.

But a good setting is not enough to support a show. It’s what takes place within that counts, and this is where Planetes shines. The show starts off as a work comedy, following the daily lives of a team of debris collectors, the Debris Section of a large conglomerate called Technora. Debris collection in space is serious business, because the extremely high speeds involved can make the tiniest objects into deadly projectiles. Indeed, the very first scene of the show shows a space passenger liner being taken down by a single screw. Still, these departments are considered lower class, and its employees are not paid particularly well or given much respect. They’re the janitors or garbage collectors of space.

Within the Debris Section are the protagonists Ai Tanabe (played excellently by Satsuki Yukino - you might know her better as the Sonozaki twins from the Higurashi series, or, for the older crowd, Milly Thompson from Trigun), a naive young woman who is excited to just be in space, and Hachirota “Hachimaki” Hoshino, a slightly older man, a 3-year veteran of the job and a cynic who feels stuck in this dead end job despite his dream of one day being captain of his own spaceship. The show also follows their international circle of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who also live in the same space station. These include the Russian Yuri Mihairokov and American Fee Carmichael of the Debris Section, Hachimaki’s ex-girlfriend Claire Rondo from a fictional South American country named El Tanika, and Hachimaki’s close friend Cheng-Shin Kho (I’m guessing Korean based on the name).

While the first half of the show did’t strive for much with its plot, I was consistently impressed by how well it built up up the characters, showing who they really were, their dreams, fears, and baggage. It was simply fun to watch the evolution and strengthening of the complex relationships these characters had with each other, particularly the budding love-hate relationship between the two protagonists. I had been made to fall in love with these characters, to form a relationship with them, simply by spending time with them in their everyday lives.

I was happy enough with this, as the level of depth seen in the characters of Planetes was a rarity indeed. But I was especially impressed by how the show used all these relationships to make the final act of the show that much more impactful and meaningful. A little past the halfway point, Hachimaki quit his debris hauler job in order to seek a position on the elite crew of the Von Braun on humanity’s first manned mission to Jupiter, a mission that would take him on a 7 year round trip. At the same time, the anti-space terrorist organization Space Defense Front was at work planning an attack that would sabotage the Von Braun and use it as a weapon to blackmail the world governments. I won’t provide any spoilers for how either of these issues was resolved.

Here was where the political landscape of this world came to greater focus. The 2075 of this show was one in which the inequality that plagued the world back in 2004 and is even worse now had only continued to grow. I recall a particularly poignant scene in which one of the terrorists compares taking the lives of 120,000 on a lunar city to the millions of people dying every year on Earth due to poverty, war, and lack of access to health care. Though I was thoroughly disgusted by the actions of the Space Defense Front, as anyone would be, I found myself also feeling sympathetic to their cause.

There was a sort of parallelism at play here between the humanity’s balancing of resources to expand constantly outward with solving the problems it already had, and Hachimaki’s balancing of his desire to keep moving forward with the relationships he had already built with the people around him. And while the former, more grand, struggle was fun to watch and told very well, the latter, more personal, struggle was where the show spent most of its time and where the show shot its way to greatness.

In the end, Planetes made no grand statements, offered no easy solutions. It was, in its core, about the human condition, the challenges we all face simply from being alive and needing to find our place in the world. The show exploited its setting to its fullest to accentuate and give meaning to Hachimaki’s personal struggles. Indeed, Planetes was a fine example of a science fiction world used correctly, to enhance the narrative, instead of serving merely as a pretty backdrop.

Planetes is also a fine example of how, as they say, writing trumps all. Production values were good, not great. There was pretty much no hardware porn, perhaps a bit unexpected from such a hard scifi show. The character designs, like the setting, were pleasantly grounded in reality. The animation quality wasn’t much of an issue as there wasn’t much action to begin with, but what action there was looked fine. I should note that I watched this in 5.1 surround sound, and the show did use the surround to full effect for background noises to build atmosphere. The music, like the production, was good, not great. Not particularly memorable, except maybe the OP.

Planetes is a great show that starts off with a compelling setting and successfully builds an even more compelling narrative on top of it. I can honestly say I feel enriched for having watched it, and I don’t think there are enough series like that. It’s a bit of a rare creature among anime because it shows adult protagonists dealing with adult issues. And it does it as well as any work I’ve seen, anime or no (actually, if Noitamina were around in 2004, this show would have been a perfect fit).

9/10