Last Exile

This is the best anime series I've seen in a little while. It started out extremely strong, and dipped a little bit after that for a while, but overall left a strong, nice impression. What's immediately eye-catching is the unique setting, in a world where the different nations are still under hereditary rule and military conflicts take place between giant airships that assault each other with bombardments of rockets and lines of riflemen on deck. Instead of normal jets or biplanes or whatever, fighter pilots and couriers fly in vehicles called vanships which look like they'd never get airborne in a million years, but have a lot of personality. There's also this crazy unknown technology called Exile which requires a small girl to activate, just so you know it's an anime.

What I liked most about the show was the charm and sense of wonder in the beginning, as the main characters Claus and Lavie take on simple delivery jobs and fly in races to scrape a living together, but things change once they land on a certain ship that has a certain connection to their past and stuff starts happening. Anime like this is so serialized that episodes are basically chapters in a novel. Most American shows with running plots still usually focus on one specific idea or story per episode, and Last Exile sort of does that too, it just feels like they took a long movie and broke it into 22 minute chunks. It gets bogged down in the central conflict for a while, but by the end the original feeling returns as it concludes very nicely before the feel-good coda. Like a lot of foreign television it only lasts for a short while, but it's fun for the duration.