When the name Katsuhiro Otomo crops up, fond memories of The West™’s first anime breakthrough hit Akira come flooding back like repressed psychic powers. His characters designs, through Domu, to Akira and continuing into the 3D generation with Steamboy are distinctive and easily recognisable. In Japan Freedom is hugely famous and bears his signature character designs, but is that where the similarity ends?

Although it was actually directed by Shuhei Morita, Otomo is the big swinging paintbrush in the anime world having proved his mettle (and bankability) with the aforementioned epics and his is the name most people associate with Freedom. He even turned his hand to live-action directing in Japan when he adapted Mushishi, a truly visionary series and one of Japan’s favourite anime that frequently appears in “best ever” anime countdowns. If his name appears on a franchise, it’s going to get noticed. By asking Otomo to design the characters for Freedom, Nissin Cup Noodle (the original Japanese Pot Noodle) got a large dose of his magic without having to pay him to direct the series. It was an inspired marketing move.

But therein lies the problem, modern anime aren’t just TV shows or movies anymore. They are increasingly becoming high concept, multi-million yen franchises. Huge unwieldy caravans overflowing with hangers on and sponsors. This time, however, the anime wasn’t sponsored by Cup Noodle to allow its continued existence. This time the anime was created by Nissin to celebrate the birthday of its culinary master/deathstroke, the Cup Noodle. This is an extended commercial for Cup Noodle that masquerades as a TV show. We have gone back through the looking glass created when washing powder companies made the early soap operas.

To add to the commodity inbreeding, popular Japanese pop singer Utada Hikaru released an admittedly catchy song called “This is love” that was aggressively advertised alongside the series’ formidable campaign and has also proved a massive karaoke hit. For a year or so one could barely walk through a subway station or switch on a TV in Japan without encountering “This is love”, Freedom or Nissin Cup Noodles tangling tendrils in every advertising medium you could imagine.

It’s hard to know whether to respond to this product as a commercial or simply to bite the bullet, live in the now and accept the fact that commercials became product placements became the showmercial. There is no longer a boundary between the commercials and the TV show. If you won’t watch our commercials, we’ll simply buy your favourite shows, kill them and make better ones.

No matter where in the galaxy Freedom’s cyber cast find themselves, they are always near enough to a kettle to make themselves a refreshing cup of noodles to slurp enthusiastically while leaning against cool-looking, Otomo-designed futuristic vehicles. If the boy-racer/otaku crowd didn’t snap up Cup Noodles after watching this show then advertising is officially ineffective and human beings are immune from the power of suggestion.

The animation is CGI with hand-painted cell style textures wrapped around them. For years now animators have been trying to bring some of the charm and warmth of cel animation to those blocky polygonal characters and this is the most successful iteration seen thus far. The characters are natural and expressive, their movement as real as one would expect from motion capture and all in all it feels like a natural progression from the style of Akira. Whatever your misgivings, you are watching a well-funded and extremely technically proficient animated show.

The story is your typical sci-fi fare. In the year 2041 mankind created their first moon colony, but after a freak cataclysm on the Earth devastated human civilisation the moon republic built a domed Megalopolis called Eden and took it old-school with some Japanese-style isolation policies. Unsuspecting street-urchin/hovercraft racer Takeru is about to take a break from making rival street gangs eat his dust (sound familiar?) to uncover the truth about the founding of Eden and the subculture that is struggling to uncover it.

The moon dwellers are living in a The Island-like environment in which they are told it is contaminated and uninhabited. They cannot even glimpse at or web search for the Earth without the authorities showing up in the fascistmobile and/or unleashing the robotic spiders. Everybody knows that future totalitarian states just love robotic spiders.

When our hero, Takeru, finds a message in a bottle, written on the back of a photo and sent by a young girl in a rich blue world he makes it his goal to reach the Earth and/or the girl at all costs. And of course those costs will be high if the oppressive fascist future government and they’re all-pervading supervision techniques have their dastardly way.

The lead character, Takeru, embodies the standard anime protagonist traits. Like Akira’s Kaneda, he has more adventurous spirit than his timid, Tetsuo-like best friend, more ganbatte than anyone twice his size and an unquenchable desire to see the girl and the Earth, the two of which he has conflated into one unified symbol of hope. A verdant and fertile Earth mother that makes him cyber-blush with almost every encounter. The viewer urges him on in his quest, if for no other reason than the visual lushness of the Earth compared to the barren and squalid moon environments are a truly gorgeous breath of ocular air. The series gets more interesting as it progresses.

The cliches are abundant however. Freedom even has its own “wa-re-wa-re” group (a group of old men who spend all their time in flying chairs, floating around in ridiculously vaulted halls, dispassionately debating the necessity of being absolute bastards to the human race for their own good while referring to themselves as wareware, or “we”, which is a Japanese word that seems to be reserved for wise old animated men). If you’ve seen Appleseed or almost any other futuristic manga you’ll start to see the pattern. It’s fun to speculate on what it says about Japan’s attitude to its ageing population if all of it’s animated old boys are such misguided misanthropists.

Another interesting interpretation of the movie is that the dysfunctional and stifled communities of the moon tend to be mono-racial, whereas the fledgling Earth, by contrast, is populated by vivid, lively and eccentric characters of deliberately diverse racial backgrounds. One could read this as a call to bring about an end to Japan’s lingering cultural isolation and welcome its entry into the melting pot that is the 21st century gene pool.

Critical readings aside, Freedom is a visual tour de force and it’s being distributed by Bandai outside of Japan. Of Rice and Zen will be an affiliate selling the spectacular forthcoming Blu-ray release in November. Not only will it feature English and French subtitles but it will also feature dual audio tracks in Japanese and English. This is extraordinarily rare for a domestic release. Even more excitingly the collection will feature a brand new episode made specifically for the Blu-ray release called The Prologue. It will also include footage from the American release of this multimedia behemoth as well as a comic book. It promises to be a spectacular collector’s item. If you preorder it from the link below you can save ¥5040 (24%) on the list price. If your Japanese isn’t up to scratch simply hit the button on the top right of the page to translate it into Japanese.

In the meantime if you can get your hands on it you’ll find it visually spectacular glimpse at the state of play in the anime world. It is a beautifully animated treat and comes with some great extra features about the origin of space exploration and as such it comes recommended.