Review for Freedom: The Complete Collection - Collector's Edition (Review)
Tuesday, 4th October 2011, 16:10

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Introduction
There are a whole lot of firsts with this disc. It's not the first anime licence rescued in the UK, but that's a rare enough occurrence to count on the fingers of one hand. But it is the first Blu-ray anime to be licence rescued, indeed back in 2009, it was practically the first anime series to be released in high definition in the West. That happened so long ago, that it was initially released on HD-DVD, before making the jump to the eventual winner of the format wars, Blu-ray. It was Bandai Visual who released it in the US, the boutique brand releasing anime directly from Japan, films like Akira, The Wings of Honneamise, and Gunbuster, which all made their HD debuts on that label and at usually exorbitant prices. The Freedom OVA was released one episode per disc on six HD-DVD discs (The double length episode 7 was never released on HD-DVD) including the last ever HD-DVD ever commercially released in the US, and then went for something of a Dolby TrueHD sonic upgrade when all seven episodes were re-released on 4 dual layer Blu-ray discs with copious extras. The US also saw a DVD release much later, but Freedom has the notable distinction of being the first high definition anime released in the UK, when Beez brought the boxset across here, retailing back then for £70. The downside was that being a Bandai Visual product, it was strictly limited in numbers, while the Blu-ray market for anime back then was almost non-existent. Not a lot of people saw Freedom.

Manga Entertainment have licence rescued Freedom, now that more people are hi-def capable, and are giving it a second chance. After all, with none other than Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame associated with the production, it really ought to be seen by as many anime fans as possible, and at a budget price of £34.99, half what the original boxset retailed for, and with the Collector's Edition Blu-ray also including the DVD release on 2 discs, as well as a bonus set of art cards, you certainly are getting your money's worth. The cause for concern is that while the original release was on four dual layer discs, Manga Entertainment and Australia's Madman Entertainment, from where these discs are sourced, have found room for all seven episodes, three and a half hours worth of high definition video, plus copious extra features all on a single dual-layer Blu-ray disc. Something had to give for the economy, and I'm almost dreading to find out just what.

It's the 23rd Century. Man was about to embark on his grandest adventure, having left the confines of Earth, established bases in orbit and on the Moon, and about to terraform Mars. Then in 2101, the Freeport space station fell from orbit, crashing into Earth, devastating the environment and wrecking the climate. The people that survived the accident practically wiped each other out in the subsequent wars, fighting over what few resources remained. The terraforming project was abandoned, and man retreated to the far side of the moon, where the Eden base was. Since then it has become the last surviving bastion of mankind, millions of inhabitants living and prospering peacefully in carefully regulated domes, following constructive, organised, and carefully regulated lives.

That's the ideal of course, but for some, such strictures are a little too stifling, and as usual it's the teenagers. Takeru wants to race bikes in order to impress girls, and with his friends Kazuma and Bismarck, he's souping up a battered old tricycle to take on his archrival Taira. Of course over-exuberance gets him into trouble, and he winds up doing community service outside the domes. He happens to be there when what looks like a meteorite impacts nearby, but examining it he finds a collection of manmade objects, a message in a bottle, a picture of a girl and a couple of lines stating that Earth is safe, and asking if anyone is out there. The government of Eden has been lying to them. To learn the truth, Takeru and his friends will need a little Freedom. Fortunately there is still some in Eden, literally, a small part of the base called Freedom where those who don't conform to societal ideals are tolerated to live. An old astronaut friend of Bismarck's named Alan runs the settlement, and he may know how to get the boys to a world that everyone has been telling them has been dead for a hundred years.

All seven episodes of Freedom are presented on a single dual layer Blu-ray disc from Manga Entertainment. The dual play collection also contains the series on DVD, the episodes on one disc, and the extras on another.

Picture
Freedom gets a 1080p 1.78:1 widescreen transfer onto this Blu-ray disc. This is where I thought that I would see some effect of having squeezed four discs worth of material onto just one, and I did read up on the technical reviews of the original release to get some idea of what to expect. One review on AnimeonDVD mentioned that the video bitrate for the show hovered around the low 30s, and sure enough when I switched on the player's bitrate meter, this encode of Freedom offered around half that. Of course numbers don't necessarily equate to what is on screen, but I did notice some digital banding and more annoying was the aliasing around fine detail. There was some nauseating shimmer around a vertical pan in the prologue, but thereafter it was only the finest of line detail that would suffer aliasing. This I thought was a further indication of compression, but reading reviews like that on Home Cinema Digest revealed that reviewers had noted these issues on the original release as well. I guess that has more to it being an early anime Blu-ray with the encoders yet to work out their art. So it seems that this single disc Blu-ray offers a similar visual experience to that offered by the first set, although I'll let someone who gets hold of both releases have the final say on that.

The anime itself is stupendous quite frankly. It takes a leaf from films like Vexille and Appleseed and delivers computer generated, cel shaded characters, but Freedom's cel shaded characters blows those of the other films away. It's because they adhere much more closely to the anime style, look more like traditional 2D characters, and you see that the CG animation has really only been used to get them moving and interacting with their environments. Otherwise, this may as well be a traditional 2D animation. The character designs may be traditional, but the richness and complexity of the world design is astounding. Again, comparing it a recent CG space anime epic, Fumihiko Sori's TO, it may lack the attention to detail and the sci-fi grandiosity, but Freedom offers a lived in, appealing and very tactile universe. Its technological creations and environments may be simpler, but somewhat perversely, this makes them feel more real. It's because they help you forget the technicalities of the animation and let you appreciate the story.

The images used in this review are supplied by the PR, and aren't necessarily representative of the final Blu-ray disc.

Sound
So here's how you find the room for all that HD footage on one disc. You ditch the soundtracks. The original Freedom OVA release had three Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. The menu for this disc mistakenly lists the choice between DTS-HD MA English and Japanese. In reality, what you get is DTS 5.1 English and Japanese, with optional translated English subtitles. Of all possible lossy soundtracks, a full 1.5Mb bitrate DTS audio track is probably the best to have, but those with discerning ears and suitable audio equipment are going to miss the lossless audio. I have to say though that the DTS was powerful enough and impressive enough to have my ears grinning during the action sequences. The race sequences were astounding, and the launch scenes really managed to invigorate my subwoofer.

I opted as always for the Japanese audio, and it was here that I came across the collection's biggest flaw. The Japanese audio is out of sync on episode 4. It lags behind the animation by a significant fraction of a second. If that isn't all, the audio in both English and Japanese is out of sync in the double length episode 7. It isn't as immediately apparent as the flaw in episode 4, but it's just as annoying. In case it's a player specific/firmware issue, I watched it on a Panasonic SC-BT330, but since the Japanese and English audio remained in sync for the other episodes, I tend to doubt that. It was distracting enough for me to eject the disc, and watch the DVD episode instead. It's the sort of technical glitch that really annoys.

Other than this whopping great elephant in the room of a problem, the original language audio is just fine, with the characters appropriately cast and performed. I sampled the English dub as well, and found that too to be of a high standard, although with the technical quality of the animation so much higher than that of traditional 2D animation, I found that lip sync, even when the audio was correctly in step with the visuals, wasn't as easy to match as conventional lip flaps. The subtitles are timed accurately and free of error.

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