Review for Freedom: The Complete Collection (Review)
Thursday, 6th October 2011, 15:52

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Introduction
Freedom is here at last, again. Beez Entertainment originally released it on Blu-ray, although that four-disc release was a strictly limited edition, hard to find now. Manga Entertainment have licence rescued Freedom, and are re-releasing it, this time with all the content squeezed onto a single Blu-ray disc. To give the package added value, Manga Entertainment release the Blu-ray as a dual play special edition, with the two-disc DVD edition, making its UK debut, included in the deluxe packaging, along with some very special art cards. You can also see Freedom on DVD without all that high definition nonsense if you want, as Manga will also release the Freedom DVD separately. This is the review of that DVD collection. The Blu-ray is reviewed elsewhere on the site.

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 dual layer DVD disc from Manga Entertainment. A second disc contains all the extra features.

Picture
I was scratching my head for a minute or two with this one. The image is clear and sharp, free of ghosting, blended frames, but runs exactly the same length of time as the Blu-ray, indicating an NTSC-PAL conversion. Frame advance eventually revealed how this transfer was created. It is the lowest, cheapest, and most expedient method of doing NTSC-PAL. Basically every 24th frame is duplicated to make the 25th frame necessary for PAL, without reducing the run time, or the image resolution. It looks great when paused, but judders constantly during playback, especially during pans and scrolls. It's not something that I would choose to watch, but I found that given enough time, I could tolerate it.

It's a shame about the standards conversion as the anime itself is stupendous quite frankly. With most anime these days getting proper PAL transfers, Freedom really should have had the same treatment. 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.

Sound
The DVD offers you audio in both DD 5.1 English and Japanese with translated English subtitles. The surround audio on this disc does offer a little presence and effect, giving a little immersion into the world of Freedom, but in comparison to the Blu-ray's DTS audio it sounds quite weedy and flat. 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 wasn't as easy to match as conventional lip flaps. The subtitles are timed accurately and free of error.

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