Broken Blade: "The Time of Awakening"

On the continent of Curzon, technology is based on operators using their mental energy to manipulate 'quartz', a sort of magically-imbued type of crystal. When one nation covets the quartz mines of its neighbour, both nations go to war using quartz-powered giant robots named golems. When the kingdom of Krishna looks set to fall to the Athens Commonwealth, a 'un-sorcerer' named Rygart - who cannot manipulate quartz like others - discovers he is the only person capable of piloting a recently uncovered golem that is hundreds of years old.

Broken Blade (also known as Break Blade) is a strange anime. Rather than be released as a television series it was produced as a rapid-fire series of six short feature films that each ran briefly in Japanese cinemas before getting a DVD release shortly afterwards. As a result episode lengths vary, but seem to be around the 45-50 minute mark each. This unusual release schedule seems to have afforded the series a higher animation budget, or maybe more time to produce them. Whatever the reason, the result is that it has a pretty high standard of animation. It blends traditional cel animation with a small amount of CGI to create a story that visually pops off the screen. The giant robot (or 'mecha') battles in this first episode look great, and are extremely well choreographed and animated. Unfortunately that seems to be where its selling points end.