Kanata no Astra is an odd sort of series.  For something that seems so old-school and even derivative, it’s actually rather unique.  It’s a combination of a premise that could hardly be more familiar (at least if your experience extends to older anime and general hard science-fiction) with a tone that’s quite distinctive.  Maybe that’s the secret of its success – in a sense the characters act in a way that’s totally inappropriate for the situation they find themselves in, but they’re actually acting a lot like real kids (who can be masters at coping with drastic change) might act.

Having established the premise in last week’s double-wide premiere, Astra takes the show on the road as the story proper begins.  The first pit stop on the perilous and intricately-plotted journey home is Vilavurs, its surface covered by thick jungle.  There’s no shortage of life here, which is a blessing and a curse.  The kids need to find enough food and water at each planet they visit to last them until the next one, but of course any planet producing plants and animals can also produce something that will kill you.  Including the plants, either from the outside or the inside (though Zach eventually jury-rigs a whatsit to deal with the latter problem).

I do think there’s a certain amount of buy-in required for Kanata no Astra to work, and I’m not blaming anyone who doesn’t get there – I can only say that I did, and pretty quickly too.  The cast is facing death, but they’re facing it with irreverence and general childishness at times.  It makes a nice contrast to something like The Lord of the Flies (or Infinite Ryvius, which I think of as this series’ grumpy old uncle) and I think it’s more realistic than we might instinctively believe.  There’s also the fact that these children have a greater appetite for adventure than average to begin with – that’s why they were on this trip in the first place.

As the kids explore the surface of Villavurs, encountering trampoline trees and tur-gons and parachute flowers (this all kind of reminded me of AtLA), we get to know the cast a little better.  Aries has a photographic memory – and, we’ll learn later in the episode, a bizarre laugh (I couldn’t be happier with the way Minase Inori interpreted this seemingly trivial quirk from the manga – a manga where the quirks are actually a big part of the joy in the experience).  As for Quitterie Raffaëlli (Kurosawa Tomoyo), she’s a spoiled rich girl who’s bad at dealing with people – and one reason she’s so cruel to little sister Funicia (Kino Hina) is that the little girl was adopted from an orphanage.

This information comes courtesy of Zach, who reveals that he was one of Quitterie’s few childhood friends.  The problem with Q’s rather stereotypical tsuntsun behavior in this context is that her refusal to let Kanata be in charge is highly dangerous in a life and death situation – and his allowing himself to be baited by her into doing something foolish shows that neither one of them are really ready for prime time maturity-wise.  Indeed, the only one she seems to take a shine to is “the hot one”, Charce Lacroix (Nobunaga Shimazaki), who proves himself very useful with an encyclopedic knowledge of botany and a knack for bonding with the local fauna.

Make no mistake, the hero of the piece is Kanata – and he’s the one springing (literally) into action when the sudden growth of a trampoline tree thrusts Funicia into the clutches of a turgon (I’m confident that’s the first time that sentence has ever been written).  Anti-grav shoes are a must, but the fact is, Kanata is a trained decathlete – indeed, getting into space exploration was a way for him to escape the clutches of the father who was trying to vicariously live his lost athletic dreams through his son.  He manages to save Funicia with the help of the javelin Luca made during their earlier foray (making things is something Luca is very, very good at), but it’s only through sheer luck that Kanata doesn’t become the group’s first casualty himself.

Again, it’s the dichotomy between the seriousness of what’s happening (and Zack’s revelation to Kanata at the close of the episode shows they’re even more serious that they already seemed to be) and the goofy atmosphere that pervades most of the narrative that really makes Kanata no Astra such an interesting series to me.  More than anything else it’s fun, and the characters (all of whom have much more to them than we’ve yet seen) are mostly a very likeable bunch.  But all that makes me care enough that when things do get threatening, the series brings a genuine tension to the proceedings.  I dig it – but at the same time, I suspect it’s not for everybody.