Original, interesting, pretty and enjoyable.
These are the things that
LaMB is not.
In 2007
Animax held a scriptwriting contest, inviting anime fans to submit their stories with the prospect of turning them into an anime show for TV. Carmelo S. J. Juinio, a writer from the Phillippines, was one of the finalist who submitted the script that became the basis for LaMB.
The story of LaMB takes place on a desert planet called Cerra. The prison system on Cerra has been replaced with
lamination, a technology that puts criminals in sex-ed out, transparent body fitting suits that inhibits their freewill and the ability to open their mouth. These criminals, referred to as
Lambs, are then put back into the society as labors (or slaves). Like a bad marketing campaign, the individials who engage the services of the Lambs are affectionately called
Sheperds.
The show feature some (relatively) big names such as
The Click Five and
Simple Plan who provided the songs,
Van Ness Wu and
Josie Ho for the character voices and
Vivienne Tam who provided the designs for some of the dresses.
As a CG artist, let me just get this out of the way: LaMB is not good to look at, to put it nicely. The show is produced by Peach Blossom Studio in Singapore, who used
Flash for the 2D animation. The excuse for this was given by one of the staffs during an interview: The process of creating anime the Japanese way was too complex and time consuming, so they opted for Flash and promised to deliver something new and unique. It was probably another way to say "Animax spent all their budget getting big names onboard, so we can't afford to spend it on making good quality animations.". There are some 3D scenes, but even those are poorly implemented. I wondered how difficult was it to actually get a Japanese animation studio to do it in the first place.
The character voice overs are also rather unconvincing. The delivery of the dialogue is emotionless and inappropriate at best, downright cringeworthy at worst. The music is nothing to shout about either; Why they got western bands to perform the songs, when there are perfectly fine artists in Asia, is anybody's guess.
Admittedly I was at first intrigued by the idea of lamination as well as an Animax original production. But when more and more footage of the show began to surface, I started to get a bad vibe about it. Those feelings were soon proven correct when it was finally aired it last week. To Carmelo S. J. Juinio's credit, the premise of the show was quite promising on paper, only to be let down by poor execution.
LaMB is launched on several platforms including a website, graphic novels, mobile content and a video game.
