Reviews for Dominion

Dominion Tank Police is a timeless classic from the master himself, Shirow Masamune. It quickly became one of my favorite ovas ever and it's rewatch value has never diminished, even after watching it for the last 14 years. STORY: A very simple story about policemen who patrol the city, keeping it safe from crime............IN BIG-ASS FREAKING TANKS!!! That concept alone had me sold! A young lady cop, Leona Ozaki, joins and she gets the cutest, most badass little tank you've ever seen!! The primary targets are Buaku and Annapuna and Umipuma, two sexy, gun-crazy catgirls. It's so incredibly simple and so effective at thesame time. Most of the story probably takes place in the manga, which I can't get my hands on, so there isn't much I can say about plot aside from Buaku's past, so if it suffers from anything, this would probably be it, but it's not too much of a concern. You won't feel left out of anything significant.

ART: The animation is very good for it's time and still holds up well today. The character designs are colorful and vibrant, in stark contrast to the gray-blue, smog-covered tone of the city. The design of the tanks look amusing, especially Bonaparte (I think I spelled that right). A highlight is Liutenant Britian's facial expressions when he's screaming and barking out orders. This Masamune never fails with captivating backgrounds or great character designs. A definite win.

Sound: The english dub is classic and gets funnier with repeated viewing. Watching the criminals bicker with each other in the museum is just friggin hilarious. The musical score is nice and transitions well from scene to scene, so you can't get tired of the BGM.

CHARACTER: Every personality in this show is just just fantastic, from Leona's mother-like affection for her tank, Britian's insanity, the Police Chief's screaming and ranting over files and paperwork, to the perfect chemistry amongst the crooks and their banter back and forth along with their hair-brained schemes that barely work, everything just works with these characters, even the bit player in the police force.

ENJOYMENT: This is a fun one to watch anytime. It has high rewatch value off of it's humor alone, and it's only two episodes long, so you won't lose any time at all. The opening theme will get stuck in your head after a while, but it's kind of catchy in a late 80's, early 90's sort of way, like Captain Planet or something (maybe not the best example, but have you tried to drill it out of your head?)

OVERALL: This is just entertainment all around. I can recommend this anyone, but the language may be a bit harsh. The first episode is drop dead hilarious, the second episdoe takes a shift from humor to tell a story about the bad guys, but it's just as entertaining. It's a must have in any anime collection.

Pretty decent short ova. Lots of action and some comedy. On the whole I enjoyed the series pretty much, good to have shorter series to watch that arent 200+ eps marathons. Since it is an ova there isnt much character development and we barely get to know who they are. Although they are mostly stereotypes so it doesn't matter that much. For the age of the anime, the animation and sounds are decent enough to watch without any complaints. It made me laugh at some parts, wich is enough for me to recommend the series to anyone.

Funny...A Little Confusing in places.....Loving the 80's 'Streets-Of-Ragey' Music over the battle scenes......Every Character has something to bring.......Very Silly at times but the better for it.

Dominion is a bit of an outlier. Usually, action anime (or any anime under 12 episodes) likes to get to the point, establish a general story and aesthetic, have a bunch of firefights, and then resolve the conflict, but Dominion decided to do the very opposite. The story is told from the perspective of the Tank Police, whose name is rather self explanatory, they do regular police things (bureaucracy and homicide), but they have tanks. As for the tanks themselves, I can’t say I’m a fan of the design, I’m not sure what science fiction mumbojumbo they came up with to explain why they look likethat, but these tanks look more like inflatable dummy tanks than actual tanks. Another major issue is that these tanks are almost never used, you see them plenty, but for the most part it’s just decorative scenery that doesn’t get properly implemented. Of all the combat encounters in Dominion, only a fraction actually utilised the tanks. Sometimes that’s because it’s in a particular time and place in which there are no tanks, but more often than not it seems the Tank Police use their tanks as regular patrol cars, and seem to completely forget that they have big guns on them they should probably be using. In fact, the main character, Leona, has a customised tank, which usually coincides with being a lot better than all the other tanks, but it’s not really, it never saves the day, the police probably would have gotten more done if they stopped using tanks, and just started carrying rocket launchers in their patrol cars. For a unit with a psychotic squad leader who likes to blow everything up, they are remarkably patient with when they decide to actually open fire.

Secondarily, for such a short series, the plot is needlessly convoluted, for a four episode series, just one macguffin would have gotten the job done, a central figure in this story is Greenpeace (a person, not the organisation), who isn’t mentioned by name until the last episode, and isn’t actually seen until it’s about 5 minutes from ending. When it comes down to it, a more effective story would be showing the sort of crime that actually lead to the formation of the Tank Police, having a criminal organisation commit bank robberies and drug trafficking and the like would make the most sense to me, but instead they’re stealing things for some shadow government who have been engaging in a several hundred year conspiracy. They say at one point that in this city there’s an emergency every 36 seconds, but we never see it, the only people who commit crimes are this one fat bloke and his two catgirls, and I have no reason to believe that there’s anyone else engaging in criminal enterprise. There is more concrete detail about ecological damage than there is about crime, which is a bit backwards for a show about police.

But, it’s not irredeemable, the firefights, though lacking majorly in tanks, are certainly enjoyable, the fighting’s well orchestrated and there’s definitely a good sense of scale, it’s hard to be that disinterested when you’ve got buildings collapsing and that, and also it’s the 80s so the soundtrack is peak as. Dominion certainly isn’t bad, but it could be a lot better, and they could start by designing tanks that don’t look pure gobshite.

Dominion is an extremely strange anime. Masamune Shirow has many ideas and many things to say. Anybody who knows more than the superficial about him knows that he's hard to neatly categorise as an author. Ghost in the Shell is a thought-provoking milestone in the medium coming from that mind and although Dominion is also thought-provoking, it is so in a much meta-textual way. I will presently attempt to articulate why. From the very second it starts, Dominion appears to present itself as biting commentary on police brutality and excess. The first minutes are spent hearing (voice-off) a heated discussion between a police chief and themayor of that city. As the mayor struggles to keep her composture and argue rationally about the necessity for the police to minimise civilian casualties stemming from police misuse of extreme force (via military tanks deployed in the streets), the chief uses screaming, bombastic arguments and logical fallacies to argue for the necessity of even more force than that, less oversight and, of course, more funding. You could have easily think that this was a very facile caricature of American law enforcement following certain events in the mid-2010s but this story was written in the mid 80s, which in itself is both remarkably prescient and quite depressing.

If you thought that this was setting the stage for a grim analogy on the corruption observed and expected in law enforcement, you may be surprised to find out it's not the case as they are the protagonists of the series. Although the series does parody (to a rather great comedic effect) the police forces' ineptitude, cruelty, and proneness to violence and excess, nowhere besides that intro dialogue and a blink-and-you-miss-it part near the end are those traits condemned, let alone met with consequences. Even the sympathetic rookie that we could have expected to become a motor for change, or at the very least a permanently horrified straight-woman, does little else than pushing against the (also expected) prevalent sexism in the institution, before being widely embraced by it when she proved she could be as bad or even worse as the lot of them.

I was constantly puzzled trying to figure out what was Shirow trying to say with this piece. Does he ultimately agree with the police stance that the necessity for their existence justifies their excesses no matter how bad? Or did he simply choose, for some reason, a complex real life issue as the backdrop for his sci-fi comedy featuring a gang of irredeemable fuck-ups? Then you have to add to this a rather significant amount of the runtime (for its scant 4 episodes) spent in intriguing worldbuilding (that sort of goes nowhere) or almost a whole episode worth of delving into the main antagonist's backstory for a dramatic and gripping commentary on the inhuman lenghts to which humans can go in the name of scientific progress as way to understand their own existence.

Having said that, by the end, the story is expertly told and wrapped up satisfactorily. In short, it is a good watch but one that might leave more questions in your mind than answers were received. And, I posit, maybe that's not a bad thing.

For me, there's two kinds of anime I like: The kind that's just good TV but from Japan (uncommon because good TV itself is hard to find), and batshit insanity that could only have been written by an Easterner fried off his block on samurai spirits and also alcohol. Anyways, Tank Police is an OVA set in a distant future city where the corrupt government has given law enforcement armored vehicles and carte blanche to fight against crime, there's a pollution cloud that means you can't stay outside for too long without a respirator, and the remains of scientific experiments gone wrong are on the streetsblowing up hospitals. In case it wasn't obvious, it's a raunchy comedy with a side of fun action.

If you watch all four episodes totaling about two hours, you will not leave a better or wiser person with a new perspective. You will, however, be unable to forget that the main character has her climactic showdown and character arc finish because the entire rest of the tank fleet got immobilized by a dildo minefield. That sentence right there is pretty much a measuring stick of how much you will enjoy the rest of the series.

Dominion Tank Police is strange. It has good animation, well designed characters, good music, and good world building. But it is so slow. It is first and foremost a comedy series, and while there are bits of action they are mostly used for comedic effect. (In my opinion the comedy has not aged particularly well, but because of its subjectivity this does not affect the overall review.) The characters while well designed are underutilized. The overall narrative is contrived. There are a lot of good ideas in the series but they never come together. Dominion Tank Policeultimately struggles to find an identity, and while there are many positives they don't outweigh the negatives.

This is another OVA that I've heard good things about for a long time now. It consists of three releases. Dominion Tank Police, a 4 episode OVA from 1986, New Dominion Tank Police, a 6 episode OVA from 1993, and then Tank S.W.A.T. 01 from 2006, and I watched all of it. The first couple of series were pretty good. Nothing fantastic, but I enjoyed them. It actually had remarkable similarities with Bad Bull 34, which I watched not long ago. Not entirely, Dominion doesn't have a plethora of nudity or fanservice, (only minimal amounts), plus criminals being blowninto thousands of bloody pieces with single bullets, or crazy stuff like one of the cops strapping grenades to his nuts. Some might say it's that stuff which makes Mad Bull 34 so much fun, and I would agree, although the absence of that kind of outlandish material doesn't make this anime bad I don't think.

Charles Brenten, one of the main characters of this anime has a lot in common with John Estes, one of the two main characters from Mad Bull 34. They're both over the top, loose canon style cops that take "the book" and burn it to ashes while laughing before doing whatever it takes to bring criminals to justice, property damage and innocent casualties be damned. He wouldn't strap grenades to his nuts, but he's still fun. And so is the actual main character in this series, Leona Ozaki. She's also similar to Daizaburo Edi-Ban from Mad Bull 34 in the sense that she's initially at odds with her over the top partner at the start of the series, but unlike him it takes a lot less coaxing for her to come over to "his side' so to speak. By the time of New Dominion Tank Police, there's very little difference between their methods in chasing criminals, property damage and all.

I also noticed an increase in visual quality between the first and second series. It kind of makes sense because one's from the 80s and the other is from the 90s, although I think the animation in New Dominion Tank Police is better than most of the OVAs that I've watched lately. Unfortunately the same can not be said for the 2006 OVA. It's actual garbage. The visuals are some of the absolute worst CGI I've ever seen in an anime, and no that's not an exaggeration. It's garbage. According to MyAnimeList it's a sequel that follows the same characters, but I wouldn't know that by watching it. Not just because the characters look like nothing you'd recognize as the legacy characters, but because I genuinely did not understand what was happening.

I have such nostalgia for Dominion Tank Police, as I saw it for the first time back in 1994 at 12 years old when it premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel during anime week. It turned out to be one of my favorites of that week, and I've loved it ever since. Having the ability to see the unedited version over the years, in its original language, has only increased my fondness for it. The gags all hit, it's super funny, it has incredibly memorable characters, the animation is excellent, the story is fun; if you thought Masamune Shirow could only do hard cyberpunk the likesof Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, and Black Magic M-66, this will open up your eyes. There's a reason this one is considered one of the hallmarks of classic, old-school anime.

The Tank Police are insufferable human garbage and Leona is worst for her contradictory "it's the human thing to do!" spiel, yet the absurdist self awareness (or complete lack thereof) is the formula for entertainment. It asks you to stop thinking, sit back, and enjoy while the characters revel in their vices. I have to commend the latter half of the OVA in particular, which focus on the recurring "villain" Buaku. His obsession with the past and eventual coming to terms with his own existence seems to have had a great influence on how Shirow approached the philosophies of artificial life in Ghost in the Shell.Dominion is worth watching for that alone. That, and pre-2000's feral catgirl designs.

Dominion, better known as Dominion Tank Police, can best be described as an utterly goofy depiction of a truly dystopian world. Beginning with the story, the viewer is presented with the backdrop of Newport City. This is a place where a crime occurs every 36 seconds, all while most of the earth is enveloped in a toxic "bacterial cloud', and the police ride around in tanks and torture suspects for fun. However, it is all played for comedy, which in its own way adds to the bizarre, irreverent charm this show puts on. The story itself is disjointed and focusesmore on gags and jokes than the progression of any kind of plot. There are two separate storylines which are covered 2 episodes a piece, and they're both unceremoniously dropped, bereft of any satisfying conclusion.

The art is probably the strong point here, but that's relative only to the rest of the show and not a general statement of quality. The world is designed in an utterly unique style, with a striking, maverick art direction. This really shines through with the backgrounds, where Newport City embodies this grungy urban squalor while still preserving that punchy visual optimism characteristic of the 80s. The best aspect of the art by far is the architectural design of Newport City, where many buildings feature this bizarre asymmetric style reminiscent of bacterial mats, while others embody a more classic cyberpunk skyscraper vibe. The character design, while characteristic of their decade, lack a certain polish which makes them feel cheap by comparison. Put simply, it feels as though this whole anime is in the same artistic genre as the Metal Slug games.

The sound, however, is a little rougher than everything else. Aside from a catchy OP, the music is goofy and often fails to compliment the tone of a given scene. Even when it tries to be deep or cerebral, it just comes off as corny. This is all not to mention it is the most dated aspect of the OVA, showcasing the worst of 80s sound design, with shallow, cheap sounds of life and uninspired voice work.

The characters are broadly inoffensive, meeting all standards of quality for their time, though nobody really stands out. Overall, Dominion is a weird couple hours, and I can only really recommend it if you are uniquely passionate about the 80s, tanks, or both.