Kiddy Grade: Ignition

Kiddy Grade: Ignition is the movie form of the first quarter of the Kiddy Grade series. A summary movie which tries its best to capture the soul of Kiddy Grade, and to a point it achieves it. If this were a review of the Kiddy Grade series you would find the scores to be somewhat higher, but alas this movie at least in my opinion doesn't stand up as well. When watching the movie, I find myself questioning it's purpose. The first section of the movie does pretty much everything I would expect from it, it steals content from the first few episodes of theseries, and the ending section does from the last section of the first story arc. All on all I found this to be rather enjoyable, although some parts of story seem misplaced, probably due to deleted scenes. These sections of the movie bring back quite fond memories and my knowledge of the series worked well enough to fill in the missing bits. That said, I would have been better off just watching episodes 1,2,9,10,11, it would have probably flowed better. What perhaps is the worst part of the movie is the clip show in the middle. After the ending of the 2nd story, the movie throws up some music and plays a 10 minute video montage of 2-8 second clips from episodes 3 though 8. There is enough clips to give a somewhat piecemeal summary of the missing episodes, I dont think there is enough there for people to get more than a rough grasp of what went on, unless you've actually seen the episodes the clips are from. One of movies better points is that during the first arc of the series there was a series of episodes which did little other than to serve as slight character development and to give the watcher a greater idea of the universe, in fact that is probably why when making the movie they decided it would be fine to cutting those episodes out completely. The movie concentrates on the initial character introduction and then skips to when the series begins to get serious. If by this point you have any doubt on my position, I personally don't believe I could recommend that anyone should watch this movie unless they had refused to watch the series, and this was the only way I could convince them to give the story a chance. That said I believe the story itself deserves some credit and I place that as being in my top 10 anime series of all time.