Anime: First Squad: The Moment of Truth

First Squad: The Moment of Truth is a 70 minute long movie from 2009, made by a Russian studio created for the purpose and Studio 4'C (as in 4 degrees). This anime has a lot of merits, but unfortunately there are also various things wrong with it, which is why its score on AniDB is accordingly low.

The project dates back to a 2005 clip, also called First Squad, that was animated by 4C. 4C is a studio that seems to specialise in making movies and clips and they made the original clip, so their input into this movie is only natural. I think that one of the reasons this movie came out this way was of the professional disagreements between the Russian and the Japanese directors and screenwriters. It would explain why a lot of the plot is rather jumbled up and the runtime is short for such a movie.

The animation in this anime is quite unique, but is of a fairly cheap standard. It is rather detailed most of the time, but it is not as fluid as one would expect. Its art style seems to be derived more from a comic one rather than anime, but is really a synthesis of both. This also means that a lot of it will be unusual to most anime viewers. There are also some quite cool bits in the anime, where the art style emulates Soviet wartime posters. In general, the movie looks and its direction are very close to that of a music video, which is not normally a good sign as that normally means that most of the staff are clip makers and not proper cinematographers.

The plot has some very good ideas, but it fails to duly execute them. The plot is set in the first years of war on the Eastern Front (or the Great Patriotic War) of World War II. This is quite novel, as there are no anime that I know of that depict this theatre even in the short length that this movie does, and stuff like Youjo Senki is hardly comparable to even the few battle scenes that this movie presents. The creators however have spiced up the plot by adding elements of the occult, whereby below the single largest conflict in history, a secret war between the Nazi SS and the Soviet NKVD is also taking place in the realm of the occult. I will say that this may be novel to anime, the idea itself is not new and many novels were written with similar themes. The plot could have been good, but the runtime is far too short. Because of this, the plot is rather messy and uneven. It does not help that the plot is also filled to the brim with info dumping essentially. In general, most people will be drawn to this anime because of the battle scenes that found their way to some videos. Honestly, I would be just fine if this anime was just about war and did not have the occult factor in it.

The characters are not developed nearly enough because of the runtime. The viewer is only half way through the movie introduced to the friends of the main character and they only fulfil certain functions in the plot. I think that the voice acting in this was of variable quality, which is an issue. I also think that a lot of people who do not speak Russian did not really like the fact that the movie was in Russian in some distributions. It is certainly unusual to have an anime have Russian as its primary casting language.

Overall, this movie fails to reach the high expectations required of such a powerful combination of themes. Watch this to see what could have been if more collaborations between anime and movie studios from outside of Japan happened more often or see the well made battle scenes that this movie offers.

Every now and again, there is an anime project done in conjunction with a country outside of Japan. With First Squad, the project was done in conjunction with Japanese animation studio Studio 4C and a Russian company Molot Entertainment. Molot Entertainment doesn’t seem to have done much else besides First Squad besides another animated film called Ivan about a post-apocalyptic world filled with magical creatures such as dragons From what I can find, the company seems to be focused on helping promote independent projects.

First Squad itself seems to have an interesting history by itself. Starting out as a music video in 2005 by both Studio 4C and Molot Entertainment, with the song for the music video done by MC Ligalize. It even won an award at the MTV Russian Music Awards for best hip-hop video in 2006. By 2007, the Russian studio behind the music video announced that they were working on a film adaptation of the music video.

2 years later, First Squad: Moment of Truth was released to the public. Apparently, is was well received enough in it’s home country of Russia that it even went on to win an award by the Kommersant newspaper’s prize. There was even a graphic novel adaptation the year after First Squad’s release. So with the surprisingly interesting history of First Squad out of the way, let’s have a closer look at it.

Set during World War II on the Eastern Front, a group of Nazi mystics plan to resurrect Baron von Wolff and his Teutonic Knights during the “Moment of Truth”, a moment that has appeared throughout various points in time that will determine the outcome of any significant conflict. To prevent this, Division Six of the Soviet Military intelligence has enlisted a group of young people with special abilities to fight the invading German armies and prevent the Nazi’s from reaching their goal.

The story follows a young clairvoyant girl named Nadya, who survived a deadly air raid attack only to be left shell-shocked. While recovering from her concussion, she soon discovers that she has a new ability, the ability to foresee said “Moments of Truth”. Soon, she is taken into Division Six, and is trained along with the rest of the rest of the squad to prevent the Moment of Truth from being used by the Nazis to win the war.

Unfortunately the whole movie is a bit of a mixed bad. While the premise is great, the rest of the movie is a bit underwhelming. The fact that this movie is only an hour long is the thing that unfortunately drags this whole thing down. I’m going to assume that the team behind First Squad not having a bigger budget, not having enough time, or not having both is the reason that the length of this movie is so short. I don’t know how much better it would have been having an extra 15 minutes, but I feel like the whole thing would have definitely felt a lot smoother.

As a side effect of the length of this movie, the characters don’t always get the character development they need. Nadya pretty much gets most of it because she’s the main character, but the rest of the characters only get the most minor of character development, something that could have been solved with a longer length. The few action scenes that this movie gets are just OK, nothing to write home about.

There is actually two versions of First Squad. A “Theatrical” cut and a “Director’s” cut.The only difference between both versions is every now an again in the “Director’s” cut there are a brief interviews done with veterans, historians, and other live actors in between the rest of the movie. These are basically just here to not only try and lengthen the movie with the meager budget they had, but these are more of a mixed bag than anything. Some of them don’t really add anything, such as the one interview that simply explains what sedatives are.

Maybe it’s to give it some authenticity, but considering that the whole thing flows much better without them, I can’t really recommend the “Director’s” cut unless you found something about the original interesting enough to warrant something more.

First Squad: Moment of Truth might be a rocky in terms of quality, but I don’t really hate it. It’s not something you should immediately go out and see, but it’s worth checking out if you some free time and it looks interesting to you.