Please Save My Earth is a series I only knew of through a soundtrack which I purchased from Forbidden Planet in London over 30 years ago. It was on sale and was an impulse buy as at the time manga and anime CDs were very expensive so a CD for under £10 was a bargain. I had never seen the series before but recently found all the English dubbed episodes online so thought I'd dive in. Was it good though?
Well, one thing that comes through clearky is how weird a series it is, one with timeslips, past lives, reincarnation, alternate timelines and the eternal love triangle. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The story concerns Alice, a typical high school student in Japan who dreams that she is the reincarnation of an alien scientist who lived on the Moon. She find other youths who have a similar dream and the group decide to find others in order to understand what it all means. However, they soon discover that their present and alternate lives clash and combine in interesting ways as past loves, hates, jealousies and worried bleed into the present.
The series, produced by Studio I.G. and based on the shojo manga by Saki Iwatari, was apparently quite influential back in the day and I can kind of see why. During our formative years we go through change and growth and the show isn't scared to look deep into our humanity to see what makes us all individual and unique.
As with many OAVs of the time, the art is stunning and has aged very well. The music is haunting and melancholic to create the perfect mood. As for the story, it reminds me of The OA in some ways with fate, destiny, The Garden of Forking Paths and the eternal battle between good vs evil playing out through time, or Sense 8 which is all to do with the interconnected lives of individuals across the world who share a mysterious connection. Mostly, I think it shares ideas that were explored further in David Mitchell's sublime Cloud Atlas- the grand story of people whose destinies are entwined across time and space in the most profound way, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.
At 6 episodes of 30 mins in length, it's not the most time consuming series to dedicate some time too but it does linger in the mind. Considering that only in the last few years have more mainstream shows depicted the ideas presented here this series was a bit of an outlier. Not bad for a lesser known series (at least in the West) which was created in 1993.
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