The Ocean, but in the Sky is a fairly common premise in fiction. Drifting Dragons sort of downplays the idea. While the main cast is the crew of an airship, the world itself seems to be a fairly typical world (with geography apparently based on the surface of Mars, at least according to Tv Tropes), rather than a world made up of many little floating islands in the sky.
People do live on the ground, but the main characters spend most of their time in sky, because that’s where the Dragons are and hunting Dragons is how they make their livelihood. At its simplest, it’s a story about whaling, though it’s called “Draking” in-universe given that way they’re whaling is Dragons — more on that later.
Drifting Dragons is fundamentally a story of sailors who happen to be sailing in the sky rather than on water and, realistically, for all functional intents and purposes the sky-boat behaves almost exactly like a regular boat.
In fact, other being a flying machine and basically a zeppelin, the protagonists’ ship the Quin Zaza fundamentally looks and operates like a late 1800s/early 1900s steamship.
The exact Romanisation of the name varies by source. On Netflix itself, it’s spelled like that, but I’ve also seen ‘Queen’; in the anime it’s pronounced like ‘keen’ in English and more like ‘ku-een’ in Japanese. I’m unclear if that’s on purpose.
Incidentally, being a “Netflix Original anime” doesn’t actually mean Netflix was involved in anything beyond distribution. They’re considered Netflix Originals by dint of airing originally and/or exclusively on Netflix.
The various building blocks the central premise of Drifting Dragons is, um, built from aren’t really that unique. I just spent an entire section of this post talking about Sky-Oceans. Similarly, stories about the crew of a boat aren’t exactly uncommon. Even whaling is the basis for at least one of the most famous books of all time.
Drifting Dragons does, however, build those basic ideas into something that is pretty novel. It’s not really an adventure series so much as a workplace, well, sitcom isn’t the right word…
The primary drama isn’t driven by quests to save the world or high-stakes battles with evil gods. Most of what’s happening is fairly mundane, at least in the context of a steampunk Fantasy world, and the danger the characters comes from the fact that they’re engaged in an inherently dangerous profession. Or else the characters are having a slow day and the episode is about someone doing something stupid.
Now, the fact that it’s basically about whaling is probably going to be a deal-breaker for some people. Though, to its credit, Drifting Dragons does treat the premise of killing magnificent animals as a business with respect and gravitas. At best, Draking is presented as a grim but necessary business and doesn’t come across as particularly glamorous or romantic and none of the character really enjoy or embrace the fact that their livelihood comes from hunting and killing majestic living creatures.
Well, mostly.
Most of the characters aren’t happy about the actual hunting and killing part of their job. Though “How can we cook them into something delicious?” is a recurring plotline/running gag throughout the series, which while providing some genuine moments of levity does also somewhat undermine the gravitas of the concept.
Drifting Dragons: Polygon Pictures and Netflix.
On the whole, the cast is compelling, though are there are two undisputed lead characters, as well as the higher-ranking crew members who don’t quite as much focus but are higher in the ship’s hierarchy than the leads. And then there’s a handful of background crew members who don’t really do anything important, but do occasionally pop up to remind us that they exist provide moments of levity and comedy.
In fact, “I want to eat the Dragons” is basically male lead Mika’s entire personality. He’s a fairly straightforward Capable-But-Hugely-Idiosyncratic character archetype, but even in a twelve-episode series, the series leans heavily enough to the idiosyncrasies that the bit wears pretty thin. Though, on the other hand, he does get enough dramatic moments to shine that he’s not a complete goofball.
Only, like 85% a goofball…
On the other hand, the female lead Takita is the newest member of the crew, creating a pretty decent narrative reason for there to be people constantly explaining life as a Draker for the benefit of both Takita and the audience. She’s not completely humourless, but she is a lot more serious and straight-laced than Mika.
Sidebar: I keep getting tripped up by Mika and Takita’s names. I feel like they should be the other way around: “Mika” sounds more feminine to me and “Takita” sounds masculine…
Though it is kind of a nice storytelling change of pace that Takita and Mika have basically 0 romantic tension with each other yet still get a pretty well-executed purely platonic relationship. They clearly care about each other, but as friends and teammates — though it’s possible that changes in the manga version of the story.
The art itself is probably also going to be enough to turn off at least some viewers. I’m not a fan of the whole “anime style but done with 3D CGI“, though I can at least appreciate that it’s almost certainly easier and therefore cheaper, perhaps especially understandable given that the 12-episode anime began life as a web series.
I didn’t like the animation style in Three Houses. I didn’t like it in the recent Dragon Ball movies. I don’t like it here. But I can at least accept it as an inevitability/budgetary necessity.
Though, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that Drifting Dragons isn’t the worst-looking 3D anime I’ve seen — the framerate does look a little choppy, but it’s better than other similar works in the same style. There’s also enough compelling material in the story that I could lose myself and the animation was only occasionally distracting.
On the other hand, the art direction is fantastic. Fittingly, the dragons, drifting or otherwise, are the high-point of the series. They don’t look like typical Fantasy dragons beyond the basic silhouette and skew towards eldritch and alien. Some of the bigger ones would fit right in as JRPG bosses.
The Netflix anime of Drifting Dragons is adapted from the original manga that is, as of this writing, still running and has more than 80 chapters. So, obviously, the anime is abridging and ignoring a lot of the source material.
I haven’t read the manga yet, so I can’t comment on the fidelity of the adaptation. Mostly, though, I feel like the anime doesn’t make the most of its 12 episodes. We don’t learn that much about the characters and while there are several multi-episode story arcs, there’s no real overarching plotline. That’s not a necessarily a bad thing in itself, though Drifting Dragons does kinda end with the feeling that nothing has really changed, or even really happened.
If anything, it does make me want to check out the manga to see if the story and characters getting more time to breathe helps the manga avoid the pitfalls of the anime.
That’s not to say there are no interesting episodes or events. The actual Draking, well very probably upsetting to some viewers, does a good job of conveying the sense of a life-and-death struggle with a powerful, majestic animal. The most interesting episodes of the series are driven by particularly large and powerful dragons essentially getting loose and wrecking everything, sort of like a slightly scaled-down Godzilla. And there are more than a handful of episodes with legitimately high stakes and actual emotional weight.
But, again, 12 of them isn’t nearly enough.
[Full disclosure: despite that linking to a TV Tropes article with “sucks” in the title, I don’t actually think Drifting Dragons sucks; that’s just the closest thing I could find to link to…]
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