Fantastic and highly underrated Sci-fi animated gem of the 80's! i liked this better then "Heavy Metal" and enjoyed it as much as "Rock & Rule" and "Fire & Ice". It combines the story of Moses with "Star Wars" about a slave from another planet that escapes, finds a magic bladeless sword and must find some comrads to help him free his people from a tyrant.

Nicely made adult animated flick hench the PG rating and nicely animated with good 3-D backgrounds since this was pre-CGI. This is Filmation's best animated movie next to the underrated "Pinocchio and The Emperor of the Night", i truly recommend this.

What if you were to ripoff (er um I mean be inspired by) two of the coolest franchises of the 80's. Well, you might make Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. You would have stone hunting slaves in a fire cave, with a desperate need to be liberated (Temple of Doom), message bearing holograms (help me Obi-Wan, you're our only hope), lasers, whips, laserwhips, cylons (also a star wars "inspiration"), androids, smugglers, and of course a princess. For a hint of originality, you might add some body part hunting mandroids along with a synthesizer based score to spice things up.

Lastly, throw in a "She"-3PO for the women's libers, and call it a day. The surprise is, that in spite of its heavy Star Wars influence, Orin actually delivers. After all, Star Wars (at least the Original Trilogy) gained its following for a reason. It was fun. Starchaser: The Legend of Orin is able to reproduce that space opera feel in an all new star warsish adventure. What more could you ask for? And at least Orin doesn't pretend to not be copying Star Wars (notice the tagline "the search for the force is over...").

The story begins with Orin finding a mystical sword hilt in the fire mines run by the evil Zygon. He begins a quest to find the blade, but oddly, the bladeless hilt still proves fatal in Orin's hand. This weapon seems to conjure up an invisible blade helping Orin slice his way out of danger. Soon enough, Luke, I mean Orin teams up with Han, er I mean Dagg. Eventually Orin meets his princess, who luckily is not his sister, and they fall in love. And the rest of the movie continues about like you would expect with space battles, swordfights and such, but it is fun to watch nonetheless. Oddly enough, the Starchaser spaceship with swivel mounted engines seems to have inspired the Serenity of the short but sweet Firefly series. Overall, the animation is decent, and I would love to have seen this film in 3D as it was originally screened, but I had to settle for the good old flat on the TV screen version.

Like most sci-fi animation, Orin did not bring in big results at the box office. I doubt the just over $3 million take was enough to justify the budget of the first 3D animated film. Maybe if the film had done better we would have learned that Zygon was really Orin's father. Of course if you have actually seen this movie, you would realize that last statement was a joke. Ha ha. Still, while the film is entertaining, its familiarity must be considered in assigning a score. Orin should definitely be checked out by all fans of stellar wars, though you might be sad to know that of all the elements carried over from Star Wars, there are no wookies. As such, Orin earns a B.

When I saw the release date on this movie, (1985), I'll admit I wasn't expecting much. Most of the western animated scifi that came out of the 80s was pretty silly--particularly in the story department. Thus it was a complete surprise to me how enjoyable this movie ended up being.

There's a definite "Star Wars" feel to the story--young Luke-like hero teams up with cynical Han Solo-like smuggler to save his people from nasty Darth-like tyrant. It's not terribly original, but I thought it was much better executed than even the PG animated scifi that came out in late 90s like "Titan A.E." or "Atlantis: The Lost Empire". While glitzier, I think both of those other films fail because they never truly embraced their PG rating. They kept falling back on the kiddie-cute factor, because that's the zone that western animation tends to be the most comfortable in. "Starchaser" is unapologetically PG--violence, dire consequences, innuendo--while at the same time it still feels like a mainstream action-adventure.

The story is good--clever and even occasionally funny in places. As you would expect, cynical smuggler Dagg gets all the best lines. It does get a little silly and trite at the end, but given how enjoyable overall the first 90 minutes were I'm willing to be forgiving.