Grendizer U

Guess I'm finally actually using this like my Letterboxd and Backloggd since I'm not waiting for anime to get added to the former. Anyways, show is loads of fun, but it really suffers from the unfortunate issue of being a mecha anime made when it's impossible to get even slice of life shit to hit 24 episodes. Grendizer U's biggest issues (besides some really wonky 2D art outside of battle scenes or still shots of the mechs) however is that its pacing is all over the pace. Characters and events seem to just happen and occur like they're teleporting around settings and locations. Again, a ... lot of this feels like it can be squarely blamed on episode count as Mitsuo Fukuda whose work I've become more familiar with after watching Gundam Seed earlier in the year across none of that series has characters just teleport around locations. Also as someone who hasn't watched or read OG Grendizer yet I do know some things about it and yeah this is just a speedran remake of the original story and what I'm truly excited for is the potential of the next season pulling an Evangelion 3.0 and being something with much more leeway to go batshit crazy and be wholly different.

Gotta reiterate that it's a genuinely fun as hell show, but definitely not something I'd go to someone and say HOLY HELL DAWG YOU GOTTA WATCH THIS SHIT!! Like I would with Shin Mazinger Z or Getter Robo Armageddon which are other anime of the big mecha grandfathers meant to be original and psychotic retellings or reinterpretations of the classics. That being said Grendizer U very similar to this years earlier release Bravern while not being perfect or this case particularly great still has highs that surpass almost everything else airing the same season despite their lows. Both series are a loud and defiant cry towards the current industry issues that despite it all Mecha will never die.

Now which country likes Getter Robo the most? We can get them to get us something like this for Getter by using the entire countries tax dollars.

I'm sorry to have to give this remake such a low rating, because I sincerely thought that re-adapting this Japanese anime myth was an excellent idea! Except that this adaptation is clearly shaky, and that's what forced me to give it this mark.

The characters are clearly less interesting and less well-written in this version (and it's not the surface depth they vainly try to create that's going to save it), some characters are clearly useless, the love plots that are brought to the fore are clearly not very thrilling, the subtlety of the story is non-existent and the episodes are frankly uneven (a problem of ... the original, by the way).

What's left to salvage in this season is a real willingness to reappropriate Goldorak, which I find quite courageous given the myth that it is once again, and here they went all out! Even though the ideas clearly didn't appeal to me, and I find them really poorly exploited, you can't take away from their desire to truly remake the anime and not just copy and paste a more contemporary version, as with many remakes, and that's great.

In the end, I was really disappointed by this season, which is shaky in a number of respects, but this desire to create something new makes me hope for a sequel that will be much more successful and where the staff will be able to exploit its ideas more effectively (and honor the characters, because things aren't going well at the moment, give us back our Maria).

In short, I'm not crazy, but I'm hopeful for a better future (by the way, the ending is brilliant).

Grendizer U is the first TV anime based on the Mazinger franchise in 15 years, the first anime adaptation of the UFO Robo Grendizer series in nearly 50 years, and a collaboration between staff members that worked on mecha classics like Gundam SEED, Code Geass and Evangelion… and it’s not good. I really wanted to like this show, and there’s a lot of ideas here that could lead to an interesting story, but the series just ultimately was a massive let down.

I’ll address the elephant in the room about this show upfront: the pacing sucks. Grendizer U feels like it’s trying to have a whole ... 50 episodes worth of plot despite only having 13 episodes to work with, so everything feels incredibly rushed, from the fights almost all ending in 2 attacks, to the characters suddenly going from not standing each other to developing strong bonds in the span of 1 episode, to the loads of exposition to advance the multiple plotlines being juggled every episode, and this just makes everything about it feel lacking in impact. I mean, I know the state of the modern anime industry sucks so asking for 2 cours was probably too much, but then they could just write the plot to actually fit the 1 cour they have, it’s not like good mecha anime that are only 1 cour don’t exist, Shin Jeeg told a coherent plot in the same time and had cool stuff like the double Jeeg battle. The show has multiple plots that are brought up, never elaborated on, and then dropped that coupled with the ending make it feel like the staff desperately want to get a second season, but given how that went for the last Mazinger anime, I won’t hold my breath for one.

Speaking of cool battles, that’s the other key issue with his show: it’s just boring. I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece of story given how messy the plots of SEED and Geass are, but I was looking forward to a fun super robot in the spirit of previous Mazinger anime like Shin and Mazinkaiser, but this show is incredibly dull. Aside from the OP and ED none of the music here is memorable, I wouldn’t care for any of these characters if I wasn’t familiar with their past versions as their relationships (with the exception Koji with Duke, for the better, and Teronna with Duke, for the worse) have no time to develop, and with the battles being so short, I hardly found myself interested in seeing how they were going to play out, which is a shame because I think the CGI mecha in the show are on the better side and the moments where they change to 2D actually feel they could be cool with the proper context. I mean, the animation of the show in general isn’t stellar, in fact I’d even call it subpar, and some of the character designs were redesigned better than others (I still don’t get why Sayaka has purple hair?), but I wasn’t expecting it to seeing as Gaina is basically Gainax’s corpse somehow still moving even after Anno took away their sustain.

This isn’t a slap in the face of the original like Devilman Crybaby was, but as far as Go Nagai remakes go, Grendizer U is sadly one of the weaker entries and I wouldn’t recommend it as an entry point for people not familiar with the Mazinger franchise. Go and do yourself a favor and watch Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-hen if you want to see a modern remake of this classic mecha franchise done right.

Thank you for reading