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There’s an idea I’ve seen expressed in film criticism before which is the concept of being stupid in a clever way, to devise plotlines and characters and situations which are totally heightened and ludicrous and yet wield them with a sufficient deftness that they remain consistently engaging, and to do so with purpose, to have something meaningful to say with all that bombast. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the apotheosis of this. It is cranked up to eleventy-stupid and then some, ever escalating in scale and ridiculousness, throwing the rules of logic and reality by the wayside to gain access to new frontiers of big ... robots hitting each other. It’s big, it’s loud, and immensely silly. However, despite all this it is consistently engaging, and surprisingly moving, because all of that scale and raw insanity is focused in service of telling a deeply heartfelt story about the power of human spirit. This is a series with a thesis statement, and that is that not only do dudes rock, it is a moral imperative. Stagnation is unacceptable. People must drive on, full force, fighting for a better future for themselves and those they care about. The forces of stagnation will knock you down, and take things that are dear to you, and when that happens you get back up and keep going, fighting for love, and truth, and justice. If Gurren Lagann was a less sophisticated series it would stop about halfway through, as a simple coming of age story, of young people claiming their future, but it doesn’t. Growing up doesn’t mean you stop fighting. Instead bigger and bigger responsibilities will be placed on you, more complex ones that can’t simply be overcome with youthful vigour, but you cannot stop, not while you can still change things for the better. The series does not shy away from grief and tragedy and the toll they can take on people, but it respects death as an inevitability, and those who live on will always be shaped by their time with the deceased. There is a very positive view of masculinity in here, one that is not jealous or possessive, and rolls with the punches, and stands up for what’s right, but feels emotion very deeply because living a life repressed is not life lived to the fullest. The characters in a work with such unsubtle tendencies could have ended up as thin sketches, but they’re not, and indeed the series simply wouldn’t work if they were. With everything else so nuts you have to have an emotional core to hang on to, and the hopes of the characters is that core. The plot is unbelievable but they’re not, they have virtues and flaws that add up into people worth rooting for, and their joy and their pain mean something.

The animation that delivers all this is directed wonderfully. It’s all highly evocative, both in the moments of stillness and in the highly frenetic action scenes, and is exciting in all the best ways. Imaishi is a director with a great sense for motion, knowing exactly where animation can be skimped out on to ensure maximum impact where it’s needed. The designs for everything are striking and original and cool in a way that’s unashamedly maximalist. Robots that combine and get bigger and bigger rule, actually, and Gurren Lagann exploits this to its full potential. There’s a great soundtrack of suitably bombastic orchestral and pop rock pieces which, combined with everything else, helps tip those high points where the heroes find new reserves of strength over into punch-the-air triumphant.
The bottom line is that Gurren Lagann is anime doing the things that animation does best, and is far smarter than its reputation might suggest, but doesn’t let that get in the way of the joy of robots knocking twelve bells out of each other in ways not really seen before or since. It’s a really special series and well worth your time.

Woah, woah, fight the power!

Twelve volumes in, Witch Hat Atelier is a spectacular piece of work. I fell in love with it from the very first chapter and that love has only grown as the story has progressed. There are two things, kept in perfect balance, that I think make this such a special comic. Firstly, this is a story with teeth. This is a world where people can, and do, come to serious harm, through the horrifying use of magic, through the neglect of systems and individuals, through acts of cruelty, through the weight of the responsibilities and expectations that are placed upon them. The threats that assail ... the characters are real and pervasive and come from all sides. While the series was originally published in a seinen (adult men's) magazine, the English volumes are labelled for ages 10+, which I think is about right. I absolutely don't think any of the content would be too much for a mature preteen to handle, the unpleasantness isn't depicted too viscerally, but there is some blood, body horror, and a short chapter that concerns a sexual assault that happened in a character's past. There is also a serious moral complexity, as the rules around magic are mostly social and cultural conventions that hinder one's ability to help those in need even as they protect society at large from the consequences of unchecked use of magic, and these issues are examined in great detail. However, this is not a grim and miserable story. It is joyous. For all the darkness, all the nastiness, at the heart of Witch Hat Atelier is a genuine sense of warmth and love and a belief that while good people cannot fix everything, they can always do something to make things better. A tragedy is the inciting incident that leads Coco into the world of witches, and the hurt of that never goes away, but neither does her wonder at magic's capacity to do good in the world. She's surrounded by an excellent supporting cast, each with believable weaknesses and hang ups, yet not to the extent that you ever doubt that ultimately they want to do the right thing. I particularly like Qifrey, who is the main adult character and Coco's teacher in magic. He has his own baggage and hidden agendas that threaten to intrude on the lives of his pupils, but it is rare to find a character in fantasy stories like this who openly, earnestly and dearly loves children like Qifrey does. They are all tested and tempted and threatened in their own ways and these things have meaning because that very tangible sense of care and comfort is what's at stake.

It's also consistently beautiful to look at. Shirahama's art is full of intricate detail and texture, and the aesthetics of the clothing and the other elements of this fantasy world are wonderful. Impressively, she can also properly integrate this detail into the action scenes, which feel dynamic and fluid while still retaining the same delicate touch. She also knows when to wield a deformed or chibi rendering of her characters, to give a little more life to small panels, without them clashing with the overall art style.

The combined effect is a manga that, so far, I have no complaints about whatsoever and should delight children and adults alike.

Fooly Cooly is about the feeling of being a twelve year old boy living in a small town in the 2000s. You're growing up and want to be taken seriously, you feel like all the adults are acting like children, there's not much to do, and you probably have a lot of confusing feelings about girls. Sometimes your emotions boil over uncontrollably. The vague sketch of a plot involving aliens and robots exists in FLCL, but really it's all about that feeling. There's frenetic action scenes, absurd comedy, a sort of earnestly base sexuality, and morose stillness, smashed together into a chaotic, intoxicating mess of ... a thing. The soundtrack, almost entirely composed of existing music from the alternative rock band The Pillows, goes a long way to make the whole shambolic assemblage almost feel cohesive as it veers from set piece to set piece. Discussing it in any greater depth feels redundant. Everything is bent towards that one aim, that one feeling, that one moment in time, and it hits you like a bass guitar to the back of the head, and then it's gone.

The first and most important thing to say about Mobile Suit Gundam is that there are a great many sequences that use flashing images that could induce seizures in people who have photosensitive epilepsy. This is a series from a time when using strobe effects to represent explosions was still considered acceptable, and it is used liberally. The sequences that use this effect were unpleasant to watch for me, and it therefore seems likely they could have much worse effects on people with a sensitivity to such things.

Despite showing its age in many ways, Mobile Suit Gundam’s better qualities shine through consistently. TV anime ... in 1979 was primitive, to say the least. Every episode looks like it had a budget of about ¥23, but you can the direction pulling hard against those limitations to get the maximum possible value up on screen. Detailed mechanical design is a pipe dream, objects on screen often don’t rotate wherever possible, and the Gundam itself feels like it’s slightly off model a lot of the time. Despite that, there is a lot of striking shot composition, and careful use of the fairly limited score to build tension and excitement even though very often what you are watching is clearly a static animation cel being moved across a background. The depiction of the grim realities of warfare, and the ultimate inhumanity of death and destruction on such a scale are evoked very effectively despite the limitations of the animation, helped along by some excellent sound design. The technical design is also constantly wonderful to look at, there’s a very distinct and interesting aesthetic not just to the mobile suits but also all the technology, ships, and uniforms have a great look to them. A lot of it is a very 1970s vision of future aesthetics that doesn’t quite line up with modern sensibilities, but the Gundam itself is a design classic that has endured in our collective consciousness for a reason.

The writing side is a similar story in how it is in many obvious ways very flawed and yet clearly has something special about it at the same time. The central character, Amuro, has a mixture of neuroticism, fear, vanity, drive, and antisociality that feel right for a teenager thrust into a key position in a war, although it doesn’t always feel like those traits come to the fore organically or in the right order. The central antagonist Char Aznable, as an experienced and cunning soldier, is an ideal foil for him, and the scenes where the power of the Gundam is pitted against the experience and skills of Char are always exciting. They are surrounded by a good supporting cast, with the crew of the White Base believably developing from a rag-tag group of children armed with advanced military technology to a hardened fighting force. The series greatest flaw which drags it down more than anything else is that the plot is all over the place. The opening arc where the White Base is trying to escape to Earth is great, full of constant tension as they are pursued by Zeon’s forces. Once they get to Earth things start to get a bit wobbly. Char isn’t present for large stretches and none of the secondary antagonists introduced in the meantime can really fill the hole he leaves, and there are multiple short arcs that are a bit of a drag to sit through. Characters also repeatedly seem to change their motivations or relationships at random which leads to a lot of scenes feeling jarring. It might also just have been a deficiency of the subtitles I was using, but the motives of certain characters occasionally seemed opaque in a way that I don’t think was intentional. For example, I have no idea what Char was actually hoping to achieve in the last arc, which incidentally also takes a lurching left turn into being concerned with dealing with the implications of the emergence of Newtypes, humans with extrasensory perception. While the plotting is shambolic, the vibes do generally shine through; this is a crushing war of attrition, where characters can and will die, with moral compromise on both sides. Zeon’s nationalism and authoritarianism are the greater folly that initiated the war in the first place, but the Federation are not innocent of carrying out many of the same crimes. Likewise, although many combatants are dragged into the war against their will, they are not any less complicit in propagating it.

The practical upshot is that Mobile Suit Gundam is deeply messy and imperfect, but it is an imperfect mess that I have a lot of respect for, and contains much that is enjoyable. I wouldn’t recommend it on its own merits, but it’s Mobile Suit Gundam; we live in its world, and it doesn’t need to be brilliant to be worth watching. An enduring legacy of mecha anime started here, in the Universal Century continuity, the wider Gundam franchise itself, and beyond, and if you care about the history of the medium it's worth it for that reason alone.

The Vision of Escaflowne tries to juggle a lot of different balls, and basically succeeds. Firstly, it's a good old fashioned fantasy adventure serial with goodies and baddies and sword fights and monsters and thrilling escapes and all that exciting stuff. Bound up with that is the fact that it's somewhat of a mecha series, with the magically powered suits naturally allowing major characters to dominate fight scenes. However, it's also a mystical and rather melancholy series about fate and how it can be fixed or changed, punctuated with a fairly large amount of on screen death and injury. Also it's got a rather shoujo-esque ... romance with a knotty love polygon and some really beautiful looking men. The series was originally intended to be 39 episodes rather than 26 and you can tell - some plot threads sort of just stop, appear late on, and/or get resolved jarringly fast. That said, I'm not necessarily sure that an additional 13 episodes wouldn't have come along with making the pacing a bit sluggish. As is, it seems to fill 26 episodes more or less nicely, even if it has to lurch a few times to get there, especially in the back half, and the ending in particular feels rather rushed.

Hitomi is a likeable heroine, and the script manages to quite effectively let her make choices that drive the plot without having to have her take part in the fighting herself. A careful balance is struck between giving her a believable fear of violence and death with a drive to see them not meted out to her friends. The Escaflowne's pilot Van isn't as deep, remaining driven by the need to avenge his homeland throughout, but still gets to evolve in how he approaches it emotionally. The central two are supported by an ensemble of engaging side players: the swashbuckling Allen, the lovesick princess Millerna, and the petulant but vulnerable catgirl Merle, among others. The truncated length does leave a few of the cast with slightly less to do than was perhaps intended, but the most important ones are correctly kept to the fore.

Escaflowne is almost always a lovely series to look at. It is animated with all the lushness you'd expect of Sunrise at the end of the cel animation era, with beautifully fluid motion on the mechs in particular, and the direction makes great use of it to bring life to some wonderfully artistic shot compositions. Yoko Kanno's score is predictably great, and gives the strange and wonderous elements the accompaniment they deserve.

The bottom line is that Escaflowne is a fantastically well produced series that is let down mostly by the circumstances of its creation, and make it less than it perhaps could have been, but what is there is broadly a well executed marriage of disparate elements.

This is a review of both seasons taken as a single piece. It's one continuous story and is best looked at as a whole.

It has been a very long time since I have enjoyed anything as consistently or as viscerally as Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. It is a piece of work that builds on the legacy of Gundam as a franchise, but also draws significantly from Neon Genesis Evangelion and plays with concepts drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The series has a deep and clear anger at how rich nations exploit poor nations and the military industrial complex forments conflict for the ... sake of profit, and at how the older generations are willing to sell out the younger generations for their own comfort in general, and that anger is given meaning by the tenderness and humanity with which it treats its characters. The warfare of this setting is not an all out conflict, but a pervasive ill whose wider effects draw in and harm people outside of it, and despite the efforts of some to contain it, death and destruction can still spill out into places that seem safe. This is a very astute and appropriate evolution for a franchise that is principally about the horrors of armed conflict but is now in a world where Japan and the main markets for anime are now separated from it, even as it continues elsewhere.

The principle defect it has is that it's only 24 episodes long, and unavoidably feels truncated at that length. There is simply not quite enough time for the world and the characters to breathe and simply be as much as they should, and there are a couple of moments where the plot makes slightly jarring progressions. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that it still does a very good job of fitting as much as possible into the time available and has the ambition to try to do so, and the short length gives it a great intensity of pace. I'd have preferred more, but the concentrated dose we got has a great effect all its own.

The animation and direction is good, if unshowy. The fights between the mobile suits are suitably impactful. I don't know if any of the designs will go down as classics, but I do very much like the look of the central Gundam Aerial. The direction contains many subtle flourishes that make key moments hit harder, and since the general direction is fairly standard this actually allows them to stick out more. The series does a very effective job of making space feel very big and hostile, which is appropriate for a story which considers whether humans belong up there at all.

The series is mostly hinged on the odd couple relationship between its central characters. On the one hand there is Suletta, the anxious and naive but skilled Gundam pilot. On the other there is Miorine, the sharper and more worldly but very vulnerable heiress to the biggest arms manufacturer. They play off each other well, offering new perspectives drawn from their differing backgrounds, but also hurting each other because they are damaged people without the emotional tools to properly relate all the time. They are also pawns in a larger game being played by their respective parents and indeed pretty much everyone around them. There is a pervasive sense of threat as the duplicitous schemes to rob them of their dignity, agency, and lives play out. Suletta's mother Prospera is the series resident masked villain, at once cloyingly sweet and ruthlessly driven, and is a particularly memorable creation. The series has a fairly large supporting cast and cannot give them all interesting things to do in its short length, but still covers more than you may expect. There is one miscellaneous criticism I have which is that the leads don't get to kiss on screen - a bolder emphasis that this was a love story would have made the ending work just a little better for me.

To sum up, while the deficiencies of The Witch from Mercury are very evident, this is still a triumphant assertion that Gundam still has a place in the anime landscape, delivering moments of tragedy and triumph with the incomparable, genre defining image of a mobile suit in motion.

The Big O starts out a stylish, oddball fusion of hardboiled detective fiction and tokusatsu style superheroics, but gradually evolves into something altogether weirder and more existential. It is partially successful in this.

First, the positives. The Big O aims to capture a very particular vibe, and succeeds. It's got interesting shot composition, a distinct visual style, and an achingly cool soundtrack of mostly jazz and funk. Most of the episodes consist of Roger looking into some case on behalf of a client, occasionally aided by an arsenal of gadgets, before a climax where he gets into the Big O and fights another giant robot in ... the middle of the city, and the show absolutely sells the idea that these two things belong together. The Big O itself is a fantastically designed super robot, and you get a real sense of it's weight and immensity whenever it's on screen. The Big O itself, and the rest of the setting, has a wonderful retro futurist analogue technology feel, all buttons and switches and levers. Over the course of the series the function of each control in Big O's cockpit is clearly shown, which makes it feel a lot more real than many other mecha. There's a lot of fun, sparky chemistry between the main cast of characters, particularly between Roger and the deadpan android Dorothy.

However, vibes only go so far. The stories of the standalone episodes often feel truncated to accommodate the mandatory giant robot fights, and the main plot is often not well explained, particularly the ending which may leave many viewers completely lost. There's also an excessive amount of time spent on characters having conversations which sound mysterious but tell the audience nothing, which adds to the vibes, but detracts from one's ability to understand anything that's happening, and twenty-six episodes is arguably too long for a show taking this kind of approach.

The things Big O does right mean it is certainly worth a try for fans of mecha, or those who are intrigued by it's unique style, but if the first episode doesn't hook you in I personally wouldn't recommend continuing with it; everything that makes the show good is right there from the off.

CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD
YE NOT GUILTY
"Big O! Action!"

Eureka Seven is first and foremost a coming of age story, but more broadly it's about how everyone can and should adapt as their circumstances change. It's also about mecha on flying surfboards, the horrors of war, the power of love, fascism, counterculture, Gaia Theory, the importance of family no matter its form, how you shouldn't meet your heroes, some really out there sci fi worldbuilding, and finding your first love. Even at a stout fifty episodes it's positively overstuffed with ideas, which does mean some have to be run through at a million miles an hour and arguably don't get the screentime that they ... should, and people coming in with an explicit desire to see a *lot* of mecha action may leave disappointed. However, all of the ideas clearly belong together and play off of each other to create the texture of the story. It's a very post-Evangelion series in much of its ideas and iconography, but is also a repudiation of the former show's crushing nihilism. The animation itself is not necessarily awe inspiring, although it is consistently good, but the designs are visually interesting and there's a very considered use of colour that means things that need to stand out, like lasers and the trapar waves which allow flight, do. The first part of the story is a bit slowly paced, but patient viewers will be rewarded with a cavalcade of "oh blimey" moments, in various forms: shocking plot twists, scenes of visceral horror, and moments of punch-the-air triumph. It is a wild and uneven rollercoaster ride that will leave viewers with a preference for more tightly constructed plots behind, but I absolutely loved it.