Anime Update: "Back in Black, Time to Dust Yourself Off..."

Despite my best intentions, I still have not wrapped up the late episodes of Victory Gundam, as I poured practically all of my attention toward Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, and – to a slightly lesser extent – Ninja Slayer. Both proved quite entertaining to watch, if not for drastically different reasons. I have begun writing my review for the second half of the Stardust Crusaders anime, and I expect said review will be posted sometime later this month. As for Ninja Slayer, I intend to keep on plugging away at that series, one twelve-minute episode at a time, with a written review following not too long after its finale airs (whenever that is set to occur, later this year). While I was rather let down with Studio Trigger's debut series, Kill la Kill, I'm completely on board with Ninja Slayer's bonkers parody of late-1980s/early-1990s action anime.

I did in fact watch a good portion of G-Reco, and found it largely to my liking. The mobile suit designs, technology of the fictional setting, and even the art direction all remind me a great deal of Turn A Gundam, a series which I absolutely adore. I intend to finish G-Reco before the end of 2015 as well, which should prove a relatively easy task, considering that is has a shorter episode count than most full-fledged Gundam series. As far as the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin films are concerned, I will continue to watch those as they are released, though it does not appear that those films are slated to come out on a particularly frequent basis – in fact, their release schedule seems not unlike that of Unicorn Gundam, which I suppose is just fine, so long as they carry on with such a high production value.

As far as other, more recent anime is concerned, I would like to give the recent Mushishi sequel series a watch. I loved the original and its bizarre fantasy folklore delivered through a calm and soft-spoken narrative style. Aside from that, there are not many series on the immediate horizon that I’m particularly interested in. Perhaps I’ll get around to watching the second season of Space Dandy – the first season was good fun and all, I simply kind of forgot about the second season in the wake of all the Jojo’s excitement. Sword Art Online’s second act of its first season left such a foul taste in my mouth that I have zero desire to view the second season.

I will keep my eyes and ears open for word of an official release date for the second season of Knights of Sidonia, however, as the first season of that anime hooked me enough to warrant a follow-up. And with regards to an (potentially) even longer-term viewing schedule, I’m excited about what Under the Dog might bring. I understand the project recently had a few staff members leave the project over creative differences, but I believe that character designer Yusuke Kozaki is still on board, whose work on the No More Heroes games I am a huge fan of.

Anime Update: The Red Comet and Star Platinum

Yesterday, I watched the first entry in the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin series of films. While I would not say that this first episode kicked things off to quite as strong a start as the most recent Universal Century OVA, Unicorn Gundam, it was a well-written and entertaining view nonetheless. Despite the name matching up with the recently-popularized manga retelling of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, which expands upon the story of the One Year War, this four-part anime release appears to be a prequel to that, seeing all the major players rise to their respective iconic roles.

This first film, Blue-Eyed Casval, deals almost exclusively with characters in the space colonies who will ultimately end up fighting for the Principality of Zeon, namely the Zabi family and Zeon Zum Deikun’s children, Casval and Artesia, who would later come to be better known as Sayla Mass and Char Aznable respectively. To finally see Zeon Zum Deikun’s death and the rising political tensions that led to the Zabi family’s rise to power and eventual declaration of war on the Earth Federation was long-overdue but no less impactful animated sequence as the first major events leading up to the One Year War. I certainly enjoyed seeing a younger Ramba Ral worked into the story, as his actions gave me a greater degree of respect for him as a character, while Char’s determination and focus at such a young age set the wheels in motion for his plans to exact revenge on the Zabi family for the death of his father. The occasional overly cartoony moments might appeal to younger audiences, but I found them a bit unnatural, even clunky in execution, given the more serious and tense atmosphere of Blue-Eyed Casval on the whole.

Despite my habit of sometimes picking up a longer anime series to view, watching for a while, moving on to another anime, then coming back again many months later to pick up where I last left off, I am now a mere five episodes from the finale of Victory Gundam. I intend to finish this soon, as I want to give the current G-Reko series a shot, but not before I’ve finished my viewing of Victory. While Gundam AGE and the Build Fighters series both failed to entice me, G-Reco’s highly-creative mobile suit designs and certain sensibilities that seemingly harken back to Turn A Gundam have me intrigued. As G-Reco is currently airing and thus not yet complete, I will likely balance my viewing of that with at least one other anime – be it one of the two remaining Gundam series I have yet to watch in full (Mobile Suit Gundam, ZZ Gundam) or something entirely unrelated to Bandai and Sunrise’s long-running franchise.

I’m still loving the current run of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, and if the most recent two-part encounter with D’arby the Gambler was any indication, the best episodes may yet lie on the horizon. Strong as the series has been since the beginning, the first season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure displayed a similar increase in quality in later episodes, with the Battle Tendency arc being more of both a visual and narrative spectacle than its precursor, Phantom Blood. While I was plugging away at Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 this Winter, it has since been removed from Netflix’s offerings, and thus I will have to find another means of viewing the series if I intend to see it to completion.

I found myself rather disappointed with the original Ghost in the Shell’s narrative suddenly dropping off at the end of the 1995 film, but the recent reimagining known as Ghost in the Shell: Arise is currently available on Netflix, and I decided to give the first hour-long episode a try. Unfortunately, it did as little to keep me entertained as the few episodes of Stand Alone Complex I have seen ever did. Arise’s blundering gaps in logic as well as its obsession with not including viewers in on what would seem like prominent chunks of information have led me to effectively resign the entire Ghost in the Shell franchise as one of those properties that thinks itself much smarter than it actually is, and subsequently a property that I will not be wasting any more of my time on.

I intend to take my time with the third season of Sgt. Frog, as it is the last season that was localized by Funimation for North American release. There is a strong chance that I may see this third season to completion by the end of the year and review it accordingly, as I do love the series’ wacky humor in its pop culture references and the general behavior of the characters. With all of this in mind, the rest of the year is largely a blank slate with regards to my anime viewing plans, as Unicorn Gundam has entirely wrapped up, and other recent series I was viewing, like The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, I have since completed.

Top 5 ‘What the hell were these characters doing?’ in Gundam

#5 - Wang Liu Mei (Gundam 00): Wang Liu Mei and her bodyguard/brother Hong Long are introduced early on in the first season of Gundam 00 with the implication that they will be important to the grander plot. They seem to be something of investors in the idea that Celestial Being can in fact succeed with their goal of eradicating war from the world. Which, admirable an ideal as it is, is in fact not the only deck Wang Liu Mei has her money bet on. As we find out in season two, she’s investing in the Innovators as well, presumably because she’s just that greedy and has a desire to come out of this conflict a winner. Except, apparently she didn’t make much of a plan for the event that she might not live to the end of the whole ordeal to actually see a return on her investments. Considering that Wang Liu Mei and her brother come from a rich and influential family line, one would assume they’d have put precautions in place in the event that things went belly-up. And when they do meet their untimely ends, it has zero impact on either Celestial Being or the Innovators.

#4 - Lupe Cineau (Victory Gundam) – Lupe Cineau has a few appearances over the course of Victory Gundam, and is shown to be a capable fighter in close quarters as well as in the cockpit of one of the Zansacre Empire’s robot-riding-inside-of-a-giant-tire Gedlav mobile suits. Around the midway point of the series, she manages to capture Uso with the help of Katejina Loos. And how does Cineau opt to interrogate the League Militaire’s ace pilot? By stripping down and taking a bath with the teenage boy. Granted, she intends to torture him by dunking him under and nearly drowning him, but why bother having both of them naked? There’s some very strange sexual tension brought on by this, while Uso is both confused and opposed to the situation. While I understand Cineau’s desire to keep Uso alive in order to try and pry information from him, this seems like the most half-baked torture method she could have devised, and considering how much her men seem to be incredibly loyal and intimidated by her, one would think she might seek out a plan that better expressed her finesse and power during the decent chunks of time where she is absent.

#3 - The other Zabi brother (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin) – The Zabi family served as the main antagonists in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, and helped fuel Char’s convictions and ideals as son of Zeon Zum Deikun. They are gradually taken out one by one as the Federation forces gain a foothold in colony space and Char goes about exacting his revenge upon those who twisted the vision of spacenoid independence his father had in mind. Garma, Gihren, Dozle, and Kycilia all carry out important roles in the One Year War, and go out in (generally) spectacular fashion. But there is one Zabi family member who never showed up in the original series. Cicero Zabi (otherwise known as Sasro) was a sibling of the other, more well-recognized Zabi children, but died before the One Year War even began. The cause of his death? Assassination at the hands of loyalists to the ideals of Zeon Zum Deikun, many of whom believed Deikun’s death was caused by Cicero’s father. Apparently Cicero was so unmemorable (even to his own family members) that he was never mentioned again, only seeing a brief inclusion in the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin manga.

#2 - Lord Djibril (SEED Destiny) – Opposite to Durandal, Lord Djibril is in charge of all the operations carried out by Logos. He appears to indulge in a rich and lavish lifestyle, owning a mansion and sipping red wines while watching over the mobile suit battles he helped to orchestrate from his high-tech bunker full of monitors. And… that’s basically it. Whereas Durandal is shown travelling from place to place, meeting with ZAFT’s mobile suit pilots, and helping to boost his own political image to gain support from the masses, Djibril just sits in his comfy chair for nearly the entirety of the series like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget until he is eventually killed.

#1 - Wufei (Gundam Wing) – Only a handful of Gundam series over the years have dared try and divvy up the spotlight between multiple lead protagonists, and while some might roll their eyes at Gundam Wing’s reliance on five pretty boys to try and boost the show’s viewership, one of my biggest problems with it lies in the fact that not all of the lead pilots see equal screen time. Wufei receives the least by far, and frankly I wonder if the writers had much of a story in mind for him due to how uninvolved he is for the vast majority of the anime. Sure, Heero and Duo receive lots of screen time early on, and Quatre sees a decent degree of character exploration. But Trowa probably received the second least screen time behind Wufei, and he managed to temporarily lose his memory, join the circus, and team up with Heero to infiltrate the ranks of Oz. Wufei, on the other hand, spent his days meditating with Shenlong by a waterfall, and had one sword fight with Treize before receiving one of the antagonist’s many famous monologues, leading Wufei to yell in frustration. He does show up conveniently at the end of the series and plays a notably more important role in Endless Waltz. But really, if you’re going to write in five characters to share the lead role, you ought to have a game plan in mind for all of them and not forget one until the series is practically over.