Anime with mechs in!

[petronia]

I've been watching Soukyuu no Fafner with Tania at the Concordia Anime Club, off and on for a couple of weeks, starting in the middle of the run; episode 15 or some such. I quite enjoy it (possibly as a result of starting in the middle XD). It won't win any prizes for staggering breadth of innovation - Evangelion did it all best - and the dialogue is MSTable as often as it's genuinely affecting, but it does have genuine affecting moments, the animation is excellent, and no one in the cast annoys me. So there's a rec.

Mostly, though, it ended up whetting my appetite for mecha anime. I didn't know I had an appetite for mecha anime. But the trope is so integral to the genre at large and my personal fannish history that at some point it becomes like, "Dude, didn't there use to be giant robots in this stuff? Where did the giant robots go?" ...So when I went out on Chinese New Year I rented the first DVD of RahXephon. I've been meaning to watch it, because I have all the music and it's ace. Without going into plot details what I garner from the first four eps is that this series is going to be 1) mind-bending and 2) leisurely paced. Thus I'll give it a couple more discs before the analysis kicks in. XD

What is not at all leisurely paced: Gundam SEED. Holy Moses it is BANANAS. Instant theory: the guiding aesthetic of the Gundam series follows what in music one would call a grunge/glam cycle, which (as in music) is really a pseudo-realism/outright escapism cycle. If Wing was big like Nirvana then Seed is big like... what? Franz Ferdinand? The Scissor Sisters? The retro! The colours! The graphic violence! The seiyuu! The Minmay outfits! The retro! The regen bubblepods lined with what looks awfully like rumpled purple satin, giving the spaceship bay an incongruous touch of the bordello! The TM Revolution opening theme! The combining mecha! The retro! The introduction complete lack of introduction of two dozen major characters over the course of FORTY NONSTOP MINUTES OF PITCHED BATTLE AND COUNTING, at least three of whom Tania and I couldn't even sex-differentiate properly until they spoke! The retro! etc. It was like a 90-minute-long sugar rush. I kept expecting it to screech to a halt so the characters could set up romantic hijinks hold a formal ball angst about the meaning of Warfare, and no doubt it will, but.

(The fact that the Infamously Soporific Gundam Voiceover Narration is LIKE DELIVERED BY SAILOR MOON!)

Comments

[squidlet.livejournal.com]

RahXephon! Worth watching for the women alone.

I'd agree with the Eva thing only it's just nowhere near as maladjusted.

Mecha anime tend to be more fun, because there's this whole host of associated universe building that offers hours of happy dissection, PLUS shiny mechanical things.

Which reminds me, I'm going to get Appleseed for that reason.