An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Mecha March

Super Space Squid Battles – Ancient Girls Frame Spoiler Review

This show is a weird one. Ancient Girls Frame is absolutely a mecha show, but it’s only really arguably an anime: it was produced by a Chinese studio. But it gets listed on MAL and other anime sources, and it’s not like I haven’t reviewed more dubious entries on my blog, so while I don’t intend to make a habit of it, I’m going to let this one go.

So, what is Ancient Girls Frame about? Well, to avoid drowning you in technical terms the way the ad copy does, it’s the sort of story where humanity is under siege from unreasonable space monsters, and fends them off with super mechas we found under various rocks. In this setting, we follow a girl who wants to become a pilot of some of that ancient lostech in part to search for her sister, a former pilot, who went missing in action.

Sounds fair enough, but a concept only gets you so far.

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A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Where There Is Only War – Armored Trooper Votoms Spoiler Review

Sometimes I feel like I don’t crack into enough vintage anime on this blog. Before streaming, before DVR, the industry for basically all things television was a different place, and that includes the anime industry as well. I’ve touched on 90’s shows before like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Record of Lodoss War, but I haven’t really taken a deep dive into a show that old that often.

Well, seeing as it’s Mecha March and I’m fresh out of model kit anime to assemble, let’s work to course correct that just a little bit with the 1983 vintage Mecha anime, Armored Trooper Votoms.

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The STL of a Double Feature – Gundam Build Divers & Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE Spoiler Reviews

I love model kits. I have made no secret of that this month, and will probably be happily assembling various mechas and mecha musume into the future. I also happen to have a fondness, from the days when I consumed more Western media, for a little cult classic of a film called Tron. For those who know Tron is – I would say – a delightfully dated little adventure that tries to show what goes on deep inside a computer realm, with some very memorable visuals and basic conceits and characters, it can kind of be considered the granddaddy of the “Trapped in a video game” genre that underscores a lot of the “VR MMO” stories you see these days when, you know, MMOs exist and VR doesn’t seem equally implausible compared to digitizing a person’s entire physical existence.

Naturally, where all this is going is Gundam Build Divers. Along with its sequel, Re:RISE, Divers takes the Gundam Build idea and translates it into cyberspace, and we’re going to be looking at it as a double feature this week.

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The Plamo of a Double Feature – Gundam Build Fighters & Gundam Build Fighters Try Spoiler Reviews

Ah, Mobile Suit Gundam… it’s kind of a marvel that no entries in such a huge and venerable series had made it onto the review blog up until now. But, the very scope and scale of the affair is part of why: Gundam is huge, and that makes tackling it in more bite-sized sections a rather difficult. Of course, it’s not entirely a single continuity, and there are certainly entries that can be looked at in isolation, but if I’m really going to address Gundam I want to do it with some sort of semblance of purposeful direction.

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It’s Only a Model – Busou Shinki Spoiler Review

So, some time ago I reviewed Frame Arms Girl, a show based on a line of plastic model kits, depicting the mecha musume girls from the kits as animate… well, plastic models, leading to a kind of odd living toys setup. Well, it turns out that I might have started in the wrong place: before there were Frame Arms Girls, Busou Shinki from Konami was the main and arguably original line of mecha musume snap-fit models. Being Konami, it was a multi-media franchise including model kits, manga, games, and of course an anime outing as well, which is probably what we have to blame for Frame Arms Girl taking the “tiny androids, VR Battlefields” sort of approach, because that’s exactly what Busou Shinki does. The question will be whether or not it does it better than Frame Arms Girl.

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