An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Mecha March

It’s International Politics Time! – Gasaraki Spoiler Review

Sit back, relax, and prepare your senses, because we are cracking into some vintage anime!

Vintage mecha shows, in particular, kind of hit differently a lot of the time. I have some theories as to why that is, but the most obvious is that mechs were some of the first things to be commonly animated with CG technology. Classically hand drawn mechas tend to have more weight to their movements than the smooth flow afforded by CG, which especially when you’re dealing with a real robot affair rather than a magical super robot one, can actually accentuate the experience.

This brings us to Gasaraki, a mecha show with real robots (in some senses), strange mysticism, and an extremely dense cloak-and-dagger political plot. Let’s watch it!

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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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