An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Mecha March

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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Finding the Right Combination – Aquarion Spoiler Review

So, when it comes to the Mecha genre, one subtype I haven’t really addressed is the combining Mecha style. It’s a very classic subgenre, going back to some of the earliest Mecha shows and one that’s fairly familiar to Western audiences thanks to the popularity of Golion, aka Voltron. Yet the closest I’ve come to really addressing a combining robot show is probably Gurren Lagann. Well, that can’t stand! So this week, I’m going after Aquarion.

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Attack of the Plot Ninjas! – Bubuki Buranki Spoiler Review (S1 & 2)

So, I suppose I should start by explaining that title. You see, I’m something of an old hat at National Novel Writing Month – a challenge to write 50,000 words (the minimum definition of a novel) in the month of November. In recent years it’s presented more as a vehicle for actual storytellers, but back in the 00’s when I first encountered it, it was a much looser group with a big focus on getting participants to create all those words in such little time, like that was the big challenge.

One piece of advice that was passed around in the day was that, if you ever felt like a scene was stalling, you should just have ninjas attack. No rhyme, no reason, just ninjas, because surely you would get a lot of words down describing the ninja attack and then making sense of why and how ninjas suddenly appeared. By the time you explained your way out of the outburst of nonsense, you’d be many words ahead and ready for the next crazy thing to propel you forward. Bubuki Buranki feels for all the world like it was written by a teenager adhering to that rule with the kind of wild zeal that only youth can provide and then produced and edited by consummate professionals who had to somehow make all the outbursts work without disrespecting the “source material”.

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Cast In The Name Of God Ye Not Reviewed (or; It’s Showtime Somewhere!) – The Big O Spoiler Review

So, after a certain little show came out , it was rather popular for mecha shows to have a psychological or philosophical bent, rather than just acting as vehicles to sell toys or model kits. Not that they couldn’t still push merch in a lot of cases, but lots of folks wanted to cash in on the success of what remains one of the most dominant anime franchises. We’ve seen entries like this before, most particularly RahXephon, the 2002 attempt to do… exactly what its predecessor did.

In 1999, however, we got a series that did clearly aim somewhere in the same spectrum, but that was also clearly doing its own thing. The Big O clearly owes some to Evangelion, but it’s also drenched in film noir and presages Demonbane more than it does RahXephon.

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Vampire Space Wizard Mecha – Valvrave the Liberator Spoiler Review

“The Tale of Sephiroth Goku” is an odd little piece of work. Effectively a parody of anime produced in 2011 by a very bored Lets Play commentator as the story of his “D&D character from [his] favorite animes”, it’s an oddly fun to listen to pastiche of direct references, bizarre genre conventions, and dead horses (and unicorns, having never been real) to beat. The whole thing is less than the full ten-minute runtime of the video that contains it – most of it is in the last four minutes – but it jams in a hilarious amount of plot summary and reference.

In 2013, Kakumeiki Valvrave (Valvrave the Liberator) appeared, apparently as an attempt to bring the Tale of Sephiroth Goku to the screen without actually violating any copyrights. As an attempt to properly represent a stream of consciousness nonsense from the internet it’s… wait, I was supposed to take this thing seriously? And it’s got two seasons?

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Super Robot versus Real Robot – Aldnoah.Zero Spoiler Review

There are, on the whole, two major wings of the Mecha genre. The “Super Robot” subgenre consists of shows where the Mechas and their pilots have magical powers and capabilities that often seem to run more on rule of cool than on anything resembling reality. One example would be Gurren Lagann, which frequently tells sense and logic to sit down and shut up, because the robots are going to do something awesome. That’s not to say that Super Robot shows can’t be serious or even dark. Neon Genesis Evangelion is also very much in the “Super Robot” bracket.

Then you get the “Real Robot” shows where mechas, even if technically still made less impractical than in reality as we know it, are treated more like standard war machines. They’re made of metal and powered by engines and nothing’s going to sprout a new ability because the pilot believes in himself. The mechas probably don’t have unique names or anything like that, and the protagonist can at least in abstract theory get a new one if they total the one they’re driving, even if they’d have a lot of customizing work to do to get it back the way they like it. Full Metal Panic lives pretty comfortably in this space, as do several of the more classic Mecha entries.

So, what happens if you put these in the same setting, forcing a Real Robot protagonist to fight against a variety of Super Robot bosses with their named mechas and might-as-well-be-magic powers? As you might have surmised from the title of the review, you get Aldnoah.Zero.

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Growing Harem Chronicle – Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle Spoiler Review

So, Fantasy Mecha is a thing. It’s certainly less popular than SF or Cyberpunk Mecha, but it is at least an established mash-up. Battle School also has its own established place, one that I’ve talked about a good deal. And, of course, into any other genre a little harem may fall. Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle is the shameless mash-up of all of this, a melting pot of mediocrity onto which light must, at this juncture, be shone.

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