APRIL FOOLS! Gunvarrel doesn’t actually exist – it’s a fictional show referred to in Robotics;Notes, and I used the references in the actual anime to create that “review”, which should be accurate to what’s known or believed by the masses in-universe. Interestingly enough, Robotics;Notes is set in 2019-2020, so the following review of Gunvarrel can also be seen as me working “in character” as though we were living on that World Line. I’ve added this disclaimer to the start and the one in the title now that the day has passed, but otherwise the review below remains unedited for your reading amusement.
So all throughout March I got email after email, telling me that if I was going to tackle (in)famous Mecha shows like Evangelion or massive ones like Eureka Seven, I absolutely had to talk about the monolith (no pun intended) that is Gunvarrel. Properly Kidou Battler Gunvarrel, this is an absolute titan that fans of a certain age have almost certainly seen at least part of… and yet despite a fairly successful mobile game tie-in keeping the idea alive, it’s one that people stopped talking about for a long time, only to have the topic absolutely explode pretty recently. Well, you know what? That’s enough reason for me to dig in.
For those who don’t already know, Gunvarrel is a behemoth of an anime, weighing in an astounding (for a fixed-run show) 155 episodes, so I won’t be doing a beat by beat plot summary. The essential premise is that the story follows the adventures of young and bold mech pilot Genki Dotou, his love interest Rosetta Yuuki, and their super robot Gunvarrel (forcing me to once again awkwardly distinguish between a show and a similarly named element. I’ll try to keep parentheticals to a minimum, but I make no promises.) Most of their adventures involve, as you would expect, coming into conflict with plenty of other robots and having to fight out their differences. Love and courage shine through, though a master villain, Anubis, provides a legitimate threat.
Gunvarrel has an arc-based structure,
but also did seem to be building up the kind of story that would have
a decided beginning and end. It’s big, bright, loud, and cheesy…
but there’s also a surprising amount of intelligence in it. While
probably meant more for kids and teens, there are elements of
Gunvarrel that get a lit major’s blood pumping. Like RahXephon, you
can find deep symbolism and subtle visual storytelling in almost
every episode. Unlike RahXephon, which does ultimately focus on the
esoteric, the themes of Kabbalistic tradition, Gnostic mysticism, and
other religious or arcane elements are kept firmly in the background.
You could pick any episode and, in the backgrounds and framing of
the shots, find at least a handful of symbols that would seem to be
some sort of coded message. If there is an answer to what it’s
saying, it was never revealed, but from a few of the ones I noticed
(and the pretty intense wiki says it was a small fraction of ones
people somewhere have found), I think it’s meant to evoke emotions
and add ideas to a scene by triggering associative memory – an
interesting technique, from a visual standpoint.
Further, the characters are
well-written and well-realized, taking advantage of the colossal run
time in order to be fleshed out without losing the plot. I know what
Genki and Rosetta are like, and though they don’t exactly go
off-script ever, they have huge ranges. In addition to the gorgeous
action, always some of the best in its class, I think those two are
part of what kept dragging people back to Gunvarrel in the first run.
They’re immensely likeable, and reaching the end of the show, I
think I’ll kind of miss them.
Speaking of the end of the show,
though… I think that’s what everyone actually wants me to talk
about. The final episode of Gunvarrel never aired, leaving the show
on a cliffhanger forever. Over the years, fans have speculated both
about the reason the final episode might not have made it to air, and
what it’s contents might be.
The first question is the easier one to
answer. In the West, we spent a long time believing that there was
no good answer. Various conspiracy theories formed, ranging from the
mundane (they never knew how to end something so massive and
deliberately left a cliffhanger and mythical “Final episode” to
keep people talking, and possibly funding a remake or alternative
version that could be written from scratch with a fitting ending in
mind) to the salacious (various stories of bribery, theft, and
extortion), the the pointlessly outré (including tales of aliens,
lizard people, and shadowy councils – even one insane theory
claiming that the production and cancellation were connected to the
European research organization SERN).
However, like the “L is Real”
mystery about the presence or absence of Luigi in Super Mario 64,
this was a mystery that was never really… mysterious in its home
context. Unlike “L is Real” where the truth is harmless and
innocent (The designers wanted him in, cut him due to hardware
limitations, left some assets in the game, planted the monument, and
said as much in a magazine interview when the game was released), the
reason behind the Gunvarrel cancellation is… more from column B.
Several members of the production team were murdered before the
episode was finished and the director became a missing person, with
the Japanese public and media inclining towards the theory that she
did the deed and then went to ground to hide from the law. It was a
tragic disaster and it’s easy to see why the studio, with such a
black mark and a complete discontinuity of the creative minds behind
the show, would choose to not have another team give it just any old
conclusion. The point is, that mystery has been solved as far as the
Japanese were concerned for a long time, even if it took years to get
to the English-speaking internet.
The content of the final episode,
though, is another thing. I think everybody who watched through the
episodes we have probably had an opinion about what was going to go
down next. And we all probably had different childish ideas, with
the common theme that this was going to have to be bigger and bolder
than anything Gunvarrel had pulled before. A lot of those ideas are
probably done elsewhere; Gurren Lagan (in its most meme-worthy form
especially) gets the ludicrous scale some fans no doubt envisioned
and dials it up to eleven. RahXephon depicts the strange and
esoteric struggle the wiki people probably had in mind but that
probably wouldn’t have made it to the screen. For me, I think it
might have looked something like the ending of Eureka Seven, not in
the action but in the degree to which it jumps into a higher order of
tropes for the course, and in the fact that the shows share a lot in
terms of theme. Love and courage are critical to Renton and Eureka
as much as to Genki and Rosetta.
I use the past tense, because if you’ve
been living under a rock since about when I started this blog, a
video claiming to be a leak of the final episode of Gunvarrel
surfaced on the internet last summer (Summer 2019 if you’re reading
this in the future). Yeah, the weather hasn’t been the only crazy
thing, we got closure to Gunvarrel… or did we?
Naturally, the video looks nothing like
a finished episode of the show: it’s four minutes thirty one seconds,
strung together with crudely animated concept sketches and
storyboards with subtitled dialogue. What’s more, the content of the
“final episode” is… bleak. The robots sacrifice themselves to
a crazy space elevator/cannon/obelisk/monolith thing that destroys
the villain…and pretty much all of humanity by causing the sun to
act up. Rosetta collapses dead, and Genki is left to roam a dead
desert Earth, presumably for the rest of his natural days, which may
not be long.
Talk about your downer endings.
When I first saw the clip, I wanted to
totally reject it. Gunvarrel was a lot of things, but one of those
things was relentlessly optimistic. In-character the movers acted
like maybe they would, but from a writing standpoint it has
practically nothing to do with Gunvarrel. If I were a studio
executive with a cash cow franchise getting the dailies of that, I
would have pulled it rather than letting such a final episode air.
However, there’s a lot of damnably accurate evidence that the clip is
authentic. All the Gunvarrel hallmarks are there, right down to the
little elements of symbolism. For instance, the Grand Obelisk has
writing on the side. As someone who took ancient near east languages
in college, I can tell you the glyphs are legit, and the arrangement
indicates that whoever did the design must have studied the
composition, structure, and common practices of the language. I’d
bet they say something, but I can’t translate that myself. Further,
the general presentation is about the place the production would have
been at, the tiny watermarks in the corner of the image are right…
everything lines up. Even nowadays, mocking up a fake this
convincing would be an insane undertaking, so there’s every
indication we can get that it’s real.
I want to reject it, to say that
something like that isn’t Gunvarrel, but unless I’m willing to deny
reason or find another out to it, I don’t think I can. Luckily,
there is another element that I don’t think has been talked about
nearly enough with it comes to discussing the lost “final episode”.
It’s four and a half minutes long.
Yes, if fully produced, the scenes
we’re shown would stretch a good deal longer, but the length of an
entire episode? I don’t think so. You’d have to spend a lot of time
wallowing in Genki’s suffering if that was the case, and even if the
director and crew were bloody insane enough to create one of the
darkest and most miserable episodes of anime ever conceived to
capstone one of the brightest animes to achieve true greatness, I
don’t think they’d do it with poor pacing. If the stuff we see
bloats to about twelve minutes (which seems reasonable to me) that
leaves twelve more minutes of episode that we still don’t have any
information on.
I think the leaked “Final Episode”
is, in reality, a planned first act for the episode, out of two or
three. This is the moment intended to take the hero to his lowest,
not so he can end beaten down and destroyed, but so he can rise out
of it and above it in the end. Given the massive destruction, and
ending line about the world being ended, I have little doubt that
time travel would be involved in the climax, resetting the narrative
to a point where the great losses (Earth, Rosetta, that kind of
stuff) was not yet inevitable. There are a lot of ways they could go
with that angle. Maybe the power of time-travel can’t be repeated
and sends Genki back to the climactic battle where he has to find a
way to win without the Grand Obelisk. Maybe it sends him back over
and over, and he has to go through that hell repeatedly, struggling
to hold on to his hope and motivation, until he finally reaches a
future where he can hold Rosetta’s hand under a blue sky. Maybe they
even go all the way and reset the show, sending Genki back to episode
1 to do it all differently, or not at all.
Time travel seems inevitable with this
setup, but how Genki gets that power on Ruined Earth (my bet is on
Grand Obelisk) and what he does with it, those are just as
up-in-the-air and mysterious now with half an episode as they were
before last summer when we had no episode. Maybe the final thing
would have surprised even me, and found some other way to reach a
satisfying resolution without actually “time traveling”, I don’t
and can’t know… but I do know enough about Gunvarrel to know it
wouldn’t have been meant to end the way that clip ends. Not with
Rosetta dead, not with the world destroyed, not with Genki suffering
with no hope of redemption. Gunvarrel is about love and courage, not
suffering and despair. And based on what we’ve seen, it doesn’t have
to. We are still missing pieces. The stage is still set for fans to
write their own truths about what comes next.
For a rating, I’m just going to give
Gunvarrel a Pass. It’s simply too big and its whole too frayed at
the end and strained because of it to get a letter grade. I’m sorry
if that disappoints anyone, but I hope my observations about the now
infamous 4:31 of final episode make up for it.
See you Monday for our
regularly-scheduled review!