Now, here’s a show I’ve alluded to before – the whirlwind of illogical, enjoyable energy known as Gurren Lagann. Part of me wants to just jump right in, because it’s that kind of show, but given the contexts I’ve brought it up in before, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least address something of the production history.
You see, Gurren Lagann (Tengen Toppa
Gurren Lagann if you prefer) is, technically, a Gainax anime. But to
an extent that’s like saying the studio behind Nausicaa of the Valley
of the Wind was Topcraft. Which it was. But Nausicaa is largely
considered a Ghibli film because much of the talent that worked on it
went on to become Studio Ghibli. Similarly, while Gurren Lagann was
created under the auspice of Gainax, it is in some respects Trigger
anime #0. Much like you can see many of the themes that would be
endemic in Ghibli’s work (particularly Hayao Miyazaki’s) in Nausicaa,
it’s easy to see that loads of Trigger’s favorite tropes and styles
were first developed here in Gurren Lagann.
So, if at some point in this review, I
mention how an element is very much like Trigger, or even call Gurren
Lagann a Trigger show, know that I am fully aware that it technically
belongs to Gainax, and am speaking more to the fact that many of the
people we think of as Trigger were here too.
With that out of the way, the show
opens with an out-of-context vision of an epic space battle before
depositing us with our main character, Simon. Simon is a young man
(boy, really) with a shy and reserved demeanor who works as a digger
in an underground village. To Simon, the village is the whole of the
known world, with nothing beyond the caves known for sure. His
friend and big brother figure, Kamina, believes that there’s a bright
paradise called the Surface which they’ll someday reach, and
encourages Simon that his is the drill that will pierce the heavens.
By Haruhi, Kamina makes an entrance.
Give him a minute – hell, give him ten seconds – and he shows you
why he’s the man of a million memes. He comes in with big energy and
a bombastic, larger-than-life presence that causes him to sweep up
everything around him and drive it forward, dominating basically
every scene he’s in and directing the flow of the show.
In any case, a lot of stuff happens at
once, as is typical for the show. Simon finds a mysterious “giant
face” buried away, which ends up dubbed Lagann. Another giant face
(a mecha called a Gunman), one much more giant and wolf-like, crashes
through the ceiling and begins to attack the now cracked-open town.
Kamina tries to fight the Gunman on foot at first, and Simon gets the
one he found under a rock, using his little drill talisman as a key
to start it. One of the Gunman’s enemies, a rifle-wielding redhead
named Yoko, appears and helps them fight back. Simon, with Yoko’s
guidance and Kamina’s encouragement, manages to not only drive his
miniature Gunman, but actually beat the attacker with a giant flying
turn-into-a-drill attack, ultimately depositing the trio exactly
where Kamina wanted to go: the surface.
It turns out that not everything there
is sunshine and roses, as Yoko reveals. She’s part of a band that
lived in a now-breached underground village, and have discovered that
now that they’re exposed to the surface, they’re subject to constant
attacks by Gunmen and the Beastmen who pilot them. We’re not
initially given a reason why Beastmen attempt to exterminate surface
humans, but at the same time, we don’t exactly need one.
Kamina shortly gets the bright idea to
hijack one of the Gunmen for his own use. Pretty much everyone tells
him it’s crazy, but in instant-classic Kamina style he does it
anyway, and it actually works. The Gunman takes well to him, and
gets retrofitted for his use (including a take on his iconic absurd
shades) and dubbed Gurren. From there, Kamina and company encounter
Viral, a squad leader among the Beastmen who comes to act as the
persistent but oddly honorable rival to the heroes. In the first
battle with Viral, Kamina insists that he and Simon need to combine
their strengths. He takes it very literally, grabbing Lagann and
slamming it on top of Gurren until reality gives up and they
successfully get a transformation sequence into the combined giant
robot Gurren Lagann, which is in fact much more powerful than Gurren
and Lagann separate. There was, I want to stress, no indication that
this would work, Kamina just did it on a whim and we get the title of
the show because of it.
With Gurren Lagann now able to fight,
Kamina leads Simon, Yoko, and their colorful support staff (now
dubbed Team Gurren) travel to track down the base of the Beastmen.
Along the way they meet the Black siblings (Kitan and his three
sisters, the former of which is only slightly less nuts than Kamina
himself) and encounter a dying underground village that has a gunman
as its religious idol, from which the team picks up tag-along kids
Gimmy and Darry and young stick-in-the-mud Rossiu. Rossiu, in
particular, comes to act as the team’s voice of reason, which must be
frustrating because (in one of those “very Trigger” traits of the
show) reason is more of a guideline to be thrown to the wind than an
actual rule in this universe.
Eventually, Team Gurren finds their
mark, a walking land-battleship commanded by Thymilph, one of the
Four Divine Generals who lead the Beastmen on behalf of a figure
known as the Spiral King. Kamina draws up a plan to go against the
fortress (it’s a very Kamina plan, consisting mostly of charging
straight in and assuming that Simon will be able to control the thing
in his Lagann the same way he can Gurren-Lagann when merged), and
Yoko, who Simon also had something of a crush on, confesses her
feelings to Kamina. Witnessing that means Simon’s head isn’t quite
in the fight when the time comes, which wouldn’t be so bad since he
does ultimately turn it around and convince his robot to do the thing
through sheer willpower (which is how robots work in this setting)…
except for the part where Kamina is killed in the battle, leaving
Simon stuck blaming himself for not being just a little bit faster,
and needing to have sense slapped into him by Kamina (so, it’s not
exactly wrong to blame him). The battle is won, Thymilph is
destroyed, his fortress becomes the Dai-Gurren, and Viral escapes
once again… but no one is feeling particularly victorious.
To me, this is actually a very
interesting choice, but not necessarily a shocking one. Kamina, as a
character, was something of a problem for the writing. He was always
larger than life, even by the standards and in the context of
something as big and bombastic as Gurren Lagann, and he absolutely
warped the show so that everything became his story as long as he was
in it. Not that he’d want to, in character – one of Kamina’s
famous catchphrases is “believe in the me who believes in you”,
after all, he really was a good guy as well as insane… but his
screen presence tended to eclipse everything else, making it hard
bordering on impossible for our technical main character, Simon, to
have any sort of growth as long as Kamina was around. And,
additionally, Kamina had trouble growing himself. He even sort of
admitted that he was on a one-way track, but it’s more pronounced
from outside the narrative, where we have to consider that it’s not
easy to give a character like Kamina nuance and humanity. Trigger is
typically good at this with its big bombastic characters, and Kamina
is much like his successors in that regard, but he’s still more of a
symbol than a person… and that symbol stays pure if the person
isn’t around any more to diverge from it.
In any case, what would otherwise be
the party’s great moment of victory becomes their darkest low, and
Simon’s slid into depression is perhaps the worst of all. In this
state, though, he notices a Gunman hurl a strange glowing box into a
valley, and goes down to investigate. Opening it with the little
drill charm, he finds the box contains a girl named Nia. She’s an
extremely sheltered, kind-hearted young lady, and also (according to
her account) the daughter of the Spiral King. She helps get Simon’s
spirits back up, at least enough so that he can do things again and,
as the team clashes with the Four Divine Generals on the way to the
Spiral King’s lair (a city called Teppelin, in the shape of a
downward-pointed drill reminiscent of Magic: the Gathering’s
Mercadia) they come to bond with Nia and Nia with them, learning more
of the world – including why she was thrown away – in the
process.
Eventually, Team Dai-Gurren reaches
Teppelin, with an army of humans emboldened by their example in tow.
The Divine Generals are put down, but Spiral King Lordgenome (yes,
that is his name) won’t go down easily, animating Teppelin as a giant
Gunman to fight off the army. Simon (in the Gurren Lagann) gets
around to the palace/control room to talk (for Nia’s sake) or fight
it out with Lordgenome, and we learn quite a lot in the process. For
one, we learn more of the Beastmen, and how Lordgenome is their
creator. He’s even made Viral immortal – not so Viral can fight
Simon (Simon thrashes him pretty easily, and Lordgenome knew that’s
how it would be go) but so Viral can be the eternal chronicler of
what’s to follow. We also learn that Lordgenome doesn’t even really
need a robot of his own to duke it out with a gunman. However, at
the very end, Simon stabs him right in the obvious boss weak point
with the little ignition key Drill, which releases a tremendous
amount of energy and at least mostly kills the Spiral King. Before
he goes for good, he offers one last prophecy of how, when the
surface swarms with “a million apes”, some great doom will befall
the Earth.
With the Spiral King defeated and the
Beastmen scattered, we can cut (after a nice ending sequence and a
recap episode for this first arc) to seven years later.
In the intervening time, a lot has
changed. The ruins of Teppelin have been built into Kamina City, a
high-tech center for humanity. Much of Team Dai-Gurren now forms the
backbone of the government, including Simon as the leader, Rossiu as
a top administrator, and most of the rest of the team in a variety of
posts. Gimmy and Darry, no longer useless tagalong kids, pilot
next-gen mechas based on the Gurren Lagann, and Yoko is nowhere to be
found.
Rossiu has become obsessed with
Lordgenome’s last words, and is doing some questionable stuff in
order to get an accurate census, worried about what will happen if
the human population passes a million. This even sees us checking in
with Viral, who gets arrested trying to protect some humans who just
want to live on their own from the government forcibly relocating
them. While some of the developments are… troubling, a
high-profile birth and Simon’s intended marriage proposal to a (still
kind of clueless) Nia are the more pressing affairs.
But as Rossiu brings more humans out of
their underground villages to be counted and a child is born to a
couple of our Team Dai-Gurren extras, a mysterious counter hidden
away reaches one million, and a new enemy appears. An alien craft
attacks Kamina City, and even fighting it off causes massive
collateral damage. To make matters worse, this alien force possesses
Nia, turning her into their herald. Through her, the enemy announces
that they are the Anti-Spirals, and that they will be exterminating
life on Earth now.
In the following crisis, Simon takes a
fall for the disaster as Rossiu basically pulls a coup and usurps
authority in order to, with a level head, attempt to save what can be
saved of humanity. In addition to the Anti-Spiral craft that attack,
the moon appears to be deorbiting, to eventually slam into the Earth.
Rossiu has Simon in prison, an ancient space battleship being
retrofitted for service beneath Kamina City, Lordgenome’s reanimated
head attached to a supercomputer, and a deep bunker for everyone due
to be left behind on Earth. It’s not a bad plan, thinking logically,
but it is a little ruthless and moreso when it’s shown that Rossiu
knows the survival expectancy for the bunker to be low bordering on
nil.
Simon, meanwhile, meets up with Viral
in prison. They’re obviously never going to like each other, but
find perhaps that they have more in common that would first be
thought, including a powerful desire to never give up. I’ll be
honest, I actually came around to really liking Viral by the last
movements of the first arc, so it was kind of nice to see him and
Simon reach something of an understanding. Nia – still as the
Herald of the Anti-Spiral – also visits, though hints of the real
Nia seem to slip through.
In any case, Yoko shows up to bust
Simon out of prison (and while she’s acting alone, some of the rest
of Team Dai-Gurren had the same idea and also show up). We’re
treated to an episode showing how she became a schoolteacher out of
the public light in the intervening time, but she’s back in the
saddle for what may be the last battle. The lot of them (including
Viral, co-piloting the Gurren Lagann with Simon for the remainder of
the show) bust out and confront Rossiu just as a massive Anti-Spiral
incoming seems set to ruin all of Rossiu’s plans and throw him into
despair. This seems to be just as the Anti-Spirals planned, since
Nia said a few things about intending to crush the human spirit.
The old band pulls Rossiu’s fat out of
the fire and for an encore takes over the battleship, using the
Gurren Lagann to pilot the ship as a bigger robot, drills the moon
cracking into the Anti-Spiral instillation, and then finds another
drill-socket there, hitting it to use the ship robot being driven by
the Gurren Lagan to connect with the moon, revealing it as an
ultimate super-dreadnought flagship. The Anti-Spirals are forced
into retreat, the real moon phases back in at its proper orbital
position, and humanity has now commandeered an ultra-badass spaceship
(once Lordgenome’s flagship, when he fought the Anti-Spirals in the
distant and poorly explained past that was likely glimpsed in that
weird first scene of the whole show). A big problem for striking
back, though, is that the Anti-Spirals are hidden, but because of
Simon’s love for Nia (and the engagement ring she still has with
her), there’s a window to pinpoint the location of their lair and
attack.
While getting to this point, we also
got a dump of the mythology of the Gurren Lagann universe. The full
story is essentially that the race now known as the Anti-Spirals
discovered Spiral Energy, the power that is behind all the “It
works because you believe”/“Human Spirit” stuff. Fearing that
its overuse would doom the universe to self-destruction through
overly-rapid growth, they severed themselves from the Spiral and
began a campaign to suppress other Spiral races. Lordgenome led the
resistance of Spiral warriors from across the cosmos, but was
ultimately defeated, earning a reprieve for his species only by
promising to keep the surface population of Spiral life on Earth
under one million. He sent the remaining humans to the underground
villages and created the Beastmen (who, incapable of reproduction,
aren’t themselves a Spiral species) to enforce his will, while
throughout the cosmos other Spiral races languish contained by the
Anti-Spiral.
The ship launches with everybody,
breaching into the sealed-off dimension that the Anti-Spiral lurk in,
as we engage in a four episode space battle against everything the
Anti-Spirals can throw at Team Dai-Gurren. The show remembers it can
kill off characters, as we lose a number of likable incidentals
through here, while the Anti-Spirals attack (in a way that’s cunning
on the part of the writers) both physically with some cool weapons,
and emotionally, trying to drive everyone to despair in order to cut
off their Spiral Power. It’s a great sequence, and has a lot of good
grace notes that are more fine-resolution than I’m currently willing
to get into (in part because there are so many). In the end, the
Anti-Spirals try to trap everyone in illusory worlds where they’re
content and safe, but the Spirit of Kamina speaks to everyone, and
leads them to strive for more. This, and recovering Nia, initiates
the final battle with the Anti-Spiral.
This battle is wonderfully
choreographed and dynamic. It’s also arguably the single most
high-scale battle in anime. At the very least, it’s the biggest I’ve
seen, and it’s hard to imagine anything topping it by too much
without losing the action. The Anti-Spirals use their own power,
formed of scorn and despair rather than will and hope, to create a
giant demon-looking robot-monster to fight the team with, while our
team does their nesting doll thing to match its size and duke it out.
How big are these fighters? The entire planet of the Anti-Spirals
hangs between the horns of the Anti-Spiral mech, and our fighters use
cosmic structures (distorted though they may be by the Anti-Spiral
dimension in which the battle takes place) to fight. Galaxies as
throwing stars! The fabric of space-time as the ropes of the arena.
But while it goes so impossibly big, it keeps the emotions grounded,
and the fight has all the astounding excess of the visuals, the
dynamic choreography of battle, and the philosophical battle between
the Spiral heroes and the Anti-Spiral hive mind that opposes them.
Eventually, of course, Simon prevails
with the help of all his surviving friends and allies (Even
Lordgenome, restored temporarily to a full body and spirit to get one
last hit in) and shatters the Anti-Spirals, who expire warning Simon
that the fate of the universe now rests on the shoulders of unfit
mortals.
Simon’s sure they’ll figure it out.
The survivors return to Earth, and Simon and Nia are married… only
for Nia, irretrievably damaged by what the Anti-Spirals did to her,
to fade away into nothingness. The universe is opened, with other
Spiral races having become aware of the fight and its victor, setting
the foundations for a galactic civilization, but Simon this time
chooses to vanish from the public light, becoming a mysterious figure
who wanders the world. The show ends as he stops himself from aping
Kamina’s “Who the hell do you think I am?” catchphrase, insisting
he’s nobody special as he inspires a little boy with a hand drill to
maybe be the next big thing.
What more can I say about Gurren
Lagann? It’s a wonderful show, really. The action is on-point,
which is critical when it is very much a pure action show. The
characters are some of the loudest, biggest, and most memorable
characters. Even the incidentals, who didn’t rate on the summary of
events, have presence and charm. For instance, one of Team
Dai-Gurren’s bridge crew is an eccentrically designed man who’s one
bit is pretty much to shout “FIRE!” as he mashes the button for
whatever weapon he’s at the controls of, sometimes appropriately and
sometimes early. He’s just there to push a button, like any of the
no-name bridge crew on Star Trek, but he makes it big and memorable.
Despite this, Gurren Lagann manages to
not just be pointless excess. It still tells a good story. It still
has powerful emotions. I’d even argue it has some good subtle
moments, where a show that’s usually the dictionary definition of
unsubtle gives you something extra if you read between the lines and
really think about it. Because it plays both angles, I really have
to respect it. There’s lots of fanservice, lots of gunfire, lots of
arbitrary drills conjured out of nothing… but also lots of heart,
and no little intelligence. I’d give it an A, and recommend it
extremely highly. It’s both an important show, something that has a
place in the “common knowledge” anime lexicon, and a good show.
It’s more than worth your time and attention.