Giant Robo the Animation: Chikyuu ga Seishi Suru Hi

Overall/Enjoyment:
A few of the things in my review have been covered by others already, but I wrote all this anyway so I might as well just post it. The first thing I would say is that Giant Robo isn't as bad as you might be led to believe. The second thing I'd say is that Giant Robo also isn't as good as you might hope. It is heavily dependent on your perspective, preference, expectations and experience.

Sure, it's epic and has plenty of action and drama and charm, but it's far from flawless. It's about as long as 14 regular episodes, and though I personally enjoyed ... it, I would not recommend it without several caveats. It's very up and down and hit and/or miss.


Story:
Giant Robo definitely has the feel of classic anime. Most of the recognizable staples are there, making it a good choice for an introduction to anime perhaps, but if you are an anime veteran, what may be considered classic by someone may come across as cliche to someone else. The story isn't bad, but not much about it is really innovative or unique. It has good foreshadowing and does a good job of gradually resolving mysteries in the main plot. However it also can be quite absurd at times, not to mention deceptive.

Most notably, for a show called Giant Robo, you would expect, well, more robots. Every episode teases you with this opening presenting different possible robo-nemisis but robotic combat actually plays a very small role in this anime. In fact, the robots are largely overshadowed by the characters incredible special abilities. Their powers are so fantastic, it doesn't really make any sense why robots/mecha are even involved at all. People can practically fly, destroy buildings, carry several tons of weight, and are ridiculously hard to kill. It makes the whole robot angle superfluous at best, and arbitrary at worst.

The overall plot is pretty good, it reminded me almost of Fullmetal Alchemist, and the twist ending is so ripe with irony it's almost redeeming. I really wish the story would've just jumped right away to and revolved around BF vs IPO. Unfortunately, the show gets really melodramatic and over-the-top towards the end which almost completely undoes its merits. There are also little annoyances like characters being able to talk to each other from unbelievable distances. The character's are extremely overpowered, especially the villains. It's a wonder the world isn't half destroyed from their conflicts and supersonic voices alone.

Did I mention at some point Robo cries? Apparently he was programmed for two things: to fight... and feel pain? There's nothing wrong with machines having emotions, it's a common plot device, but it's out of place here. He doesn't have steam vents to show when he gets angry, so not only is this inconsistent, but there's no possible logical reason for adding this feature.

The worst part of the story is probably how much they overplay Daisaku's importance. The way the character's bend over backwards for him felt really forced. Giant Robo isn't even the biggest or strongest robot really, he's just a big robot with something "unique." Their whole presence in the show felt like it was a token they were contractually obligated to include amidst the real story.

The ending is a mixed bag. Some parts of it are touching, surprising, and gratifying. The rest is just contrived and ridiculous. Some of it gets so cheesy your eyes may roll right out of your head. As if that wasn't bad enough, everything but the main story arc is left kind of up in the air. So after watching about a season's worth of episodes the end result is basically one big "To Be Continued..."

Oof...


Characters:
Some of the characters like Alberto or Ko-Enshaku or GinRei are kind of cool and central to the story, others not so much. Some of them had a lot of potential to be cool but most are just so sudden and random they aren't much more than cameos. With a few exceptions, the "bad guys" aren't even that bad, you almost want to root for them instead.

The tragedy in this is that it feels like they're trying way too hard to convince you Daisaku/Giant Robo are more important than they really are. I think I probably enjoyed them least of all. You could probably remove Daisaku and the few robots in it and have a better show.

The names are classicly generic. "So the Magnificent Ten are on the move again." Then there's "Big Fire" or the "Experts of Justice" and of course "GIANT ROBO." One guy might as well have been called Fingersnaps McDoom, it would've fit in just as well.


Art:
The mech design is very much like Big O, and the art's pretty good. It's bright and full of color and nice and clean for the most part. I'm not a big fan of the older anime style/look. Such as the tight modelesque Astroboy look or the weird long-nosed Cyborg 009 character designs, but something about this still felt kind of fresh.


Sound:
The music's also pretty good. I thought the whole orchestral sound fit pretty well and probably wouldn't mind having the soundtrack. The English dub is ok, and it certainly sounds a lot better than the older English dub. I still prefer the sub (of course).

Giant Robo OVA 20.10.08

Fanfiction is not something I ever got into. I did try it, but the ratio of dross to quality was far too high, and even when you find something that is well written, it's almost never created in the spirit of the original; another person's vision and ideal has inevitably crept in and improved/tweaked/changed/adulterated/spoiled/messed up/ruined it - circle your preferred response.

Giant Robo OVA is, when you come right down to it, fanfiction. If I read wikipedia right, all that remains of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's original Giant Robo is Robo itself and its operator, Daisaku. Cropped from Yokoyama's highly ... varied other works and stretched or shrunken to fit are the entire remainder of the cast; to create a world that fits this elaborate homage is the basic reason for the shape and nature of the world that is created in Giant Robo OVA (as opposed to traditional things like the story dictating the setting, for example). What that world basically amounts to is a peculiar blend of retro sci-fi, superhero and chinese kung fu legend; any resemblance you may see to our world is purely coincidental, and fairly rare.

From a personal perspective, Giant Robo OVA is fundamentally difficult to deal with. The reason? It is trying to be something that I don't actually like but I can at least appreciate it, and at that aim it is succeeding spectacularly.

Let me elaborate. That this has not only been made in the first place but in fact hailed as a classic is a pretty amazing achievement for something that basically amounts to a gigantic cut and paste manoeuvre. However, the key thing to consider when pondering whether to watch this OVA is this: how much you enjoy this is likely proportional to how important consistency and logic are to you, or rather how important superpeople and giant robots fighting each other are over the former. This is because, looked at from one viewpoint, you can consider this a masterpiece of old-style giant robot action with a remarkably well-crafted cast and an epic yet affecting story, while from another point of view Giant Robo is a cliche-ridden, overblown mother of all messes, with a hodgepodge of ill-assorted and basically unbelievable characters, a formulaic and nonsensical storyline, and no sense whatsoever of its own ridiculousness. Both of these are right, neither is mutually exclusive.

The narrative approach, for one thing, is interesting, if basically a bit misleading. For something called Giant Robo, there is in fact remarkably little of Giant Robo. The scale is epic in the literal sense, with huge numbers of people involved, clashes of armies and chaos and destruction on an enormous scale. Despite this, in actual fact, character interaction is the soul of the thing, and therein lies the quality of the piece, and the trouble. The tone is unremittingly fantastical; all the heroes are death-defyingly heroic, all the villains death-defyingly villainous, harking straight back to classical heroic pulp fiction, the Golden Age of Comics or chinese Wuxia novels (Yokoyama's manga adaptations of which many characters are lifted from) when supermen were Super, had named attacks, needed to be killed at least twice, flew faster than a speeding simile, etcetera. All the values are old-fashioned and absolutist - good is good, bad is bad and the ethics gradient is a cliff.

There's a large number of people who will lap that sort of thing up. However, the reason that this harks back to classics, in the past tense, is that the prevailing style has moved on. Suffice it to say that I can see what the creators of this OVA are trying to do, I even think they've done it, but while it delights existing fans, this does nothing to convince non-believers of the fun they are missing out on. Logic or common sense is notable by its absence from the story; at no point did anyone give any kind of reason why the good guys don't simply destroy the piece of doomsday machine they have hold of and foil the naughty plot; nor is any attempt made to explain the soopahpowahs that the characters have. Now, the likelihood is that either you're reading that and going "Hmm, good point", in which case I suggest not watching this, or you're going "but who cares about that stuff?" in which case this is an OVA for you.

Characters are similarly problematic. You could argue the case for these characters being tried and true heroic/villainous archetypes fairly convincingly. But for me, the characters are unbelievable despite their careful construction, ridiculous despite their sincerity, and above all, anachronistic despite their archetypicality. A character driven story needs complex and credible characters; without them, in my estimation anyway, it's a basic failure. The script is far from genius, frankly, which doesn't help. I was unable to take anyone seriously, which made the whole thing fall down on the serious level it wanted to be taken at, and doing things like suddenly introducing characters called Mr Wonderful who splits things in half by snapping his fingers at them (I'm not joking) does not improve this situation. The world has mostly moved on from such old-fashioned, one-dimentional characterisations, and for me at least, Giant Robo acts as a regrettably faithful tribute to the bad parts alongside the good parts of the old days.

On the up side, however, I did feel that if I didn't already find the whole thing too essentially ridiculous to get over, I might enjoy the breadth and richness of the universe that was being shown to me. The villains, for example, were every bit as diverse and sympathetic as the heroes, and thanks to its good direction, unlike many such things, despite its flaws , it felt like a universe imagined as a whole system.

However one feels about the story or characters, however, one has to give high praise to the animation, which is of a consistently excellent quality, smooth and richly coloured. Direction is also thoughtful and highly atmospheric. Alongside this is the highly elaborate orchestral soundtrack, that rivals the best the world can offer. Here too, however, I have reservations; the art may be immaculate in quality, but I'm not really a fan of the 1970s art style, I find the design ethos unco-ordinated and incomprehensible, and while the music may be of the highest quality, it nonetheless sounds unpleasantly overdone and of a hackneyed and eclipsed style in my ear. Everything about Giant Robo, in fact, harks back to an era that began and ended well before I became interested in anime. However, the massive respect some have for this series is all that stops me from saying it is outdated - while I personally prefer more modern things in terms of style and narrative, it is fair to say that mine is not the only perspective.

Perhaps I'm suffering here from my constant search for an Evangelion successor; highly regarded mecha series are few enough, and while such a combination of cool stompy robots and grown-up seriousness as Eva gave us is unlikely to come around again any time soon, the continuing apparent inability of anyone or anything to compete with Evangelion on that ground and claim a slice of its pie is baffling to me. This is a fundamentally different beast to Eva and makes no attempt to cover the same ground.

So, getting back on track, for me, I don't much like it, to be honest. However don't go believing that I consider it a trainwreck, because I don't; I simply dislike what it is trying to do more than I enjoy the high standard of work it employs to achieve it. If you enjoy old-fashioned superhero stories, or want exciting without having to worry overmuch about logical, this is very much up your street. I may not like it much, but I am highly impressed by it.

This review will be harsh. But I literally just watched the last episode & the ending was so crap I hated everything I liked about this. After watching all those long, confusing episodes to find that the fight is still going on is like racing an Ironman & being slapped in the face at the end.

Fuck you guys.

You didn't even give closure for half the characters. It felt like a prologue.

The story is disjointed & confusing. A fucking mess. Seriously I couldn't even begin to explain how bad it is. From what I understand a boy's Dad gets killed by the badguys for ... some reason. So then he becomes a robots partner because the robot represents the people who sacrificed themselves for him...or something. This makes the boy & the robot justice fighters in a plot about pollution. With a few twists along the way. I mean the story isn't just rubbish. It's confusing too. AWESOME.

It uses odd formats, often in X-Files fashion where something will happen leaving you asking WTF & then it will decide to explain a few episodes later with either a flashback or some kind of twist. But it really doesn't work. It often just confuses things worse & I see no point in it at all. It provides no dramatic effect. It just makes more work for them. I mean in a few places it worked really well. But it failed a lot more often than it worked... If you're going to introduce something, just explain it at the same time. I'm not thick, but having a sense of order to your anime should be expected.

The animation ranges from ok - mediocre - bad. The animations are fine. But this is really showing its age. Often the art is either ugly or cheap looking. Like the animators were trying their hardest to do the least amount of work & skipped or rushed certain parts.

The characters are amazing. The use of them isn't. Characters are thrown in at random times. And can die within five minutes of appearing. Big characters to. And then randomly turn up again slightly later with a few bandages & then they fight some more. Some didn't even have bandages. They just turned up again completely fine. And some of them weren't even tied up by the end of it. It was just as messy as everything else. They had more characters than they could handle clearly. I mean some didn't even do anything if I remember correctly, but they were big main characters in the universe at least. I mean what was the point of them?

I've never seen anything else from the GR franchise, so I was actually like o_O When suddenly they're flying around & firing off energy attacks like some kind of cheap DBZ. Off the handle & unexpected. But AWESOME.

But with the sheer number of characters the powers just seemed to get crapper & crapper towards the end. Synchronized drums? Laaaaaame.

The story died ages ago & now we have synchronized drums? Talk about running out of steam.

Although I wouldn't say I hated this anime. This anime frustrated me in so many ways. But I don't deny that this was epic, intense, GAR & in places quite moving. I cheered along to the fights, beamed when certain people did the resurrection act & even cried in certain places. YUP! I cried. Shame so many characters have no closure at all....and that fucking ending. I feel like I've been given a piece of anime in the middle of something larger. Terrible.

I wouldn't recommend it to be honest. It's long & the ending & the terrible use of characters just takes away anything that was worth watching in this to be honest.

Blah.

Notice how I keep saying. THE ENDING WAS TERRIBLE.

Well that's because...

THE ENDING WAS TERRIBLE.

This is a beautiful anime to watch and to hear (except for every time Daisaku speaks), but not so much to think about or try to buy into a lot of the individual scenes. It was a worthwhile watch, and certainly was most enjoyable when I could zone out the art and just enjoy the art and action for a while, but that cannot last.

Another important note is that the ending is not THAT much of a twist; it is set up very, very, very clearly from the fifth OVA onward, specifically when you see Emannuel/Genya's flashback, and was even clearly entailed by the plot ... to be possible before that. It is literally revealed to you in the fifth OVA, so anyone who was not expecting it was just not paying much attention.

The art in this series is just gorgeous. The colors still retain some of the bad idiosyncrasies of late '80s art, but are usually incredibly vivid and a treat to look at. With the older style character designs, this series feels like some sort of unique bridge between Black Jack and any early Gainax works (minus the obnoxious size F tits), or perhaps the coloring mirrors Akira a bit more, though needless to say it does not touch that level of animation, like most everything else does not. The style very obviously influenced Big O, but has smoother action and more vivid coloring here. It is simply a treat for the eyes, despite the limitations of the characters faces and expressions.

The music is, at the worst, "irrelevant" but still pretty much enjoyable, and at its best sets a very distinct tone at certain points in this anime; e.g. really setting a cheery, mischevous tone, sort of like Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche at one point . The extended finales as the credits roll are a very mature touch, and show how the feel of this anime is something a bit more mature and serious than a normal action anime. The voice acting is also mostly smooth and professional, including Norio Wakamoto sounding serious instead of absurd, although the generally whiny voice of Daisaku clashes with this the entire way, particularly whenever he grows whinily emotional.

The characters all could be nice enough in all this, but what we are shown of them is always banal and trite. We see one character take several episodes to realize that being jealous of a 12 year old might be stupid, Ginrei is flat at all times, the various professors all supposedly struggle with their grief, but really are just being really tepidly halfhearted (as in, the way they are depicted is very tepid even when repenting), and Daisaku is given a gigantic robot and shoved into the plot repeatedly for no apparent relevant reason. Daisaku is not anything close to a center of this series; perhaps we are "supposed to feel" like he is, but the action is sprawling and he is often out of place and clearly being forced into scenes a bit, and even then is not present enough to be anything like a superbly main piece of the plot. No, people have inexplicable superpowers that are never explained, so that takes up a good bit of the time...

Which brings us to the story, which on the surface is about the Shizuma drive, and that is really fleshed out pretty nicely. It is not exactly original to have either an apocalyptic plot, let alone one related to energy, but the personal motives and personalities were fun. That was kind of murdered by the rash of superpowered characters running all over the place, Giant Robo being incredibly useful and alternately completely useless, and the "become a man already, Daisaku!" elements. Of course, it was also obviously hurt by the generally poor characters. Despite all that, the typically cliche revivals for the ending are definitely the most egregious story element.

This is definitely not an anime that has somehow "showed age", unless what people mean is that it has old art styles instead of copy and paste modern art with even LESS expression in the characters, but it is not a slick package. You are not going to enjoy it, perhaps, if your idea of a good time is ef. Also, I do not think I did a good job emphasizing up to here; if you can just sit back and enjoy action, then there should be plenty of that in this anime for you. I am a person who is not really satisfied by just a lot of action, so that did not really come across in my review style.

This series is a tricky beast. On paper it should be the perfect anime for me. I love the style of Post-Tezuka Manga/Anime, so character designs that embrace the look of the era like these sold me on watching it alone. The show's premise too seems interesting. A new energy source that turns out to be far less perfect than we initially believed. Dueling agencies of secret agent martial artists duking it out in the best wuxia battles this side of Crouching Tiger. This show should be amazing, but sadly, it falls a bit flat. And Here's Why

Pros:

-The art design in this show is ... phenomenal. I liked how they didn't just copy the art style of the late 60s/early 70s, but rather took elements of that style and mixed it with the style of the time. The character designs I love, I really love, and even though some feel kinda bland, this show definitely has a distinct look.

-The animation is phenomenal. This show is definitely one of the highlights of the pre-CGI era of anime. Everything is smooth and crisp, and it is a joy to look at, even if the content lacks substance at times.

-The music is also interesting and distinct. It has this operatic/orchestral feel that makes it stand out from it's contemporaries. It helps to underscore the tragic themes that the series inhabits.

Cons

-As other reviewers have pointed out, for a show called Giant Robo, the show really doesn't feature that much in the way of Mecha Battles. It saves the action for individual fights of the wuxia variety. This isn't a bad thing, it's just that this show bills itself as mecha, but doesn't really feel like it.

-The story starts out really interesting. Once I understood that this wasn't a mecha show, just more of a sci-fi shounen, I started to find it interesting. However, it doesn't elaborate enough on the interesting mythology of the world, and instead continues to give us meaningless action, death, and explosions.

-This show has some great character designs and animation, but that can't make up for the lack of connection I feel towards these people. There are about a dozen that we are told to empathize with, and the way that they're introduced makes it hard to latch onto them. There are some interesting ones in the bunch, but the time that the show would use to show us these details is used to introduce us to more characters instead. A lot of them start to feel really homogeneous after a while too. I can only have so many Chinese Warriors. A few of these characters die, and this lack of connection I feel towards them makes these deaths feel trite.

-The ending of this show is effing ridiculous, and not in a self referential way. It's bad, and the last few episodes are these really long, drawn out battle scenes. I'm not against sequences like this, but when I'm not really feeling the characters or the story, it makes me feel disconnected. The last two episodes are a non stop battle that doesn't take a breather, and this really messes with the pacing of the show. The unending pace makes me feel desensitized to everything that's going on and makes me feel disinterested.

TL;DR
This show is a joy to look at and appreciate as long as you don't pay too much attention to the story. This isn't a mecha anime as much as it's a weird sci-fi shounen. It throws at lot at you at once, but if you are in the mood for some crazy action battles, this may fit the bill.