EPISODES 1-13
The first anime review I ever wrote was written four years ago and focused on The Big O. Needless to say you don’t see it on this site because it was a terribly written piece of crap comprised of two hundred words, one hundred of which laughed at the fact the robots in the series are called “Mega Deuces”. Get it? Like big poops.
God I was a stupid sixteen year old.
As this is the beginning of a series of reviews focusing on anime that I’ve neglected to critique for this site, I found it only fitting to rectify my getting rid of my shitty Big O review and replacing it with one that is written with more intelligence and a better understanding of anime. Seriously, Big O was maybe the fifteenth anime I’d watched all the way through in my life at that point.
The first thirteen episodes of Big O were released in 1999 by Sunrise Studios and was co-produced by the now defunct Bandai Entertainment. Most people know of it from childhoods long past as it aired on Adult Swim in 2001, which is where I initially saw it.
Roger Smith is our protagonist, a negotiator in Paradigm City. Forty years ago everyone in the city lost their memories but life continued anyway. Inside the city, domes were built for the rich to live under while the poor are forced to live outside in squalor. Androids walk among humans and giant robots called Mega Deuces appear, seemingly whenever someone remembers something they should have forgotten. The idea here is that random memories pop up in the minds of certain people, kind of like a glitch, that leads them to combat the dictatorship of the Paradigm Corporation and Alex Rosewater.
At least, that’s what I take out of it. The plot is convoluted as hell and only gets worse as the series progresses. What is initially a seemingly intelligent and interesting mystery quickly devolves into a mind-numbing experience, especially once you get to episode thirteen, where everything begins to go nuts.
The initial run of episodes introduces us to the main players. Roger is a rich, gentlemanly type a la Bruce Wayne. He has a butler named Norman. In the first episode Roger picks up an android girl named Dorothy. There’s also a mysterious blond woman who works as Rosewater’s secretary but has an agenda of her own.
As a negotiator Roger deals with all kinds of situations, most of which involving kidnapping though some have to do with getting a person to accept a severance check or helping lower the price of fish. After the job is taken you can expect some human drama ended with a battle between Roger’s giant robot, Big O, and another robot or kaiju.
The emphasis on the story here is that it is very episodic and formulaic but it never gets boring. There’s a good array of stories that all contain some sort of mysterious element beyond the norm. The few recurring bad guys are not the most interesting but are good for what they are and most of the minor characters throughout aren’t boring.
The biggest allure of Big O is the style. Sunrise did some contract work on Batman: The Animated Series and you can definitely see the influence (and if you can’t, you’re blind). The western animation style is interesting and the approach to the style is where a lot of the mystery comes from. It’s a great study of noir with blacks and whites, shadow and light clashing to provide one of my favorite animation styles of all time. The gothic architecture outside combined with the strange, futuristic design inside the domes gives it a dream-like quality of two worlds meshed into one. On top of that, the character design and archetypes help build that air of noir that fans of my reviews know I love.
But even then Big O isn’t done impressing you with genre artistry. The robot designs of the show are some of the most memorable in anime and when Big O comes out to play, you know you’re in for a show. I love how the military police shoots at the robots from below, not affecting them at all as buildings are destroyed, cars are crushed, and huge swathes of destruction are left in the wake of each battle. It’s a throwback to Godzilla and classic kaiju movies.
One of my favorite parts of the whole series is how much Roger seems like a good guy yet in the first episode his Mega Deuce bursts from the ground and through an apartment building, probably killing dozens of people and destroying thousands of dollars of property. As the series progresses, you wonder why Roger cares so much about saving a couple of people on a Ferris wheel when he just punched into the air so hard the shockwave blew holes through three buildings.
This blend of genres works immensely in a style as well as a writing sense and is helped even further by the fantastic soundtrack. The iconic opening is a cheesy ode to Flash Gordon while the ending is a strange but pleasant love song duet. The music during the show ranges from classical compositions to jazz to cheesy monster movie music. A bit more variety of songs would have been nice but what is here is definitely worthy of a download.
The first half of The Big O is a very well-rounded experience. It has the cheesiness of classic Batman combined with the feeling of a crime movie of the 1940’s and the excitement of a giant monster movie. Every episode is interesting and decently written with my personal favorite being a very poetic crime drama centered on a military policeman’s dreams of watching an old French movie. It’s the kind of show that revels in appealing to fans of classical animation, movies, and music.
But the last episode is where things fall apart, as I mentioned. Roger starts having memories of certain events, people are being killed off who are remembering things they shouldn’t, a farmer implies that he was the one who implanted those memories and starts making abstract and weird metaphors about tomatoes; everything gets wacked out. And it’s not bad in any way, it just starts to feel overwhelming. There are biblical references, visual and spoken metaphors, and it’s all topped off by a final moment that makes no sense to me.
The series was originally intended to be 26 episodes but failed pretty miserably in Japan. When it played on Adult Swim though it became a huge hit. And I can understand that. This is a show that most likely has a lot more appeal to a western audience. Not only is the animation style familiar and classic, but the style of story and world is very western too. With the words “To be continued” at the end of episode thirteen, it had to be pretty sad for Sunrise when the show wouldn’t be greenlit to finish its run.
But Cartoon Network jumped in to provide support and a second season was aired in 2003.
As an aside I really want to own the DVD for this series but it’s out of production because of Bandai Animation going under. Currently Sentai Filmworks has the rights to the show and I’m sure they’ll be releasing it on Blu-Ray at some point. Most likely it’ll be sold as two separate seasons and cost sixty dollars for each one because fuck consumers who don’t want to spend ridiculous prices for their anime DVDs (I’m looking at you Kill la Kill release). But that’s a completely unrelated rant….
The Big O’s first half is an excellent show. I enjoyed the hell out of it and I hope it is resurrected soon and interest returns. Nowadays it’s an underappreciated gem, shadowed by the more contemporary Cowboy Bebop and Trigun. But to me, it’s better than both.
PART TWO
EPISODES 14-26
Here’s the half of Big O that ultimately decides whether or not you love it or hate it. While the first half had confusing ideas and may have been hard to follow at points, it was still a solid and enjoyable episodic experience with unique style and memorable characters. The second season amps up the confusion in what has to be the most mind-bendingly crazy finale of any anime I’ve ever seen.
This second season starts where the first one left off with Roger and Big O battling three Megadeuces who come in from the sea. This is where things heat up for the series as a whole. We are introduced to a group of people known as the Union who are battling Paradigm City’s leadership and attempting to take fragments of memories. Roger’s negotiations through the first part of the second season has him facing off against Rosewater as well as the leader of the Union.
While the season starts confusing, it falls back into the same episodic nature of the previous season pretty quickly though there is an overarching story. Roger takes a contract to negotiate, human drama, giant robot battle.
But then there’s the last few episodes…
The Big O II has a finale that has left people baffled for as long as it has been around. Four years ago after watching it I had to Google what the fuck I’d just seen and was taken to a ten thousand word essay on all the major symbolism and what the ending means. But I think it was looking much too hard into it.
The memory fragments are individual people, most of which we actually meet. They’re the ones who can pilot the Bigs because they are basically reincarnations of people of forty years before (right before the memory wipe). Gordon Rosewater was in charge of the government at the time and he and his fellow politicians genetically engineered perfect people without knowledge of the past not only as a social experiment but as a complacency measure. The defects were sent into the wastelands where they would form the Union, a people angered by the fact they were cast aside despite having the capacity to remember…
That’s a more literal interpretation and I don’t think it’s what we’re meant to be thinking. I want to say that this is a meta anime, perhaps the most meta anime ever made. Near the end we see that Angel’s childhood home was merely a set being recorded by cameras. The clouds above the city, a perpetual feature of Paradigm, clear up and it’s nothing but studio lighting. Roger mentions not needing memories to define himself as a human.
This is an anime about a bunch of people realizing they’re in an anime.
It’s a simple idea and this theory works from the start. Why else would nobody have memories of the past? Because the show was written from a starting point. The characters all live in a present with superficial memories added in to give them character. It’s kind of like watching a three-dimensional character trying to understand why he’s in a world of two-dimensional characters.
Gordon Rosewater is the scripter. He is where these characters all come from, their father. He takes the good tomatoes (ideas) and puts them in the main city to be our heroes. He takes the defective tomatoes and tosses them into the wasteland where they plot against their creator.He keeps one favorite defective tomato and puts him in a place of power because it’s hard not to love a favorite, even if he may have issues.
What does that make Angel? She’s the director. She manipulates the story. We see her play both sides but never get truly close to either. We see Roger try to reason with her about being a person before the world is reset. The negotiation Roger was always meant to do from the beginning was negotiate with God. The angel inside The Big O may be a messenger of the director–a memory fragment from the director.
We see a small scene at the very end with Angel manipulating the controls of the city outside of what she’s doing in the city. Definitely a directing role. We also see Roger and Dorothy there for negotiations. So perhaps it worked and Roger has negotiated with Venus enough that he has transcended the anime and become a true character. And Dorothy is there too because what’s a Roger without a Dorothy? Perhaps she holds his memories?
We see Roger being manufactured like a robot and then see concept designs of Dorothy and a doll of her standing atop them. This is the creative process, the work being done before placing the characters on the stage.
I think it’s all about anime characters realizing they’re in an anime.
Mind=Blown.
Usually shows this pretentious and hard to understand leave people with a bitter taste in their mouth, something I can occasionally understand, especially when an anime is trying so hard. But I don’t think Big O is trying too hard to be smart, I feel it is inherently smart. Tons of things were hinted at early on in the series and I think there’s a lot of meaning to be found if you really crack the show open even further than I have. The idea of the anime being a huge “meta” experience may not even be correct. I like shows that leave you thinking and interpreting. These are the anime that stay with me long after they’re over and make me want to watch again to see if I missed something the last time.
Season two of The Big O may be better than its predecessor in most rights. The characters are even better with an entertaining Joker-esque baddie as well as the return of first season favorites, the plot is even more exciting, and the conclusion is satisfying in a weird, abstract kind of way.
The Big O is one of the greatest anime ever made. The characters are all entertaining and memorable, the plot is great, the design, action, and music are all damn near perfect. To me, it only fails in two departments (which are truthfully the same complaint for two areas). Too much reuse of music (even though the music is absolutely stellar) and too much reuse of footage.
If you haven’t seen The Big O, drop everything you’re watching and commit yourself to it. It’s one of my favorite anime of all time and the entire series overall is about to get a score I’ve bestowed only a few times before.
