Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has been consistently compared with Kill la Kill ever since I can remember hearing about the latter. Usually in TTGL's favour.
Now having gone the wrong way in and watched KLK first, I expected different things than what others did, and I must say that no, I do not find TTGL to shine as much as I was told. It may just be my complete disinterest in mechas, but mechas are a tool to tell a story as, and they aren't the only point in this anime. This is more about the characters and story.
Art: It's ok, I guess. Except for Yoko's bounciful bouncyness of boobage nothing really struck me stylistically. Again, coming from Kill la Kill which is an onslaught of visual style and design madness and creativity, TTGL looks less flamboyant, less fantastic, less everything in comparison. Yoko's as sexy an anime girl as it gets, I remember Nia and Kamina as looking pretty good, and my opinion on the mechas is nonexistent. It's a solid 7 but I really have nothing all that fantastic to say about it. Even the main visual and philosophical metaphor of the series, the Spiral, I don't think is all that brillant. It's good, it works, it is competent, moving on.
Sound: Again, KLK first, have to compare the crappy rap opera that's supposedly the best song from TTGL with the great soundtrack from KLK. Or even with other animes honestly. I can like a lot of little things, I love the openings and endings from cheap shows like Dagashi Kashi or Himouto Umaru-chan and I just can't remember a really strong song from any part of TTGL. No, that Row Row Fight the Power didn't stick, it just made me wanna listen to something else. Voice acting in all versions that I saw(japanese, english and french) is brillant and deserves a great note, and general sound design is fine, but I really can't imagine ever trying to look out for the whole OST of TTGL and listening to it. 6.
Enjoyment: It was okay, good most of the time, but some things just confused me, especially with story design. 7.
Characters: This is where I'm gonna take some time explaining my issues with TTGL.
Because beyond the comparison with KLK and the fact that KLK was literally no substance and all for style, I find TTGL to be a bit...odd. TTGL isn't, like I expected, a style over substance, it has style and substance. So that's an obvious plus, correct? Well yes and no. To be honest after watching TTGL I understood why the makers of it would do KLK as a no-substance show: because's that's clearly their greatest talent. TTGL has some great stories and core ideas, it has solid characters and in general it's a monomyth story done with gusto and style. It would be a truly great anime if not for several problems with the general design.
Let's talk characters and pick out 5 for a bit: Kamina, Nia, Yoko, Roshiu and obviously Simon.
Each of them has his own part in Simon's story. Kamina has the timeless "if you can't believe in yourself, believe in me, who believes in you", he acts as the motor of Simon's natural abilities. He serves a purpose in Simon's life by teaching him courage and confidence by example.
Yoko's part in Simon's life is to teach him love and sexual attraction. She's nice to everyone, including him, and also ridiculously attractive. She falls for Kamina(which could have been better portrayed but w/e) and she teaches Simon (and the audience) the pains of teenage love and rejection, in an interestingly intricate situation, too.
Nia's part in Simon's life is to teach him a more mature love, based on common values and life goals. It's a more adult love about commitment and understanding rather than boob wiggling.
Roshiu's part in part 2 of the anime is to show Simon his own weakness in constantly trying to solve everything with his strength and the strength of Gurren Lagann instead of cutting corners and doing the harsh, difficult decisions that might end up sacrificing a lot of people for the sake of survival of the most. Sort of a political motto, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of all".
Now with that list compiled, I want you to try and think about which part of these characters actually had an arc that properly ended except for Kamina's.
Kamina's arc ends in the most endy of all endings. So that's settled. But what about the others?
Nia's personality is heavily overcome, so she can count as dead/gone for most of the anime.
But what about Yoko and Roshiu?
Yoko gets horribly lovescarred, that's fine, but what comes after? Does she ever go on to have another love story? Does she ever move on from her emotional state? She does get over the pain, a little too quickly if you ask me, but that's not the point I'm trying the make.
The point I'm trying to make is that once her love triangle with Simon and Kamina is gone, there is literally nothing going on with her as a character. She keeps shooting some more things and disappears for most of part 2, and when she comes back she shoots some more and gets kissed by Kittan and then it's the end. She does get that whole Yoko episode where you see what she's become, but I only saw that episode as being an open admission that she was completely stuck as a character and they didn't want to write anything else for her. What makes a coming of age story or a conquest story really good is what the characters discover, and what changes about them during the process of growth and discovery. And the thing that by far made me scratch my head the most during TTGL was the fact that once the characters had ended their direct relationship with Simon, either through death or because Simon's arc with them was done, they were basically put aside and never evolved again. Yoko loves Kamina, Simon loves Yoko. Kamina dies and Yoko, whose love triangle is over and who never gets into a romance with Simon, basically never evolves again until the end of the story. Her teaching bout is just about as distant from evolution as it gets, it's like she's 20-something and yet has already decided on her entire life course and will never change again.
The same applies to all the other side characters. Breaking down the entire story arcs, I always come to the conclusion that the characters bring something to Simon, and once that's done and they cannot directly influence Simon, they just leave the spotlight, making a very large cast entirely Simon-centric.
Story - And this is where we talk about the story. A lot of it is character driven and since characters and their evolution always revolve around Simon, it's basically a long Simon monomyth of how the wimpy talented brat became the hero. In part 1, you start in the underground and end up defeating the Spiral King. It's almost a videogame story, go from dungeon to dungeon and fight whatever's there, usually with Kamina as the knight/hero/loudmouth, Yoko as the support/helper/white mage and Simon as the talent/problem solver/black mage. It's simple and works, even if it is blatantly obvious to me that the makers are better at giving a brimming style than at telling a multithreaded story with lots of character arcs at the same time.
Part 2 is about understanding what the Spiral King was and why, and then about fighting the fight he had been fighting all along, with him transformed as a galactic tourist guide to boot.
Of Part 1 I have the general sentiment that they are trying to tell a lot of little things but again, it ends without really ending, characters just stop being useful to Simon or Kamina and then they just sort of get dropped. It's still mostly fine.
But of Part 2 I have a lot more to say, and now it's time to talk about Roshiu as an adult.
Roshiu in part 2 gets to a point where he essentially understands the dangers that all of mankind is facing and is trying extremely hard to deal with it in the only way that he sees fit. By itself, his decisions are rational, make sense, and are very difficult to make. Roshiu's tale in part 2 is the tale of one who has to become Caesar, he has to become the dictator and to do so has to cross every Rubicon in his way, including letting hundreds of thousands die and reject all his friends and former fellow fighters. His tale should have been extremely interesting because he is the voice of Reason and Logic at every step: do what is sensible and coldly necessary and ignore all your feelings and morality, painful as it may be.
The problem is, exactly like with Yoko's part in the story in part 1, all of Roshiu's actions end up not being of any use to Simon's personal story anymore. It boils down to all his cold decisions being pointless because Simon just pulls Gurren Lagann and destroys all opposition with brute force, like he intended to.
This part honestly baffles me because it means that:
-We follow Roshiu's painful decisions for over 5 episodes to a point that's absolutely nil
-Cold, hard and difficult choices are made, only to be literally annihilated by anime rules
-Why would you spend so much time making a character's story arc so deep and then undo it all with a simple "just make a bigger mech and rekk them all"
Very much like Yoko's part, Kamina's part or any other character's, I feel like Roshiu's part ended at the precise moment where Simon didn't need him anymore. Simon needed Yoko to know love and its pains, Kamina for confidence, and in Roshiu he needed to face Reason and the pains of doing what's necessary. Except it WAS NEVER necessary, since he could just pull a new mech out of his butt and instantly defeat the adversity! If you look at the facts, Roshiu's arc could have entirely been him sitting at his desk sipping tea telling everyone "it's all gonna be fine, don't worry" and let Simon talk with his mecha fists and the result would have been almost EXACTLY the same.
And that's by far my biggest problem with Gurren Lagann. I get the sense that for a large and wide mythological story done with mechs, with heroes, fallen ones, kings and gods(the antispirals are definitely godly), love and its pains, for something so grand in scale and so powerful in its themes, almost everything it does is sacrificed on the altar of Simonmaking. Make Simon confident, make Simon sad, make Simon great, make Simon the Hero...
It feels like 50 threads were given to me and whenever the threads were split from the main "Simon's story" thread, they were just cut off. How do I feel about Yoko never growing out into a new relationship or story after Kamina? How do I feel about watching Roshiu try and take all the world's weight on his shoulders for a lot of episodes then just get it all undone because Gurren Lagann is there to save him? I feel wanting, and incomplete. I wanted to see Yoko end up somewhere nice, not go live like the love of her life was gone and nobody else ever came up so she'd just live taking care of kids instead. I wanted to see Roshiu's actions get given results, painful as those might've been. I wanted to not see Simon smiling it off once Nia's story ends and going "ah, we were expecting it anyway"!
In general TTGL comes off as daring and as a modernization of an almost greek-mythology epic, which I absolutely love, but I can't help but feel extremely wanting. I wanted endings for all those side characters, I wanted all the things that were launched to end properly, I wanted to see something else than to see Simon and Yoko living to old age without any real changes or growths to the characters they were when they fought with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann at the end!
And I got none of it. I'm not disapointed, but I just feel like it fell short of its potential in too many ways to not feel itchy at all the parts that should've been properly done if this was indeed a large mythical epic and not just Simon's mythical epic.
Overall: As I said in the beginning, watching KLK and then TTGL made me understand why KLK is so shallow. Because that is by far, in TTGL and in KLK, the greatest suit for their makers. TTGL may give me a lot of threads that get cut, and it may have lots of parts that have left me wanting, but the over-the-top style and love of exaggeration and going beyond the credible is something that is a complete success in both, and is easily the most faultless part of TTGL. The mech growth in size and levels of craziness especially in part 2 are a testament to that.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann may have let me down in quite a few ways, but it is still daring and tries a lot, even if it's too Simon-centric. It has qualities in spades, I just wish that it had properly taken care of all its interesting and attractive side characters.
