#rating-d

[hardworkandguts]

TRIGUN STAMPEDE

(Anime)

Sci-fi by Yasuhiro Nightow

Era: 2020s

Rating: D

Plot: Rookie reporter Meryl Stryfe and jaded veteran Roberto de Niro cross the desert to find more about "The Humanoid Typhoon", a gunslinger with a 6 million bounty on his head. What they find is a pacifist goofball with incredible shooting abilities.

Length: 12 episodes

Thoughts: I've mentioned a few times the late 90s adaptation of Trigun is one of the first "anime as it's own thing" shows broadcast here in the early 2000s I remember whatching (along Excel Saga, Ghost in the Shell SAC and Escaflowne), it's a show I'm yet to write about because it was one of those with a rewatch too fresh to watch it again just to half-ass a few lines here, but a bit too long to actually write something meaningful. Meanwhile, before that, Stampede was out, but at the time gave it a miss for three reasons: being full CG, not really digging the character design and where the fuck is Milly you can't do Trigun without Milly fuck off. Since the sequel fixed that last problem and added it to the weekly viewing, I generally don't like to watch shows without watching what came before, so... I guess here we are.

First impression really is "thanks I hate it". Character design is better than I expected, but CG really still is in some sort of uncanny valley where movement is too smooth but too jerky at the same time. You can kinda feel all in-between frames are there, and while in traditional animation they have full control over what gets drawn at every frame (well, every 2 or 3, depending on how the budget is), in here trying to not give characters the too noticeable motion smoothing feel you can see right away anytime a 2D show adds a 3D sequence (usually involving vehicles), they chop down the character animation frame rate, and the end result at times is like being a bit too greedy with the settings and trying to get away with graphics on Ultra. Very jarring to see particle effects going smoothly and then the next cut character animation is stuttering (on a couple of occasions, the same shot), and that's a bit of a shame, looking at the screenshots folder it looked a lot better than I expected, it even has some cool camera angles and it made a honest job of making it feel 2D. Strangely, my biggest initial reservation ended up being the one I find some redeeming factors, and if I expected to have a long rant on how CG shows are basically how the industry says "we don't have any budget, here, go make PlayStation 2/3 cutscenes", I left feeling a CG show that quality-wise matches a regular traditionally animated show might not be too far ahead. At least for Orange.

Where the show really lost me is the characters. Ok, Milly was cut from this half (that a lot of people made a celebration she's back in the new show really tells how very few people stuck with this, where she's mentioned as a new rookie who asked to work under Meryl at the end of the show), but... I really don't like this version of Vash. The original was hiding his incredible skills under the plausible deniability of being this lanky, incredibly silly guy nobody in their right mind could actually believe he's Vash the Stampede. In Stampede that dies pretty quickly, outing himself quickly, his skills rarely seen because while in the original he truly lived for Love and Peace, he understood sometimes you have forego those hotcakes and waste a few bullets so that everyone he helps can also live for Love and Peace, but this Vash seems more of a passive bystander for everything that happens around him, leading to another problem: I can understand trying to focus more on the story, but Trigun to me always felt more of a vibes show thriving in the very likeable characters interacting, which is not the case here, same with cutting down on the humour, which was crucial as that's how Vash threw people off his back. The story isn't good enough to carry the show, as deep down it's just another "artificial life form rebels against humankind", and while I can excuse a lot of that if the characters are good, that isn't the case, even Meryl and Nicholas D. Wolfwood feel clear like downgrades to their 1998 versions, and focusing more on the Millions Knives story doesn't work if instead of a compelling antagonist you just have another cookie-cutter villain who wants to end humanity. Also, the original setting, very openly "old west in space" was replaced into a more generic rust-looking version, which I'm putting down to the old west not being as popular as it used to be.

Trigun Stampede feels mostly a disappointment on how it picked up one of the best remembered shows of the late 90s and try to make it something else in a darker tone. If you have to expect existing fans to forget what they know and like about the characters to enjoy it, then sorry, but my impression when this happens is always that someone is trying to salvage a project that started as something else licensing the characters. Sure, it might work for new fans, but for old fans, regretfully it might be a hard pass.

Plus:

Visually it's a lot better than I expected

Minus:

Still, a lot of problems with how it moves

The characters aren't that fun

The story kind of sucks

[hardworkandguts]

Uzumaki

うずまき

(Anime + Manga)

Horror by Junji Ito

Era: 1990a, 2020s

Rating: A (manga), D (anime)

Plot: In the small town of Kurouzo-cho, as Kirie Goshima is heading to the train station to meet his boyfriend Shuishi Saito, she passes by his father who is obsessively looking at a snail. When they meet, he proposes the two leave the town, which he claims is contaminated with spirals.

Length: 4 episodes (~30 minutes), 19 chapters

Thoughts: Well, here's the first (note: this is the fourth published but there's bi-weekly posts scheduled until next February) I feel a need to really separate a rating between the original manga, who's a fantastic piece of both social, psychological and body horror, where the spiral curse starts by first manifesting in small ways, like dirt devils or the way water flows in the canals, but soon start affecting the people, who become obsessed with spirals, drawing them in, until they become spirals themselves, and this is just the beginning of the end stage of the curse as it engulfs the town. It's not an easy read particularly as things get worse and worse and you just know there isn't going to be a happy end, but is certainly engaging. The adaptation that mostly follows the same story, with some changes to accommodate a shorter run time, but it's not something I can recommend.

A big problem is the animation after the first episode. Sure, it often looks the part (other times, it looks clearly rushed and more a fan project from the 2000s), but seeing it move doesn't do *anything* for it. It's just that, it moves, and not exactly in a dynamic way, either. Or even well executed. You could, in fact, argue that the animation is something brown and spiralling, that you might find in the sidewalk.

All in all, no reason to watch the adaptation, for which I'm not blaming the animators, this has a clear feel of "executives screwed the studio over who screwed the people actually working on it after five years in development hell". Particularly ironic, since there's a text by Ito collaborator and former Japanese diplomat Sato Masaru doing a Marxist analysis of the story and likening it to Japanese society (after all, what is the genre of horror but the horrors of daily life in a more palatable and grutesque form), which you can read some notes from here.

Recommended to: horror fans

Plus:

Some incredible body horror in here

Adaptation looks like the manga (complimentary)

Minus:

Adaptation looks like the manga (derogatory)

Ending doesn't feel as strong as the start and middle.

[hardworkandguts]

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam

機動戦士　V　ガンダム

(anime)

Real Robot by Yoshiyuki Tomino

Era: 1990s

Rating: D

Plot: It's the UC 153, and Earth is under threat by BESPA, the army of the space colony based Zanscare who quickly took over human colonies with their aggressive tactics and brutal displays of power, and with the Earth Federation severely weakened, it's up to the League Militaire, a resistance group, to stand up to them. Üso Ewin is a boy living peacefully on Eastern Europe until one day paragliding he gets tangled up with a BESPA Mobile Suit chasing a Core Fighter, and gets himself tangled up with the League Militaire, becoming the pilot of the Victory Gundam, their biggest hope to fight back against BESPA.

Length: 51 episodes

Thoughts: Well, It's been a few months since I've covered a Gundam show, and part was that I'm watching them in release sequence and having a +50 episode show that I've seen a lot of fans complain about it isn't my idea of fun, and it comes from a sequence of productions with meddling problems where Bandai was very much telling Tomino (who was also not having a good time, coming after the hell that was the production of F91) "this exists to sell Gunpla and toys and don't you forget about it", because, as we know, anime is pure and free of commercialism, according to some people online, often pointing at something like Transformers, a cartoon made by Toei for a toyline initially developed by Takara with designs by the people who brought you Macross, Gunbuster, Escaflowne and a ton of other stuff.

It starts in a somewhat clumsy way, with protagonist Üso Ewin almost doing literally a "Yep, that's me! You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation..." because allegedly Bandai didn't like how the new Gundam took several episodes to appear, so they forced the fourth episode as the premiere, and the first three episodes are then reframed as Shakti Kareen, Üso's best friend, reminiscing on what happened. Said situation, he was just a paraglider minding his own business when he got in the middle of a fight between a Core Fighter and a Mobile Suit, getting tangled on it. After doing some Just Cause 2 shit and climbing and accidentally opening the cockpit, in the fight he manages to throw away its pilot Chronicle Asher's, a man with a reverse Char mask, and quickly gets familiarised with the controls, setting himself up for the cursed fate a Newtype after witnessing Zanscare (The Matriarchy of Zeon, if you must) wipeout a nearby civilian area and joining the League Militaire alongside Katejina Loos, a friend who lived in that area.

If Gundam always had a strong component of chewing the young pilots and make them experience war in the front seat (because Bright Noa really is Galactic Kony) in Victory Tomino decided that the main character should just go through Shinji levels of existential despair at just 13, which everyone acknowledges is wrong, but regardless he must get in the Gundam, or Marvet and her bad leg will have to do it again; Shakti just wants them to go to their hideout, Katejina in particular voices an intense opposition to the League Militaire relying mostly on his talents. Meanwhile, he kills his first Mobile Suit pilot, watches a grown ass soldier just break down and realise they're fighting middleschoolers now and decide that blowing himself up is the only honourable way out, watches people get executed, sees one by one his allies die or even defect, unleashes death on a massive scale, while becoming more of a crucial part of League Militaire strategy (or lack thereof), all this while wiping out entire units even while trying to avoid casualties. If a constant on the series is how the sight of the Gundam turns everyone into a death seeker, and while the franchise gets really grim at times, here it feels it is trying so hard after a while you just shrug. You want a shocking death? Not even going into War in the Pocket, Nadesico has one that is so anticlimactic, absurd and out of nowhere it's actually shocking, in Victory after a while it kinda feels Tomino is just feeding cats to the coyotes, in an almost nihilistic view of the series. And while the story overall isn't bad (some parts are), it just repeats so much of the beats of the previous shows it's hard to be surprised at anything that happens, and then there's the usual Tomino problem on how he used to write women characters: it's not like they aren't strong, that was never the problem with him, but more often than not fall into mommies, idiots who keep putting everyone at risk, backstabbers, boy / baby crazy (or other sorts of irrational) or a mixture of the above. I have been increasingly frustrated with how every new iteration of Gundam seems to be the same script with a new coat of paint, and Victory seems the corollary to that, to the point I don't even feel like exploring the plot points.

Visually, there's parts where production got a lot more consistent with animation and decided they should join the early 90s good face club, but otherwise in a lot of it can be quite unremarkable with very little shading work on most scenes (front-facing characters often look like they have a messed up nose because they had the lines but no shading, often absent) and it kind of feels the line work became more sloppy as the series progressed. But on the plus I do like the Mobile Suit mechanical design quite a bit here, particularly the rotors the Zanscare Mobile Suits use in their helicopter form doubling as shields (although magicking away gravity is kinda of a detriment to the appeal of a big giant robot who should feel actually heavy, a thing that really stoodout in Zeta to me), and if I wasn't really a fan of the multi-core thing in 0079, the way they work and fit together here looks a lot better, and I'm not saying this because they did a brief nod to the gerwalk mode from Macross, I like how they made "detach a part part and use it as a battering ram against other Mobile Suits" or "dropping parts like a lizard cutting it's own tail to escape from danger" an actual tactic and just swapping parts on the go is a constant in battle, and I really like how the Victory mk2 looks. The non mobile-suit is also generally pretty good, from the big carriers for the parts, the battle bikes, the big cargo airplanes, the small Fishbone crafts who transport Mobile Suits like they're sports drinks bottles and even the biblically accurate Angel Halo, really solid design all around. Now notice I said generally, because some range from boring to "what the...", and if you've seen the show, you know what I'm talking about. No, not the big cannon that are two balls and a dick Üso has to fire to become a man. Or putting Mobile Suits inside a prop for game from Jeux Sans Frontieres although that's also dumb as hell, like the Gundam shaped like a dragon and both feel like someone got a few too many designs sent back and said "oh, they want a toy? (grinds teeth) I'll give them a toy!", I mean the land battleship in two wheels. Doesn't help they appear in probably the worst part of the story, and how dumb it looks is certainly part of that.

So, where to rank it. Good question. While it had good moments, it also felt a lot of it was just dull at best, uninspired garbage that was just a chore to get through at worst. I'd probably put it barely above F91, which felt just like a derivative mess and the worst Gundam I've seen so far, and if I expressed little confidence with the belief if it just had been backed for +50 episodes it would have been good, Victory seems a confirmation that the series were just a spent force at this time and in need of some fresh ideas. So it's good next up is G Gundam, a complete reboot for the series with a new background and a new head writer with Tomino in the backset (let's call it the "haroseat" from now on), so while the story on preview might look like "Gundam but make it an SNK fighting game", at least hopefully I won't have to groan "oh, we're doing THIS again?" several times through it. Tomino himself is not a fan of Victory, and although I'm sure there are personal reasons regarding how everything Gundam had been going for the previous five years, I don't think he sees it as one of those very noble efforts that was hell to go through, but at the end you're proud of it. Ultimately, it's one I had to see it because I'm watching everything in sequence, just avoiding SD Gundam and compilation movies, but it's not something I would recommend.

Plus:

Some great designs in here

Minus:

"... this plot again?" factor extremely high.

Some arcs of the story are just plain bad.

[hardworkandguts]

Mobile Suit Gundam F91

機動戦士ガンダムF91

(Film)

Real robot by Yoshiyuki Tomino

Era: 1990s

Rating: D

Plot: After decades of peace following the defeat of Neo Zeon, a new threat emerges as the Crossbone Vanguard invades and takes over some space colonies to build their utopia, Cosmo Babylon. Caught in the middle of the invasion, Seabook and Cecile go in separate ways, the first trying to escape from the carnage in an Earth Federation training ship, the second joining her biological family, the to-be rulers of Cosmo Babylon and it's main enforcer, Iron Mask.

Length: 115 minutes

Thoughts: After finishing up the Amuro vs Char fight, Tomino intended to start a new show with all new characters as a 10-year celebration of the original Gundam, but as you can see, this is not Gundam 0089 and it's not an anime not a a TV show either, as after disagreements in the staff production hit a roadblock, it was decided to turn what they had into a film, and here we are.

But why?

Starting with the good, the first 30 minutes are pretty good at capturing the chaos that must be being at ground level while mobile suits fight in an urban area, where you often don't even see the full mobile suits, just parts of them (I wonder if this was a deliberate directing choice, or were cells or storyboards planned for the 4:3 broadcast re-purposed for film, as the quality early on is very spotty), and the visuals and animation is generally quite good. While mechanical designs are alright, Metal Chin's ship, the Rafflesia is maybe the best non-mobile suit design they had so far.

The problem is the rest. Animation is generally good, but as I've mentioned at some times during the start it feels like they picked up leftover cells from the TV production stage and re-used them for a movie in 1991, and in good TV style, at times they seem to have not sent the character reference sheets to the studio they subcontracted to do a scene. It tries to hit the same plot points from the previous three shows, but falls because there just not enough time to develop them, there are barely any character-establishing moments because this is a the first arc of a season (or what you'd call now "a full show") compressed into two hours, and while the story is somewhat coherent if you can fill in what may have happened between scenes from previous shows, and here comes the other big problem. Wanting to redo the original TV shows by copying what they did before: the group of kids gangpressed into serving in an irregular military ship, and making them witness the horrors of war, the dangers of being in an enemy-controlled zone, people changing sides, the recklessness of the Earth Federation towards civilian population and the other guys who believe in humanity as long as there's an established monarchical ruling class and the little people who serve them loving a bit of backstabbing as a treat etc and... why not try to do something different? I've mentioned one of my complaints about Char's Revenge was how it felt derivative and did nothing new, and it feels the direction Gundam 0089 would have taken would have been exactly the same. After a while you really have to try and tell a different story, my guy, War in the Pocket is one of my favourite Gundam things so far and it's about a kid befriending a Zeon rookie pilot and a Earth Federation test pilot and seeing them shred each other in the name of a war that was almost over. Why not mix up the formula a bit? Speaking of "re-purposing", we need to talk about ripping off Star Wars music cues, once again, in 1991.

In the end, F91 almost feels like a sunk cost production, they had the storyboards for the first fourth of the season complete and weren't letting them go to waste, and weren't going to spend time trimming parts of the story they could have not develop in a convincing fashion in two hours. Making that worse is a feeling that it would not do anything new, just repeat old stories with new characters. An extremely frustrating watch salvaged only by the intensity of the initialhalf hour and some good visuals on the later half.

Recommended to: completionists, I guess.

Plus:

The ambition for something is there

Good action sequences

Really good visuals and animation when it has them, but...

Minus:

...kinda poor when it doesn't

Feels like the TV Show would be just a repeat of previous plot points

Extremely rushed, you barely memorise names of characters

Ripping off Star Wars music in 1991 is a really, really weird choice