Mobile Suit Gundam - Anime Review

Brent provides an introduction to the seminal anime mecha series, the original Mobile Suit Gundam.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• anime
• review
• mobile
• suit
• gundam
• mecha

[HajimeNoJMo]

back to the subject of 15 year old pilots. i just recently learned in japan, for some time until I think around 2005, the minimum age to enlist in the japan self defense force was 15 years ago. but i doubt it was very common anyway

[ONVPodcast]

@HajimeNoJMo Fascinating! Yeah, I bet 15-year-old enlistees were extremely rare, but that's a very interesting fact.

[HajimeNoJMo]

great review. if people don't want to put up with the old animation, then play the games such as giren's greed (i say the best gundam game ever) or the ps2 games like journey to jaburo. as for teenage pilots, the original series was a motif on WW2 and at the time, 15 year olds were fighting in the war on all sides. interesting you don't note the trilogy which is the official canon. as for the series dub, i thought brad swaile was perfect was amuro and i liked richard cox as kai

[ONVPodcast]

@HajimeNoJMo Interesting! I hadn't heard that the movie trilogy is considered the official canon. Where'd the creators say that, out of curiosity?

[ReVolutionOfEva]

Evangelion's creators said they took inspiration from Gundam (though Tomino hates Eva)....not much, but one specific theme: "why do we have teenaged pilots?"

Lighthearted Giant Mecha shows before this didn't have a reason, it was like Power Rangers.

Gundam, however, came up with a simple and logical reason: both Earth and Zeon have long since fought to the point of exhaustion, they're running out of men, so they're scraping the bottom of the barrel and sending in the young teenagers.

[ONVPodcast]

@ReVolutionOfEva You're right! OTOH, it's not quite that extreme in Gundam. :-) The (roughly) 15-year-old pilots in Gundam are special cases, thrown aboard White Base at the beginning of the show. The military forces are still drafting 18-year-olds. But the point stands.

In general, in earlier mecha series, the young pilots either stumbled on their mecha, or had some mystical connection so they were the only ones capable of piloting them. So like you say, there was at best a hand-wavy excuse.

[ApeCape92]

I loved your review very much but mecha anime today doesnt have good plots or likable characters like in the original 79 gundam series like the one year war. Seed tried to do that but failed to remake the feeling of the original 79 or the other UC gundam series

[HajimeNoJMo]

@ONVPodcast well, watch cca. remember char's flashback of when lalah died? look at what sayla was piloting in the flashback and look at what she was piloting in the tv series. plus, in zeta gundam, it features one of the numbered guncannons and the numbered guncannons were only in the movie trilogy.

[ReVolutionOfEva]

@ReVolutionOfEva (ugh, think I had a double-post).....so a plot point in Eva, like Gundam, is that they're putting child pilots in life-threatening situations because they ultimately don't care about the future anymore. Mortgaging their childrens' futures? They're getting them killed. Its all about "The Me Generation", not the future generation.

[ReVolutionOfEva]

@ReVolutionOfEva the point is, that the leaders of both sides really don't care that they're sacrificing their children, *literally sacrificing their futures*, embodied by the children. The leaders of the war are so short-sighted they don't care.

Which is sort of social commentary on "Japan doesn't care about the world we're leaving for our children now" -- which with "the Graying of Japan" has become a serious problem.

Eva, also, put child pilots in life-threatening situations

[ReVolutionOfEva]

One thing that Gundam inspired in Evangelion was the plot point about using teenaged pilots: most Mecha shows don't explain that, Gundam had a simple logical answer: the war has long since reached the point of exhaustion, each side is scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower, and they're sending the young teenagers out to fight.....instead of, you know, *stopping the war when literally 50% of their populations have already been killed*