zaphdash's Anime

I hardly even watch anime anymore, but I had gotten really sick, didn't really get out of bed for a few days, and just had a strong urge to watch something while convalescing. On a friend's suggestion, this is what I chose. All in all, not a bad show. To be truthful, it didn't quite grab me and pull me in the way anime or other TV shows that I really love tend to do, but it was an intriguing story that managed to maintain my interest, even if it was a somewhat detached interest. I was never really dying to jump right into the next episode, but I was still curious what was going to happen next. On top of that, the production values are quite good and the opening episode, with actual English-language voice actors hired to voice American characters, was impressive. The show ultimately ends by addressing the immediate issues but leaving the story open-ended, which makes sense with the upcoming movies. But the skill with which the story is simultaneously tied up and left open is also pretty impressive. It's a difficult thing to do, to offer a satisfying conclusion while explicitly setting up the sequel, and they pulled it off here.

In the end, I did have to dock the show some points because it didn't connect with me on that really basic level that my favorite shows/anime do. I think it's just a matter of taste, because the show is undoubtedly well-crafted, but for whatever reason it just wasn't fully my cup of tea. Still a solid show and I am looking forward to the movies. This franchise officially has my attention. That's saying a lot, I think, since I watch about one new anime a year these days.

I first watched this show as it was airing back in 2002 and 2003. At the time, I was unimpressed. I was probably at the peak of my Gundam fandom. I had recently finished watching the stunning Turn A Gundam, as well as Victory Gundam, which I liked even more. SEED felt like a blatant ripoff of the old UC storylines and it just didn't click with me. I went to great lengths to stress that I wasn't a UC elitist -- "look, I consider Turn A one of my favorite shows and I think Zeta is overrated!" -- but I still kind of was, and that clouded my judgment as much as anything. And so it went for upwards of five years, until last week I got a random inexplicable urge to watch SEED again. I rarely watch anime at all anymore, much less anime that I decided long ago was not very good, but for some reason I just felt compelled to watch the first couple episodes of SEED. And from there, unexpectedly, I blew through the entire show in a few days' time and enjoyed it quite a bit more than I ever thought I would.

Certainly, it's not perfect. The character designs are not great, the mecha designs are even worse, animation is recycled and reused far more than it should be, and a lot of the computer animation looks kind of awkward and ugly. But these are minor quibbles, aesthetic flaws that may detract from the show a bit, but definitely don't ruin it. It would seem a bit hypocritical of me to consider a show like Macross a masterpiece, when it at times relies on still frames because the budget was so low that they couldn't properly animate a scene, and then hate SEED for a comparatively minor aesthetic issue. The story has a couple flaws, too. Some loose ends are left unaddressed at the end, but nothing critically important. And I feel that Rau Le Crueset, as the story's main villain, has some pretty weak justification and operates on questionable logic. But upon rewatching, that just doesn't really bother me as much as it used to. Of course, the biggest problem with the show is the gratuitous use of flashbacks and recap episodes. I simply skipped the recap episodes in my most recent viewing of the show, and it drastically improved the viewing experience.

My biggest problem with the show five years ago was its supposed unoriginality. I don't care anymore. True, it apes certain plot points from the UC and particularly First Gundam, but by and large it just takes a few cues here and there to construct its own story. Whatever plagiarism exists in the show is not nearly as flagrant as I once believed, and certainly no worse than what other Gundam shows have done in the past. In fairness to Sunrise, the two biggest departures in the Gundam franchise, G Gundam and Turn A Gundam, were both met with a fair measure of hostility from some pockets of the fandom; you really can't blame them for mining the tried and true and that's no reason to write the show off without a second thought. Besides, the show introduces a lot of new and interesting elements. For instance, Newtypes are replaced by Coordinators, who present a much more intriguing set of problems, not to mention themes relevant to the real world, such as racism, the ethics of genetic engineering, etc. The show also explores themes of cooperation and compromise that are also touched on in Turn A Gundam but are largely absent from much of the rest of the Gundam franchise. Basically, there is originality there if you're willing to see it.

For the life of me, I have no idea what compelled me to give the show another shot, but I'm glad that I did. It is far better than I once gave it credit for. Is this Gundam at its best? No. But it's still pretty good. It has become probably my second or third favorite alternate universe Gundam series (behind Turn A and possibly G), and among UC TV shows I would rank it behind only First Gundam. It's just a shame that Destiny was such a poor sequel. I've started pushing through it again too, but given its myriad faults much more serious than those I once found with SEED, I don't imagine that I will have a similar change of heart. Hopefully the SEED movie will right the ship and pave the way for more CE-era stories.

I recently rewatched this on a whim and found it better than I remembered. Or perhaps "better" isn't the right word, but at least, more entertaining. I don't know what compelled me to watch a show that I was pretty sure I would hate, but I did, and I didn't hate it. That said, it suffers from a number of glaring flaws that make it one of the worst TV shows to bear the Gundam name.

For starters, there are serious issues with the characters. Heero, Trowa, and Wu Fei are all pretty wooden characters, and for the most part very similar to each other, all quiet, brooding, unsociable guys. Duo as the gregarious, laid back pilot and Quatre as the soft hearted, empathizing pilot were acceptably different from the other three, though. However, no character in the show is very well developed throughout the course of the story. Duo is essentially the same guy in episode 49 that he was in episode 1. Trowa, Quatre, and Wu Fei each undergo ordeals at some point in the series (each lasting only a few episodes) that temporarily shakes their character, but then they return to their old ways and are also pretty much the same. Heero changes a bit, but it's somewhat difficult to see how. At some point along the way he just kind of changes from hardened soldier to warrior fighting for peace; I would like to be able to say it was just a successfully subtle execution, but the truth is that there really isn't any apparent reason for him to change the way he does. Other characters similarly change for no good reason. Relena abruptly goes from ordinary teenage girl to staunchly pacifistic queen of the entire world, and the only reasonable way to read it is that she learned what she was "supposed" to believe based on her lineage and just kind of went with it; because her character is handled so clumsily, you never get the sense that she's any more mature than she was at the very beginning, she just seems like a child fulfilling a role. The development of other characters is just as haphazard. How did the Zechs of episode 1 become the Milliardo of episode 49? How did Treize go from traditionalist military leader at the beginning to pacifist at the end? These are changes that happen, but why they happen is a bit of a mystery.

And then there are a lot of things throughout the course of the show that just simply don't make much sense. Why, for instance, are Gundams so special when they can apparently be built by just about anyone? Wing and Sandrock are both destroyed and rebuilt by people who had nothing to do with their original construction. Wing Zero, the ultimate Gundam (in fact, the ultimate mobile suit), is built by a kid who just finds the plans (nevermind where he managed to get all the material, or how he built the Zero System into it without understanding what it was or even knowing it was there). Treize, while in exile for defying the Romefeller Foundation, and with no known engineering background, constructs Epyon, a mobile suit on par with Wing Zero. How exactly did he get all the materials to build it while under house arrest as a rebel against the organization? How the hell did he know how to build it in the first place? Gundams are regularly constructed and reconstructed right under the noses of the enemy military forces, even in their very own bases. If Gundams can be built even under these circumstances, then how can they be so much better than the mobile suits built and operated by legitimate military organizations? It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and these are only a handful of the problems in the story.

Overall it's just a very haphazardly thrown together show. It has its entertaining moments, but it's thoroughly mediocre. I guess I can see where it appeals to people unfamiliar with the Gundam franchise and how it can draw them into it, but the story is just very poorly constructed. It's not a total waste of time to watch it or anything, but it is riddled with flaws unmatched by most other Gundam shows.

A good but not great adaptation of a great show. The big problem is that it feels a lot less focused than the First Gundam compilation trilogy, and if you watch the two trilogies back to back (as I have over the past few days), the difference is especially pronounced. First Gundam flows together very well and in my opinion is actually better than the TV series. Zeta, on the other hand, feels like it was given a lot less attention, like Tomino just plotted out the major points he wanted to hit in the movie and shoehorned them all in without necessarily worrying too much about transitioning from one scene to the next. The result is a story that feels a little incoherent even to someone as familiar with the TV series as I am, though still a great deal better than the messes that are the Gundam 0083 and Turn A Gundam compilations.

The other big issue I have is with the new animation, which generally sticks out like a sore thumb against the original TV animation. Ideally they would have just reanimated the entire thing, or failing that, they would have tried to make the new animation look a little bit closer to the old. The switch is abrupt and jarring and it happens frequently as each movie has quite a bit of new animation in it. It's not a huge problem, but the patchwork of old and new certainly doesn't work that well. Use all original, all new, or at least make the new look like the old. Don't do it this way.

It's not all bad, though. I do actually rather like the new ending, though it seems to have broad implications not just for Gundam ZZ, but really for the UC continuity as a whole. The new ending certainly doesn't preclude Char's Counterattack, and it doesn't even necessarily have to eject ZZ from the canon, but it certainly makes both stories a little bit less likely to follow up this one and raises questions about how exactly they fit in now. Having rewatched ZZ about a year ago and finding it far better than I remembered, I wouldn't actually mind a ZZ compilation to try to resolve the discrepancies, but it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Overall, one of the better compilations to come out of the Gundam metaseries, but certainly not flawless. It's a nice way to get through Zeta without having to sit through fifty episodes (which is why I finally got around to watching it), but if you've got the time for those episodes, the TV series is still the way to go.

For a long time, I was kind of swept up in the anti-Evangelion backlash. I had remembered enjoying it a bit when I watched it, but thought it was extremely overrated and not worthy of the praise that it gets. To a certain extent, I guess I still feel that way, but I have learned not to hold it against the show that its fans can get obnoxious. I recently had the inexplicable urge to watch it again; it was the first time I'd seen it in many years and I wasn't really sure how I would feel about it. Overall, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The early episodes are really entertaining, with a nice mix of lighthearted and darker moments that allows the show to feel serious without seeming overwrought. As the show passes its midpoint and begins building toward the climax, the introspective metaphysical stuff begins to take center stage, and where I feel the show begins to lose its footing a little bit. It remains interesting enough, but for all the attention that anime fans give it, you'd expect a little more depth than what you'd encounter in any high school psychology class, but that's all you really get here. However, though it's a little lacking in substance, it is stylistically interesting, and you can see where later shows (particularly later Gainax shows) have taken their cues from Eva, particularly Kare Kano (a show that I feel uses a similar style to much greater effect). For what it's worth, I don't find much fault with the final two episodes, at least no more than with the rest of the series. The Angel story was already resolved with the death of the seventeenth Angel, but Shinji's inner turmoil and the Human Complement Project still remained and were effectively wrapped up together in those episodes. They aren't exactly my favorite episodes, but I don't have the same problems with them that many other fans do.

Incidentally, though this does not really figure into my overall opinion of a show, I do think that Evangelion has probably the greatest opening credits sequence of any anime. I don't have any strong feelings about the song itself, but it has an appropriate sound for the show and it works very well with the animation; together I think they really capture the atmosphere of the show very well, much better than any other credit sequence I've ever seen. It's not something that's terribly important, but I felt that it was worth mentioning all the same, since it struck me each time I saw it as I was rewatching the series recently.