 |
| From https://cdn.myanimelist.net/ images/anime/9/21718l.jpg |
Director: Masami Obari
Screenplay: Fumihiko Shimo,
Kiyoko Yoshimura and Yuuji Hosono
Voice Cast: Haruna Ikezawa as
Luna Gusuku; Houko Kuwashima as Leele; Jun Fukuyama as Toga Tenkuji; Kenichi
Suzumura as Eiji Shigure; Mai Nakahara as Eina; Saeko Chiba as Fei Shinruu; Sho
Hayami as Klein Sandman; Yuu Asakawa as Mizuki Tachibana; Hikaru Midorikawa as
Raven; Kenyuu Horiuchi as Hugi Zerabaia; Michiko Neya as Ayaka Shigure
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
This links to a
review for Gravion, which can be
read HERE.
Warning: Despite the difficulty you may have tracking this series
down, the only way to properly review this series involves major plot spoilers,
so be aware.
Two years after the first series,
which is a surprising delay in time for a work like this, the next part of Masami Obari's super robot tribute
finally answers a hell of a lot of questions and plot threads established in
the prequel. The first season, which was openly a tribute to the old type of
super robot genre which had to yet cater to sexual fan service for a new otaku
audience, left on a very open ending following a group of pilots, all barring
two female, who on have to protect this futuristic Earth from alien
bio-mechanical monsters under the watchful eye of their mysterious leader Klein
Sandman.
There were some abrupt swerves
along the way, but Gravion Zwei did
so with some success. It draws some l-o-n-g bows on how it got to some plot
twists, where rewatching the prequel series adds some idiosyncratic character
drama to say the least, and there's clearly a sense they had to still cater to
more fan service. In fact they must've have had to do a bit more, as the first
quarter of the series does touch upon fan service in lighter hearted episodes,
and even has actual nudity for the second series rather than merely teasing the
audience. Gravion is clearly a case of
a show where it was a necessary to just sell the show; for the most part, everyone
on this staff clearly wanted to create a sci-fi action melodrama, and good
grief they turned that up to eleven for this finale.
Sadly, they had to sacrifice the
prequel opening song for whatever reason, the musical choices curious for this series;
it's still by JAM Project, de facto
choices for any robot show, but no way near as good as the first, which is felt
when it makes a cameo for a perfect time later in the series. The pop punk song
at the end credits, about a telephone message machine, doesn't match the content
at all but is admittedly an ear worm that compensates for the opening choice. Also,
that thing I mentioned with the fan service is of note as, taking up an entire
first disc of four episodes on the version I had to track down, Gravion Zwei starts off effectively
with the mid-season filler if you view this entire project like a twenty four
episode show.
There's still major developments,
like an actual big baddy shown behind the aliens, but I can say "hot
springs episode" and you know what I mean. To those who don't, the common
trope is that there's a hot springs episode in a lot of anime, a cultural
aspect in Japanese culture of bathing hot springs which people can go to,
usually there for fan service but usually without actual nudity, which is an
exception here. The clichés I have seen even in shows that parody it - like Double Decker (2018) in one of its OVA
bonus episodes - within the last few years of writing an anime blog means that
everything from the fan service to ping pong being an activity at them checks
off a tick list. I will admit having your maid characters sing the giant robot
transformation song to help cheer on the heroes is inspired, even if it asks
some questions about the fourth wall.
I think the best way, if there is
a flaw with Zwei, to describe how
the escalation hits is that its episode five, beginning with a theme park island
that eventually turns into a monster, only to drop a hint about the character
Leele, a meek and quiet female pilot, that will eventually detonate over the
next episodes of family melodrama when she realises where she comes from and
who her father is. I presume the first four episodes get you back up to speed
with Gravion after the season break,
but we're here for the story escalation, and it drops with a bomb-like
intensity soon after that does cause the first four episodes, for their good
moments, to be the weaker episodes.
Gravion whilst not reinventing the genre does get interest onwards.
Whilst there are multiple people writing the show, the general story
composition goes to Fumihiko Shimo,
who has an interesting career that is probably more well known for Kyoto Animation work like Full Metal Panic or The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010);
I wouldn't be surprised a lot of the more pleasing character touches come as a
result of this, but Shimo also makes
sure to write a big epic of the tale too, especially as with a lot of
characters and plot points to juggle, this is a plate spinning act
metaphorically that could've been disastrous.
Interestingly our lead Eiji
Shigure, who was our window to the world in the first series, is practically
brushed off to the side as his story, adapting to this new role, has little to
go with, even the left open issue of what happened with his older sister Ayaka
more interesting from her perspective, which we'll get to soon. I think from
there are only characters that gets short changed. The first is Mizuki, the
only adult character on the team and who was built as a fascinating character
despite her comically voluptuous character design, because it's an abrupt
double cross to a return that means a little less in context, and her being
isolated on a literal island for the middle of the series. Luna too, the tsundere
character clearly with a growing bond to Eiji because they argue, gets a little
less then you'd hope considering her character back-story. I was surprised they
used Eina, the timid maid character, in the way they did for an emotional
shock, the show deciding to have its cake and eat it in a mid-season tragedy
but also running with sci-fi tropes with a disregard for logic that you can
strangely get away with in super robot story telling. Leele is used well with
her parental issues, and Touga, who was an emotionally stunted character who
grew up only in Sandman's castle, is written further in this lack of emotional
empathy further to an interesting existential crisis.
This however is where I get into
major spoilers, because how interesting was it to find Klein Sandman, the
generic mysterious leader, got an arch where he's particularly (if majorly)
responsible for all that transpires, as an alien scientist on Earth, who must
redeem himself by protecting Earth even if it's on a death wish. Gravion is still a cartoonish series -
we need to remember a lot of anime is hyper exaggerated, in its characters'
figures and costumes designs, let alone how they act, not connected to our
reality in the slightest, but if you are going to try for drama, write actual drama even if its angst. It was already
interesting when the prequel show prodding some light humour from his bombast; then
the production went a great direction in having him even wallowing in despair when
things go horribly wrong for the team and the World Government finally gets
around to building their own robot team, a nice change to the pace. This is
still a show where they get out of issues usually by producing a new super
weapon or ability, but when Sandman cannot be proud to the point of cockiness
and, in a curious twist, Raven is his emotional foundation in ways you might've
not expected, thus making the mysterious leader a frail figure needing to find
his courage again, it's a way to stack the cards dramatically than just
producing a bigger, scarier monster to fight.
It does also lead to the curious
plot point, spoiled in the Wikipedia page for me but not able to explain fully
without experiencing it, when his assistant Raven is actually Ayaka. Obviously
masks play to the logic in anime, like Chekov's gun, that they have to be taken
off at some point, but the memories of an old ally on the face of one's own
significant love interest, which obvious brings some issues of how the
character design drawn for her can change as much as it does in disguise, does
raise some odd touches that I actually liked the most out of the entirety of
the series.
If it's a contrivance to get to this
point, it compensates by leading to some curiously deep psychological licks to
the material. That a) now watching this character be hard even on Eiji, and
bemoan being stuck running the place when Sandman goes to the beach, now has
more meaning, especially as for all my issues with the first four episodes
here, the one seeing Raven and the maids get drunk on a picnic, bemoaning they
get stuck running the castle, was hilarious. That and b) whilst the final scene
of the series with a wedding nearly falls off into bad humour, and comments
that every woman wants to get married that will cause one to roll their eyes,
that it's cantered around a relationship where Ayaka/Raven is the one who runs
the show and has to give their love Sandman a confidence boost every time he
gets despondent is a character dynamic I legitimately loved in the series.
It does in the modern day raise
issues of "trans baiting", a lot of anime and manga about cross
dressing and gender disguising not considering trans culture even in the 2010s
well or never considered, but more depictions of the woman in a relationship
being the strong emotional arm who gets the work done is a nice subversion when
giant robot shows were originally male power fantasies about male pilots in
giant robots. Admittedly, back to the character designs, Ayaka is drawn like a character
in a fan service heavy show, but one of the curious paradoxes that came with Gravion all this time is that, particularly
because having to appeal to sex appeal, that likely influenced the need for a
larger female cast, wisely here all shown to all be reliable and getting work
done. It's a nice breath of fresh air even in context of an older show watched
in the late 2010s.
Arguably the show could've
elaborated a bit more on details, particularly as we only get a glimpse at the
World Government's robot group, four men following the leadership of their
female captain Faye Xin Lu, a character for this series with an axe to grind
with Sandman and connected to Touga. This is probably an issue with ever having
a large cast of characters but not being a show over thirty episodes - again I
wish there was more done with the character Cookie, superhumanly strong lead
maid, as in the last season - but in spite of this Gravion Zwei wisely drove itself entirely into its melodramatic
final and went for the bombast. Some of it, as mentioned, involves some
convoluted sci-fi nonsense, unarguable in how it throws twists around like a
mad person, but taking the enigmatic leader of this group and making his plight
front and centre with a cast with their own issues was a very good choice. It
was arguably as well an important note as, whilst this is a throwback to the
past in this genre, Gravion Zwei
comes from a period where narrative driven tales dominated the robot genre
rather than monster of the week. Whilst this type of show ran counter to Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), and the
shows influenced by it, wanting to be more serious, there was less likely
chance of this genre really going back to the old weekly episodic programming
of the past with some exceptions, now that this is a genre catering more to
adults than to children.
In the end, whilst not perfect, Gravion proved quite a nice surprise,
an argument that I can really get behind the giant robot genre as I've covered
a few for the blog so far, none major titles but all (yes, even Gundam Reconguista in G (2014-15) in
all its misguided, baffling glory) appealing for various reasons and showing
what this genre is good at when it works. The initial template, whilst Gundam and other titles have
drastically rewritten it, does openly embrace plot points likely to have been
used by these titles over the decades, but the base is good enough to play
with, expand and manipulate you can get a lot of combinations of worth, the
idea that like the Western genre, its premise's iconography and ideas can be
manipulated, toyed with or even played straight and lead to interesting results
if the character is distinct. Some of the virtues of Gravion arguably even came from one of its clearest compromises,
having the fanservice leading to a larger female cast, so particularly with the
growth of throwbacks to the old style in the early 2000s onwards, there's a lot
of interesting material to consider especially as this genre had more
difficulty trying to be sold to children but could be sold to adults.
Unfortunately this is one of the
latter works in Masari Obari's career
as, whilst it'd go up to to 2011, mainly on robot shows, even into the
mid-2000s his directorial work would become rarer and even by 2005 he stopped
doing hentai either. At this point his character designs didn't look like those
that became his trademark in the nineties either, accidentally a symbolic place
for a man whose reputation in design and animation was unmatched but left not
actually working eventually. He still works in mecha design in video games, and
his reputation in this realm is held aloft, so if he has mostly retired so be
it.
 |
| From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lmEo6XzFNKY/Swzda6romPI/ AAAAAAAAKgg/ZvMbvUKn8FE/s1600/ScreenShot004.jpg |
No comments:
Post a Comment