This weekend’s episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has been action-packed, and full of the valor, burning passion, and forthright struggle we have come to expect through eight episodes largely comprised of excellence. This week, the series passes a major milestone, a waypoint that anybody could have seen coming, but one that feels like it came all too soon. The pacing and craftsmanship of Gainax shows through in this episode, as it wrenches the faithful viewer though emotional peaks and valleys, wrapping up with a poignant, appropriate ending.

I’m not in the habit of posting spoilers, but I’ll be flying my Gurren Dan flag at half mast this week.

Upon looking around for some new anime to watch, I have stumbled across something I’ve noticed for a long time but have never written about. The Japanese market lacks the necessary gag reflex, antibodies, lymphatic system, or whatever it is that keeps really bad rock music from floating to the surface. Warning the “exhibit” links below lead to Youtube content with extremely lame music, and are not recommended for the faint of heart.
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Three episodes in, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann continues its tour de force. The craftsmanship of this story is absolutely top-notch, rivaling Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu in places, surpassing it in others. The animation itself fails to match Kyoto Animation’s masterpiece, but the pacing, voice, and dramatic flair are all second-to-none so far.
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Nadie is a bounty hunter, and a good one. Ellis is a fugitive with crazy psychic powers. Upon tracking Ellis down, Nadie sympathizes with her plight, and helps protect her from the various other bounty hunters on her trail. El Cazador de la Bruja tells the story of how they meet up and the various challenges they encounter and overcome seeking out Ellis’s mysterious past.

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Gainax is at it again. This past week saw the release of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the first new show of the season to properly grab me by the ear and drag me in. The first episode reveals to us a small village underground, where our protagonist, Simon, works drilling new holes for expansion of the settlement. Simon is an orphan, his parents having died in an earthquake some time ago. He’s gota headstrong buddy named Kamina that has dreams of traveling up to the surface, which the village elders deny even exists.

But as with all good Gainax titles, it isn’t the premise, or even the characters, that grab me here; it’s what Gainax does with them. No tedious exposition. No long brooding moments. No pandering to the intellect of the audience. Sequences where Simon is drilling are comical and stylized while still working to show us what he’s made of. Sequences where Kamina is puffing out his chest and trying to be manly walk the fine line between inspiring and laughable. Production values are excellent but not totally over-produced, in keeping with the tone of the story.

There are a couple of specific aspects to this show that get me thinking a bit. Kamina clearly thinks he’s the leading man in this story, what with his bravery, determination, and big ideas, yet Simon is the focus. This immediately makes both more appealing to me as a viewer. Something very similar was done with the character Balthier in Final Fantasy XII, and he was my favorite character in that whole game. This goes well past the normal self-interest you’d expect from any realistically-portrayed actor in a story. Where else has this been used, and was it effective there also?

The other aspect that has me thinking is the presence of giant robots. What the hell is going on when I’m liking giant robot shows? I may have to fire up some old Voltron episodes and do some soul-searching here…

Code Geass starts with a lots of strikes against it. Let’s list a few:

• Character designs from Shojou uber-group CLAMP. Aloof pretty-boys with angular features must be the order of the day.
• Giant robots. This is a draw for some folks, not for me. They tend bring a lot of baggage.
• Japanese patriotism. Everybody gets to be proud of their country, I get that, really I do. That said, oldies like Starblazers have already taken the sci-fi metaphor for America’s occupation of Japan everywhere that premise needed to go.
• High-school hijinks. Everybody can identify with school drama and school romance and school comedy. I have no particular problem with school-based stories, except when combined with other premises that I already take issue with. Throwing some stereotypical shy-students-in-love-dodecahedron tripe in with a contrived romantic-comedy harem or Japanese Liberation Front sci-fi war saga, and it’s bound to be trouble.
• Strong-headed student council president. This falls under high-school hijinks, really, but deserves special credit. Oh! Great ruined this character archetype for me with Tengo Tenge, though others had damaged it before him.
• A demure, frail, wheelchair-bound, kind-hearted blind girl. What? That’s a joke, right?
• Mysterious science-experiment-girl. Not the redhead in the picture above, but there’s what amounts to a djini in a bottle that has escaped from the evil empire’s scientific laboratories. This isn’t a thematic dead horse or anything.
• Mysterious ancient magic-girl. Same girl as above. Her mysterious sci-fi past also appears to be some kind of mysterious magical mythology past. Oh boy, this is really starting to add up.

But some how it’s working. I’m still not clear on why I even gave Code Geass a chance. There have been other titles that were well-received by the discerning anime fans that I just never got around to (such as Nadesico, also featuring giant robots), but fourteen episodes in I’ve found that production studio Sunrise has risen above the traditional confines of its component genres. The principle characters are accessible, in that you can readily identify the familiar archetypes they’re built around, but have layers of complexity built onto them. In most cases, this is done without getting too heavy-handed about character development.

Despite the heavy, heavy handicaps this series brings along from its very conception, Code Geass is a solid series with well-executed action sequences, an interesting cast of characters, excellent production values, and good pacing. Give the first couple episodes a chance, and it may draw you in, too.

Ghost Hunt grabbed my attention with its first episode, and has been reeling me back again and again for ten episodes now. I anxiously await each release from the small cluster of fansub groups that purvey this title.

Each plot arc takes a few episodes to resolve, balancing accessibility with mystery. As a series that revolves around a team of paranormal investigators, Ghost Hunt faces the pitfalls of the genre: the writers must not make the solution too obvious, nor can they make it too arcane. The basic structure follows a simple structure that helps assure that this balance is reached. First the problem is introduced, with its new characters, setting, and the particular symptoms of the haunting or curse. Then the regular cast peels things back a layer or two, easing the audience into the particular parapsychology that will be used to resolve the case. In one cast we learn about poltergeists, in another about onmyouji curses, in another we learn about the paranormal properties of dolls. With this foundation, the parapsychology and the facts are thrown against each other. Investigation and experiments yield a theory or two, and the audience has a solid opportunity to puzzle things out. Ten episodes in, each story has been wrapped up tidily in the end without insulting or frustrating its audience.

The production value has been quite good. The character designs are a bit shoujou, but not enough to grate. The stories are the primary focus of the series, which I appreciate. Mid-series, I give Ghost Hunt a solid A-. Check it out.

A title that I picked up some time after its initial airing, Speed Grapher strikes me as one of the better titles of 2005. I understand that Funimation has the rights to release it in the United States now, and I wonder what they’ve done to it. Speed Grapher has some rather adult themes to it, the story featuring the debauched behavior of a perverted upper-class in a dark future where anything can be bought. A photo-journalist named Saiga uncovers a secretive night club that caters to the most depraved of fetishes, and find himself trapped in a web of intrigue, murder, and crazy science-fiction superpowers.

The opening theme music, appropriately, is Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film,” making this one of the few animated series whose opening credits I’m willing to sit through. Alas, I cannot go into much about the particulars of the story without spoiling it, but the pacing of Speed Grapher is largely a simple “bad guy of the week” episodic chase show, with big bad villains trying to foil our intrepid heroes. Enemies lurk around every corner, and seemingly all-knowing arch-villains maneuver towards unknown ends that are somehow threatened by Saiga’s activities.

As the show progresses, it breaks a bit from the Dragonball / Bleach / One Piece formula of ever-more-dangerous opponents appearing over and over again and develops into a relatively sophisticated look into man’s cruelty towards man and the selfish pursuits that cause us to hurt each other. The writers seek at time to shock the audience with character that have truly abominable motivations (e.g. one character has been building a body out of the body parts of beautiful poor people), sometimes to the point of being insulting, but it is important to establish and affirm the wickedness of the antagonists from time to time.

The production value is generally excellent, though Studio Gonzo‘s signature inconsistency is present, the story is interesting and several of the characters appealing. I strongly suspect they could have told the story in half as many episodes, as there is a fair amount of filler in the middle of the twenty-four episode run. If you’re interested in some tough-guy action, a lot of violence, and some truly dastardly bad-guys, I highly recommend it. B- overall.