Review Mobile Suit Gundam: The OriginSome pretext: I am a mature adult anime reviewer (34), and recently begun exploring the Gundam series. I actually came across the Alternate Universe of Grim dark series Mobile Suits: Iron-Blooded Orphans before watching this. I chose a standalone alternate universe before getting into the main series to see if it was a type of anime I would like. So my review is influenced by the natural comparison of the two series. [SPOILER WARNING FOR ALL 6 OVA's]Story: 5/10
It's difficult for me to put the pro's and con's into seperate categories because some of the same flaws are some of the things that are also brilliant.
The fact this is made into a 6 hour continual OVA, was much more paltitable and less rushed than 20 min episodes in a small series. There is quite a lot of depth involved overall in this story. I enjoyed that the series started with M.C's as small children, Aretesia is 7 at the start of the show, and I believe Casaval/Char is around 13, this was an interesting choice. It's certainly not what I expected from the trailers and then the intro to the first OVA. Honestly, if I had only watched the first OVA, I Would have scored this much lower than 5. Although Sunrise started off with the right hook and introduction, the pacing in this series is all over the place.
It has a strange vibe that alternates from Annoying Villian 1(no context or background), to cat climbing up bed posts(slapstick humour?), to grandfather having an apopolexy, to fanatical deiken father who looks like he's going to molest his sleeping children in the first 3 mins...
Another jarring aspect was in the first OVA they explain absolutely nothing and everyone is ranting and raving in the first 10 mins that I am having a difficult time making heads or tails of the dialogue.
Then when you hit the second OVA they spend 4 mins recaping everything and finally explaining the hour you spent. Honestly I'd tell people watching this for the first time like myself to skip OVA1 and start on OVA2, it made much more sense in 10 mins recap than an hour...
Irritatingly the series continues to do these annoying voice over recaps in every OVA until the last ones are nearly 10 mins long each. Then the LAST OVA doesn't have one at all... It makes no sense to show these in such a manner. First confuse your viewer with no explanations at all and then add needless explanations after we painstakingly figured it out for ourselves insulting our intelligence. And then the one time you might need it, coming back to the very last OVA, it's not there at all. Not to mention the narrator then overlays in the middle of the shows starting on OVA 2-3 breaking your suspension of disbelief and being in the storyline.
Seriously, the pacing in this story often had me falling asleep on different parts of the OVA's. The first OVA in particular. And again when long spats with the Zabi's made me want to rip out my ear drums. Many of the scenes voice acting was so gutteral and didactic that I really hated listening to most of the characters speak at all.
Despite this, the anime picks up on storyline by OVA 2, 3, and 5.
However, I'm really not sure what this anime is trying to achieve storywise. Are we supposed to love Casval/Char or hate him? And what of the side characters?
I felt nothing for the uncle Ramba Ral who helped rescue the cat in OVA 1 and his design is so different later that if it wasn't for subtitles labeling I wouldn't have realised it was him.
I enjoyed the dichotomy between Artesia and Char, but clearly she was nutured and loved and he was neglected quite a bit. Stark example of this is the last night with their mother in the tower and Artesia is held lovingly and the boy left without even one last cuddle.
Was he always malacious or was he simply harbouring anger from neglect, trauma, ptsd, and abuse from a young age? Should I really believe we can make mechas in the future but we still have outdated tropes that women are nutureres only still and are "blood thirsty monsters" otherwise? That's a direct quote for the movie when the main Zabi leader asks Garman not to change because he's not "blood thirsty like Kycilia". Yeesh. I rolled my eyes hard there considering it was the men of the Zabi's who took down an entire space station of people an landed it on earth, killing earth and space people alike with no hesitation.
And am I supposed to believe that mental health isn't addressed at all- or for that matter cured? I guess this is where trying to adapt 1970's era anime fall flat for me in 2020. Things like all the miltary garb resembling WW2, and all the "mothers" and "good women" being blonde haired blue eyed. Not to mention all of them look like carbon copies of each other. Artesia's mother, Crowley Hamon, the miltary girl turned Dozle Zabi's wife...someone couldn't make the women look different from each other? Or are they all expendible? The red headed Kycilia Zabi, and the three very small side love interests (Engineer who helped design Mobiles suits sons girlfriend and the girl who went in shelter and died from gas/fall of shelter onto earth and Char's wife/partner) were exception to the rules of this design flaw... however they all suffered in this series as props to the men except Kycilia. On an aside, I would have loved to see this show based on her point of view. She is the only one whose dialogue didn't centre around men other than the context of war but still, better than the rest when it was the context of love. It was so jarring to come from Mobile Suits Ironblooded Orphans with strong female women, in design and concept to this mess of an OVA series for the views and roles of all the characters.There was a lot of plot to chew in each OVA, and each one is over an hour long. So i took quite some time to finish them all. I do not reccomend binge watching as you will find yourself pondering the motives, plot an storyline for a little while after. This at least I think is a positive thing.
And all this brings me to characters: 5/10
I found these to be the single most one demensional characters I've found in any series. Especially the villans. The only saving graces were Casaval and Ral... The poor voice actors weren't given much to work with in concern to the Zabi's. Still even Casaval fell prey to some one demensional tropes in that he was made to look only bad. If we are to believe and want to put faith in an antihero, at least give us reasons to like him as well as hate him. The Zabis were possibly the most ignorant, irrrational, confusing bunch of antagonists I've come across in susposedly mature niche anime in some time. Their voice acting was far too over the top, and their animation too. It must be something from that era because it was completely the opposite of what I am used to.
Honestly I'm not sure how I sat through this entire series.
I think what kept me going was that I was seeing a history lesson on future Gundam that might be wildly different and add context to needed next installments, and also my favourite part of the series: The music and animations.
Animation: 6/10
I didn't like a lot of the character stylisation as it didnt suit my preference but it was still done expertly. I appreciate the effort for returning gundam fans and the studio to keep faithful to the origional design ideas. However, after looking up the director and designer teams for these gundams, i have to say I will not be watching anything futher from them. I can see now why IBO was different from this series. Completely different designers/directors team.There wasn't any annoying jarring or off lipsyncing for the japanese audios. They looked realistic in different point of views and not just straight forward or sideways but three quarters as well. The physics behind them walking, running, jumping, etc were really well done. Casval/Char's iconic tilt of head and movements of his hair out of face was a good example of this.They didn't use place markers scenes like looking at a static object to make up for laziness or lack of animation skills. And don't get me started on how beautiful and breathtaking the background artwork was, the clouds, the perspective shifts from close to large views. Oh my! One really memorable one of this was when the father and son(Amuro I think?) were standing in the industrial biosphere space shelter, overlooking all the red wasteland and the cranes surround them, that was beautifully juxtaposed. Another was the combat fights. Many people dislike the 3D CGI and look down their nose but I think they are a wonderful innovation between full cgi and anime. It also was used quite a lot in the character's animations and no one seems to comment on those sections. It created a much more seemless and fluid movement of characters then just drawn by hand because the physics were handled by the computer. A good example of this is in OVA 2, and 5 when the club dancer Crowley is singing, or when Char is running up the mountainside while training in OVA 3 and then slides down to rescue the zabi heir Garman and places his waterproof shelter overtop his rival/companion, which really was a fine example of good physics in animation design and tastefully done 3D CGI. I feel uniquely qualified to comment on these things because of my own lifetime background in the arts. So definitely the art was something that kept me going in the sluggish moments.
Bringing me to Sound: 9/10This is based solely on the soundtrack and not the voice acting. This is a soundtrack I would purchase and listen to again, it took awhile for the overarching theme to match the ova's it worked much better in OVA 4-6, but it really hit me in the feels when I watched the shelter plummet to the earth. It reminded me both visually and emotionally of visiting the harrowing Holocaust musuem in Washington D.C., they definitely sourced some of the scenes from those historical videos/pictures from those times because the placements of how people lay like they were asleep or gasping for breath, was uncanny and gave me shivers with the timing of the music. Definitely a wonderful sound track and highly reccomended.
So overall I have really mixed feelings about this series. I love what Sunrise made in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphan, and I saw small moments of similar brilliance in this series, but the overall themes, the lack of development outside of Casaval and Artesia, the amounts of useless characters who are brought in then dropped and the pacing made this a really strange experience for me. I loved parts of it, I hated parts of it, and I felt some parts were mediocre. So all in all this rated 5/10.
Screenshots
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