To spare myself the agony of watching bad animation, i did a bit of online research and thus decided to watch the compilation movies. The first gundam series named Mobile Suit Gundam was made in 1979 and i bet even the remastered 43 episodes will not be very good. This review will focus mainly on the first movie of the trilogy.
Starting off typical gundam style, amuro ray is a 15 year old kid with 1979 hair style. His homeland got attacked and he found a book, not an ordinary book, but a Gundam manual.
He hops into rx78-2, which happens to be lying around after the attack and many of the experienced soldiers and military experts were either killed or running away. He immediately pilots the rx78-2 and takes on 2 zaku grunts.
At this point i suddenly remember gundam seed which was the first gundam series i watched. No doubt gundam seed was a reboot of the original gundam series. In both case the ultimate newtype/ coordinator happens to pick up a gundam, boards a ship with mainly inexperienced teenagers and proceeds on to beat the crap out of
seasoned war veterans.
The animation is better than i expected and is actually around the standards of Gundam F91 even though they are 12 years apart. Also since this is the first gundam series, the name Rx78-2 is not mentioned, they just call it Gundam.
Char Aznable
The most popular character in gundam history appears in the form of Char. Char is so badass that every single gundam series has a character or sometimes multiple characters looking or sharing many similarities with him. The more recent ones include Graham Aker in 00, Athrun Zala/Rey Za Burrel/Rau Le Creset/ in Seed and Destiny and Milliardo Peacecraft from Wing, in ascending order of insanity.
Char's Zaku II
In fact, Char is so incredibly badass that he has a pink spacesuit, which he uses when he goes on stealth missions.
Rx78-2 vs Char's Zaku II
The story is very good and far exceeded my expectations especially after watching Gundam F91 as my first UC show. Char betrayed his fellow comrade Garma Zabi and made use of the white base ( ship for the gundam) to kill garma.
The reason behind Char's actions were not revealed till the 3rd movie, and the show had some politics in as well which probably was too ahead of its time in 1979. No wonder it did not become popular until years later.
Character wise, i do have some issues with Amuro being too much of a jerk and there seems to be plenty of slapping going on. Most of the slapping seems to involve Amuro at the receiving end.
Slapped again! By Bright Noah again.
There must be some kind of trend in the seventies and eighties where slapping people is a cool and perfectly acceptable way of getting your point across. Then again, Amuro probably deserved all this since he repeatedly refused to sortie in the gundam when the white base is in danger.
As it turns out, the Federation had also developed other mobile suits other than the Rx78-2. The Rx77 guncanon and the Rx75 guntank. All 3 uses the core fighter for their cockpits. The core fighter idea, was of course later reused in the design of force impulse.
Towards the end of movie one, another badass character appears.
Conclusion:
I am very happy with the compilation movie, part 2 review will be up soon for Movie II and III. You can't say you are a gundam fan unless you have watched the original series. Gunpla wise: RG gundam Rx78-2 and RG Char 's Zaku II coming up.
yeah while I do adore the TV series, these films are very, very good, I still prefer to watch them with the original mono soundtrack though, they seem to have removed much of the plinky plonk synths in the 5.1 remaster track. Also they have 'realistic' machine gun type sounds which I do not like.
ReplyDeleteYeah, i agree with you. I have finished watching the original series and i must say that they are a real classic and real gundam fans should not really skip those.
Deleteyeah to be honest I even like the episode Tomino himself hates (the one with the Zeon guy on the island who protects the kids) :p
ReplyDelete