Wait, there's more Gundam? I mean, I know there's more Gundam, if there's one thing you can say with certainly about possibly the most expansive science-fiction franchise in existence, it's that there'll always be more, but until not so long ago I was labouring under the misapprehension that I'd covered all of what fell under this series' purview, that being the films and OVAs released prior to 2000.
Admittedly, I wasn't that far wrong, except for Mobile Suit Gundam 0083, which I'd had my eye on for a while. But then along came Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, or more specifically the film adaptations that were released in 2005 and 2006. Now, obviously both of those years are a good bit later than 2000, but the original Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam TV series they were drawing upon wasn't, and that leaves us with a definite grey area - one I've gone and ignored by reviewing them anyway. Which means that up this time we have Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Heirs to the Stars, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Lovers, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation: Love is the Pulse of the Stars, and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory...
I can barely imagine the thinking that went into Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation. Oh, not the notion of producing a trilogy of compilation movies of what, by the start of the twenty-first century, was already established as being among the highlights of the vast edifice that is Gundam; given that we've already covered the compilation movies of the original series and rated them pretty highly, that bit's perfectly understandable. And reanimating them, well, that's not quite so easy to get your head around, since you'd suppose part of the point would be that you didn't have to make three new movies from scratch, but Zeta Gundam was heading rapidly toward the big 2-0, and as good as it may have looked by eighties TV standards, there was a gulf between that and what you could chuck into a cinema. No, the unfathomable part is how the solution settled on was to reanimate only some of the films, with percentages ranging from a third to four fifths.
Compilation movies have become almost standard practice in the years since: it's almost rarer for a popular anime show not to get cut down, retouched, and thrust into theatres. But what Tomino and co attempted was very much not retouching or anything close. A heck of a lot had changed since Zeta Gundam first aired and apparently it never occurred to anyone to disguise the fact, because it would be hard indeed to mistake the old footage for the new. The TV stuff looks decidedly ropey, the more so for being blown up to fit a cinematic aspect ratio, and the 2000s stuff is nicer but also very of its time, meaning plenty of shots with that awkward glossiness of animation made by people still fighting the contributions of computers as much as they were aided by them. But what really sucks is the transitions between the two, or rather, the lack thereof: while things settle down somewhat toward the end, where the bulk of the new material is, lengthy stretches chop from one to the other with no rhyme or reason or logic as to why, say, two people having a fairly uneventful conversation needed reanimating at all.
On that last count, the answer is surely that A New Translation, as its name tells us up front, isn't quite the Zeta Gundam of old. Having never encountered the show before, I'm not well placed to comment, but the internet tells me that there were changes made both big and small, and that's presumably why we get shiny 2000s animation for scenes that don't obviously warrant it. Then again, keeping track of what matters on a minute-by-minute basis is such a task that it's possible I was just underestimating the significance of certain conversations: this is, after all, a conflation of one third of 50 episodes of TV, and it's not even an especially long film.
To say the results are confusing is an understatement: Heirs to the Stars does most of its storytelling at the most breakneck pace. Nobody relays details they wouldn't have good reason to, which often means vital information arrives long after you'd expect, and rare are the moments when you entirely feel you grasp anyone's motivations, the more so since we have good reason to suspect numerous cast members. There is a pattern that emerges whereby every few minutes events slow down enough for your brain to catch up on the essentials, and that combines with a sort of osmosis that lets the bigger picture gradually soak in, as the repetition of names and faces and concepts counteracts the general chaos. It's mostly frustrating but sometimes exciting, since the effect - and from my experience of Tomino's work, I doubt this was accidental - is less like watching an anime show about a space war and more like learning the essentials of said space war by skipping news channels.
To some extent, that's all well and good for the tale being told. However, while we can make excuses for Heirs to the Stars and even propose that its flaws are more like features, that doesn't do a lot to improve the experience of actually watching the thing. It's draining and bewildering, and who wants to be drained and bewildered by their entertainment, especially when there isn't enough to compensate? Much of the action borders on incoherence, and the better sequences are backloaded, meaning a lot of damage has been done by the time they arrive. The politicking is more interesting in theory, except that, while it's fairly simple once you get your head around it, it's delivered in the most headache-inducing manner possible. As with all of Heirs to the Stars, the good stuff is definitely good and the spine is pretty great, but that delivery turns it into work, and I'd be hard pressed to suggest it's worth the bother.
What struck me most about Lovers is how consistently it manages to fix some aspects of Heirs to the Stars while breaking others in a fashion that does barely a thing to nudge the overall quality in one direction or another. So, for example, there's considerably more new animation this time around, and the integration is generally better, and for that matter even the original TV footage seems to have improved somewhat or perhaps was chosen with more care. But then the new footage is generally less impressive, to the point where I occasionally found myself struggling to tell which was which. There's also some prominent use of CG, something that was hardly guaranteed to go well back in 2005 and doesn't particularly here, aggravating the general tendency of the "modern day" footage to be too glassily smooth and polished. On balance, the shift towards visual consistency probably has to be regarded as an improvement, and if nothing else it means we get some action sequences that are legible and thus reasonably exciting, but it's less than I was hoping for when I noted the ratios of old to new footage.
On the plot front, meanwhile, some effort has gone into addressing the aimlessness that afflicted Heirs to the Stars. The answer Lovers brings - look, it's right there in the title! - is to focus on the relationship side of things, which Heirs to the Stars largely neglected. Sometimes this pays off, in that there are lengthy sequences where Lovers behaves like a proper film, focusing on the interpersonal conflicts of a manageable bunch of characters in a handful of locations rather than batting madly around the solar system while flinging names and faces at us seemingly at random. The trouble is, judging by what I've seen of his work and certainly by what's on offer here, Tomino is awful at writing relationships, and the central one, between reliably dull protagonist Camille and enemy pilot Four Murasame, is no hook to hang a movie on. Possibly it would have worked better with the breathing room of multiple episodes, but it's hard to wish for more scenes of incoherent teenage romance. Four reminded me strongly of Quess from Char's Counterattack, one of my least favourite characters anywhere in anime, and if she's not quite that bad, her actions are just as unmotivated by anything that could be considered reasonable or believable human behaviour.
Then again, perhaps Camille secretly found her as irritating as I did, since within minutes of their earth-shaking romance reaching its inevitably tragic ending, he's making out with someone else - again, presumably a consequence of cramming hours of footage into ninety-some minutes, but it doesn't make things less absurd in the moment. And what's worse, the price we pay for this slightly more lucid change in direction on one front is that the wider conflict hardly makes a shred of sense: I could offer no better summary of the plot than "The good people try and stop the bad people from doing bad things while running away a lot." A degree of that probably comes down to my fuzzy memories of part one, but contemporary audiences had waited five months between entries and it was twenty years since the TV show had aired, so I reckon I can be forgiven for a gap of a couple of weeks, and I don't feel bad about suggesting that the fault lies in some thoroughly inarticulate storytelling.*
I'd naively hoped that this last entry might be the point at which the series really began to pick up, perhaps became the original Gundam movie trilogy managed to end on a high note that made it feel retrospectively more like a trio of proper movies than a massive quantity of TV footage chopped, often clunkily, together. No such luck: despite containing the largest percentage of shiny new twenty-first-century footage, Love is the Pulse of the Stars is comfortably the worst of three films that only ever succeeded in clawing their way up to fairly good.
Love is the Pulse of the Stars doesn't manage that much. Oh, maybe there's the odd scene, but if there was, I refuse to be blamed for missing it, since the hundred-minute run time is an almighty slog: with two movies of back story, countless characters major and minor, and not one iota of an attempt made to re-establish anyone or anything, keeping the barest grasp of what was going on was such an ordeal that I had no energy left for discerning okay-ness from mediocrity.
By the end, it's tough to imagine that there could ever have been a worthwhile three movie adaptation of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, at least with this particular approach. There are elements to this one I personally found wholly off-putting, like a drift into vague spiritualism in a series that's always struck me as avoiding that sort of thing hard, and I could definitely have done without the bizarre "The Zeta Gundam is powered by love or maybe ghosts or some damn thing" twist we get in the back half. But there is certainly good stuff in here; the problem is that it's so rarely foregrounded. With the running time hobbled by the determination to re-animate so much of the footage, there isn't room to balance the wider conflict, which is on a particularly enormous scale this time around, and once again that means a focus on interpersonal dramas that simply aren't that interesting. It really does reach ludicrous heights here, as giant robot fight after giant robot fight is reduced to clashes of personality between people who were once friends, lovers, enemies, or a combination of the three, and always seem to somehow know who they're up against. Meanwhile, the whole interplanetary war that you might naively imagine would be the point is sidelined so hard that I truly don't think it's followable without having seen the series.
So are there any compensations? Not really, no. For all that there's theoretically 80% new footage here (which, yes, makes this vastly more a film from 2006 than a TV series from the eighties, but it's too late to worry about that!) the animation is, on a whole, that bit weaker. This possibly has something to do with just how much Love is the Pulse of the Stars is mobile suit battles, something Tomino is bafflingly bad at directing given how much experience he'd clocked up by this point. He routinely acts as though space is a flat plane, the older footage continues to suffer from being awkwardly zoomed in to suit the cinematic aspect ratio, and the balance of CG and traditional animation is never quite right, as it rarely would be for another half decade or so. So for all that the visuals are the strongest aspect - after, perhaps, a noticeably more novel and interesting score - they're not the sort of strength that could hope to make up for some disastrous narrative weaknesses. I'm sort of glad I sat through Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation to fill in a gap or two in my Gundam knowledge, but I can't think of any other reason to devote five hours of your life to these movies.
Throughout most of my watching of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, I was confident I'd be starting this review by declaring that I'd gone from some of the weakest Gundam entries I've encountered to one of the finest, if not the very best. And now, coming out of its thirteenth and final episode, I still think that's the case, I'm just disappointed that I'm having to hedge that statement a little. So let's be clear up front: Stardust Memory is superb, both top-tier Gundam and top-tier science fiction in general, not to mention an extremely high water mark for animation and one of the better OVA series ever produced. It's excellent stuff and I recommend it, I'm merely sad to not be recommending it unreservedly is all.
But that start - oh my! The first episode, in which the first of two experimental Gundam units is stolen from a base on Earth and rash greenhorn test pilot Kou Uraki borrows the other in an attempt to retrieve it, is as near to flawless as you could dare to hope. And what's more astonishing is that the level of quality barely slips for its immediate successors, building out the cast and context with slick economy while never losing track of the core conflict and mixing compelling character drama with absolutely thrilling action. Really, I'd struggle to point to anywhere in the first two thirds where a foot is inarguably put wrong; my heart sank slightly when the conflict left Earth for outer space, since, for me, Gundam is always at its best when it's not just mobile suits whizzing around against a black backdrop, but the actual dip in quality is negligible, in large part because the storytelling is so good that the shift feels both natural and necessary.
Stardust Memory will eventually take that dip, and I could point to the exact moment at which it happens, but I won't because it would be both an enormous spoiler and somewhat unfair: the scene in question is superb in its own right and the partial reboot of the narrative that follows is, again, both earned and dramatically satisfying. The problem is merely that it pushes Stardust Memory from a track that felt genuinely fresh onto one that's more familiar Gundam fare. Familiar Gundam fare delivered superlatively, no doubt about it, and yet there's an awful lot of Gundam in existence, and there are beats that had been hit many a time by 1991 and would go on to be hit many times more, and so the early freshness is all the more exhilarating, just as its lack is that bit more frustrating - though even then, Stardust Memory is canny enough to use the experienced viewer's assumptions against them to pull off some real shocks.
It helps, obviously, that Stardust Memory both looks and sounds extraordinarily good. Indeed, if Gundam's ever reliably looked better than this, it's outside of my experience. Obviously, that means that the giant-robots-fighting stuff is magnificently animated, but so is everything else, from the most mundane conversations through to the most trivial of character details. Neither Kase nor Imanishi ever get particularly show-offy in their direction, but it's purely because they don't need to when every shot feels like showing off. Chuck in some left-field soundtrack choices that feel like they ought not to work at all and end up as a triumph of constructing a unique mood and you have the sort of show that you genuinely could enjoy without following the plot purely for its overwhelming quality.
So, yes, it's great, and I'd feel terrible if I left anyone thinking overwise. It's only that a Stardust Memory that had stuck to its early guns and been largely insulated from the wider Gundam-verse in the manner of other highlights like War in the Pocket and The 08th MS Team would have been both a new favourite and an easy recommendation to more or less everyone, whereas the one we have, which starts out as that and ends up getting awfully busy with filling plot gaps from other shows, isn't quite there. If you're a Gundam fan, then obviously this is indispensable, and likewise if you're a Gundam casual like me, and if you don't even know what a Gundam is but love sci-fi and outstanding animation, then this should be high on the list of franchise entries you really need to sit down with regardless one of these days.
-oOo-
It gives me no pleasure to be mean about Gundam, the rare series that has absolutely earned its out-sized cultural impact by being far more often excellent than not. But then, it gave me no pleasure to watch Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation, so what can you do, eh? Still, I'm very glad we got to say our last goodbye** to the Gundam-verse with an entry that shows off so much of what makes it so special.
Next up: hopefully some stuff that's actually definitely from the nineties!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* If more evidence were needed, I'd point to the crucial scene that relies on two children hidden in a spacesuit failing to hear or even notice a heated conversation taking place roughly a metre from their heads.
** OK, so there might be a Mobile Suit Gundam 0083 compilation movie to get to at some point...
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