Well, I guess this is fairly unexpected since I haven't done one of these in about 19 months, but nevertheless, here we go:
Mobile Suit Gundam ZZStudio: Sunrise
Director: Yoshiyuki Tomino
Writer: Hidemi Kamata, Minoru Onoya & Yumiko Suzuki
Producer: Juichi Kamiya, Kenji Uchida & Mitsushige Inagaki
Composer: Shigeaki Saegusa
Design: Horiyuki Kitazume (characters), Mika Akitaka & Hajime Yatate (mecha)
Released: April 1st, 1986
Genre: Mecha
Format: TV series
Runtime: 47 episodes, 25 minutes each (1175 minutes)
US License: Unbelievably, still none[/b]
See those pictures above? Those pictures simultaneously represent everything right and wrong with
Gundam ZZ[/b]. In the wake of the dramatically overblown and ridiculous
Zeta Gundam[/b], the saga needed nothing more than it needed to take itself less seriously. While many fans immediately cried foul at
ZZ[/b]'s lightened attitude, I thought it was exactly what was needed to diffuse the tension left by
Zeta[/i]'s almost unbearably melodramatic conclusion. At least… for a while. You see, if there's one thing I've learned about Tomino over my many wasted years of watching his shows, it's that he really knows how to drive a concept home. He's able to play from any angle, but once he picks an angle, he's going to sharpen it as much as possible and then shank you with it until your belly looks like a bowl of linguine carbonara.
Unlike its predecessor,
ZZ[/i] takes place
immediately after the show that preceded it. After the climactic battle at Gryps in
Zeta Gundam[/i], the survivors are scattered to the four winds, paving the way for a new, spunky group of heroes to take center stage. Enter Judau Ashta (an almost abrasively obvious response to Kamille), a young, cocky junk collector who makes his way into Captain Bright's ranks after he attempts to steal some of the Argama's mobile suits. Bright needs Judau and his cohorts because the Argama and its crew are being hunted by Haman Karn's Neo Zeon group, and with all the massacring at the end of
Zeta[/b], the Argama is sorely lacking experienced pilots. As the series presses on, adventure is had, old friends and enemies are revisited, and Judau is slowly groomed into a soldier.
It's easy for me to understand the ire given by Gundam fans when it comes to
ZZ[/i]. After the conclusion of
Zeta[/i], Gundam faithfuls were no doubt expecting something grand to fill its vacant time slot. But alas, what they got, at least in the beginning, was something that was less the mechanized space opera of its predecessor and more a tongue-in-cheek, villain of the week show with lots of slapstick and silliness abound. It makes me glad to have not been around in 1986 when the show premiered, because I would've probably been really pissed about it too. Luckily, I began my journey into the more obscure recesses of the Gundam mythos during the age of the internet and was well prepared to face the universally deemed "bastard" of the franchise head on. I can't quite tell if it was my ironic sense of humor or my general dislike for the second half of
Zeta that allowed me to initially accept
ZZ[/i] with open arms. Its silliness and ambivalence towards what occurred before it were, for me, delightfully unexpected.
Now, that's not to say I thought it was good. The first arcs of
ZZ aren't just silly, they're fucking Andre 3000 silly. I'm not exactly sure what happened to Tomino in the very brief interlude between
Zeta[/i] and
ZZ[/i], whether he was simply burnt out or suffered some major cognitive backlash from depression by upping the dosage of his Zanex prescription to entirely unsafe levels, but the man was clearly on a mission to make the follow-up to the child-murdering, girlfriend-exploding Holocaust that was the end of
Zeta Gundam[/i] the feel-good comedy of the year. Now, while that definitely left me scratching my head, it came from far enough out of left field for me to give it a chance, because encountering the unexpected when it comes to anime is quite an event for me.
However, it didn't take long for me to begin wondering how the series would survive this change of rules for 47 episodes. And then, slowly, the answer revealed itself: it wouldn't have to. Tomino, either realizing the err of his ways or acknowledging the cries of his fanbase, decided to slowly (and awkwardly) sculpt
ZZ[/i] from slapstick to serious, thus creating what is by far the most schizophrenic entry to the Gundam saga. Had
ZZ[/i] started down one path or the other and stayed on it, either way, it would have been
something. Instead, we get a show that has a major identity crisis. At some point, as jarringly as it started, the comedy gives way to drama, and the chicken-headed antics are supplanted with characters getting vaporized in their mobile suits, long-winded soliloquies about the horrors of war, and other acts of Gundam-brand histrionics that call for a level of gravity the show simply doesn't deserve at that point. There are a lot of shows that deal with a major change in tonality at some point, and in many shows, those moments can be the apex of the story.
ZZ[/i] takes the fifth and just goes from one gear to the next with no fanfare whatsoever and then expects its audience to not only tag along, but enjoy it.
The biggest offense caused by
ZZ[/i]'s personality disorder is that when it finally gets back to business as usual, it loses that sense of unpredictability. Tomino ultimately retraces his own steps, and episode by episode,
ZZ[/i] becomes a retread of
Zeta[/i], sometimes with agonizing specificity. The tearing of the hero's attentions between multiple love interests, the revisiting of the previous show's protagonist, the innocent "little sis" who's forced to pilot the big, bad mega-mecha, it's all there, but it's far less endearing this time around because it's so forced and telegraphed. It's as if Tomino didn't know how to respond to the show's reaction and instinctively fell back on his own tropes.
Coming hot off the heels of
Zeta[/i],
ZZ[/i] more or less shares its aesthetic. In some places, the animation feels lazy compared to
Zeta[/i]'s, and in other places, it shows some surprisingly impressive visuals. Shigeaki Saegusa returns to compose a soundtrack that feels as confused and hesitant as the story, never quite capturing the darkness or splendor demonstrated with his soundtrack for
Zeta[/i]. With
ZZ[/i] never having been released in the US, there is no dub, and your only outlet for enjoying it in English are through channels that are somewhat less than honorable, though even if other options existed, I would nevertheless try to talk you out of spending money on
ZZ[/i].
ZZ[/i] isn't
bad. Rather, both
Zeta[/i] and
ZZ[/i] represent the Gundam saga's turbid development through its teenage years, with
Zeta[/i] representing the angst and aggression and
ZZ[/i] representing the sense of confusion and awkwardness. As unsavory as these elements are, they are nonetheless necessary components of our development that define who we are later in life, but are still quite embarrassing: apparently embarrassing enough for Tomino himself to retcon
ZZ[/i] out of existence with his recent remakes of
Zeta[/i] as a movie trilogy. I can only recommend
ZZ[/i] to the most die-hard of Gundam fans. But then, if you fall into that category, you've probably already seen it. If you’re a newbie taking your first trip through the wonderful yet immensely inconsistent world of Gundam, you can very easily skip
ZZ[/i] and move right into
Char's Counterattack[/i], and you'll be better off for it. 47 episodes is a long time to waste, after all.
- Shalashashka
Overall Score: C[/size]