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So, in the spirit of 2020, I watched the second episode of Gundam SEED. Shockingly, it's still bad. We already talked about looks, where the show's ugly designs are seldom helped by dull shot composition, but it is still worth noting how little the show does to make conversations dynamic. Murrue's scenes stand out here. You have struggles inside a Gundam cockpit under fire and her holding the protagonists at gunpoint, some of the lowest hanging fruit around for exciting scenes, and it's just... there. I'm not expecting full Sergio Leone, but most Gundam shows do more with their visuals. (To be fair, Natarle Badgiruel's scenes are a bit better. There's more attempts at odd framing and things to emphasize an emotional atmosphere. Basic stuff, but there's something.) It's not like the pacing is too frantic to afford atmospheric shots, either. SEED is still inside the colony at the start of episode 3, with less of interest having actually happened in two episodes than 0079 managed with one. If that time was spent on building up interesting characters, I'd be less impatient, but with how dull Kira and his friends are, it's not really working. The original Gundam started actually playing out some of Char and Sayla's drama in episode 2, not just saying it'd be so dramatic once it actually impacted the plot. Oh, and Murrue makes Bright, the nervous wreck of a 19 year old, look like he had a handle on things with how she responded to Kira saving her life. Where the original Gundam had the White Base crew get temporarily arrested once they were in Federation territory, Murrue pulls a gun on the people who just saved her life, a group including the only person who knows how to pilot the Gundam. And then she shoots the gun in the air, shoots right next to Kira's friends, aims at people she doesn't intend to shoot, and generally demonstrates a suicidal lack of concern for gun safety. It's dramatic, but it's also really stupid. It's also really unsympathetic, which is weird when Murrue's going to be the "nice" officer as the show goes on. I admit, there's probably something obvious I'm missing, but I still don't get why this was such a success when it came out.
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Aug 16, 2020 05:49
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Former mod Zorak literally put out his SEED primer video yesterday and I think I agree with the assessment that SEED was Gundam for people not into Gundam. It’s more spectacle and melodrama than well written but that appeals to some people in a way. I forgot half of the things in SEED and a lot of it comes down to throwing poo poo at a wall and turning everything from 0079 up to eleven. I don’t think it’s good but I get why it worked for new younger watchers in the 00s.
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Aug 16, 2020 17:39
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This might sound insane and will definitely date me but SEED was my first Gundam when I was a kid. I didn't have access to CN or Toonami when I was younger, so I got DBZ and Gundam Wing by osmosis. I knew they existed and I, like a lot of my friends, was very into DBZ. I had some toys from G Gundam but honestly I have no idea if I even knew what they were other than "cool robots". When I was getting into anime around high school my methodology was "look at the 'Top 100 Anime' list on this stupid streaming site and watch what looks cool". SEED was up there and hey, I was sort of familiar with Gundam. "SEED was Gundam for people not into Gundam" is exactly how I look back on it. I loved the spectacle, the heroism, the Gundams everywhere and all of the deus ex machina "cool" moments. So much so that until recently I shrugged and thought "UC probably isn't for me". I just wanted to watch a bunch of high spec robots fighting each other, not a space opera. Basically, space robot shounen. Finishing Turn A spiked me into watching the rest of the franchise that I missed and after finishing 0079 and getting about halfway through Zeta I feel like a moron or thinking UC would be droll or not for me. Zodack fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 17:44
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Weird BIAS posted:Former mod Zorak literally put out his SEED primer video yesterday and I think I agree with the assessment that SEED was Gundam for people not into Gundam. It’s more spectacle and melodrama than well written but that appeals to some people in a way. This is precisely why SEED is one of the high water marks for how popular Gundam ever was. It appealed very strongly to non-Gundam fans(who don't give a poo poo how it compares to UC) and made an effort to reach out to demographics who would traditionally not be considered the target audience of a giant robot show, like girls and women.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:24
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both of those descriptions of SEED just make it sound like Wing for the 00s
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Aug 16, 2020 18:27
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Generally speaking I found SEED to be a copy of 0079 but usually coming off as the poorer version, though it does some of its own things that I don't quite think work in the end, especially when its revealed what the end goal of the Char clone (heh) is. What really puzzled me was what the show does with the co-ordinators. Its says that they're physically superior to standard humans and there are some scenes where Kira the co-ordinator states he can easily beat people to death, and at least one time he easily over powers someone, but in the battles co-ordinators that don't get names or shiny special mobile suits are just typical cannon fodder. And it isn't just because they're fighting against the protagonists, even in the big battles random Earth alliance soldiers seem to take them out pretty easily. When the show started I assumed the A guy I'm subscribed to really likes SEED though and recently released a vid defending the show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaJ7qLNsn4s
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Aug 16, 2020 18:27
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dogsicle posted:both of those descriptions of SEED just make it sound like Wing for the 00s You aren't wrong. I believe one of the things Sunrise learned from Wing is that you can actually sell character merch in your giant robot series. Yeah, it sounds obvious now, but apparently the Wing Boys were similarly popular to the cool robots they piloted and that was a big deal because prior to that point character merchandise didn't make money like Model Kits. SEED happens and not only are there a lot of Gundams but there's also a lot of character melodrama with cute anime guys and lots of Bank-y shots and surprise! SEED moved a lot of merchandise even besides model kits and made a lot of money. Moreover I remember a poll of Japanese Gundam fans, they generally didn't like DESTINY more than anyone else and yet many of them still bought character merchandise for it. It's no surprise that Gundam 00 and onward came pre-packed with attractive dudes to sell character merchandise for alongside the giant robots, they realized they were leaving money on the table to do otherwise. SEED and DESTINY were the "It" anime for their respective years and brought in lots of eyes and got lots of non-Gundam fans to watch Gundam and to that extent good for it. The demographics that didn't generally buy Gunpla were attracted into SEED thanks to SEED's characters and style and bought character merchandise. Of course the problem for SEED's long-term prospects is that very few of the non-Gunpla buying fans branched out into the rest of Gundam to turn into the Gunpla buying demo that's Gundam's primary long-term cash source.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:42
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Kanos posted:This is precisely why SEED is one of the high water marks for how popular Gundam ever was. It appealed very strongly to non-Gundam fans(who don't give a poo poo how it compares to UC) and made an effort to reach out to demographics who would traditionally not be considered the target audience of a giant robot show, like girls and women. but 0079 was carried out of the grave by its popularity with girls and women dogsicle posted:both of those descriptions of SEED just make it sound like Wing for the 00s wing is good tho
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Aug 16, 2020 19:17
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Stairmaster posted:wing is good tho perhaps SEED is good too
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Aug 16, 2020 19:19
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So SEED doesn’t just have coordinators. It has newtypes too. It also has anti coordinators who are trained to kill coordinators. It also has SEED tendency which is people that stab gooder as far as I can tell. It ALSO has Kira be the ultimate coordinator in addition to being a SEED and newtype. Maybe I should’ve said turned to 13 instead of 11 because of the edge.
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Aug 16, 2020 19:30
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SEED has some very interesting ideas with some muddled execution, but I wouldn't say it's a bad show or anything
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Aug 16, 2020 20:01
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Stairmaster posted:but 0079 was carried out of the grave by its popularity with girls and women Women have always been a significant portion of Gundam's fanbase and just as often have been overlooked or taken for granted by developers and fans alike. They represent a fairly significant part of every successful Gundam show for the most part but damned if you'd know it sometimes. I think one thing that gets overlooked with SEED is that it may borrow a lot of Gundam tropes but in structure it's more similar to Fukuda's other big (and much much superior) work Cyber Formula. Which is technically a Speed Racer style dramatic racing anime but the racing is almost exclusively done in the service of interpersonal drama and as the OAVs came out that interpersonal drama got more and more to the forefront and ended up more successful. While it may borrow plot beats the actual writing is fairly different. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 20:12
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Heck look at how they handle gunpla. Women dont buy them as much, so their solution is to... condescend to them with goofy bears that are clearly 'so simple a child could do it!' and write half the women in build fighters like theyre experiencing sentient thought for the first time Like thats not how you make them feel welcome lol. Plenty of women like bearguys but surely theres some kinda obvious onroading you can make from that to gunpla of actual gundam mechs, rather than acting like its the most women can handle.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:15
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Early build fighters try had fumina with a powered GM and she seemed the most enthusiastic about gunpla out of anyone in the setting and I always really liked that Too bad about the show past episode 2ish
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Aug 16, 2020 20:39
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Fumina, Gyanko, and Shia were all pretty stellar until they got sucked into the Jigen Hao Ryu vortex
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Aug 16, 2020 22:15
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https://twitter.com/TomAznable/status/1295102293755531266
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Aug 16, 2020 22:52
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Reminds me of Hideaki Anno's introduction to The Origin. He doesn't call out SEED by name, but given the timing and the complaint about everyone having Gundams, it's pretty clear what ticked him off.
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Aug 16, 2020 23:25
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tbf in tomino's case he hates everything gundam that isnt by him, i doubt its exclusive to seed. heck he seems to hate half the things that are by him.
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Aug 16, 2020 23:26
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I don't get the feeling he hates any of them and it's more that he's always disappointed that he couldn't convey all he wanted to as clearly as he wanted to in his own work, while being disappointed that others emulate what he had done and only iterate slightly on it rather than doing their own thing. When he was talking about Narrative a while back he grumbled that they were doing the colony drop again at the start, and that that was the same thing he had been doing 40 years before hand. On the other hand he was apparently quite happy with what he saw of both G and Wing, because both were examples of things he would and maybe could never make and did their own thing using elements of his work. He's not mad at them, he's just disappointed 
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Aug 16, 2020 23:46
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Endorph posted:tbf in tomino's case he hates everything gundam that isnt by him, i doubt its exclusive to seed. heck he seems to hate half the things that are by him. I think I've seen some mildly positive noises from him in relation to G, even aside from referencing it in Turn A. A kind of "Eh, the corporate overlords will try to make more money off my work. At least other people tried to do their own thing." bit. SEED is probably a distinct case for a lot of reasons. It came after Turn A, which was Tomino coming back to put Gundam to bed, so there's a bit of a personal insult feel to it, only amplified by it being the original remade FOR THE 2000s! Even more than other Gundam, I can see why he'd feel like it was something he made as art being remade as pure product. And it succeeding meant that pure product Gundam would continue to be made for the rest of Tomino's life. Small wonder that he'd have a grudge.
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Aug 17, 2020 00:41
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no he called g boring
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Aug 17, 2020 00:54
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quote:“Gundam shows made by other people are crap, including Origin.” He also bitches a lot about bad animation in that interview and when I think a gundam series with bad animation, I mostly think Wing. here's the interview, the translation is a bit rough but it links to japanese tweets reacting to the interview that back up the gist of whats being said Endorph fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 00:55
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I don't know if he's just changed his mind on G in particular over the years but I'm going off this with Yoshizawa Shunichi and Ogata Naohiro regarding Gundam NT.Yoshizawa Shunichi posted:It was always very concrete advice so I sent him the storyboard for the opening phase of NT out of curiosity of what he would say. The next day he didn’t come to the studio. I thought, “Huh, that’s weird,” but then he didn’t come the day after that either. I thought he’d had enough, but when I finally asked him he said he got frustrated after seeing the first couple of pages. Reason being that NT starts with the colony drop scene. “You’re all so young, and yet you’re going to start from the colony drop scene just like all those years ago?” Basically, he was saying it was a pretty big failure (laughs). Yoshizawa Shunichi posted:I’m going off track here a bit, but Tomino always has nothing but positive words for Imagawa Yasuhiro (director of G Gundam). Imagawa made a completely different kind of Gundam, after all. Tomino also saw the first episode of Wing Gundam recently and had nothing but praise for that as well. Seeing the scene where the character just comes out with, “I’ll kill you,” he said that was a fresh spin on drama (laughs). I'm full sure that I saw him talk about seeing a bit of Gundam Unicorn at some point a few years ago too, and that he thought it was fine from what he saw of it. I'd have to go searching to find any kind of source on that though. tsob fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 01:08
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I meanquote:
this bit itself says he doesn't tell it to other people much, just shunichi. plus hes a nearly 80 year old man who's discussing a legacy hes had barely any part in for the past 30-some years. it makes sense that he'd have conflicted feelings.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:12
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Honestly, if I was creating anime, I'd probably take the disapproval of a man who has made approximately one thing that didn't suck in over thirty years as a compliment.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:17
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Seemlar posted:Honestly, if I was creating anime, I'd probably take the disapproval of a man who has made approximately one thing that didn't suck in over thirty years as a compliment.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:18
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I'm always slightly disinclined to believe interviews like the one above where Tomino is apparently cursing and calling other things rubbish, because he seems a lot more reserved in the few live interviews I've seen of him, such as the documentary NHK did about the history of Gundam a few years back or the one on YouTube at a con back in the mid 2000s. It makes it hard to imagine him as someone who'd have that kind of attitude or speak that ill of other people in general. I can't speak Japanese, but the source tweets in the page you provided all seem to just link to random Japanese Twitter accounts rather than Tomino's own account (does he even have one?) or any kind of official one that would be hosting an interview with him, for instance.Endorph posted:turn-a, king gainer, and g-reco are all very good imo I'd add 0079, Ideon and Xabungle to that personally, though I'd be replacing King Gainer with Xabungle since I think they go for much the same atmosphere and style, and Xabungle just does it way better.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:20
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tsob posted:I'm always slightly disinclined to believe interviews like the one above where Tomino is apparently cursing and calling other things rubbish, because he seems a lot more reserved in the few live interviews I've seen of him, such as the documentary NHK did about the history of Gundam a few years back or the one on YouTube at a con back in the mid 2000s. It makes it hard to imagine him as someone who'd have that kind of attitude or speak that ill of other people in general. I can't speak Japanese, but the source tweets in the page you provided all seem to just link to random Japanese Twitter accounts rather than Tomino's own account (does he even have one?) or any kind of official one that would be hosting an interview with him, for instance. It doesn't match with the infamous Anno interview either, which seems to be legit from all I've seen. Tomino is constantly self-effacing and all "glad you like it, but seriously, it's not that great.", when Anno praises him, and when Anno starts going after Miyazaki for a bit, Tomino's the one going to bat for the other director's work. There's a lot of false Tomino quotes going around, and there's also a lot taken out of context where the obvious humor in the tone is ignored to stir up poo poo.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:28
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I won't argue about G-Reco because at this point that show is love it or hate it and everyone knows that but I will absolutely object to Gainer being good that show is loving dull. It's as boring as any of his Byston Well shows. Also in Anno's defense his going after Miyazaki in that interview is basically limited to him not being able to take Porco Rosso seriously because he thinks it's an extremely transparent Miyazaki self-insert wish fulfillment movie where the allegedly "cursed" protagonist actually doesn't seem all that bothered by his curse at all. It's a complaint that makes sense from Anno's perspective considering what he did when he made his project that was blatantly about himself. Blockhouse fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 01:54
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I mean, why would random unrelated twitter accounts react to the same thing Tomino said at the same time? If it was to 'stir up poo poo' the tone of the reactions wouldn't be 'oh you, tomino!' *sitcom laugh track*
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Aug 17, 2020 01:58
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tsob posted:I'd add 0079, Ideon and Xabungle to that personally, though I'd be replacing King Gainer with Xabungle since I think they go for much the same atmosphere and style, and Xabungle just does it way better. Don't forget Zambot 3.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:58
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Blockhouse posted:I won't argue about G-Reco because at this point that show is love it or hate it and everyone knows that but I will absolutely object to Gainer being good that show is loving dull. It's as boring as any of his Byston Well shows. the first couple eps are dull but it gets pretty crazy pretty quickly. genuinely hilarious show
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Aug 17, 2020 01:58
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Endorph posted:I mean, why would random unrelated twitter accounts react to the same thing Tomino said at the same time? If it was to 'stir up poo poo' the tone of the reactions wouldn't be 'oh you, tomino!' *sitcom laugh track* ...Because they saw the same questionably sourced quotes at the same time, and then they thought it was funny enough to spread around? I mean, the SEED one with Masahiro Mukai is almost certainly real. There's a specific cite, and the source is one I more-or-less trust. It's the other quotes where it feels odd.
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Aug 17, 2020 02:33
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"the only two gundams that tomino has any praise for are wing and g" is something that kinda makes sense but also if you just showed me all the gundam shows and then asked me to pick which ones the original creator would like, there's no way i would guess either of those 2 shows within my first 10 guesses
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Aug 17, 2020 03:36
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Tbh having seen any of tominos shows, ever, wing definitely seems like something hed at least find interesting
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Aug 17, 2020 03:51
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i was watching wing and tomino showed up at my house and started beating up my dad
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Aug 17, 2020 04:08
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I mean considering that he references wing in turn a it doesn't cause that much of a shock also I feel like most people, even if they might not agree it was good, would at least find wing interesting it's a very unique piece of television
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Aug 17, 2020 04:16
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i was watching victory and tomino showed up at my house and started beating up my wife
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Aug 17, 2020 05:18
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tomino hosed my wife
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Aug 17, 2020 05:20
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i told him it was an honor
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Aug 17, 2020 05:20
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