Super Dimension Fortress Macross

Super Dimension Fortress Macross:  C

It always feels so mean to give truly classic and formative anime poor ratings, because usually it's not that they're bad, just that they haven't aged particularly well.

Super Dimension Fortress Macross is an early 80's mecha anime about a war with aliens.  It was intended (according to some reasearch I did) as a modest parody of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, but it quickly became its own serious series.  For me personally, the oddest thing was seeing that the series was responsible for a number of mecha designs which were used in BattleTech, a game I thought was totally awesome when I was 12.  This is because the rights for Macross' use and distribution in the United States caused it to be combined with two other series to make Robotech.

The series itself breaks a number of traditional conventions over its knee, and I do appreciate that.  The main character, Ichijo Hikaru, is not a super-ace unstoppable superman, and feels very real and believable (at least until late in the series, but I'll get to that in a bit).  Lynn Minmay also feels like a relatively normal girl thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and shows believable confusion at her sudden popularity and such things.

The alien invaders (The Zentradi) are an interesting take on a supremely militaristic society, having an... unusual reaction to human culture, which creates a much different dynamic surrounding the conflict than most series present.

Now I'm praising it an awful lot, so why did I give it only a C?  Well, the animation has aged very poorly and the romance plot, which is very important to the development of the series as a whole, drags on, with the main characters becoming incredibly self-absorbed and thoughtless by the end to justify failing to resolve it.  Sound familiar?  It should, because it's a very modern harem series conceit, appearing about 20 years early.

Finally, episode 27 wraps the series up nicely and provides a superb finishing point for the series... which is why it's a shame that the series is 36 episodes long.  The final 9 episodes kind of jog around, feeling epoxyed on at the last minute to keep cashing in on a popular series.  That's not the sort of thing that happens in modern anime, and it's something I personally really like about it as an art form, and Macross' actual ending episode feels kind of out of nowhere, failing to wrap up a lot of supporting characters' stories and generally leaving us hanging with regards to conclusion.

It IS a classic, don't get me wrong, and not unreasonably so, it has some genuinely moving sections and a very thoughtful interpretation of culture and culture shock, but considered as a whole the experience falls short of a lot of more complex modern stories.

Gundam SEED Destiny

Gundam SEED Destiny:  C

So it took me a while to finish this series, as I started it a while ago and split the watching between the first 35 episodes and the last 15, but here it is, better late than never.

There's a lot of debate (or so I hear) between the original SEED and SEED Destiny as to which is the superior series.  I've wound up giving SEED Destiny a lower grade than I gave SEED for weird reasons, especially in that, for the most part, I found Destiny to be more engaging a story than SEED, so perhaps it's because I split my viewing in half.

To provide a little background, the series begins a year and a half after SEED lets off, and introduces us to a new protagonist, Shinn Asuka who immediately sets himself apart from his predecessor Kira Yamato by being gung-ho and unhesitating at jumping into combat to fight for his ideals and his people.  And I really liked Shinn, he was a refreshing alternate outlook on 'The Hero,' he's got a temper, falls in love easily and is generally a bit prickly but a good guy and someone I could relate to without Kira's constant hesitation and insistence that he doesn't want to fight.

SEED Destiny's plot is also more complicated, the characters do an intricate dance of friendship, love, duty and loss that remains interesting and quite fresh...

Up until, just like SEED, the last seven or eight episodes, when it seems as though the series goes "okay, that's enough of that, now one side has to win, so the other side goes ahead and does something heinously evil and then loses."  Just like SEED.  And that's ultimately why I had to grade it lower, because it was both a bigger disappointment than SEED was and because I would have thought they'd have known better than to do the exact same thing a second time.

I also need to bitch about Kira Yamato a little bit more.  I didn't mind him so much in SEED, he was a little self-righteous, but he made mistakes, suffered, got angry and emotional, lost occasionally, learned and grew as a person and I could appreciate all that.  In SEED Destiny, he is never wrong, learns nothing, the only evidence we have that he ever doubts anything is when he tells us after the fact that he wasn't sure what he was doing was the right thing, (it was) and is only so much as frightened once in the entire series, which he promptly recovers from.

Would I recommend SEED Destiny?  I... have to say yes, because the early series is really good, and I really do like the perspective that Shinn gives, because I really like watching sympathetic characters, even protagonists, fight each other, but the almost cop-out ending was disappointing and weakened SEED by association.

I begin to see why people say the Universal Century Gundam series are better... I mean, Zeta may have had the most singularly downer ending of any series I've ever seen (including Neon Genesis Evangelion but maybe not Bokurano), but at least the ending was satisfying, and didn't feel like the villains were being uncharacteristically incautious or vile.