Saturday, April 4, 2009

Mainlining awesomeness

Yasuhiro Imagawa, director of Giant Robo, the greatest anime of all time, returns to TV with Shin Mazinger Shogeki! Z-hen on television, his take on Go Nagai's infamously fucked 70s robot show.
From FRAME ONE it is pretty much more incoherent awesomeness than the human mind is capable of processing.

The entire first episode is pretty much one INSANELY bad ass entrance after another, with fucking hundreds of characters and robots and powers and gizmos flung willynilly at the viewer with suitably epic music and accompanying imagery.

A friend called me halfway through and I pretty much just sobbed into the phone, long past the capacity for rational thought. Were I to watch more than one episode of this in a row, I suspect I would lose control of my bladder as well.
Unmissable.

4 comments:

  1. "Unmissable."

    Some fansubbers out there also apparently agree.

    Aside from Giant Robo (and evidently this), is there anything else Imagawa has done that's worth checking out?

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  2. G Gundam has its moments. Big, cheesy, stupid moments.
    What I saw of Tetsujin 28 was also something; it was weirdly subdued and straightlaced, and I ended up not getting very far, but it was singularly committed to feeling like a show from the decade the manga was written, and probably was truer to the original artist's vision than Giant Robo's over the top pyrotechnics ever were. Probably one for the more hard core retro robot lover, though.

    But this is a significant comeback for him; he was backstabbed pretty badly on the horrific Shin Getta Robo, and it seems to have left him largely unable to work. He wasted his time with Seven of Seven, which appears to be a moe show even moe people didn't bother with, and writing a few things, like Bartender. I wonder if the awesome Giant Robo manga and the success of Gurren Lagann didn't open a few doors for his own brand of epicosity.

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  3. Wow this show was... massively incoherent. And awesome. All at the same time.

    "Number's don't count, this is a contest of SKILL!"
    *bazooka montage*

    That sequence alone sold me.

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  4. I attempted to explain to my carpool how the second episode has him riding his bike while robots climb out of the sea and other robots fucking vault over him to battle the robots behind him and then he vaults his bike into the cockpit of his own robot and even they wound up being sort of impressed.

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