Unicorn Gundam… we’re supposed to get it this winter, it’s not clear at this writing if it will be a TV series or a film. I’m thinking TV series myself. It’s meant as a 30th anniversary project designed explicitly to please the die-hard, old-school Gundam fans who were generally too old to find SEED or 00 interesting. The Zeta Gundam movie audience, if that makes any sense.
In terms of production pedigree, Unicorn should be amazing (but I would’ve told you the same thing about 00 or SEED before either series was actually made). Gundam Unicorn will be directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi and written by Yasuyuki Muto, both veterans of the excellent L’Chevalier d’Eon series. A Gundam series produced at Chevalier’s high standards of quality would be a welcome change from the franchise’s recent turn toward utter schlock.
The series or film is explicitly going to be adapting the Gundam Unicorn light novels written during the production of SEED and 00. The novels take place in UC 0096, three years after CCA, and concern a newly reformed Londo Bell hunting down remnants of the last Neo-Zeon movement (calling themselves “The Sleeved,” which is like… guys, I think everyone in space probably wears sleeves).
The main guy is an engineering student from the moon who fights a masked dickweed manipulating the Zeon for his own purposes. Very classic UC stuff. The series will even acknowledge Gundam’s shoujo roots by having artist Kumiko Takahashi adapt Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s character designs from the light novels. Mechanical design team will include Hajime Katoki (!), Junya Ishigaki (!), and Nobuhiko Genba.
The problem with Unicorn is that a lot of things about the actual plot are pretty damned awful. There is, for instance, a highly distasteful female love interest/enemy character called Marida Cruz whose secret backstory reveals that she’s Puru Twelve (yes, one of Glemmy Toto’s). After the events of ZZ Gundam she was sold to a child prostitution ring and over the course of the next 7 years was raped and beaten and put through “forced abortions” so many times that her womb is broken and she cannot bear children.
This is not a plotline I want to see animated, ever, by anyone. To be fair, a lot of Gundam light novels include absolutely insane sex-related plots that animated versions never, ever acknowledge. But since Unicorn’s light novels predate the animation by so many years in this case, uh, the sexual insanity is all we have to go on.
Honestly I actually enjoyed 00, mostly for the HD, and slightly less for the awesome tactics designed by their commander.
I never thought much of the “good guy” tactics for 00 but I found many of the “bad guy” tactics really engaging and clever. In general 00 kind of had the problem that it would’ve been a better Real series had the main guy been Graham Acre and Setsuna been the villain he tragically needed to destroy. (I’m pretending Mister Bushido didn’t happen, because… I don’t like living in a world where it did, to be honest.)
The HD… my feelings are really mixed about it. On one hand, the particle effects animation was great, character animation was great even if the design work was sub-par. The mechanical animation… well, they were very nice drawings but the actual fight choreography was just appallingly lazy. You may need to turn the sound off to notice it, but there are a lot of major 00 fights where the robots actually move maybe 7 or 8 times in the course of 8-9 minutes of footage.
The direction does everything in its power - cuts to people moving in their cockpits, overlaid particle effects shots, use of BGM cues, cuts to other scenes entirely - to distract you from the basic fact that 00 machines tend to spend battles in static positions, being basically dragged around the screen until they get a burst of movement during key sequences. I can understanding that drawings at HD levels of detail might be hard to move around even on Gundam’s TV budget, but damn. I understand that early in production the Japanese fans got so angry about this that Sunrise formally reprimanded the entire production team for it.
Setsuna was utterly forgettable, but honestly, it feels weird that Lockon doesn’t top the charts in some way. I think, if they hadn’t killed Allelujah’s schizo other personality, he would have been a dream. By dream I mean, in a totally hetero way – Hallalujah was awesome.
Al/Hal was great and an utterly mismanaged character. He should’ve been the show’s standout. Instead they gave him nothing much to do for the show’s entire last… 26 episodes. Yeah.
With Lockon… what I understand of Lockon is that he was essentially mandated in by the show’s producers, who wanted a character like Mwu La Fraga around to appeal to a slightly older demographic. What seems to have happened here is that people who already liked Mwu La Fraga kept right on liking him and ignored 00 entirely, even after the producers insisted that Lockon get a girlfriend in the second season so he’d be more like Mwu.
It’s a little sad given that Mwu himself was forthrightly meant as an homage to Roy Fokker and no more-- it really shouldn’t have been difficult to come up with a similar character that was just as likable. I chalk it up to Seiji Mizushima not being used to the levels of interference a director experiences with Gundam and so not really having the energy to make the producer-mandated stuff feel interesting. Everything about 00 that is interesting is essentially a holdover from Mizushima’s original pitch.
