Good Old Fashioned New(ish) Anime

I’m watching this again. In short spurts, a few episodes at a time, in between when I should be writing or playing other things, but for some reason, I just felt compelled to sit down and give this another watch.

I’m talking about Mobile Suit Gundam Seed.

It all gets a bit confusing unless you were following the intricacies of anime from its relatively simpler beginnings in the late 70′s before it took off into the much bigger cult status of the 80′s and the more mainstream acceptance it enjoys today, but it all started with the original Mobile Suit Gundam back in 1979. That was the grand daddy of all giant robot anime, or at least, the grand daddy of giant robot anime in which said giant robots were actually just vehicles of war, like tanks, or planes, as opposed to giant, sentient, mechanized samurai that fought for honor. It was a landmark in Japanese anime in that it attempted to do a “realistic” story about space and giant robots, trying to come up with rationales to explain everything. For example, the giant robot itself was justified by the invention of something called a Minovski Particle. In the context of the series, this was a special kind of particle that scrambled electromagnetic waves like radar, and thus rendered long distance, guided “smart weapons” like nuclear missiles useless. Suddenly combat went back to the WWII days where everything was either line of sight, or done by calculation. As a result, the Mobile Suit, which started its life originally as a general, all purpose construction/loader vehicle for space colonies, was weaponized.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed is sort of a remake of the original 1979 series in that many of the same themes are touched upon. There is a rebellion fomenting amongst the space colonies that have long been abused by Earth. There is an evolutionary leap as a new type of human has been slowly appearing, cause panic and outrage in the old type or “Naturals”. And of course, there is angst, self doubt, sacrifice, angst and more angst.

And, lest I forget, there are huge freakin’ robots attacking each other with laser swords while shooting around at mach 12.

Now if that ain’t cool, I dunno what it is…