Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Studio Gainax
2007
For many years since the rise of Gundam, Mecha anime has been all about the realism. With the mecha being treated like walking tanks that have motors, servos and actuators and stuff, teams of engineers maintaining them in between battles and pilots relying on skill and training rather than sheer force of will.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann decided that those ideas can all go die in a fire! Who wants to watch some military type do his job when you can have a kid jump into a machine and start kicking faces!
The story follows Simon (Pronounced See-mon because it’s more weird that way.), a young orphan who lives in an underground town digging tunnels for a living. Soon enough, he finds a weird glowing object that looks a little like a drill bit. Action piles upon action and soon enough Simon has found a small robot to go with his key-thingy, and has destroyed a giant robot menacing the town and escaped to the surface with his friend and thinly-veiled father figure Kamina and a scantily clad, pneumatically bosomed lady called Yoko to embark on adventures on the deserted surface of the Earth where the only other souls are the Beast-Men, who have it in for all humans, killing them almost indiscriminately.
And that’s just the first episode!
It may sound jumbled and incoherent when being vomited onto the page by your humble yet sexy narrator. But the fact of the matter is, none of it comes out of nowhere, there is a reasonable sequence of events involved in this story… it just moves really bloody fast, and it uses that speed to kick you in the balls as many times as it possibly can!
This is the cartoon equivalent of the Powerthirst ads! Watching this anime is akin to surfing on the back of a fighter jet made of Biceps! Everything is so over the top the series actually takes it on as its personal mantra. “Go beyond the impossible and kick reason to the curb!” and by god it does! Everything from Kamina’s way of picking up a sword by kicking it upwards, letting it spin round his neck and catching it in a dramatic pose complete with lens flare. To the deliberate yet consistent breaking of the laws of physics in everything from the mech fights to the way Yoko’s breasts bounce around like a couple of puppies. This show is over the top, it’s outrageous, and it knows it!
Not only that, but it’s really funny as well! Kamina’s presence is both hilarious and inspiring at the same time. Not many characters do that mix quite so well. That is where this show truly excels. It’s not serious, and yet when it wants drama, it does it. It’s not depressing or didactic, yet when it is over you walk away feeling that you have learned something. The world may run on a fictional form of energy derived purely from hot blooded fury, but you will feel genuine questions about the human condition being subtly whispered into your ear so surreptitiously you’ll think you must have come up with it yourself.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has it’s cake and eats it. And then it turns it into a big-ass drill and puts it in someone’s face purely because it can!
