Anime Review: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Long title and a bit of a tongue twister, but it’s anything but that. As if I didn’t already have enough good things to say about the guys over at Gainax, they give me another gem of an anime.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a new action/comedy/mecha anime from them that promises insane action sequences and delivers. On the surface, it’s your standard action/comedy blend. And it does entirely well, even if that was the only thing it had going for it. But this is so much more. It’s an homage to all the great, epic hero tales that have come before it. A young boy finds a key to an incredible power, and as the story progresses, he learns how to use it. The anime itself spans about thirty years. It has love, action, laughs, and loss. It even dives headfirst into some deeper issues about mankind and life. But it never dwells upon them. It never takes itself too seriously. And that’s part of what makes this series so great. It has all the pieces you’d expect to find from past films and movies: young hero destined for great things, dark evil villain bent on destroying the world (multiple villains in fact), attacks that have signature names, transformation sequences that are repeated over and over again, and the good guy walking away victorious. It celebrates all these things, and with a care and ability that doesn’t come along too often.
The animation is, as always, impressive. I just can’t get enough of the style and quality Gainax continues to put out. The remarkable final sequence of events is enormous. Literally, the hero and the villain fight atop multiple universes in the final duel. It takes everything that has come before it, pays its homage, and multiplies it. Just when you think things can’t get any worse, a bigger badder enemy shows up. And the heroes are there with an even mightier, stronger weapon.
The comedy and action blend is not something I generally fall for as hard as I did here. Full Metal Alchemist had a really nice blend, as did Trigun. But most of these are exceptional cases, for myself. Somehow, Gurren Lagann manages to remain funny when it needs to be while still dramatic enough to care, and has so much action that you’ll watch episode after episode, cringing that it ends at episode twenty-seven.
The only negative things that one can say about the series is that it doesn’t try too hard to do anything new and a little bit of an animation hiccup during one of the earlier episodes. But I’m completely content with that. It doesn’t need to do anything new. The one episode, which introduced characters and was pretty funny, is an insignificant blemish on an otherwise flawless pearl. Gainax achieved something so pitch perfect with this series, that it feels completely fresh, even though we’ve seen all this before.
This is another notch and perfect example of just how far anime can be pushed, and why it’s an incredible medium. And, on another positive note, a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann movie is in production, debuting in Japan in September. I cannot wait.
Leave feedback
Related sites
Recent features
Leah Andreone - Break Your Fall
Coheed and Cambria - The Velorium Camper II: Backend Of Forever
The Format - Give It Up
Song of the week
Sara Bareilles - Between the Lines
Sara Bareilles' "Between the Lines" is the Song of the Week for April 20 to 26.