Well, you can always just watch Unicorn.
Yes I can! Twice a year for the next
three years. :laugh:
I'm just disappointed when a show that could've been good isn't. I get angry about GSD the same way. Had that show been produced without interference it would've been The Wave as a mecha anime and that's a
brilliant concept for a Gundam series, especially one cast from the Zeta mold.
Keep in mind the current benchmark for good mecha anime is Code Geass, which went off the rails after episode 19 and was not really as good as 00 S1 anyway.
I dunno. Code Geass before the episode 19 shark-jump is some brilliant deconstruction of Sunrise's Gundam formula from a top-notch director. The show really begins to falls apart when it starts acting like the audience should like Lelouch, rather than treating him like a charismatic monster hiding beneath a veneer of nobility and self-righteousness.
Geass R2 is largely an embarrassment, though I'm hard-pressed to say whether it's worse than 00 S2. Geass R2 at least stuck to what was clearly the originally intended ending of the Geass franchise, despite what was probably enormous internal pressure to do a wussier and more commercial ending. 00 S2's ending is just hilarious because the show's core rivalry ends up being so tepid.
What made audiences (especially Japanese ones) interested in Geass to begin with is that it's really just a Gundam retelling that casts a Char Aznable-type as the main character, written in the vein of Tomino's Char. Early on Lelouch is completely unidealized and acts with a wonderfully human selfishness that's clearly going to grow into his tragic flaw. You'd think this would be such an obvious way to revitalize the Gundam formula and yet
nobody had done it before.
00 S1 is a bunch of good ideas that spend roughly four times as long getting anywhere as is desirable, let alone strictly necessary. I think I timed it and in the first 13 episodes of 00 S1 there's roughly 60 minutes of footage with long-term plot relevance. Almost everything else is either padding or building up plot threads that will eventually be dropped. (Or that cool but sadly irrelevant episode about Allelujah's backstory.)
In terms of mechanical animation and combat choreography, there's no contest. Geass is unquestionably the superior show. The Knightmare Frames are far better-animated and better-realized as mechanical design concepts. The 00 Gundams don't make any sense even from a soft-SF POV and in some cases were very poorly thought-out from a choreography point of view (i.e., original Dynames, who spent most fight scenes thrillingly
not moving).
00 has a lot of shiny particle effects animation from the D.I.D., but turn off the (utterly bitching) 00 OST sometime and just watch the way the robots move in the combat sequences.
Just the robots. You'll see a few frames of mechanical animation about once every thirty seconds and a lot of the other "movement" consists of still shots and drags.
While the original 00 designs were gorgeous (if pretty archetypal), the super-high line count clearly made moving them effectively on a TV budget far too much for the production to afford. Despite being consigned to a late-night timeslot with a far lesser budget, Geass managed to pack in a lot more true mechanical animation and some utterly brilliant combat choreography that gave its machines a real feeling of weight and mass.