Closing the book on Gundam Reconguista in G (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Yoshiyuki Tomino)
(Originally posted on May 1, 2023)
I watched the 5th and final G-Reco movie a while back with @gee-man and @dragonzigg, which is kind of conflicting for a variety of reasons. At time of writing I'm broadly willing to call it my favorite Gundam show. As for whether it's good, well, I mean, look, that's a complicated question...
I knew what Gundam as a franchise was - almost anyone who watches anime has at least a vague idea - but I didn't start watching any of it in earnest until early 2014. The first few Gundam shows I watched, were, in order:
- 08th MS Team
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam
- Gundam Build Fighters
- 0080 War in the Pocket
- Gundam Build Fighters Try & Gundam Reconguista in G (Concurrent)
I'm grateful for this bizarre slate because it largely prevented me from getting locked into an idea of what Gundam is "supposed to be". Like, 08th MS Team is a star-crossed lovers / boots-on-the-ground war story, while 0080 is all about how the same war is affecting civilians supposedly far removed from the conflict. G Gundam is a melodramatic kung-fu movie. Build Fighters is a Yu-Gi-Oh style kid's show. They run the gamut on the "War-Is-Bad <-> Wow-Cool-Robot" spectrum, and I could easily understand how the milieu of mecha tied in with each of them.
Except G-Reco. I had no clue what the fuck was going on. I was dimly aware that G-Reco was series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino's return to the director's chair after a decade, but I had no context for what that meant in practice. There's an old series review on ANN that describes the show:
+Engaging characters, expressive music and animation, immersive world-building that exudes creativity in every aspect from architecture to battle choreography
-Plot is so nonsensical that it eclipses the enjoyment of everything else
I find this hilarious because it's exactly how I felt watching G-Reco when it first aired. I could feel that there was something in there, but I simply couldn't parse it. Wasn't that character a POW, why are they still allowed to pilot mobile suits? Why is this brain-damaged girl running around? Why are we showing Bellri taking a dump in his mech? What the fuck is Kia Mbeki's deal? Why does every character act so dumb?
I was out at the Toy/Model shop one weekend when G-Reco was airing (to buy the Powered GM Cardigan from Build Fighters Try), and another customer was bemused by the new robot being called the G-Self. "Oh yeah, that's from the new show airing right now," I said. "It's real weird, though."
"Weird? You mean like Turn-A?" he said.
At the time, I had no context of exactly how Tomino directs his shows. I began to slowly work my way through the backlog, started to grasp on why G-Reco was the way it was, learned the idiosyncrasies of Tomino's style. It took a few different earlier Gundam works to see the patterns, but it didn't really click for me until I watched Xabungle.
Combat Mecha Xabungle (referred to in its own subtitles as Blue Gale Xabungle) aired in 1982, putting it right in the middle of that weird period in-between the original Mobile Suit Gundam and the famously beloved Zeta Gundam. To my knowledge - I haven't seen ZZ Gundam or Daitarn, for instance - Xabungle is the most overtly silly show Tomino has directed. Plenty of mecha anime have jokes and japes, but I don't think I've seen any other straight up comedy mecha (perhaps the closest might be Gurren Lagann, which is... directly inspired by Xabungle). Even serious plot episodes are filled with wacky slapstick both in and out of the robots.
When Jiron Amos pilots the Xabungle and literally slips and stumbles into another robot, knocking them both over, it's funny because Jiron is a clumsy oaf, but it also reinforces the idea that the mech is a physical object. When a character does something like fidget with their drink's straw, it gives them a sense of being a real person (even when Tomino's dialogue can get, uh... well, people literally call it "Tomino dialogue", so...).
Watch any Tomino-directed show and keep an eye out for people just bumping into things, bonking their head on a canopy or something. Slipping and catching their footing, fiddling with random objects, flailing to catch a railing. Drinking their space drink, which is now a bit of a series hallmark. These kinds of details are all over the place in his shows and add a sense of physicality and humanism to proceedings that's decidedly rare in anime.
Possibly my favorite example: in the third G-Reco movie, protagonist Bellri Zenam learns a shocking hilarious truth and proceeds to basically throw a screaming tantrum over it. He runs outside, lamenting his fate, tripping and stumbling, furiously punching the ground until he's exhausted himself and all he can do is kneel and sob. At which point, the back of his jacket flops down over his head.
It is so fucking funny.
And, of course, when Tomino's feeling a little more dour, this same sense of presence can be used for horror, like the infamous first 20 minutes of Gundam F91. Or, take any old fashioned cockpit kill where the mech remains otherwise fully intact, simply collapsing to the ground with its animating spirit extinguished.
Before, I just couldn't understand why everything in G-Reco was so weird, and I was tempted to write it off as old man Tomino being out of touch or even plain incompetent. Now, experiencing it again through the movies, I can appreciate how the characters are a bunch of imperfect little freaks. They don't act like I've come to expect characters in media to act. They act just a smidge more like real people: people who don't think before they speak, who just do stupid shit sometimes for no logical reason.
It doesn't always work perfectly, or even well. But it's definitely an intentional device that creates an essential humanism scarcely seen elsewhere. As I've been working through the backlog (I'm partway through Aura Battler Dunbine which cut the entire current isekai wave off at its knees 40 years ago, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, and Zeta Gundam), this is what I've come to appreciate the most about Tomino's directing. Nobody else does it quite like him..
For a majority of the time I've actively watched anime, and certainly as long as I've actively enjoyed the mecha genre, Reconguista in G has been a constant presence. It's a bittersweet farewell, and the fact of the matter is that G-Reco might be Tomino's final work. Here's hoping the shitty old man has a bit more fight left in him.
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