SPACE RUNAWAY IDEON GOGOANIME MOVIE
While the movie that concludes the series corrects something of these stylistic and narrative deficiencies with a relentless pace and animation and art that remain stunning today, it’s an ending so notorious for its cruelty and pessimism that working toward it can feel pointless.
The series’ sense of aesthetics has aged little better: Tomonori Kogaway’s character designs look as if they were cobbled together from the garbage bins of a thousand late-70s sci-fi B-movies and clash heinously with art director Mitsuki Nakamura’s sweeping visions of cosmic vistas (though not quite so badly as the design of the Ideon and its constituent vehicles, which suggests less the slowly waking judgmental god that wiped out countless ancient civilizations than a giant, boxy humanoid fire truck composed of three smaller, somehow even blockier fire trucks). It feels as if in the absence of a studio mandate Tomino might have dragged the series on for another 39, another hundred, another thousand episodes. Plot development is even less existent, so much so that the series’ climax comes as a surprise, supported by no narrative logic that dictates it ending where it does, no inciting incident that forces the final confrontation between the refugees and the Buff Clan. It feels as though Tomino was offended that he ever had to expand the scope of the original Gundam beyond those early episodes where the White Base spent its days running from Zeon and saw Ideon as a way to push that formula to its most maddeningly mundane extreme.ĭramatic developments are sparing what few do happen-an attempted defection by science officer Sheryl Formosa an encounter between Jordan and his parents that ends with him court-martialed-lead with only a handful of exceptions not to major advances in plot but to strange moments of character development that don’t constitute an arc so much as the revealing of trivia.
The structure is so conservative it could generously be described as fossilized: besides a blistering opening two-parter, each episode from the third until the final begins with commander Jordan Bess, Buff Clan defector Karala Ajiba, Ideon co-pilots Cosmo and Kasha and all the rest of the crew of the Solo Ship fleeing across space from the latest robots or strategic gimmicks fielded by their pursuers only to defeat them at the last minute by deploying the titular Ideon. There’s little wonder it took so long to receive an official American release. But compared to Evangelion-which with its exacting character studies, iconic psychedelic imagery, and outré approach to shot and scene composition ensures its tale of looming apocalypse feels pressingly of the moment even a quarter of a century later-Ideon seems like it’s been dug up from some Precambrian stratum. The tale of a group of space-faring colonizers forced to flee aimlessly across the galaxy after they earn the ire of militaristic aliens known as the Buff Clan, today it’s known almost exclusively outside Japan as one of the inspirations for Neon Genesis Evangelion. It would be easy to categorize his Space Runaway Ideon as an emblematic mess. His storytelling style is “muddled and distracted,” his “sense of dramatic timing and emotional gravitas” is lacking, every element too often undermined by a reliance on mercurial characters whose attributes shift as the plot demands it and a wishy-washy transcendental metaphysics actively at odds with Tomino’s own graspings after a kind of hard-bitten, hard-boiled realism. Examining Space Runaway Ideon, another one of Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino’s many beautiful messes.Īnime News Network founder Justin Sevakis once dismissed Yoshiyuki Tomino-creator of the Gundam franchise, Space Runaway Ideon, and dozens of other series both influential and forgotten-as “one of anime’s naked emperors,” a storyteller with a style “muddled and distracted,” lacking for “dramatic timing and emotional gravitas.” If such a declaration sounds callous given Tomino’s distinction within the industry, it’s not necessarily unfair: by any metric modern or classic Tomino is something of a bumbler.
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