Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Reviews – Apr 2009

30 Apr 09 – Why You Should Watch Mobile Suit Gundam

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This is intended to be the first of a multi-part series where I write about each major animated work in the Gundam universe. I want people to know what each of these shows has to offer.

About spoilers: I won't tell you who dies, but this is a review of a 30-year-old show, for Pete's sake. Anything I write about here has long since been analyzed frame-by-frame on 2ch.

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Mobile Suit Gundam, of course, is where it all began. The first Gundam show, which aired in 1979.

And that is the key aspect in appreciating this series. Mobile Suit Gundam (MSG) must be understood in its historical context. Before MSG, anime was aimed squarely at pre-teens and tweens. There was no anime aimed at teens or adults, except maybe Go Nagai's cheesy giant robot shows, depending on how you squint at them.

Mobile Suit Gundam was aimed at mid-teens, as evidenced by its 15-year-old protagonist (in most anime series, the protagonist is the same age as the target viewer). Heck, the only characters younger than that are the comic relief orphan children.

(Only in Gundam do you have comic relief orphan children.)

MSG also strove for realism. In previous mecha series, the titular giant robots almost always had ridiculous backstories—designed and built by a single scientist, usually. Transformation sequences often made no sense; the vehicles that made up Getter Robo melt together to form the giant robot.

Not so in MSG. There's certainly a magic technology—there has to be for giant robots to be practical—but it's placed on a different level, behind that of the giant robots. MSG introduced Minovsky particles, an otherwise undiscovered element that makes compact fusion drives possible and jams radar. This makes hand-to-hand combat critical, especially for large vehicles. And when one side adapted the arm-and-torso construction machines originally used for colony construction into fearsome humanoid war machines, they suddenly found themselves with an ideal war technology for space combat.

(Think about it: You need huge construction equipment to build something as big as a space colony. The construction equipment needs to be highly flexible and powerful. What sort of controls do you put on a highly complex piece of equipment like that? You make it as humanoid as possible, since people can more easily map controls to human movements.)

This is what you get in great science fiction—the magic technology suggests technological innovations and historical responses.

The two sides of MSG's conflict also stand out. The Earth Federation—the "good guys"—is simply Earth's government. It's not particularly noble or just; in fact, it's portrayed as bureaucratic and behind the times of modern warfare. The Principality of Zeon—the "bad guys"—objected to Earth's control of a fundamentally new civilization in space, and declared independence. Not only are several Zeon characters sympathetic and noble, one of them became one of the most popular anime characters of all time, Char Aznable1.

Side note: Most folks see the Nazi-style uniforms of Zeon and read that Gundam's creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino, wanted MSG to feel like the German offensive in World War II, and call Zeon simple stand-ins for Nazis. Saalon and I disagree. Zeon is much more similar to Japan in WW2; motivated by a zeal for independence against an economic powerhouse that they see as oppressive. While I'm sure Tomino originally intended Zeon to be like the Germans, I think he ended up creating Japanese. While the upper-level Zeon nobility are clearly power-mad, most of the other Zeon characters are portrayed as soldiers doing what they think is right.2

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Characters, too, elevate MSG above other anime of the time. I can list four main characters who behave significantly differently by the end of the series. And others explicitly don't change, to their detriment. I can't think of any other anime with that much character change.

And those characters! A few highlights:

How can you not be intrigued by these people?

MSG accomplishes so much, especially in 43 episodes in an era when most anime had the barest thread of a story arc over the course of 50-odd episodes. Characters evolve (and some die), technology changes, and the war builds up to a fever pitch. Heck, the unexpected early cancellation of the series helped it, as the show focused on its end game for the last six episodes, and drove straight for it at full speed.

I distinctly remember watching a sequence about two-thirds through the show, in which the narrator explains the current Federation offensive against a major Zeon supply base. There's a shot of White Base, followed by a shot of General Revil debating strategy options. I suddenly realized: I understand the overall course of the war, and the characters' exact strategic role in that war, and I know what the characters are going through (and they're going through a lot). I've seen this show only once (plus the recap movies), and I just turned to one side and rattled off the names of fifteen major characters. I know them that well. I literally can't think of any other anime that accomplishes this much; even later Gundam series sacrifice one of these levels of detail.

Downsides? In 1979, the Japanese still hadn't wrapped their heads (or their drawing hands) around fluid 2D animation. MSG can be painful to watch, unless you've seen a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

It's also uneven. Tomino felt compelled to include a mobile suit fight in every episode, and at times they feel unnecessary.

But it's worth it. Oh, it's worth it, if just for the experience of this futuristic war story, and the great characters you'll meet, and the choices they face.

1 Char's popularity is according to polls in Newtype magazine, which consistently put Char Aznable in the Top 20 list of most popular anime characters.

2 See Of Space Nazis, Gundam Sequels and the Horribly Underated MS Igloo for an excellent analysis of the Nazi design aesthetic in Gundam.

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22 Apr 09 – Eulogizing Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive

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There are a number of blog posts and articles about essential business books. "Ten books everyone entering the working world should read," and such.

I only have two.

One, Getting Things Done, I've already talked about quite a bit here. Just about everyone needs some way to organize their work. GTD does a great job of explaining what you need to track (and what you don't).

But today, I want to write about Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. Drucker's the best writer on business and management I've ever read, and this is my favorite of his books. It's also the most directly helpful to regular workers.

First, an explanation: By "Executive," Drucker's referring to anyone in an organization who executes. So, the book's aimed at those who work with their brain, which seems to be a large majority of the work force these days.

The book is a rumination on—and a set of advice for—knowledge workers. We have to be responsible for our own work, while also fitting into a larger organization. We have to manage our own time, while respecting time restraints placed on us. We have to be independent and lead, appropriately.

Here are a few of his insights:

Which sounds like standard business advice. But each one of these (and more) are accompanied by in-depth thought and advice. There's plenty of analysis of what this means, and all of it is clear and concise.

The book's amazingly valuable, if just to help one re-think one's place and responsibilities.

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20 Apr 09 – A Japanese Noir French New Wave Black-and-White Yakuza Film

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So imagine a Japanese film, set in the 1960's, involving a down-and-out Japanese private investigator named Maiku Hamma ("My real name," he says), who takes a missing-person case and winds up in the middle of a yakuza/triad turf war. He drives a convertible, wears a samurai-style jacket, and has an shoebox-sized office over a movie theater (you have to buy a ticket for the latest movie just to go up to see him).

It exists. It's called The Most Terrible Time In My Life.

The director, Kaizo Hayashi, was obviously influenced by French New Wave, American noir, samurai, and yakuza films. Everything's in black-and-white (almost), the characters are almost all tense (or hiding something, or both), and there's even a brief scene with Maiku's "mentor," who wears a white suit and uses a cane.

(If you're a die-hard MST3K fan, you'll be tickled to learn that the aforementioned white-suited mentor is played by the thick-jowled spaceship captain from "Star Force: Fugitive Alien" and "Fugitive Alien II," he of the maniacal laughter followed by "You're stuck here!")

See, this movie should be a terrible mess. This should be confusing. Instead, while the film certainly has its flaws, all of these elements work together.

Why? Because the director's influenced by all those disparate film styles; he's not trying to make a film that embodies all of them. He uses those styles to create effective scenes. They're all tools.

The result is a remarkably entertaining film. It starts out as simply great fun, then grows increasingly dark and brooding as the various plotlines accelerate towards the (inevitably bloody) end. Which is exactly as it should be for this sort of film. As long as you aren't expecting a mindless, high-speed action flick—Japanese movies rarely are—you'll probably get it.

And you'll find a weird, wonderful little gem. I can't wait to see the sequel.

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