Monday, November 26, 2018

Review: GURREN LAGANN

Let's wrap up this month of mecha with an adaptation of one of my favorite mecha series (as well as one of the first ones I ever watched).

GURREN LAGANN (Tengan Toppan Gurren Lagann), based on the series by GAINAX and Kazuki Nakashima, with art by Kotaro Mori.  First published in 2007 and first published in North America in 2009.



PLOT:

Simon is a lowly digger in the underground city of Ghia.  His only friend is his 'big bro' Kamina, a teenage rebel who wants nothing more than to see the surface.  Their adventure begins when a giant robot falls through the ceiling, followed shortly by a beautiful, rifle-wielding girl named Yoko.  They all escape together in a small, head-shaped robot that Simon found while digging, but the surface world is full of new people, robots, and danger.

STORY:

The Gurren Lagann manga is a fairly faithful retelling of the first five episodes of the series.  That is both a plus and a minus here.

Everything that works well about those first five episodes works just as well here.  Simon and Kamina make a good pair of leads, with Kamina bringing bravado and guts while Simon helps to ground him through his thoughtfulness, quietness, and anxiety.  There are plenty of great action setpieces that only get bigger and crazier with each new one.  Mori even manages to preserve some of the sense of blissful insanity that would define the show (as well as the director's later works). 

Mori even makes some good changes here, mostly by remixing some of the events from Episodes 3 through 5 to make them flow a little better.  The downside, as always, is that if you've seen the show you've already seen this all before in a much more dynamic package.  This may be a better screen-to-page adaptation than most, but its literalness and redundance will turn off those most likely to pick this up.

ART:

Mori also does a decent job with replicating the look of the show...at least, as much as one can in still image.  The cast and the mechs look more or less the same as they do on the show.  Mori does his best to recreate some of the bigger, more iconic shots of the show.  He even tries to replicate Yoko's jiggliness (and throws in a lot more ass shots to boot).  Much like the Evangelion manga, though, it has to compete with its animated counterpart when it comes to the action and that's always a losing battle.  Gurren Lagann was a show acclaimed for its energetic and loose animation and those are qualities that are simply impossible to reproduce on the page.  Worse still, Mori stages these fights in a way that feels messy and hard-to-follow.  That's never a great quality in a manga, but in a mecha series it's a series killer.

RATING:


Gurren Lagann's manga counterpart tries its hardest to capture the show in its pages, but it loses its visual verve in the process and doesn't add anything new to the experience.

This series was published by Bandai.  This series is complete in Japan with 10 volumes available.  7 volumes were published and are currently out of print.

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