Gundam 00 Movie:

Awakening of the Trailblazer

Spoilers Under Tags Below

Non-spoiler review HERE.

Now, the point of this review is not to spoil the plot. It is to write in detail about various things of interest to the Gundam community, especially details which are not explained within the four corners of the movie itself.

But, no discussion of these things without spoiler tags. So, let’s dive into the spoiler space, minna-san!

show

And Now, The Review

So for people who didn’t want to go through all those details, here’s my simple, spoiler-enhanced short version of a review. But, it too will be under spoilers. See the non-spoiler review for er, a non-spoiler review.

show

And that’s all for now. Comments welcome. Anyone reading this post has been repeatedly warned, so don’t bother worrying about spoilers in the comments.

Thanks. – J

No Spoilers Here

Spoilers, under appropriate tags, will be included in a separate post. This post is spoiler-free so that I can link back to it for people who don’t want to know any of the plot.

The Skinny

This is a must-see for fans of the Gundam 00 series. If you haven’t seen any of the show, or much of it, you can still enjoy it as a movie, but the movie does not stop to hold your hand and explain who characters are (beyond pointing us at the main character) and what their relationships to each other are.

This movie has spectacular visuals. If you have a large HDTV and want to make it sing, get this on Blu-Ray when you can and feel your optic receptors explode. The battles are very visually intense. Judged purely by visual hedonism, this movie is 10 of 10.

The theme – again, without spoilers about how it ends – is first contact with an alien species. As such, it is best approached as more traditional science fiction that just happens to have giant robots (Gundams) in it, rather than dwell on it being a “Gundam” anime.

Now, to be completely honest, I always found Gundam 00 to be very predictable in overall plot, however ornate its handling of technical details (minor and major). The movie is no different. The movie retains the series’ penchant for over-wrought dialog, but that’s the nature of the beast.

In its favor, the movie has a minimum of human beings acting like jerks, largely thanks to the single unifying threat in the show.

Running time: 2 Hours (120 minutes). Bring extra popcorn.

Overall impression:

It is what it is. If you’re into Gundam 00, or into the sci-fi genre, watch it, enjoy it for what it is, and sit back and enjoy the pretty colors.

I saw this word being used as a cultural principle over at the Japan Times in an article about a modern production of the Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin (known natively as the Chuushingura – “chuushin” (中心) means loyalty). They are also known as 47 Ronin, 47 Samurai and so forth, in the West.

Apparently – and I didn’t know this prior to reading the article – the story was considered such an inspiration for the WWII Japan regime that MacArthur’s occupation had it banned in its entirety. I have no idea when or how it became un-banned, either. Anyway, this is a more modern creation, a movie / film that covers the story.

Here we see inserted “gaman” as a principle, defined here as endurance.

Well, I don’t think this is a very good translation, myself.

The Literal Side

The first kanji, 我 (ga), uses the “on-yomi” (Chinese phonetic reading) of the kanji used for the formal 1st person pronoun waga (in native Japanese). Being part of a compound word, the on-yomi is not at all unusual.

The second kanji, 慢 (man), has a normal meaning of ridicule / laziness. Well, I personally think it is the first version which fits, but we have to start with the dictionary version and work our way to reality. The root of the kanji is actually sloth, but as the lazy tend to be ridiculed, we can see those aspects. However, it is also true that “boastfulness” and “conceitedness” are borrowed from this concept; so let’s go with conceit.

Other words using the latter kanji are 自慢 (jiman), self + conceit for boastfulness; 高慢 (kouman), high + conceit for haughty; 傲慢 (gouman), pride + conceit for arrogance; 怠慢 (taiman), neglect + conceit for negligence.

It’s not the fault of Japanese, but English uses “pride” both for the positive aspects, and for the deadly sin version. In Fullmetal Alchemist, the homunculus known as Pride (taken as an English loan word in the Japanese version) represents the deadly sin of 傲慢 (gouman), per above.

There is one more good word for our purposes here: 緩慢 (kanman), slacken + sloth. This means slow, sluggish, dull, languid. Thus, it takes our “sloth” not in the sense of a vice, but behavior.

So now that we have context for the kanji, let’s look at gaman itself once more.

The Figurative

So, 我慢 (gaman) is really the imposition of physical reluctance upon the self. It is to behave in a restrained manner.

The easiest way to explain gaman is by calling it perseverance.

In other words, it means to double down and endure, yes, but that’s not the whole picture. Specifically, it means psychological endurance, not being able to take a punch. Hence, perseverance.

This is also being self-effacing, and through that, it is an expression of patience and self-control (even though “patience” is properly 辛抱 (shinbou) in Japanese). It is also in this sense that it means tolerance, for to tolerate behavior is to not react to it even when one otherwise would.

For instance, one scene in the first chapter of Sakura Taisen (which I mention a fair bit here), the main character, Ichiro Ogami, is pressed into service as a ticket clipper for the theater where the “secret military unit” comprised of all girl pilots (before his arrival) was under er, shall we say, very deep cover. Not exactly trained for this, Ensign Ogami has to pretend to be just a lowly ticket clipper and act polite and nice when a quite annoying young boy demands his ticket clipped.

The player can permit Ogami to let slip his annoyance, or to even scold the child, but the proper thing to do is to 我慢する (to persevere). That is, to exhibit self-control in the face of a… spunky and annoying little kid firm in the belief that you, the ticket clipper, are his servant.

Well, that does take some perseverance.

Movie Context

So from the link above,

But in Shigemichi Sugita’s slow-paced and didactic, if well-acted, “Saigo no Chushingura (The Last Ronin),” the old “Chushingura” spirit is still alive and well. Far from being revisionist, the film is unapologetically traditionalist in sentiment; with some tweaking, it would have made an excellent home-front film, circa 1940, since it extols the value of self-sacrifice and gaman (endurance) for a higher, feudalistic good, even in nonviolent anonymity.

So it’s not exactly endurance, but rather than do the normal samurai thing and slit their bellies upon the wrongful death of their lord (from their point of view), these 47 ronin choose two years of life in utter disgrace, mocked by all who knew them, before gathering together in secret and taking the life of the high official who had wronged their lord and caused their lord’s death. They turned themselves in and then slit their bellies, for that was the only proper way it could have gone. They just made sure they got their business done first.

Now, this particular film explores two ronin who were supposed to be part of the whole thing. One was ordered to not participate in the last part so that he could report upon their noble deeds; the other, well, ran off, hid, and became a merchant, which was considered the lowest class of all. (…By the government, which wanted samurai flattered and feeling important.)

Anyway, you can read the rest of the article at the link at the top of this post and judge this movie for yourself. I just wanted to give this cultural principle some context so that there’s no misunderstanding here. It took some explanation, as you can see.

Like Romance Novels On A TV

In American culture, a “chick flick” is a romance oriented movie that occurs from a woman’s perspective and is meant to play to a woman’s tastes.

There is anime like this as well, and Hakuouki: Hekketsu Roku (the sequel to the first Hakuouki) is a leading example.

To make a long story short, this is a historical drama with a fictional supernatural twist, with a female lead who comes to be with the Shinsengumi, “New Select Group,” an elite special police force, during the death throes of the Tokugawa shogunate (i.e. the battles that gave way to the Meiji Restoration). The pretty, but not idealized, female lead is therefore surrounded by handsome, very much idealized male leads and supporting characters.

Also, she happens to be on the losing side, essentially witnessing a tragedy in progress as lives expire; indeed, an entire era and a whole way of life is expiring as the best swordsmen Japan could hope for in that day and age found their blood and heroics for nothing.

Now, without getting into the niceties of plot, that’s essentially the whole show. Last season, the members of the Shinsengumi were still in “wafuku” (Japanese-style clothing,” and this season they’re in snappy Western uniforms as things get really bad, but anyway, that’s the essence of it.

This is not a show to observe military tactics at work, or for swordfighting (there’s lots of edge on edge katana fighting, which is fine for a “chick flick” where women don’t know the niceties of swordfighting, nor do they care). It is a show for seeing a lot of male leads that girls might like to fall for, imagining themselves in various roles and scenes on the side while the television show itself (for at this point, this being anime is quite irrelevant) proceeds towards some kind of historical finality and plot conclusion. The show is mid-way through its second and final season.

I presume final, because there’s not much of the Shinsengumi left to collapse.

A Leap Into “Fantasy”

The point of this is that even though the events portrayed are barely a hundred and forty years ago, they might as well have taken place a full thousand years ago considering the cultural, technological, and psychological chasm between that time and the time modern Japanese (or Western) viewers live in.

In other words, this is a leap into a world of fantasy. It may be fantasy that resonates on a cultural level, but it is no less fantasy than magic spells, swords and flying dragons.

There is also the fantasy of a girl who is not hot, but who is pretty, being sincerely cared about by so many dashing young men, even if fate is against them all. This is very much reflective of romance novel character design.

In this case, the show was merely based on a Playstation 2 game. While most games surrounding romance are explicitly geared for males, this is one of the notable exceptions. Also, it covered a period rich enough in history to provide a platform for well developed characters, settings, animation, and so forth. Obviously, the plot (which I am not getting into) also made a leap in the process.

While hardly a mainstay of Japanese anime, the “chick flick” style represented here does exist as part of the mosaic of entertainment in Japanese society. This show will never approach Naruto or Bleach status, nor was it designed to; however, it offers an opportunity to get a feel for the era, just as Seven Samurai offers us a window into the samurai as they lived, and died, in the wake of the end of the Civil War era.

Hakuouki represents the end of the era that followed the Civil War era, and represents the dawn of Japan’s modern era, which lasted until WWII. There is something of a pattern here.