Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a highly productive week on my end, as I surged through the last act of Space Runaway Ideon, and topped off the series with a viewing of its apocalyptic concluding film Be Invoked. That screening served as a fine trail marker for a project that I’d initially assigned myself as research: filling out my understanding of Tomino’s style and the classics of the ‘70s and ‘80s, starting with the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Of course, as anyone who’s actually seen the original Gundam knows, the show is actually thrilling even for modern audiences, and hasn’t really aged poorly in any way beyond the mores and production constraints of its time. And the ways it goes beyond most modern anime, both in its ambition and its maturity, make it no surprise that Gundam has become such an enduring franchise. Anyway, I’ve clearly got Opinions on these shows, so let’s get to it!

First, the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Going into this viewing, I was prepped for something that would likely feel slow, episodic, and somewhat awkwardly beholden to its principle duty as a toy-selling marketing tool. Fortunately, all three of these assumptions turned out to be (mostly) incorrect; the show generally possesses a great sense of momentum, it only briefly brushes on monster-of-the-week structures in its middle act, and I have deep concerns regarding whichever producer thought this was an appropriate vehicle for children’s toys. Thundercats this is not; Gundam is brutal and unrelenting, consistently frames battle as a senseless evil, and spares no effort in emphasizing that even people who survive war are permanently scarred by the experience.

From the show’s very first episodes, it expresses a confidence of worldbuilding that ensures its conflicts feel grounded in relatable, mundane human lives. Many misguided writers believe worldbuilding should be judged by its volume – the more you have invented, the richer your world. But in truth, excessive worldbuilding just bogs down a human narrative, ceding the emotions of storytelling to the sterility of a wikipedia article. Instead, Gundam reflects on its world’s mechanical systems as infrequently as possible, but each tidbit of data feels logical and retrospectively obvious, with the show’s points regarding the eccentricities of zero-g movement mingling confidently with thoughts on the Gundam’s own workings. Not only does this make Gundam’s world feel thoroughly considered, it also helps sell the brilliance of its cast – we aren’t just told they’re clever pilots, we actually watch them make self-evidently clever decisions.

And though it seems Tomino isn’t really a character-focused storyteller, Gundam certainly offers a compelling array of characters. I could have guessed from the first episodes that Char would be this franchise’s breakout character; his excellence as a soldier, his unique camaraderie with his fellow men, and his intriguing deeper motives all make for a figure of gallantry and mystery, who you cheer for even as he’s wailing on our heroes’ mechs. But the crew of the White Base is collectively just as strong, offering a wide mix of personalities, and crucially tempering those personalities episode by episode, letting the horrors of war sculpt them into fatigued but resilient champions.

Within the generous canvas of Gundam’s forty-some episodes, the show has ample time to demonstrate war’s incoherence and atrocity from many different angles, its focal characters ranging from pig-headed glory hounds to orphans turned spies for a piece of bread. All the White Base can do is keep fighting, driven forward by martial responsibilities they never asked for, consuming themselves with the daily grind of resupplying and fighting and burying whatever’s left of the dead. Gundam’s heroes fight for a home they can never return to, for a cause of dubious nobility, against enemies of equivalent righteousness. It’s a thrilling yet sobering watch, and a stunning testament to what anime can achieve when producers aren’t paying enough attention.

I jumped directly from Gundam to Space Runaway Ideon, buoyed forth by my understanding that Ideon served as a key influence on Neon Genesis Evangelion. And indeed, plenty of Ideon’s ideas would end up recycled in Eva: the idea of a central mech that is a living organism beyond its wielders’ control, the persistent focus on mothers, children, and returning to the innocence of the womb, and even the use of a brutal concluding film spiraling towards the mutual understanding of collective consciousness. If you asked someone with little interest in psychology or character drama to create their version of Evangelion, the result would likely be close to Space Runaway Ideon.

Which is, of course, where Tomino and I differ in our interests. Though Ideon grapples with core questions of whether human beings are fundamentally good or redeemable, its characters tend to be lightly sketched, with their evolving feelings or relationships generally inferred rather than prioritized. Watching Ideon gave me a much clearer understanding of Tomino’s antipathy towards Makoto Shinkai’s work; there is essentially nothing that happens in any given Shinkai film which Tomino would qualify as drama, and I imagine he’d relegate any arc reminiscent of such films to an ad break, after which the relevant characters walk in and announce they’re now fucking.

Tomino’s seeming preference for telling stories of humanity on a macro scale, and seeing most characters more as role players than individuals, makes for an uneasy alliance with Ideon’s quest for the ultimate truth of human nature. Equally debilitating are the show’s weaker dramatic fundamentals: the Ideon’s Buff clan enemies are all essentially interchangeable, and while the idea that our heroes can’t fully control the Ideon is intriguing, it also means most episodes end with “and then the Ideon decided to win the fight for them.” It’s a slow watch through its first half, though the second begins to restore the sense of character and consequence (alongside the death count) that helped make Gundam feel so urgent.

And then there’s Be Invoked. After forty episodes of watching both the Earthians and the Buff Clan grapple over a weapon they cannot hope to contain, with Ideon’s operators attesting that they have become prisoners of their own ship, Tomino decides to blow up the universe. The entire military might of a galaxy-spanning civilization is thrown against the childlike god of the Ideon, an unstoppable force crashing against an immovable object for ninety torturous minutes. The desperate confusion and sense of vulnerability attendant in End of Eva’s opening invasion was clearly lifted from this heartrending film, as characters who always seemed far behind the line of battle take up arms and are struck down in turn. The intensity and brutality of this film is like little else I’ve seen in animation or otherwise, harnessing forty episodes worth of familiarity for savage purpose, as the battle lines move from beyond the ship to the cargo bay, to the domed farm, to the bridge itself, each holdout point marked by familiar bodies.

Be Invoked also offers plenty of the personal reflection and interpersonal camaraderie lacking in the show proper, doing a fine job of tying a bow on every possible character arc, and thereby making you feel the unspoken bonds connecting the Ideon’s crew just in time for those bonds to be heartlessly severed. The film is a harrowing, almost exhausting watch. Yet it’s also oddly uplifting, both in the lengths the crew go to save each other, and in the unlikely idealism of the Ideon’s final decision. Space Runaway Ideon was ultimately a far messier experience than Mobile Suit Gundam, and I can’t even say I came away from the show proper with a positive impression, but Be Invoked truly is something special.