Writer: Mari Okada
Studio: Sunrise Inc.
Completed on 25/06/20
***SPOILERS***
Completed on 25/06/20
***SPOILERS***
MSG: Iron Blooded Orphans (hereafter 'IBO') is comfortably the worst cartoon I've watched since I started writing these reviews. It's not just bland or boring but actively makes decisions which make it a terrible watch. I've tried to keep these reviews relatively short so that I (or anyone else) can get a good idea about a cartoon fairly quickly by reading them. Unfortunately, that just isn't going to cut it here - I'm going to really dive deep into why I think this show is so awful.
Redeeming Qualities
It would be completely unfair to say this show has no positive elements. They don't make up for all its flaws but they're definitely there and worth mentioning.
Top of the list has to be some of the really important overall themes and messages of the series. Especialy given its position in the 'shounen' genre, where main characters are often teenage boys thrust into violence and conflict, the series really makes you consider the reality behind these sorts of situations. The use of child labour, child soldiers, trafficking and abuse all for the benefit of corrupt adults etc. The use of a term like 'Human Debris' and the ways these people don't even consider themselves human nor deserving of having a family is really something to be commended for reflecting the reaity of the situations we often see portrayed on screen. I have no actual experience of this myself obviously, so may be ill-informed but I'm sure people who do would appreciate this.
Overall, I would have to call the quality and 'finish' of the cartoon a positive as well. That is, there are lots of areas where the fine polishing applied in production is very clear. You can see it in things like the sharpness of the images, the incredible, vibrant background art and similarly in the art of the mobile suits in some shots (more on this later). Things like this show that plenty of skill and experience, as well as budget, went into the series, as is to be expected from an absolue giant of the industry like Sunrise.
That same quality runs through the OST. All the openings are sick and it is such a touch that both series 1 and 2 have a change of opening and ending halfway through. The opening sequences themselves even have some pretty nice shots in them.
Some of the romantic relationships in the series were also really well done. Merribit and the Old Man was nice and it was nice to see her treated respectfully by all the boys. I also thought how they handled Yamagi being a young, gay boy in the company and his feelings for Shino really tactfully. Akihiro and Lafter was done well too.
I will also definitely commend their approach to a final episode. Having definitive conclusions on things and dedicating half the episode to showing what everyone ends up dong in the future is far better closure than just ending after the big finale.
A few other good bits: really good voice acting at certain times and for certain characters, really visually pleasing settings and of course giant mech fights will always be cool, even if the studio decides to completely half-arse them. You see where this is going.
Plot (or the Complete Absence of One)
When the show first starts, it takes time to set some things up. There are a few different moving parts and it looks like all of these dominos are about to fall and lead to something big. That doesn't even nearly happen.
You see Kudelia's dad selling her out, then pretty much never hear from nor about him again. The people to whom he sells her out all end up dying within about 5 episodes (series has 50 total). The political situation is more like an undertone than a genuine plotline. The other Gjallarhorn guys get killed and Pot-Bellied Hitler-Moustache guy's plan turns into nothing, since Mikazuki just kills everyone.
The first actual objective that arises in the series is taking Kudelia to Earth. I'd assumed that would take 3 episodes at a stretch and then the fallout of that would set off the next thing (admittedly, making assumptions is not a good way to watch something) but it practically took the entire first series. That would be fair if it were the main focus of the plot but it definitely isn't. There are all of these pointless other escapades with the aim of getting to Earth, when really just getting there is only the start of it. They have so much other stuff do after that.
The escapades themselves aren't just pointless, they are relentlessly repetitive. Tekkadan gets attacked by the same people 3 times in first 5 episodes. What's worse is that somehow, Mikazuki is randomly strong enough to defeat them all by himself (that's pretty much the theme throughout). They literally just win every single fight - it's so boring. I like the fact that the show clearly made an effort to include lots of battles but they're all so inconsequential and meaningless. Not only is it just uninteresting to have a main character that is so disproportionaltely overpowered for no reason at all (other people have the Alaya-Vijnana) but 80% of the fights could be removed and you'd still effectively have the same story.
Continuing the theme of things being repetitive and inconsequential: are any of the events in the series supposed to have any significance later on? Clearest example of a pointless event is Biscuit's death. He has a long conversation with Orga the day before about how they should avoid conflicts and think about their long-term future. Orga actually gets really cut up by his death and starts to rethink his decisions... then literally enters every single conflict that presents itself from there on. He does this until the very end and only changes his tactics when he's completely backed into a corner in the final battle. Even then, he just gets clapped and dies, so there was no point to him changing his approach anyway. Buiscuit doesn't even get mentioned when they make decisions after he dies. That's just one example of the many things in the series that happen for absolutely no reason.
The storyline itself has no idea what it's doing. What was the point of the cold-war thing with Galan Mossa? The conflict with Jasley? Shit, what was the point of Naze even dying? How in the hell could they introduce something as colossal, in world-building terms, as the Mobile Armour and let it have next to no relevance to the story!? That was like a weird Evangelion tangent but they also implied the Gundam frames are conscious too, then just... left it.
In exactly the same way, characters very abruptly fade in and out of significance at random points. Chad and Dante are major players in Tekkadan in series 2 but I'm fairly certain neither one is even named in the first 10 episodes. Aston is literally introduced so that he can be killed. There's a lot of cheap death in this show. Last point on this, we get such surface-level info about the actual driving forces in the show (Nobliss, Barriston, Makanai etc.).
Overall, the story is a complete mess.
Directing
There are so many mind-boggling choices made by the director(s) that I don't even know how this show made it through test screenings.
Again, things become really repetitive. The bloodshot eye used when someone got killed in battle was really powerful the first time we saw it. So why would they then re-use it every single time someone dies after that? It loses all its power. Same goes for the flashacks to "that day" between Orga and Mikazuki, which gets rinsed into indifference, even being used in the openings and endings. We feel nothing when they allude to it in big moments.
The worst example of diminishing impact is Mikazuki's loss of limbs. Him losing the use of his arm gives the battle in Edmonton some kind of significance. It feels important. He then goes on to lose two more limbs in the evidently insignificant Mobile Armour fight. This then has no impact at all. We already know he's willing to lose a limb to win a fight, so what was the point. He certainly doesn't change anything about himself after either event and can also still pilot perfectly. There's no cost to it.
Another mystifying directing decision is the ridiculous names of things in the series. Not only are names like Arianrhod, Gjallarhorn and Alaya-vijnana difficult to remember and pronounce but they aren't very appealing in my opinion. A bit like character design, names should be simple and invoke some kind of feeling. Most viewers will never have heard these words before in their lives. There also are lots of ridiculously long names for stuff, like the Outer Earth Orbit Regulatory Joint Fleet. They get used in conversation all the time and they're never even abbreviated. Surely this just overcomplicates things, especially for viewers reading subtitles.
An entire sub-section of bad directing is the action directing but I'll cover this in the animation section. So I'll just highlight one last example of awful directing below. Just look at that shot. There was dialogue ongoing and the credits started to roll. Instead of placing the slab of text over the big, blank, green space to the left, they plonked it right in the middle, on top of a character's face, in the middle of a reasonably important conversation. I wouldn't say stuff like this is typical of the show but surely a good director would never let this happen.
Animation and Art
This is quite a harsh one because animation is reasonable for a serial anime produced to undoubtedly tight deadlines. We have the usual staples of jaw-only speech, a lot of staying perfectly still, CGI spaceships and the expected array of anime exclamations (like people slightly moving their head to just say "tch" - no one actually does this in real life) but overall it's a decent standard.
Where I do have to be highly critical of the animation however is in all of the Mobile Suit battles. These are surely the focal point of any Gundam series, so it was very disappointing to see that they basically took every shortcut they could in the majority of fights.
Fights have constant rapid cuts, so you're never just watching the action happening. They animate either the movement of a single body part or a slight movement of the whole body, then just glide the frame or the object along. They also slide and shake the camera a lot to give an impression of action but this is a half-hearted attempt to cover up undoubted cop-outs and rushed animation. The result is disorientating, low-impact fights with poorly articulated movement. The actual choreography of the fights is good but the approach and animation just really undersells it.
Compare the two gifs below. The top one is from Iron-Blooded Orphans and the bottom is from Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096, which aired a year later in 2016. (Comparing IBO to the old school Gundam would be totally unfair.)
Notice all the things mentioned above. Quick cuts, lots of shots of inside the cockpits, avoiding actually animating the full suits as much as possible (although for Gaelio's shooting disc, focusing in is actually a good choice).
Now look at this one. The shot has the two suits in the frame almost the entire time and they take up the whole frame. No cutting away and they're happy to animate whole-body movements, complete with effects and lighting. So much better.
There are a few other issues with battles generally as well. Mobile Suit designs and colours aren't distinct enough (especially early on) to recognise who's who, especially in the quicker-cutting sequences. Also, having the fights take place in space means there are almost no objects/landmarks around to help orientate the viewer. Again, add in the constant quick cuts (and breaking of that imaginary line thing) and it just becomes dizzying. Fights don't feel weighty nor tangible at all.
As mentioned above, there's an over-use of 'gliding' an object across the frame, instead of actually animating movement/flight. There are occasions where they glide a really beautifully done painting of a suit across the screen but like many other things, it's overused. In powerful shots like Barbatos standing victorious over the Graze, it works really well. It's good storytelling. But mid-way through actual fights, especially when it interrupts the usual art-style, it has the opposite effect.
Now just a few words on the art. As mentioned above, the backgrounds and environments are legitly stunning. I love the feeling inside McGillis's waterfront office and on Rustal's lavish ship. You can't really fault it. The character art however is horribly inconsistent. Cartoonists will always use 'symbols' to represent facial features, especially in anime. My personal belief is that the "anime" style is too quick to borrow already-established symbols but worse yet, the symbols themselves are actually bad/not representative. IBO borrows a lot but strangely, only does it selectively. Some faces and some features are actually really well thought out but others are straight off the dusty shelf. Like these two:
Characters
This has pretty much been covered everywhere else but characters are super shallow across the board. Everyone has one motivation, one mood and often even one response to every situation they find themselves in. I will say that I really like the fact that Mikazuki often acts as soon as he gets the chance to; he doesn't stop to listen to people's speeches and let them sneak in an advantage, he just kills them straight up. That's about it, though. Even his character has no goals, motivations and just no depth overall.
Active Mistreatment of Female Characters
Women characters and their significance in stories is quite a common feature on this blog. Usually, the criticism is that women are either absent or silent but as I alluded to in the opening paragraph, IBO actually makes conscious decisions to mistreat its female characters on top of this. Susprisingly, it does pass the Bechdel test but that only goes to highlight the wider point of the test - it's technically very easy to satisfy whilst still writing women terribly.
As mentioned, women are generally insignificant and act as passengers to the story for the most part. Either that or everything they do relies on men. The only woman who's actually a major character by any definition is Kudelia but everything she does is actually driven by Nobliss or Makanai. She has very little ability to do anything for herself. Other women include: Julieta, whose every move is made literally to serve Rustal; Merribit who gets sent to Tekkadan to do their books, then literally does nothing for 5 years; and Atra whose entire identity revolves around care responsibilities and having babies. It was seriously fucked up the way they made the baby thing with Mikazuki a 'solution' for Atra and then even had the older, wiser Kudelia agree with her. That's not flawed, naive characters, that's writers genuinely believing this stuff to be true. One female character who was actually quite good and in some kind of control of her own future was Fumitan but of course, she served Montag and Nobliss and shock horror, she gets killed for dramatic effect. That's all the passive stuff, now for the active examples.
First up: the Turbines. The all-female crew of the Hammerhead. Now the show focuses mainly on a group of boys. That's the story being told. Fine. However I mentioned in the 'Redeeming Qualities' that the show did a good job of showing the realities of these characters' experiences of being trafficked, being forced into labour etc. That's why it's important to notice how bad a job they did of acknowledging the realities of the experiences of the Turbines.
For starters, all of these woman are Naze's 'harem'. I'm a very big fan of portrayals of relationships other than 2-person monogamies but there's no balance to this. This is the only example of any non-normie relationship and given the history of harems, even within anime (and has to be said, probably hentai too), this is a really degrading base on which to form these characters.
Worse than this, is when they do expand on it, it turns out Naze 'rescued' all of these women from the exact same trafficking and forced labour that the Tekkadan boys experienced. The big difference though, is that 1) these women were 'saved' instead of deciding their own destiny like the boys did and 2) they're all now completely supposedly in love with Naze as a result. The show offers no exploration of these women's potentially misplaced adoration nor the possibility of dishonest intentions by Naze. Ultimately, the reality of this situation would be that if women are rescued from trafficking and then end up in an unbalanced relationship with their so-called saviour, they're likely being manupulated. The show though chooses to show them being endlessly grateful to him and happy to spend the rest of their lives literally serving him.
The confirmation of this pretty disgusting situation is when they try to paint Naze as a good guy for offering refuge to the women (seriously, imagine someone running a women's shelter then making all the women their "wives" - that person would be a pimp), he explains his intention was never to garner sexual favours but says something along the lines of "but I took whatever came my way". Yeah, that's horrific. The series would have been ten times better if they replaced Naze with Amida.
Second and most important case: Almiria. What the actual fuck was going on here?? If there is only one element of this show people need to know about, it's this whole situation. Almiria Bauduin is a NINE-YEAR-OLD girl, who is promised in marriage to a grown man in order to strengthen the positions of their respective powerful families. Again, this presents the writers with a great opportunity to show the realities of countless situations like this in the real world and maybe show how damaging this sort of thing can be to these children. But again, they don't do this and in fact show little else except this child falling in love with a grown man and how excited she is to be his wife. No one steps in and offers her guidance, makes sure McGillis acts appropriately with her nor even suggests she doesn't have to go through with it. It's totally cool that she's being used like this, apparently. Just the same as with the Turbines, this is not (in my view) the writers showing how indifferent and complicit people can be to child abuse but that they think this is a genuinely okay thing to happen (or at least okay enough for TV).
They compound this with Almiria feeling like she isn't a "woman" and is too much of a child to be with McGillis. Great opportunity for someone to remind her to actually enjoy being a child and worry about all the other stuff later but nope, never happens. The only friction that their relationship meets is "people" apparently saying things about it and being disappproving of the age gap. Important to note that no one actually says this in the script. Instead of actually addressing this, the writers just have McGillis manupulate the fuck out of her and continue to pray on her insecurities and make him seem like some white knight.
The only time we actually see Almiria have any kind of thought or emotion of her own is when McGillis literally kills her brother. Once more, McGillis manipulates her (this time by self-harming). Then, when her dad tells her that she needs to leave Earth, she says that she has to wait for McGillis, because she's his wife no matter what and that she'll face his retribution with him (yes, the retribution for killing her brother). The dad doesn't even say anything back to this. It's absolutely insane.
Last thing I'll say on this, it was incredibly uncomfortable viewing watching McGillis lift Almiria up from under her arms (as you would only lift a child) and sit her across his lap, with her legs apart. I really mean it when I say the show should have been taken off air after that scene.
I was astonished to discover that the series was in fact written by a woman. It's a shame because I'd love to watch as many amazing women writers, producers, artists, animators etc. as possible and write about how skilled and accomplished they are. Not the case here, sadly. Also goes to show it really can be anyone with this misogyny stuff.
Conclusion
Hopefully no one has to read all this in future but I do intend to save everyone I can from investing the near 25 hours of their lives it would take them to watch this series. I'm genuinely annoyed that I sank that much time into it myself but this review at least shows that I learned something from it (I hope).
Please do not watch this show. It is awful.
Other random thoughts:
Shino literally gets himself killed for no reason. He misses his shot with the Deinsleif and then... charges for absolutely no reason, unaccompanied. No one even tries to stop him.
Was McGillis's actual plan to go through all this shit just to get in the sickest robot, then everyone would listen to him? Why did he have to kill Gaelio to do it? It makes no sense at all.
The big reveal of Montag's identity was possibly the most underwhelming moment of any story ever told.
