Funny Little Men

Okay, okay, that title wasn't very good. We might as well be copywriters for the Sun newspaper if we're going to be like that. But it will be more and more difficult to come up with new titles every time we want to talk about Gurren Lagann.

Uh, yeah, you heard the man. We're talking about Gurren Lagann again. Sorry, but that's how much we love this series. Give us any excuse and we'll be posting. As it so happens, Gainax, in their unstoppable drive to suck the last drip of blood out of their franchises, keep giving us excuses. Their latest Gurren Lagann exploit is called "Gurren Lagann Parallel Works", stories with the Gurren Lagann characters that happen in parallel universes. Each one of them is set to one piece of music from the series. In a way, they serve as video-clips. At the time of writing, there are eight of them. All of them are being published on YouTube.

So far, we haven't reported on them, but with the emergence of Parallel works number eight, we couldn't contain ourselves any longer. It is, in the words of our Producer, "f***ing amazing". First of all, when you click on the link, remember to click on the "watch in high quality" link at the bottom right. The other thing to point out is that you can use KeepVid to download this little beauty.

So what's so great about it? First of all, the animation looks like it actually had a budget, just check out those animated camera moves. Take it from us kids, we've been there. We have done the paper and pencil animation before we lowered ourselves to the likes of Flash and Moho. We know what it's like to animate the traditional way and what a pain it was. We can still remember those many hours spend drawing what turned out to be less than a second of animation somewhere in the background. It would still take us days to do it. We had a bit of a reputation for doing hand-drawn animated camera moves. Not a enviable reputation as it turns out. They're a pain. So believe you us when we say that the animations in Parallel works number eight make our eyes water. Or in the words of our lead animator: "That's f***ing awesome".

But like with all things Gainax, it's the designs that really get us all excited. Parallel works number eight is directed by Yoh Yoshinaro, who's one of our animation heroes. There's a brute yet refined quality to his artwork, we often think of Mike Mignola's artwork when we see Yoshinaro's stuff. In fact, Yoshinaro designed the robots in Gurren Lagann, including Lazengann, a machine that looks as slick and cool as a Ferrari in a sort of twelve-year-old-boy's way. Gurren Lagann is all about embracing the inner twelve year old. Good thing there's lots of Lazengann in Parallel works number eight. To quote our lead designer: "Dude, that's F***ing gorgeous"

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In other news, Code: Geass has finally been put out of its misery. It's done, finished. Geass is no more. We can all breathe a sight of relieve. That slow-motion train-wreck of a series has come to a conclusion of sorts. It ended up looking like a mangled corpse by the time it reached the halfway point in season two, only to be dragged along for ten or so more episodes. Not a pretty sight ladies and gentlemen. It was so bad , it was good, then it got worst to the point that is was bad again, only to get almost good again. In the end, Geass must have darted about two or three times around the circle of good-and-bad.

The script wasn't even your typical monkeys-and-typewriters type of fare. Someone must have decided to give the monkey's LSD and put oven-mitts on their paws. Once sobered up, the monkey's probably tried to commit hara-kiri when confronted with the results. "But but, that dialogue made perfect sense when I wrote it. It convincingly connected the meaning of the universe with atomic bombs, lost eternal love, caught in the wheels of karma, with shame and cries from the depths of despair... hang on, the LSD hasn't worn off yet. Get me a banana, that I can cut my own belly...". Poor, poor monkeys.

Having said that. The reason Geass finished is of course because a new season with new series has started. About 48 new titles have arrived, none of them look very promising so far. Maybe our obsession with anime will have to take a step back for the foreseeable future.