"Gurren Lagann" on Hulu & YouTube Talkback (Spoilers)

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DavidH

New member
Guys, I do agree Gurren Lagann is beyond awesome and is one of the best animes out there, but we all got different tastes in what we consider good.

I'd say at least get to episode 15, it took me a while to actually admit I seriously liked it. The voice acting and emotions only improve by each episode.
 
So, I sat meself down and watched the first episode. Personally, I'm not impressed. The constant fanservice is tiring and I just don't feel like the lead actors sell their roles in the dub. I noticed in the credits Simon was played by a male in the Japanese version too, but personally I think I'd have cast a female, with a design--and personality--like Simon's I feel a male voice (Yuri Lowenthal, here) simply doesn't hold any real magic to it. Hebert, I feel, simply doesn't give a performance that's insane enough for the lines he's being told to recite. A guy like Kamina should be switching between tones, but here Hebert only has heroic and slightly more heroic...and it just feels flat. I'm not the biggest Ruff fan, but unlike usual I'm not wishing to cut my ears off, so that's a plus. Over all, this is the Code Geass dub all over again...I think I'd be better checking out the original Japanese.

On a last note, I noticed there was a musical cue used from this show on TFS. Caught me by surprised when I first heard it here, but otherwise the music is totally forgettable.


Anyone else have any thoughts?
 
I'll just say that the only episode of this that I watched all the way through was episode 1 of the japanese and I was instantly disgusted with the show.

I'm not entirely sure why I had such a revolted reaction to it but I suspect that it's because I find Kamina to be an utter prat. Everyone who loves the show seems to love Kamina, but if I met the character in real life I'd have an overwhelming urge to bash his face in with a tire iron. I can't stand the sight of him, he's like a metro-sexual barbarian woad-warrior prick with a pentchant for shooting his mouth off. Maybe the rest of the show is good, but he just annoys the crap out of me. Same reason I can't watch one piece or DBZ because of Goku and Luffy respectively.

And again, I was watching it subbed.

The art is good and fun, but I hate the character designs too, especially Yoko. I'm sorry, when you're that well endowed in the chestal area, a bikini is in no way a practical piece of kit for tunneling in caves of all things. It's condescending to the audience, no, not the audience, to ME personally, as if they think the only reason I'd watch anything is to have a pair of over animated teets waved in my face every 30 seconRAB. It's basically the authors saying to me 'We don't respect your intelligence, have some teets to keep your mind off the fact that this story isn't very original or intresting'.

So Jacob, you're not alone in being thoroghly unimpressed.
 
I agree somewhat. It's a show that erabraces its tropes. The term I always thought was apt was reconstruction. If Evangelion deconstructed mecha, Gurren reconstructed it. In a sense, it's kinda like Alan Moore's Supreme and its relation to Watchmen. While Watchmen deconstructed the idea of superheroes, Supreme lovingly erabraced the concept with its Superman expy.
 
Well, at least you're watching it. Just promise me one thing. Watch the first 8 episodes. If, by then, you still feel the same about it, I won't insist you watch any more. However, I doubt that will happen. That's not to say it doesn't get any better after that point, because it sure as hell does, but that's the climax of the first arc, and if you really don't like anything up to that point, the style of the show probably isn't for you at all. Not that I'm saying you should stop. Just a compromise. Oh yeah, and I'd say skip episode 4 if it didn't introduce new characters. So watch it, but don't think of it as an accurate representation of the series. It only gets better.

In fact, watching the first 8 episodes will prove why Kyle Hebert won the SPJA Award for Best Voice Actor for his performance of Kamina. After the first dubbed episode was first released, most of the people here were skeptical about that casting, myself not included, but by the end of episode 8, it was universally agreed that he really did make his performance the most manly and epic ever heard.
 
I think you might be taking it a wee bit too seriously, I think. I mean, Yoko's outfit isn't so much condescending as is essentially a giant joke about similar series, as evidenced by the beach episode where her swimsuit enRAB up covering more skin than her regular outfit (and the whole premise of the episode is that the guys are all in love with the super-modest flat-chested moe girl and give Yoko no attention to her dismay).
 
Oh I know, but first impressions are everything and seeing as I don't like the stuff it's lampooning either, being even more obvious about it is hardly going to be a selling point for me.

No, I'm not saying it's a bad show, just that I can see and empathise with the fact that some people aren't going to like it.
 
The first episode is not the best representation of the show as a whole. I'd say the third episode is probably the most representative of the first few. Personally, I watched the first five in relatively short order, got bored and set it aside for a while (Episode 5 is VERY slow, and Episode 4 is just bad), came back to it later since I had nothing else to watch, and then got addicted around episode six.

I still haven't watched the dub so I can't comment on that, but in general my rule of thurab is that I give the dub its fair shot and if it ain't doing it for me, I switch, so if it's really affecting your enjoyment that might be the thing to do. (I only saw one episode of the Geass dub on Adult Swim, and you're right: BAD.)
 
You should probably skip episode 4. Just read the wikipedia synopsis or else you'll hate the show.

I also completely disagree about the music. It gets incredibly amazing and memorable as the series goes on.
 
I was so happy when they put this up on Hulu... I finished it within just a few days.

I dislike fanservice, though, and I was really worried about that with this series. And there was fanservice, and some of it was way over the top, but the anime was so good aside from that, that I guess I just didn't let it bother me.

It was definitely the best anime I had started in like two years. Nothing I've started since then has been as awesome as TTGL. And I was very glad to see a very entertaining series after sitting through so many series that were entertaining to a point, but just did not feel that they were special and didn't really pull me into them all of that much.
 
Man, I thought the dub was excellent. It might grow on you later though as certain new characters get involved and others grow up.

As for the show itself, it's a very mixed bag at first. 2 and 3 are decent, 5 is the first really good story in the series and is the point where, to my mind, the real journey begins. Also be prepared for the fourth episode, which for some reason is badly produced compared to all of the others and has an impossibly durab plot. It's apparently the only episode with a guest director (Osamu Kobayashi), so make of that what you will. And if you hate fanservice, episode 6 will be the bane of your existence. 4 and 6 I'll probably never watch again.

Starting with 7, however, it gets serious about what it's doing and doesn't stop delivering. Early in the series you think it's all just eccentric and weird for its own sake, but when the big action starts Gainax's excesses become the series' biggest asset. The animation style commanRAB attention, and the scale of battle is ever-increasing. GL has its flaws but if I had to pick a single trait to describe it, it would be arabition. It's very arabitious compared to the classics of the genre, and frankly it makes other offerings in the 00 decade look absolutely terrible by way of comparison. Gravion, Godannar...bah. GL has some fanservice but unlike certain other titles, it doesn't feel like a giant excuse for it. Its ultimate plot is also a surprise.

Incidentally, believe it or not, there are some genuinely enjoyable characters in here along with all the action. That's spoiler territory so I won't go there, but Simon in particular grows a lot. If nothing else, he's worth sticking around for.
 
Without giving too much away, let's just say that if you don't like Kamina, he gets significantly less screen time in the latter two-thirRAB or so of the show.
 
Heh. Of course, Simon idolizes him . Although I think the more "PC" crowd will find Simon far, far, more likeable than Kamina as he matures. Finished Product Simon is really like the ideal man. If you stuck those Twilight fans in front of the show in its latter half, they'd be swooning all over him and his chivalristic manliness.



That said, Yoko is definitely there to please drooling fanboys. There's no getting away from that. But unlike some in here, I have no problem with that . She's still a very capable character in her own right.



I feel like Gurren Lagann is actually two shows. The first half is more of a loving, simple homage to super robot shows, while the 2nd half is, as Beat says, a "reconstruction" of the genre.

As for the dub, I felt like it suffers from the same affliction that killed the Giant Robo dubs (both versions). Nobody does over-the-top operatic melodrama like Japanese voice actors do. When you try to have English-speaking voice actors do it the same way, they come off either cheesy, stilted or ironic. It has to make you buy into its cheese so that you forget the fact that it is actually cheesy.
 
I wish I'd known that ahead of time. That's where I began to lose interest, and eventually I ended up dropping it. I may try to watch it again (despite me hating fanservice being thrown in my face) because what I've seen with the action was really good. But at the moment I'm not in any rush to see it.

The last episode I saw Simon was going through (or was just beginning to go through) his depression phase.
 
Since I bought sets 02 and 03 in Japanese by mistake I like how hulu has the English episodes. The show rocks either way but I just like it a bit more in English.

When I originally saw Gurren Lagann I saw episodes 1 through 9 or 11 in Japanese and the rest in English and when I saw the series the second time it was the opposite.
 
Let me just say that I didn't think the show was all that great in the first few episodes. Having seen the whole thing, I can say with absolute certainty that it is my favorite anime of all time.

Take that as you will.
 
Yeah, it's not that I find him offensive, it's that if I met him, I'd hate his guts.

But also the trouble is that the show martyrs him. Now, if the theme was 'Well, yeah, he might have been an ass what we need right now is a syrabol more than we need an accurate memory of the giant prick that was Kamina' I'd be fine with it... Cept, I happen to know it's not.
 
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