Director(s): Yoshiyuki Tomino
Script: Akinori Endo, Hiroshi Ohnogi, Miho Maruo, Minoru Onoya, Tomoko Kawasaki, Yasushi Hirano, Yumiko Suzuki
Music: Shigeaki Saegusa
Zeta Gundam my favorite Gundam– no, favorite mecha anime- of all time. Why, you ask? Well, first of all, it outclasses the original series in quality of storytelling and concepts. You get the feeling you’re watching a real, fleshed out tragedy. No Gundam title does as good a job as Zeta does in showing how truly desperate people are in a war situation. All of the characters lash out to fulfill a sense of helplessness or to control the world around them through others’ helplessness. This means the characters are all predators or prey. In a swirl of desperate madness, the characters play outo a tragedy that claims lives and chews dreams, and spits the characters out broken, flawed, but intensely interesting. The characters are tempered in raw desperation, raw despair, which makes some of them heroes and some of them monsters. Now, I know there are flaws. Some awkward, unnatural dialogue, characters who act irrationally with little reason to, plot elements that seem to crop up at inopportune times. But I think the pluses far outweigh the minuses. In the end, you understand the tremendous price to be paid for a better future.
