Comedy, echii’ness (perverted’ness), romance, comedy, exaggerated action sequences and mechas: if this had been the way someone described any anime to me, I would say that that misture is certainly a recipe for failure. A lot of the current, or recently past, Animes all used a few of those ingredients, and the results were mildly amusing poor Anime shows.
Zero no Tsukaima, To Love Ru, Rosario Vampire are all good examples of what I meant by my previous statement. They all took a few of those ingredients, and they all made me lose the interest in them after a few episodes. Had it not been how tired I was at the time from watching good Animes with “complicated” storylines I probably wouldn’t have watched more than their first episode.
In the midst of those mediocre Animes, and in the middle of my boredom from watching some high-quality but slow-paced Animes, like Bouken no Xamdou (which I definitely recommend) a friend of mine lent me Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, which I’ll call Gurren Lagann from here on. His description of the anime was more or less the recipe I gave in the first paragraph. I thought to myself “well, as long as it’s very lively it will probably be more entertaining than the other Animes I tried”.
With these low expectations in mind, Gurren Lagann came out to be surprisingly good. Despite having a very straightforward storyline, it showed excelent character development, a surprisingly “mature” story which was anything but funny many times, and never showed me a dull moment thanks to it’s clever funny scenes or the well animated fighting sequences.
The following paragraph will have a few spoilers, so jump to the end of the article if you do not want to see them.
I have to admit that it was when one of the main characters died that the anime grabbed my utmost attention. Until then it only seemed to be like any other “cliché” anime that came before it. From that point onwards, the story spiralled into a much darker, mature setting, without losing any of the things that kept me entertained before that.
Gurren Lagann borrows heavilly from many Animes that came before it and failed miserably, and it had more than enough oportunities to become one of them, and it never did.
It didn’t have the “happy” colorful storyline I thought it would, it didn’t have a happy ending like one would expect, and it provided all of the characters with excellent character development (except, of course, for the comedy relief ones) and it taught a very valuable lesson that many shonen (action) Animes fail to give: strong will and power isn’t enough to achieve anything.
I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys Anime. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is, to me, a modern classic.