The first shot of the first episode is a little jungle critter? This is already the most Tomino-ass Tomino show in its first minute.
The Bluff Clan are humans, the Ide is mysterious, everyone’s parents are dead; fine, whatever. The important thing is the critters.
It’s an adjustment to know the Ideon by reputation as this unstoppable machine of cosmic horror, when in the opening stretch it’s a clumsy, vulnerable thing only kept alive by the conventional weapons strapped onto it by the colonists.
The little guy lives here now! He’s got a big glass habitat dome where the military teens have meetings while he does extreme frog spitty slurpy behind them. Also a robot gets electrocuted with a lot of wires, all the big man’s signatures are here.
It’s kind of interesting that the “peace princess” became such an established part of Gundam in the post-Tomino 90s, even though he was doing them in his non-Gundam 80s works all the time.
This one is thick laden with critters. Critters riding other critters, critters eating critters, dinosaurs killed by artillery fire, quality stuff all around.
Tiny hidden Haro! Up to this point the Ideon’s armaments are 1) an absurd amount of missile hatches, and 2) Big Punch
It did the thing! It finally did the thing! Big turning point as the traumatized children with combat experience meet the professional adult soldiers who dress up and drill sometimes. And that inhuman scream at the end! Also a character design that fell out of Star Trek: TAS
“Oh look, a little pomer-OH GOD NO!” New record for shortest critter appearance. And all this because of an unvaccinated infant, what a shame.
I love how space colonization has recentered people’s perspectives to their separate worlds rather than a singular humanity. Each planet is alien to one another. And it’s all communicated through implication when the crew doesn’t really notice or care that Earth is being bombarded by massive meteors for years.
Also ocean planet has sea monsters, and the squirrel mascot gets its own space suit, somehow.
After a long stretch in space and barren planets, the critters return in force. So many apes.
The show is following the 13-episode structure more closely than I expected, you can feel the tension that’s about to break in a big way soon.
