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.