Quarantine Control #74: Dug Days in This G
The COVID-19 situation? Still bad. The rest of the world with nearly every other real-world situation you can think of? Also terrible as all hell. You likely know all of this, so there’s no need to go over all of it every single week. It’s a bit satisfying to see COVID and vaccine deniers who love to spread misinformation about both topics get the virus and realize how bad it is. It’s a shame some of them had to die, alongside plenty more who listened to their bad advice and the unfortunate souls within their vicinity who also caught it. But they’re providing important lessons: To not be like them.
Geoffrey Barnes
Gundam Reconguista in G the Movie I: Go! Core Fighter and Movie II: Bellri’s Fierce Charge
Source: Gundaminfo YouTube Channel
Episodes: The first two movies in a five-part series
Should anyone need to know what they’re in for prior to tackling the Gundam Reconguista in G movie series: Let the preemptive message from Gundam creator and series director Yoshiyuki Tomino be sufficient information. It begins innocent enough though saying “anime is okay as long as it’s fun, cool and fast-paced.” Then it goes places. “But it’d be even better with characters who are a bit misguided, confused or comically out-of-touch. Aiming to be such anime, ‘Reconguista in G’ soars around toward space! Don’t miss it!”
Tomino sums up not only Reconguista in G here, but most of the anime he’s directed over many years. The man is, to be honest, not the best director, writer, or editor around, but he has some of the best ideas in the anime business, and damn if his stuff isn’t entertaining. It might have helped the TV series reception if he put out this kind of message at the start (though it may not have helped its early reception, particularly among younger audiences), but it’s alone fortunate that the series got another chance with a five-movie series. It wouldn’t have received this kind of benefit if Tomino’s name wasn’t attached to it.
Reconguista in G occurs in the year 1014 of the Reguild Century, long after the Universal Century of the oldest and some recent Mobile Suit Gundam series. It primarily follows the perspective of 16-year-old Bellri Zenam, who begins the series as a pilot training with the Capital Guard, until his fate is changed with the arrival of Aida Surugan of the Pirate Corps and the G-Self type Gundam, which he happens to fall into and pilot. The early events change Bellri’s intended fate, and the paths of his close cohorts like totally-NOT-girlfriend Noredo Nug and requisite mysterious girl from an unknown place Raraiya Monday. Plenty of characters are introduced within the first two movies, several of which have the kind of hilariously good names expected of a Tomino anime (Klim Nick and Mick Jack are my favorites, in addition to Raraiya), and many of them do insane and illogical stuff.
Tomino’s anime works are an acquired taste, especially his newer content. The movies thus far have made the story easier to follow, but it’s still not easy to figure out exactly what’s happening early in the first film. This gets easier by the end of it and for the entirety of the second film in times when the pacing relaxes, though plenty of characters still have motivations that aren’t clear. Even while it’s confusing, it remains entertaining thanks to characters engaging in the kinds of antics that make them trademark Tomino characters.
Bellri nearly automatically knowing how to pilot a Gundam and an eventual Char Aznable-like rival who wears a mask (and is literally called “Mask”) are prerequisites for any Gundam anime (and, by extension, a lot of mecha anime). But actions like a character shooting another dangling character in the booty while they’re dangling from a collapsing building and wildly unnatural (and memetic) lines like “I’ve found love, I’m not gonna die”? They’ll let anyone know that they’re watching a certified Tomino Anime. (Clips of these should damn-well be on YouTube, but I’m sure Sunrise and Bandai have made sure they aren’t.) Both movies are entertaining despite the messiness.
I was also a little more forgiving of the series’ storytelling and character actions thus far due to the clear references and homages to older Tomino anime like the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam. There are, for instance, hints that Bellri and Mask might have Newtype-style abilities, and Minovsky Particles are used to discourage long-range fire for beam saber battles. It’s incidents like these and some early character actions that invoke memories of older Gundam and Tomino works, invoking a sense of nostalgia. As I’ve alluded to above, this is nowhere near enough to make for a genuinely good series, but it remains a good time.
That Reconguista in G is a pretty series to look at doesn’t hurt either. Any kind of animation errors that emerged from the TV series which weren’t fixed for the previous home video release were smoothed over here. The character designs from Ken’ichi Yoshida (most known for this work on Eureka Seven) are nice and colorful too. They drew complaints from fans for not fitting in with the previously established designs in this Gundam timeline from the Universal Century works and Turn-A Gundam, but the Reguild Century is a new century and should have its own look.
Credit to the first two movies for making Reconguista in G easier to follow, though watching all the content all at once has also helped instead of digesting one episode weekly. The subsequent three films will hopefully continue the polishing trend. It’s the upcoming fourth movie that will really stick out from the series and the previous films with around half of it consisting of new footage. It might be too late for Sunrise and the production team to fully salvage this particular series, but they deserve credit for trying to make it more digestible. Kudos to Tomino for sticking to it here while currently approaching 80 years old, with plans to still produce anime for the next two to three years.
Joseph Daniels
I’m going to skip the preamble this week and get right to what I think you should be watching right now.
Dug Days (2021)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 5
As you’ve likely heard by now, legendary actor Ed Asner passed peacefully on the 29th of August, reportedly of natural causes. As we all know, death does come for us all and can’t be predicted with 100% accuracy. That said, the timing for Disney couldn’t have been more interesting, because just three days later, a series of animated shorts based on Up was scheduled to debut.
True to Disney’s usual method of operating, they made sure to get back the original voice actors, including Ed Asner as Carl Fredricksen. Sadly, it would be his last acting role before his passing.
Although the focus of Dug Days is undoubtedly Dug, the talking dog from Up, the heart of the series is most certainly Asner’s Carl. Whether by accident or on purpose, the most stirring lines shared between the two occur at the very end of the last episode of the series. I know it wasn’t intended to be Asner’s final farewell, but it certainly feels like it could be interpreted that way.
In a way, Dug Days shows why a streaming service can be a great place to release a high quality series. On American television, a series like this would’ve needed several more episodes in order to be worth airing and as has been seen in the past, this can cause a show’s quality to suffer. Animation has come a long way from the early days of bad CG, but I blame this for why shows like Game Over were way behind the CG animated movies you could see in a theatre at the same time. Even a great show like ReBoot still featured graphics that didn’t look like they’d improved much from the days of Money For Nothing.
Father of the Pride showed that decent animation was possible on a TV budget, but there’s a reason most shows since have opted for 2-D puppets in Flash or similar computer animation software, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, The Littlest Pet Shop, The Lion Guard, and so on. It simply isn’t as difficult or expensive to make it look good enough, whereas 3-D can look bad very easily.
Dug Days can get away with looking as good as it does by only being five episodes long, essentially taking up about half the running time of a full length animated feature. It’s also not like Disney+ can’t make up for the lack of episodes. They’ve got so many projects in the works that we’ll be getting new content at a steady pace for months and even years down the road, so five episodes of Dug Days is enough.
And honestly, I hope that we only get five episodes, because I don’t think you can recast Ed Asner’s role and get as good a performance. He’s irreplaceable as Carl and they shouldn’t even try.
We’ll see you next week for Quarantine Control #75!
The last thing anyone should want to see at this point is news of new COVID variants on the horizon and medical experts actively planning the need to deal with them, naming schemes and all. Right-wing talk show idiots getting the disease and using quack solutions to treat themselves in lieu of getting a free vaccine, some of them dying from it, is not satisfactory enough to offset this. If you’re reading this, take care of yourself.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
