Giant Robo

aka Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still. 1993–98. OAV series. (7 X 40 min.) Science fiction/superhero. org Mitsuteru Yokoyama (manga). dir Yasuhiro Imagawa. scr Yasuhiro Imagawa. mus Masamachi Amano. des Toshiyuki Kubo’oka, Akihiko Yamashita, Makoto Kobayashi. -jd

A retro-style reimagining of a classic story created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, Giant Robo resurrects the early days of the anime art form in big-budget color and spectacle, with an impressive musical score to match.

It is the world of The Future, a glorious new era in which a clean, new energy source called the Shizuma Drive has supplanted pollution-spewing fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear power. But danger remains in the form of the scheming Big Fire organization, bent on world domination. A handful of International Police Organization agents called the Experts of Justice and a twelve-year-old boy named Daisaku Kusama and his powerful robot, Giant Robo, are all that stands in the way of BF’s evil schemes.

The story opens with Professor Shizuma, creator of the Shizuma Drive, trying to escape from Big Fire agents. Rescued by the Experts of Justice in the nick of time, Shizuma explains that the mysterious attaché case he’s carrying must not fall into the wrong hands. Two identical cases are already in the possession of the Big Fire organization, and they only need the third to complete their latest project—triggering an anti-Shizuma effect that neutralizes all Shizuma Drives and plunges the world into powerless darkness. The device in the attaché case is revealed to be a special sample that can shut down all Shizuma Drives when activated in connection with the other two. The city of Paris is the first to be blacked out, an opening salvo that recalls the infamous Tragedy of Bashtarle, the nightmarish event from ten years previous that wiped out an entire country. An early version of the Shizuma Drive was responsible for that tragedy, and the scientist who activated it, Professor Franken Von Vogler, has been posthumously blamed for the disaster.

The Experts of Justice are pitted against Big Fire’s own elite, The Magnificent Ten, in a series of costly escalating battles as the anti-Shizuma sphere, the Eye of Vogler, makes its way across the globe, spreading devastation. Professor Vogler, it would seem, survived the conflagration at Bashtarle, and wants revenge for the blackening of his name. In a series of repeating flashbacks of the catastrophic event as told by different people, we are shown the truth of what happened at Bashtarle, and the real secret of the samples in the attaché cases.

Visually, Giant Robo is a retro-future as imagined from the 1930s. There’s a kissing-cousins resemblance in Giant Robo’s animation style to Max Fleischer’s vintage Superman cartoons and Bruce Timm’s latter-day homages to Fleischer’s style in Batman: The Animated Series (and also The Big O, which was directed by one of Giant Robo’s animation directors). Searchlights sweep the skies over Art Deco cityscapes. Streamlined vehicles with rounded edges ply the roads. The Experts of Justice travel in an airship. There is no plastic on view here, only metal and glass—director Imagawa has explained the design of Robo as based on farming equipment, such as heavy tractors. Flying robots aside, there is little hint of technology here that didn’t already exist before WWII. Giant Robo is set in a world without an Internet, a world of radio transceivers, steel rivets, manual drive systems, and awkward levers and gears.

There’s no attempt at realism in the animation—this is a completely cartoon world. All of the Experts and Magnificent Ten possess superpowers. Practically every combatant can run at high speeds, make impossible vertical leaps, or has some other hidden power. Warrior-monk Issei hurls spells, the Blue Beast has a magically elongating staff, Ginrei teleports. There’s a playful quality to the animation that harkens back to early Miyazaki films such as Castle of Cagliostro—episode 1 features Experts of Justice Ginrei and Tetsugyu running along the top of a train as the trestle collapses beneath it in a particularly hair-raising escape. Yet the overall tone of the animation is deadly serious—in the context of the Giant Robo world, all of this is real and meant to be taken at face value. Beyond that, it’s meant to be epic, legendary. The production’s operatic soundtrack is a continual auditory cue to viewers that they are not just watching a cartoon, but a larger-than-life clash of the titans.

The retro-style of the character designs also reinforces this epic quality. Simple, graphic, and stripped-down to their essentials, these exaggerated pulp-magazine characters are at the heart of nearly all later anime to follow, no matter how sophisticated. The effect of seeing such primal designs resurrected into a new age of high-budget animation is akin, in anime terms, to something like seeing ancient Rome restored to its original glory.

Giant Robo (aka Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, 1967–68, TV live-action, 26 eps.)

The 2007 animated TV series, GR Giant Robo, was produced for the 40th anniversary of the original Giant Robo manga serial. The series was planned with the involvement of series creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama before his tragic death in an accident in 2004.

In the 1990s, the biggest trend in the anime industry was nostalgia. Over the course of the decade, remakes of popular TV titles of the ’60s and ’70s—Gatchaman, Hurricane Polymar, Cutey Honey, Tetsu­jin 28 (Gigantor), Speed Racer—were produced as high-budget original videos. Giant Robo was one of the first of these productions, a slickly animated upgrade of many an adult Japanese fan’s beloved childhood memories, although unlike other productions, Robo was not just a remake or “reimagining” of Yokoyama’s original manga or the live-action series of the same name, but a virtuoso merging of characters and props from multiple stories by Giant Robo’s original creator, Mitsuteru Yokoyama, along with new characters created specifically for the video series. This plundering of Yokoyama’s back catalog yielded a variety of characters from different genres: ninja, a warrior monk, an immortal detective, Machiavellian supervillains complete with hooded henchmen. Director Imagawa tied all these elements together with a consistent visual style and through the addition of family connections within the story.

Daisaku Kusama was not the son of Robo’s designer in Yokoyama’s original Giant Robo (although this was a common construction in later science fiction stories, such as Mazinger Z). In Imagawa’s version, Daisaku is carrying on the work of his father by commanding Giant Robo, and defending the family legacy is a motivation for the antagonists of the story as well. In more general family terms, Daisaku represents family to many of the other Experts of Justice, either as a surrogate son, or as a reminder of themselves when they were children, an innocence they want to protect.

The largest theme of Giant Robo, though, is of course technology, and Imagawa visualizes technology as essentially neutral, only good or evil depending on its user. As Frederik Schodt points out in Inside the Robot Kingdom, this was a theme of Yokoyama’s Tetsujin 28, which could be used as a tool for anyone who had possession of his control box. The nuclear-powered Giant Robo, a throwback to an earlier, more dangerous time, is likewise a double-edged sword, as is the Shizuma Drive itself.

The original ground-shaking appearance of Robo in episode 1: Revealed only in partial shadow at first, moving between buildings like a huge, mobile tower to a slow, Godzilla-like musical score, Robo finally emerges into the light with full-on crashing fists and the music rising to a triumphant march.

The Tragedy of Bashtarle is retold for us in black-and-white flashback sequences, backed by mournful opera singing. To underline the significance of this event in the story, these flashbacks are animated in a sort of high German expressionist style, with a flashing strobe light illuminating the arguing faces of the scientists, their elongated shadows on the wall as they struggle, until Dr. Shizuma rises up high above the others, lifts the Shizuma Drive over his head and gives a memorable speech about bringing on the “beautiful night.” The explosion that follows and the collapse of the complex is shown from a distance, like newsreel footage of a nuclear detonation.

In episode 4, as Ginrei races to escape from Alberto with the precious attaché case, rank-and-file members of the International Police Organization leap into the fray to cover her exit with the quicksilver assembly of a human pyramid.

When Daisaku orders Giant Robo to go one-on-one with the massive Eye of Vogler, the ensuing punch into the gigantic hovering eye shatters Robo’s arm nearly to the shoulder, and the machine’s subsequent mechanical breakdown causes it to weep pouring tears of coolant from its “eyes” as Daisaku screams in horror.

Original creator and manga artist Mitsuteru Yokoyama (1934–2004) essentially invented anime’s giant robot genre with Gigantor (Tetsujin 28), and also created the first “magical-girl” anime series, Maho Tsukai Sally. His other creations include Babel II, Mars, Iga no Kagemaru, and Kamen no Ninja Aka­kage. Many characters from these works are featured in Giant Robo.

Nearly every character to appear in the video series is either borrowed from another Yokoyama series, or a reference to one, as are the mecha in the opening credits. Series referenced include: Suikoden, Tetsujin 28, Babel II, Kamen no Ninja Akakage, Mars, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Iga no Kagemaru, and Maho Tsukai Sally.

The Shizuma Drive is a dead ringer for the oxygen-destroying bomb in the original 1954 Godzilla movie.

The character Mask the Red, a hero in Yokoyama’s original Kamen no Ninja Akakage series, was retooled into a villain for Giant Robo, and so the voice actor cast to play him was Osamu Ichikawa, famous for portraying handsome masked villains like Raideen’s Prince Sharkin.

Director Imagawa took time off in the middle of the production of Giant Robo to direct the TV series Mobile Fighter G Gundam (which also had a very strong family theme), and in the hiatus, the Robo staff, headed up by Gainax alumnus Takeshi Mori (Otaku no Video) and Umanosuke Iida (Hellsing), produced a short series of outrageous parody videos based around the character of Ginrei. Big Fire is changed to the “Blue Flower” group, Ginrei’s clothes come off, a giant robot is built in her image, and nearly the entire cast wears her Chinese dress.

violence There is a great deal of character death—shootings, stabbings, hangings, and disintegrations. Most is not particularly gory, although in some cases there is a fair amount of blood. Every scene of violence is meant to be emotionally wrenching, however, so they may be too much for younger children. nudity There is no nudity in Giant Robo, although the Ginrei Specials do feature quite a lot of naked Ginrei, and also a shot of Alberto’s naked rear end.