GRIDMAN UNIVERSE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionSSSS.DYNAZENON
MOVIE ActionSSSS.DYNAZENON Movie
NOVEL MechaGRIDMAN UNIVERSE

REVIEWS

• 

  brandotendie

  100/100
  a perfect victory lap.

  i first watched SSSS Gridman purely bc it was Studio Trigger and Rikka had taken ahold of the internet as the Thigh Queen, but now, after rewatching both SSSS. Gridman and SSSS. Dynazenon on top of the original 1993 tokusatsu Gridman: The Hyper Agent, this franchise has become something so goddamn special to me. 

  Gridman Universe is a movie that revels in what the SSSS anime accomplished stylistically and narratively.

  it indulges in the formula that makes these shows so good: slice of life portions to flesh out the characters with a realistic approach to dialogue/voice acting, and juxtaposing it with ridiculous and bombastic tokusatsu action that is brimming with earnest joy, not a single tongue in cheek.

  it is a victory lap, tying what few loose ends remained from these airtight 12 episode character studies. it's insane to me that with two ensemble casts interacting, there really isn't much the movie can do to give most of the main cast a happy ending.

  except of course, for Yuuta. 

  Yuuta's character has always been fascinating to me because due to SPOILERS, we never truly get to know who he is in SSSS Gridman.

  how did he take the news that he was basically possessed by an inter-dimensional space cop? what was he like in terms of his character that compelled Gridman to possess him? how did this experience (or lack of) change him?

  i loved loved loved how the movie tackles these things, showing us a boy who, like Gridman, is much too weak alone and needs the power of his friendships to ever win. it's one of the most cliche tropes but this franchise has a way of balancing extremely nuanced character developments purely through visuals with dialogue during climactic moments that come straight out of any given Showa-era toku. 

  but more than anything this movie is a love letter.

  this thing is just bursting to the seams with so much love, man. love for tokusatsu, love for the medium of anime, love for Gridman, love for these characters, love for the process of creating, love for fandom, love for art, love for humanity. 

  it gives a middle finger to subtlety and just screams into your face that love and art are all worth fighting for because our lives are going to end, and goddamit it works, my blood is pumping just thinking about it. 

  Studio Trigger has made some bangers but i honestly can't think of anything they've made or will ever make to top this. 

  seeing an early NA screening at Anime Expo 2023 was worth the full price of admission fr man i just can't get enough of Gridman and i'm crying i love these characters so much and how they've encouraged me to keep living and to keep creating.

  mortality is what makes life so precious. 

  mind your best-by dates, and keep fucking fighting.

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• 

  SkiesOfAquaria

  40/100
  Sucking your own penis while also being deeply ashamed of it

  No intros no nothing let's cut the shit at once: I don't like this movie, and any reason I've been given to like it boils down to the exact reasons I dislike it. If you liked it then good, you probably don't overthink stuff and/or are happy just having cool action and a bit of fanservice, but as someone who was a big fan of Gridman and Dynazenon for all the things they tried to say and the universe they built this movie at best just kind of incompetent or at worst self-absorbed to no end, one of the greatest cases of "it insists upon itself" I have ever seen

  Gridman and Dynazenon were pretty sweet but they had obvious flaws, be it Gridman's main cast being pretty uninteresting besides Akane and Dynazenon feeling kinda rushed and like it forgot what it was going for near the end. Trigger and rushing things is nothing new, they've been doing this for years, but you'd think that with a movie that they were in no rush to make and would serve as an epilogue to their miracle child of a series they'd learn from their mistakes, tie up any loose ends and then everyone would be happy, a job so easy any half-competent AO3 writer could make work. Sadly, Universe is too busy sucking itself off while apologizing for its own existence to do this

  Mecha and metafiction have been going hand in hand for a long while now, and every time it's either some life changing franchise-defining work of art or a half-assed insult to the rest of the series. Universe is closer to the latter than the former, seeing as the first half of the movie is every character going "Wow guys isn't Gridman WEIRD?! he's kinda cool tho i think" in the bluntest and least interesting way possible, a metafiction is supposed to make you question the very building blocks of the work not just point at them and go "damn that's crazy", which Universe is adept at doing

  The second half of the film tries to bait powerscalers into adding Gridman into their pantheon of misunderstood overpowered mechs like Mazinger ZERO or Demonbane or Aquarion Logos Genesis (go watch Aquarion Logos btw that anime is the realest shit ever) etc etc. It tries to pull off some Mazinger ZERO thing where every Gridman is a creation of Gridman and the amount of spin offs is breaking the balance or who gives a shit. It's well executed for about 3 minutes before they remember the movie is ending in 20 minutes and have to shove in one last high-budget key jingl- i mean one last final fight with all the new toys before the movie ends. That's right baby they made the same mistake as Dynazenon AGAIN

  Speaking of Dynazenon I hope you weren't expecting an actual crossover or anything like that, this isn't Gridman x Dynazenon this is Gridman ft.Dynazenon. I almost closed the movie when the Dynazenon cast !literally got fucking erased for like 30 minutes, as someone who likes the Dynazenon cast WAY more than Gridman's that shit felt like a slap to the face, it was insulting. Oh and forget about any mention of any spin off or even Hyper Agent, all the manga spin offs appear for like 5 seconds as loose panels probably just so no one complains that the movie about Gridman's Universe forgets about most of the universe, but I'll complain anyways because Dogma is one of my favorite mangas of all time and it deserves way more respect that like 4 panels put straight from the manga into a throwaway scene

  Akane is there too, the Kaiju kids get mentioned, Anosyllus gets a mech form which I thought was fucking awesome until I realized she doesn't even get used. Then the movie ends

  But here's the thing, and this is what really makes my opinion on Universe go from "it's incompetent" to "go fuck yourself": What if it's all intentional!
  What if the movie is supposed to suck, what if it's repeating mistakes because hey Gridman had those mistakes, what if it's rethreading every step and every slip of the SSSS series as one huge looks-into-the-camera-and-says "wow guys, get a load of this anime" moments. Maybe it's just the creators talking to themselves and addressing all the criticisms of their animes themselves, maybe every word spoken by the characters is just an echo of the shit that goes down at Trigger HQ, maybe the movie is extremely smart but just not in a way that the audience wanted or expected. Maybe, Gridman Universe is a movie made for the Gridman team first, and the audience second

  Well, good for them, but if something is supposed to suck intentionally then it still sucks. I'm the audience, I didn't do shit for Trigger and I'm pretty sure anyone reading this also didn't, I don't want to hear what the crew of this movie thinks of their franchise for two hours I want an epilogue to the franchise I've been loving these last few years. They had every chance to fix every problem with the franchise but instead we got two hours of the team ranting on about how weird Gridman with a focus on the two least interesting characters in the franchise, while anyone actually likeable never gets the spotlight or is, well, forgotten half way through the movie

  So in conclusion, if you just want to see the SSSS cast one last fight and check out a cool kaiju fight, go watch this. But if you're expecting any sort of gratifying conclusion to Trigger's only work that doesn't give me a headache you're shit out of luck. There are many better meta-mecha works out there and most of them don't feel ashamed of their own franchise

  I ain't proofreading this

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• 

  TheAnimeBingeWatcher

  65/100
  An existential argument in favor of playing with all the toys in your toybox... but there'a a problem.

  In some respects, Gridman Universe was nothing like the movie I expected it to be. I came in prepared for a multiversal mashup or Trigger's series of high-concept sentai reimaginings, and that's definitely what I got. But I also got something a lot weirder and wilder, a movie that in many ways is trying to be a definitive statement on the nature of Gridman itself. It's a film deeply obsessed with its own concept and place in the world, not simply as a means of reference-pandering for longtime sentai fans but as an examination of what it even means to exist as a story like this to exist and have meaning and let meaning be taken from it that may not even be there. And yet at the same time, it's also a big goofy crossover that feels like playing with all the toys in your toybox at once without caring much about making it all make sense because isn't the point of having fun to just, you know, have fun?

  Which seems only fitting. Gridman and Dynazenon have been one of the most conceptually bizarre undertakings in Trigger's history, marrying the Saturday morning cartoon spirit of Ultraman with more existential, metaphysical themes and an eclectic directing style that feels more like a proper successor to Evangelion than anything else besides the Rebuilds. It's simultaneously pretentiously highbrow and shamelessly lowbrow, while also being just kind of unapologetically normiecore somewhere in the middle with how it depicts the awkward mundanity of normal life juxtaposed with mecha-on-kaiju action and universe-reshaping cosmic high concepts. It's a bizarre concoction that by all rights shouldn't work, and yet it does? Somehow, director Akira Amemiya has figured out how to make all these disparate tones sing together in harmony, and the result has been one of anime's most singular voices in the modern era. And this movie is just that on the biggest scale imaginable, throwing all restrictions to the wind and seeing just how far it can push this absurd, experimental niche it's carved for itself.

  At least on paper, the plot is simple. Gridman protagonist Yuta Hibiki is working up the courage to ask out his crush Rikka Takarada, but that's all thrown into chaos when kaiju once again start appearing in his world. It soon becomes clear that some unknown threat is starting to merge universes together, leading to the cast of Dynazenon crashing into Gridman's world and kaiju going on the rampage. So the two groups must put their giant robots together- both metaphorically and literally- to face down the new threat and put the universe back in order. It's an extremely by-the-numbers setup for a crossover movie... at least until we get into the back half and reveal the nature of what's actually happening. And then things get so high-concept and reality bending that it's honestly kind of funny. I won't spoil the reveal of what's actually going on cause it's worth discovering yourself, but suffice to say, not only does it answer a lot of long-standing questions about the nature of this world in the trippiest way possible, it also sets up Gridman Universe as an answer to the question of its own existence.

  See, in many ways, the mismatch at the heart of Gridman's aesthetics is the entire thematic point it's trying to make. Why redo a simple, straightforward sentai show as something so weighty and almost intellectual in its presentation? Why attach so much existentialism and cinematic complexity to something that's still, at heart, about punching big monsters in the face? Or, more broadly, why do we, as people, seek to draw meaning from art, even art as simple as giant robots fighting Godzilla? These questions may have been floating in the background of both TV shows, but they are the driving force of Gridman Universe. There are multiple times when characters will comment on the nature of Gridman, as a character, as a concept, as an idea, as an active force with a tangible effect on the world. The ultimate reveal of what's going on entirely rests on pushing this question to its logical extreme. It's simultaneously a celebration, interrogation, and deconstruction of the lizard-brain desire for popcorn entertainment and our ability to read deeper meanings where they may not actually exist, and whether or not it matters what a piece of art "intended" as long as you found something powerful in it.

  There are so many ways a metatextual metaphor this tangled and self-fellating should have fallen apart. And yet, once again, by some magic, it all makes sense. Yes, the movie seems to say, Gridman is all these things. It's absurd rock-em sock-em action that speaks to your inner child, and it's weird-ass mind-bending sci-fi, and it's genuinely grounded naturalism that perfectly captures that particular teenage mindset of half-sleeping your way through life as you figure your shit out trying to put the world's bigger, more existential questions out of mind because hey, kaiju or not, you've still got college exams to worry about, right? It's all of these things at once, and it has a right to be all of these things at once, and you have the right to find power in them no matter how silly it may seem on the outside. And it justifies it all by once again just doing it all really, really fucking well. It's a bizarre, purposefully overthought stream of consciousness that's all about the importance of letting ourselves overthink the stories we love, putting our own meaning into them and forging our own relationship with them to better understand ourselves as individuals and a collective. It's an argument for art as an active conversation, even with something as simple and silly as this.

  And yet, there's a problem.

  See, while this movie is billed as a Gridman x Dynazenon crossover, it's really more of a Gridman movie. The title Gridman Universe is not an accident: this movie is centered on Gridman and its cast of characters first and foremost, with the Dynazenon crew mostly playing backup and hanging around for some character banter. Yomogi, Yume, Gauma, and all the rest are bit players meant to spice of a narrative that's all about Hibiki and his desire to go steady with Rikka. And unfortunately, this ends up confirming something I've believed ever since this series started:

  The main cast of Gridamn is the single most boring aspect of this entire Gridman experiment.

  Look, I'm sorry, but Hibiki sucks. He's an utter void of character and personality, as blank a blank slate as you can possibly get. Even your average isekai potato-kun tends to come off as smug and self-satisfied thanks to the power fantasy that guides the author's writing process, and while that's definitely obnoxious, it's at least something. But Hibiki's entire existence in both the show and movie is little more than taking in information, making bland observations, and spouting generic hero motivations whenever it's time for an action scene to happen. And you could maybe justify that in the show because he's technically a dormant passenger in his own body for most of that, but now that he's back to normal in the movie, it's painfully clear that the central figure around which this entire franchise revolves is little more than featureless white noise.

  And that only becomes clearer when contrasted against the Dynazenon crew. I had my issues with Dynazenon- much weaker villains, no real standout moments- but the reason I ultimately prefer it to Gridman is because everyone in its cast is full of life and personality. They're all still awkward, mumblecore teenagers for the most part, but they're believably awkward, mumblecore teenagers who come by their personalities with purpose and meaning. So you've got Hibiki and his pals bumming around not being much of anything while the script insists on putting all the focus on them, while you've got this much more interesting crew running circles around them in basically every interaction they have. Seriously, every second Yomogi is on screen is basically walking proof of how to write a "generic" protagonist well in contrast to Hibiki's extreme nothingburger of an existence. Yes, Akane Shinjou was a spectacular character, but it's clear that Gridman put all its writing chops into her and no one else, but Dynazenon spread it out evenly. And now that she's gone, there's nothing left to distract from how much the people at the core of this narrative just don't measure up to their much more interesting backup singers.

  And that's not even going into the "romance" that's supposed to be the emotional center of this whole affair. Hibiki and Rikka's love story is one of the most generic "boy pines after girl until she falls for him" plots I've seen in a long time. The fact it's merely boring instead of actively painful is wholly thanks to how damn good both their voice actors are at selling the scenes between them; whatever chemistry these two have is wholly thanks to how good Yuuya Hirose and Yume Miyamoto are at playing believably low-key teenagers navigating the liminal space of a changing relationship. But the writing just gives them nothing to play off of, and it never feels like anything more than a one-sided crush on Hibiki's end, which makes Rikka's eventual reciprocation feel wholly unjustified. Which only stands out more in contrast with Yomogi and Yume's utterly natural couple dynamic and- hilariously- Rikka's own unresolved feelings for Akane. Yes, the most blatant queerbait this side of Kumirei makes another brief appearance in this movie, and the brief twenty seconds it takes up have more believable chemistry, intimacy, and yearning to be together than the entire rest of the movie trying to sell you on the watered-down heterosexual alternative. Talk about an unforced error.

  Ultimately, Gridman Universe is at its best when it embraces the philosophy at its core. As a showcase of everything worthwhile about this franchise- the believable teenage moodiness, the overturned-toybox action sensibilities, the willingness to go trippy and weird and artistically ambitious- it's as good as this franchise has even been. As an argument for being such a bizarre mishmash in the first place, it's the stuff of high concept metafictional wet dreams. But if it wanted to be a true masterpiece, it needed to tie all those wonderful elements to a central narrative and a main protagonist that were actually worth a damn. Yes, we can find meaning in even the silliest of stories, but we can just as easily find even the most ambitious experiments lacking. And until Gridman figures out how to make its main cast even half as interesting as their spinoff bretheren, then this story's ability to reach me will always remain a half-measure.

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