A Whack to the Head with the Surprise Bat

Review: Generator Gawl

Anime/Fandom

Reviewed by: NotHayama

Title rating: PG-13

-12 episode TV series (1998-1999), complete

Generator Gawl is much cooler than people give it credit for. It's not particularly flashy or marketable, it's short, has a small cast of characters, and there aren't any super-famous people involved in it. It seems to have slipped through the cracks as far as popularity is concerned, getting a mixed bunch of good to mediocre reviews and launching a handful of fansites (most of which have been deleted or abandoned). But Generator Gawl is good. Generator Gawl is quite good, and with the relative ease with which one can purchase and view it, there's really no excuse for anyone to miss out on such an intriguing series.

To keep from ruining anything, I'll stick to the basics: in 2007, a scientist makes a discovery that leads to a bunch of bad stuff in the future. Three teenage boys from way farther ahead in time--scientists Koji and Ryo and their friend Gawl, a rambunctious young man who can turn into a tough, robot-esque thing called a Generator--travel back in time to stop the discovery from ever happening. What they bump into in 2007 are a pissed-off high school landlord named Masami, her best friend with shockingly bad hair named Natsume, and villains from the future (with evil Generators) who want to stop the boys for reasons of their own. The plot gets a lot more complex and involved from there, but I can't go any farther without reaching spoiler territory.

Anime

Generator Gawl has been domestically released by ADV Films. It's 12 episodes long on 4 DVDs (or videos) and is even available in a nifty box set. The DVDs don't have much going for them as far as extras are concerned. You know it's a bad sign when they try to pass "interactive menu" off as a special feature.

The story takes a while to get cool. The beginning of the series is a lot of talking, hanging around, and trying to figure out what to do. There isn't the sense of urgency that the end of the series has; as much as some characters go on about how there's not much time for them to do what they need to, you wouldn't know the boys are in a hurry by looking at them. The characters take a while to grow on you (some of them are really annoying when they first appear), but if you have any interest in the story or premise I advise you to stick it out. Generator Gawl has a huge number of plot twists and surprises, particularly for such a short series, and even if you catch onto some of them you won't catch them all. Nothing is as it seems in this show.

At first glance, the cast of characters is really annoying. They all seem to fall into the most irritating categories of anime stereotypes: the loud, goofy, immature boy; the loud angry girl who smashes the loud boy over the head at every opportunity and accuses him of being a pervert; the painfully shy, polite girl; and the anime dream-team, the angsting bishounen (pretty boy) and the brooding bishounen. Surprisingly, though, for a cast made up of the worst clichés ever all the main characters end up being sympathetic and likable. They're all done with a creative spin, so as the series develops some character traits are explained and others are shown to be fronts to hide characters' true feelings and/or intentions.

Another thing the series does really well is angst. As I mentioned above, two of your major characters are the angsting and brooding bishounen; this is usually a bad sign. One angsting bishounen can single-handedly turn a fun and entertaining series into a boring angst-fest, so what would two do? Luckily for us, the writers of Gawl know about a concept I call Proportionate Angst (which is rarely employed in anime, unfortunately). This is the idea that the amount of time spent angsting over something should be related to how bad the thing is and how current it is. If you get dumped by your boyfriend and still sit around having angsty flashback three years later, or if you get over your beloved parent's death after one 3-minute sad scene, that's not proportionate. Ryo, Generator Gawl's angsty bishounen, spends a fairly high percentage of his screen time angsting; however, without giving too much away I can tell you that his problems are both very worthy of guilt and very immediate. Plus, all his angsting flashbacks have a practical purpose--they always have a new piece of the story to show the audience. In a longer show Ryo could get annoying, but in a short series like this one his angst is both appropriate and necessary to fill the audience in.

The animation throughout the series isn't particularly noteworthy, in either a good or bad sense. The fight scenes and mech designs are cool but not remarkably so. The character designs are pretty good for the most part, but I can't overlook two glaring exceptions. The first of these is the butt-ugliest boy's school uniform in existence. The second is the Thing from the Pink Lagoon that lives on Natsume's head that some character designer thought could pass as hair. I mean, come on. Did anyone look at her character design before it was handed to the animators?

Dammit, look--the hair is clearly trying to devour her head. And hence she angsts.

The voice acting is quite good in Japanese, and surprisingly enough, in English as well. I would recommend to anyone who owns the DVDs to listen to both tracks and you will be pleasantly surprised. One thing to note, however, is that when you're watching the dub you're really watching a different series. The English writers took huge liberties with the script to the point of taking major thematic lines and completely reversing the meanings. Here are some exact quotes of the same line:

Sub Koji: "But we'll only use physical violence as a last resort."

Dub Koji: "I will kill him if he gets in the way of our mission."

There are advantages to the new dub script: in the original Japanese a lot of the bickering between Gawl and Masami was the same really dumb insults repeated over and over, but the dub script spices up these arguments and makes them more interesting. Almost all of the humorous scenes are rewritten and usually end up funnier. However, the serious story and themes work a lot better and make more sense in the sub version. For humor choose the dub, but for story choose the sub--or just listen to the English and leave the subtitles on, picking which lines you like better throughout the series (yes, I actually did this). Just note that I've only seen the dub of the second, third and fourth DVDs, and from another review I read it seems that the dub of the first volume gives away a lot more of the plot than the sub. One of Gawl's main strong points is that you don't know what's really going on for a long time, so to keep the surprise factor I'd say sub only first time around.

Gawl does what he does best.

The soundtrack is pretty good, and although I don't think it's purchase-worthy I did find myself watching the opening and ending themes more often than usual. The opening and ending animations are also a lot of fun to watch, with the opening being creepy and interesting, and the ending being just funny.

Fandom

Like so many series of similar length and makeup, Gawl has practically no fandom. Even the official site no longer exists, and ADV's page makes hardly any mention of it. This site is just about it as far as fansites are concerned. It's a pretty good basic info site with some downloads and things, but it hasn't been updated in quite a while and I doubt it ever will be. You can also check out this review on the EX online mag, one of the first English pieces ever written about Gawl way back in the day.

Overview

Generator Gawl is a hard show to review. All the cool parts are spoiler, so I can't write about them--you don't know how many times I had to delete stuff I'd already written to not ruin it for all of you. All I can say is if you see the beginning of the series and think it's at all interesting, keep going 'till the end and you'll be pleasantly surprised. I'm giving Gawl 3.7 stars out of 5.

Right before work on the ending theme, animation budgets got a bit tight thanks to that year's kickass Christmas Party with Studio Gainax.

Lianne: Hot damn this show did it for me--entertaining, touching, and surprisingly well-written. Its flaws force me to give it a semi-low rating, but don't be dissuaded. 3.75 stars.