Reviews Anime / Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Not just epic

This series is completely and utterly ridiculous in the best possible way: the breaks from reality are so shameless that they stride confidently straight past being wallbangers and into just plain awesome, and everything comes together to make it work, feel genuinely inspirational and make a strange amount of sense in its own completely nonsensical way. It's worth seeing just for that.

However, Gurren Lagann also has a surprising amount of subtle depth that isn't obvious at first glance. Kamina is the embodiment of the series itself, over-the-top and crazy and ridiculous - but he has no real heroic qualities to speak of outside of his Determinator status, and the series knows. My absolute favorite part of Gurren Lagann is how this is shown in the backstory of how Simon met Kamina: relatively early in the series we see Simon explain the story, how they were trapped after an earthquake and losing hope, but Kamina refused to surrender his spirit and kept Simon going until he'd managed to dig their way out. This is in line with how we've been viewing Kamina, through Simon's eyes, as an inspirational idol. However, much later, we see a flashback to Kamina telling the same story to Yoko: he explains that as they were trapped, all he could do was sit there babbling while Simon was the one tirelessly digging their way out of there - Kamina idolized his determination.

It's beautiful. It's stirring. It's poetic, really, realizing that the guy who's spent the whole series hamming it up and hogging the attention felt positively inferior to the quiet, resigned little boy who viewed himself as just tagging along. Gurren Lagann is full of little, understated character moments like this underneath all the epic and ham. How about the fact Kinon straps explosives to herself to go with Simon in Gurren Lagann to destroy the Anti-Spiral mechs? In a series stuffed to the brim with Determinators, she blows them all out of the water without even having to summon giant drills out of the ether to prove it. And Viral, the tough rival, turns out in one of the last episodes to wish for nothing more than a family, the one thing he, by virtue of his genes, can never have.

These little things are what really makes this series; without them it's epic, but with them it's truly, genuinely good.