The Complete & Ultimate Post on Aquarion EVOL Episode 1

Why does this franchise exist? Why? I am asking a serious question. Let’s put away the obvious reasons: make money, sell merchandise, etc. But surely, there are more efficient and less expensive ways to make a buck and sell toys and music. Why assemble the kind of talent that went behind these shows just for those reasons?

In the process of making this post, I figured it out. It’s so simple: It’s fun as fuck.

Kawamori and his tribe grabbed each other’s genitalia and just had one orgiastic creative party. Does the product have any “artistic” merit? It does. I really think there are cherries here for the picking. Does the product have fucktons of “artistic” demerit? You bet. There is probably a lot more bad, than there is ever any good in the whole thing. But I also truly believe everybody had fun making this show. It’s the bad idea everyone was wary to do, but had the time of their lives making, and then well, now Aquarion exists.

Then years later they made some more… then even later, they did it again!

Thus, this post is a metaphor for the anime:

• A concept of dubious merit.
• Content of doubtful value.
• A talented (read: faggoty) creative team behind it going “what the hell.”
• Incredible effort going into the production.

You think you’ve gone far into this post? We haven’t even started.

I could write a whole post on how EVOL basically animated Aria’s Neo Venezia so awesomely beautiful beyond anything even Aria the Origination can hope to do, then have a whole super robot battle fuck the whole place up. For me, this alone was worth it. But this post isn’t about that. Maybe some other time.

Instead I will note the significant thing in Aquarion EVOL is the metamasturbation (read: Kawamori “remembering love” for his own shows); this work immediately does, in Kawamori’s special way: He inserts an in-universe film version of the 2007 film Gekijoban Aquarion, and have the first leads fall over the film and perhaps each other. This is halfway between Macross: Do You Remember Love? getting discussed in an episode of Macross 7, and Bird Human being made as an in-universe film adaptation of Macross Zero in an episode of Macross Frontier.

The best part is how the “useless couple” as they will refer to themselves, note how the film was not successful, but it had a great song. Yes. Exactly. That’s how I feel about the franchise as a whole. It was unsuccessful (as an anime), but it had Kanno Yoko goodness, particularly in this variation of the first OP:

I think this is one of Kanno’s best work, and I love a whole lot of what she does for anime. But enough of this. Time to really talk about the show. Here to do just that is Digibro’s BRO, our token girl mecha pilot Victor:

What to make of that rapid-fire recapping? We complete our GATTAI trio with JoeAnimated’s wary but optimistic take:

If you left reading this post with exactly how I left watching Aquarion, then I’ll take it.