Reviews Page 3

That's not what happened, because Norio Matsumoto got assigned this episode.

If you know the name, you already know where this is going. Matsumoto is one of the most celebrated sakuga animators in the industry, and episode 30 is one of his earliest and most unhinged calling cards. The second Orochimaru starts trading blows with Sasuke, the model sheets go out the window. The rigid, clean lines from the academy episodes melt. Character proportions get loose and sketchy and alive. When Sasuke sprints through the canopy dodging fireballs, his body elongates and the background plates smear into impressionistic streaks of forest green. It looks like the animation is trying to keep up with the fight instead of containing it.

The Dragon Flame Jutsu sequence is the centerpiece and it earns that status. The line-weights on the ninja wire tightening around the tree trunk are razor-sharp. The fire doesn't look like a generic orange glow sitting on top of the frame. It has weight. It explodes along the wires with a violent, flickering, hand-drawn density. This is three minutes of a studio sacrificing budget to the anime gods and getting their offering accepted.

Then there's Orochimaru himself.

People forget how genuinely wrong this man is in the Forest of Death. Not villain-wrong. Wrongness as a fundamental condition of being. He peels his own face off. He extends his neck at an angle that implies his skeleton has filed for divorce from the rest of him. He crawls on all fours like something that only learned about human movement from a pamphlet. And after all of that, his tactical solution to acquiring Sasuke Uchiha is to unhinge his jaw and bite a twelve-year-old in the neck at a municipal exam. Sir. There are proctors.

This episode has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. We're 79 episodes in. The show has been building toward two separate emotional climaxes for months, and someone in the writer's room looked at the schedule and went "yeah, let's do both of them in the same episode." And it works.

On one side of the intercutting: Naruto, riding Gamabunta, going toe to toe with a half-transformed Shukaku the size of a building. Full demon mode Gaara. The show's been teasing what's inside that sand gourd since the forest of death, and now you're looking at it. It is as terrifying as advertised.

On the other side: Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Third Hokage, running out of time.

"The Demon in the Snow" is the episode where the show cashed every check it had been writing since episode one. Haku is already dead. Kakashi's Chidori went through him like he was nothing, a body used to shield the man he loved, and the camera doesn't look away from that. Naruto is screaming at Zabuza. Calling him a monster. Demanding he feel something. And Zabuza, this mountain of a man who spent two arcs being played as an unstoppable force of nature, tells a twelve-year-old boy that shinobi don't have feelings.
He's lying. To the boy. To himself. To everyone.
Then Gato? shows up.

Full-series review, contains spoilers

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is a difficult series to review because the things that make it fascinating are often the same things that make it frustrating.

It is ambitious, politically complicated, emotionally theatrical, occasionally ridiculous, and sometimes far more insightful than it has any right to be. It can deliver a genuinely thoughtful conversation about war and pacifism, then follow it with a teenager calmly threatening to kill someone at a birthday party. Its alliances change constantly, its characters speak in dramatic philosophical monologues, and its battle animation is recycled so often that certain explosions begin to feel like recurring cast members.

And yet, despite all of that, I still think Gundam Wing works.

It may not be the most tightly written Gundam series, and it certainly is not the easiest one to follow, but it remains one of the franchise's most distinctive entries. It introduced an entire generation of Western viewers to Gundam, gave the franchise some of its most iconic mobile suits and characters, and attempted to explore war, political power, child soldiers, artificial intelligence, and pacifism within a 49-episode television anime designed partly to sell model kits.

That combination of commercial entertainment and sincere political ambition is a large part of what makes the show so memorable.

For me, Gundam Wing is an 8 out of 10: a flawed classic whose ideas, atmosphere, characters, music, and cultural importance outweigh its uneven storytelling.

A New Beginning for Gundam

Let me be upfront about something: if you grew up in the West watching Robotech, you didn't watch Macross. You watched a stitched-together Frankenstein of three unrelated Japanese shows that Carl Macek reverse-engineered into a single continuity because American TV syndicators needed 65 episodes minimum for daily broadcast. The show you actually want — the one that started everything — is this one. Super Dimension Fortress Macross. 36 episodes. Broadcast in Japan from October 1982 to June 1983. The real thing.

And it's better than Robotech. It's not even close.

What It Is

Military sci-fi. Love triangle. Pop idol saves humanity from an alien armada through the sheer power of music. That's the pitch, and it sounds ridiculous until you're actually watching it and realize Sh?ji Kawamori wasn't joking — he was building a thesis.

The setup: a city-sized alien warship crashes on Earth in 1999. Humanity spends a decade reverse-engineering it, ends a worldwide civil war in the process, and christens the rebuilt ship the SDF-1 Macross. Then on launch day, a fleet of giant humanoid aliens called the Zentradi shows up. The ship's automated defense systems fire on them before anyone can stop it. War starts. The ship accidentally folds itself — and the entire civilian island it was docked on — to the edge of the solar system. Now 50,000 civilians are trapped inside a military fortress with a three-year trip home ahead of them, an alien armada in pursuit, and no good options.

That's episode three. The show moves fast.

The Love Triangle That Drives Everything

Kawamori described Macross as "a love triangle against the backdrop of great battles," and that framing matters. This isn't a war show with a romance subplot. The romance is the spine.