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fostersffff · 1 year

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The Big Gundam Watch, Part 12: Mobile Suit Gundam F91

Back when I started doing these write-ups, I was pretty certain I was just going to ignore F91. Reading up on it at the time, it was clearly an odd duck: it’s a standalone movie in the Universal Century timeline that takes place 30 years after Char’s Counterattack and 30 years before Victory Gundam, so outside of the manga-only continuation Crossbone Gundam, it didn’t seem worth checking out. But as I and found myself enjoying more and more of the Gundam franchise, I figured I should check it out anyway, especially since the F91 and the Crossbone Gundam are really cool designs.

As it turns out, I really like F91! Unfortunately, this is in spite of some major flaws, mostly stemming from the fact that it feels like a TV series they had to condense into a two hour movie... which it turns out is literally what happened:

So with that put out right at the start, let's get into it:

THE STUFF I LIKED:

I promise I won't start every entry like this, but with the knowledge that this was originally going to be a TV series, I think "the gang" they introduce is perfect. Seabook, Cecily, Seabook's Little Sister, Grumpy Techie, Normal Kid, Team Mom Punk Girl, Seabook's Cowardly Rival, a bunch of kids like the White Base Babies/Shinta and Qum, a literal actual baby- that's a Burger King Kids Club right there, perfectly suited to TV hijinks. Of course, you can't do a lot of goofy, ZZ-esque hijinks in a two hour movie, but they manage to slip some stuff in, and in isolation I thought they were mostly pretty fun.

I'm also really fond of the actual crew of the Space Ark, because they collectively remind me of my favorite version of Bright Noa; people way out of their depth and doing their best with way too much responsibility while being relentless dogged by Federation war hawks who- in a pleasant contrast to War in the Pocket- are maybe the scummiest bastards they've ever been.

With those two things mentioned; I don’t think it’s much of a secret that F91 was almost certainly an attempt at soft-rebooting Gundam. I think it was a noble attempt; unlike Wing, which I regularly derided as “the Universal Century again, but with arbitrary differences”, the differences here feel more considered. For example: Seabook is an amalgamation of Amuro, Kamille, and Judau, Cecily Fairchild is F91’s equivalent of Sayla Mass, but also, she also fulfills the role of a grown-up Mineva Zabi, and the F91 itself is actually pretty special compared to all of its contemporary mobile suits because of Seabook's mom's quirked-up design.

Visually, I really love this movie. I'm not very good at describing visual stuff, so I tend to avoid saying much more than "it's good" or "it's bad", but this movie uses a lot of unusual colors and lighting compared to what came before. Like, I would describe the most commonly reoccurring color in this movie's palette as "periwinkle", and this shot from the first conversation between Cecily and Iron Mask really highlights how important lighting is in this animated feature, which is not something I typically think about when watching animation.

Speaking of: it's crazy to think Unicorn's Riddhe Marcenas was never The Biggest Cuck in Gundam, because Iron Mask has been occupying that position since 1991. Not just literally, but every single word he says and action he takes is just barely not seething. Explicitly mentioning he came to terms with the guy his wife ran off with right before murdering him with psychic powers just to make her sad is peak Cuck Behavior.

Way back in my Hathaway review, I talked about how much I liked the scene of Hathaway and Gigi having to navigate a mobile suit firefight on foot, and for how good that was, F91 actually outdoes that movie. Like, not even 10 minutes in do we get the scene of the baby's mother getting instantly killed by a shell casing, and this is before the fighting starts in earnest.

I pointed this out in a separate post but man do I love the space rescue from Final Fantasy VIII, so finding out that (barring this movie having taken it from something else itself) F91 was the origin of this was a genuinely delightful way to end the movie. Also, even without that comparison, there's is something powerfully romantic about the visual of clinging to your loved one in the endless, uncaring vacuum of space.

THE STUFF I LIKED LESS:

For all the things this movie must have cut, there's an equal number of things it didn't and just rammed in there anyway, like the subplot with Annamarie and Zabine. In a ~50 episode TV series, they could have stretched her growing resentment towards Cecily, defection from the Vanguard, and ultimate clash with Zabine over like 10 episodes, and her death at his hands and his cold dismissal would've had way more impact than it did over the course of 10 minutes.

I mentioned before, Cecily is both a "what if" of an older Mineva Zabi as she appeared in the Zeta/ZZ, which also makes her the blueprint for Mineva Zabi as she actually appears in Unicorn. The flaw here is the Ronah family: unlike the Zabis, who rose to power and infamy with cloak and dagger, the Ronah family just... exists? And they have enough power and resources to form a fighting force as threatening to the firmly entrenched (but arguably stagnant/in-decline) Federation as the Crossbone Vanguard? It'd be easier to handwave if F91 took place, like, 100 years after CCA, but with only 30 years it's just bizarre.

Also not to let Cecily off scot-free, it's very not flattering how easily she fell for the absolute monarchy meme. Like, ok, she's 17 and definitely in over her head, but when Seabook came to rescue her I still don't understand why she was like "no, it's too late, they already convinced me facism is based".

Wiki diving on this subject indicates the Ronah family is basically a new money family that bought an old money name to sound more important, which is delicious, and even sort of ties in with Iron Mask being a Cyber-Newtype, but that's not really present in the movie. Never a good thing when I have to wiki dive to understand something better.

Speaking of this movie only taking place 30 years after CCA: this is not at all the fault of F91, because at the time it was made nothing had else had really been written to have happened aftere Char's Counterattack, but it's very weird to see people who should know better be like "there used to be these people called 'Newtypes', and a special kind of mobile suit called a 'Gundam'".

The Bugs are comically stupid. If I were being charitable, I could chalk this up to Iron Mask being a seething cuck and wanting to be as cruel as possible to the people he's killing, but the idea that self-propelled heat seeking sawblades are a more viable method of mass killing than the gas attacks in Zeta is bananas. (I wrote this right after watching F91, and now that I've had the chance to think back on Zeta- specifically how the first colony we see that got hit with the Titans' gas attack was still uninhabitable years later- I can kind of see the rationale behind the Bugs, but they're still very dumb)

Most of the mech designs in this are pretty great, but I gotta say I'm super disappointed with the Rafflesia. I kept waiting for it to bloom into a dope-ass Qubeley/Kshatriya lookin' thing but it was just the Final Weapon from Mega Man X4.

I mentioned I liked the mobile suit designs, but the Crossbone Vanguard in general is not beating the Star Wars allegations.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

I aspire to own the BEAUTIFUL LIFE TOMINO jacket in the way that other guys with different brain problems than me aspire to own the jacket from Drive.

There was a bunch of stuff in this movie I thought was very funny, intentionally or otherwise:

Despite how horrifying the scene gets, the War Museum fight kicking off with the curator announcing/revealing that the name of the museum is "Roy's War Museum" killed me.

Seabook jumping off the maintenance platform and audibly shattering his knees is incredibly fucking funny.

However, Seabook's mom hopping on a moped and immediately eating shit is maybe the single funniest scene in any Gundam media ever.

You're right, random citizen attending the Crossbone Vanguard propaganda rally: beam flags ARE awesome!

This sentence is just a literal observation of what's literally happening in the scene. Like, thinking about it, most attacks on colonies from space in the Universal Century would necessarily come from what would technically be considered "underground" because of how they're designed, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sound poetic. Tomino strikes again!

I've talked about SPEEN before, but it has literally never been SPEEN-ier than F91. Like, here's over a full minute of So Much Fucking Spinning (with the dub audio, where they added in sound effects for everything that's spinning for some reason):

If you don't count the numerous manga follow ups: lol, lmao

IN CONCLUSION:

In an alternate universe where F91 had the chance to be the TV show it was intended to be, I think it would have been successful in trying to soft reboot Gundam. There's a ton of stuff I really like about this, but the execution is lacking because of course it is, and judging it as is without considering hypotheticals, I'd probably put it about on par or just a hair above Char's Counterattack. It has almost the exact same pacing problems I had with that movie, but because it's effectively a clean slate and a single, unconnected, complete narrative, it winds up being a less frustrating watch.

Next up: Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory! This one is a coin flip, because I don't think I've ever heard a single complementary thing about this outside of Cima Garahau's design and the fact that it's a beautiful 90's anime OVA, but it takes place in a timeframe (smack between 0079 and Zeta) that is just so rich with potential that even if it's bad, it should at the very least be interesting.

#Gundam #Mobile Suit Gundam #F91 #Gundam F91 #Mobile Suit Gundam F91 #The Big Gundam Watch #anime #blu-ray #long post

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