Japanimation Station Season 6 - TOMINO-THON!

Gundam: The Origin comes to a spectacular end with its sixth and final installment, “Rise of the Red Comet,” in which Zeon decimates the Earth Federation at the Battle of Loum, Char Aznable becomes a legend, and General Johann Ibrahim Revil delivers a speech that will change the course of human history. It’s a great episode, one part space naval epic, another part political espionage thriller, wit...

With Part V of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin – Clash at Loum – this outstanding OVA delivers not only its finest episode, but one of the single most memorable and powerful installments in the 40-year history of Gundam. Dramatizing Zeon’s disastrous colony drop operation, Sayla Mass making a stand at Side 5, Ramba Ral and Crowley Hamon bemoaning the loss of a world that’s passed them by, and Char...

Eve of Destiny, Part IV of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, is a messier installment than others in this series, failing to find as clear or compelling a through-line as prior or upcoming episodes, and taking a weird jump in the middle that feels like a key piece of story is missing. That said, it’s still a highly entertaining part of this terrific series, featuring the first meeting between Char a...

A legend is born in Part III of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin – Dawn of Rebellion, which sees Casval Rem Deikun adopt – er, violently steal – the identity of Char Aznable, and gradually develop the colorful, calculating persona made so iconic in Gundam ’79. It’s one of the most entertaining episodes in the history of Gundam, an archetypal military academy story built on the foundation of Char’s t...

Our journey through the past of the Universal Century continues with Part II of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin – Artesia’s Sorrow. Picking up three years after Casval and Artesia fled their homeland of Munzo, the action picks up on Earth in 0071, where a young Edouard and Sayla Mass live peacefully with Don Teabolo Mass and Jimba Ral…for a time. Events conspire to rip peace away from the siblings...

To kick off 2022, we’re starting our journey through Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, the 6-part theatrical OVA created between 2015 and 2018, based on Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s manga of the same name. And to give this great series the royal treatment it deserves, we’re covering it one episode at a time! For this week, we’re discussing Part I: Blue-Eyed Casval, where we return to Universal Century 0068...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to one and all! At The Weekly Stuff Podcast, we have an ongoing tradition of extremely silly Christmas special episodes – from reviewing the hilariously terrible Pokemon Christmas Bash album in 2018 to performing an entire Western-themed Evangelical Christian rendering of A Christmas Carol in 2019 – and this year, we’re bringing that tradition to Weekly Suit Gund...

It’s safe to say we were big fans of the first season of Iron-Blooded Orphans here at Weekly Suit Gundam, and as the length of this podcast can attest, we are even more invested in the big thematic, narrative, and emotional swings the show takes in its second and final season. As it traces the fall of Tekkadan, Iron-Blooded Orphans challenges its characters and audience with a story that’s richer,...

We finally arrive at the most recent mainline Gundam TV series – 2015’s global smash hit Iron-Blooded Orphans, created by the “Super Peace Busters” team of director Tatsuyuki Nagai and writer Mari Okada. Tackling the theme of child soldiers more directly than Gundam ever had before, Iron-Blooded Orphans is one of Gundam’s darkest and most violent hours, but also one of its richest and most rewardi...

For the 35th anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam, franchise creator Yoshiyuki Tomino returned for what is, as of now, his latest installment in the series: Reconguista in G, perhaps the strangest and unquestionably the most formally daring of all Gundam series. Dense, complicated, wildly fast-paced, and persistently challenging, Reconguista is a divisive entry among the global Gundam fandom, but her...

After reviewing the original Gundam Build Fighters and its sequel series Gundam Build Fighters Try on our last two episodes, it’s time to round out the original Build Fighters run by rounding-up the many OVAs related to this corner of the franchise. We begin with Model Suit Gunpla Builders Beginning G, the 2010 OVA that first introduced the concept of a Gunpla Battle-based anime, and holds up surp...

After the huge success of the original Gundam Build Fighters, Sunrise turned around and produced a sequel in just six months – Gundam Build Fighters Try, set 7 years after the original with a new cast of Gunpla battlers. It’s a divisive show in the Gundam fandom, and on this podcast! Jonathan loves it, though not without some reservations, and Sean is mostly unmoved by it, despite liking certain t...

With 2013’s Gundam Build Fighters, Gundam leaves the world of life-and-death warfare and science-fiction (mostly) behind, and instead settles in for a slice-of-life sports anime centered around the Gunpla plastic models that have long been one of the most beloved and popular parts of the franchise’s legacy. And in a wonderful surprise, it winds up being one of the franchise’s finest hours, a pract...

Almost two years ago, we took a little detour from Gundam to review Neon Genesis Evangelion upon its Netflix streaming debut, and promised that we’d come back to discuss Eva again if and when the 4-film Rebuild of Evangelion project was ever finished. And with the final film in Hideaki Anno’s lifelong passion project, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time, now streaming worldwide (alongside the...

It’s the end of an Age on today’s show as we finish reviewing Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, covering the 3rdand 4th arcs and episodes 29 through 49 of this severely underrated gem. This half of the show sees another jump to a new generation, as we join young Kio Asuno on his journey to learn the true nature of the Vegan and their world, reunite with his pirate father, and to bring his grandfather Flit b...

Continuing on to the next full-length Gundam series, we reach Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, Sunrise’s 2011 collaboration with video game giant Level-5, whose lead creative Akihiro Hino conceived of and wrote this child-friendly Gundam series that spans 3 protagonists over 3 successive generations in a century-long space conflict. AGE did poorly upon its initial airing in Japan, and has suffered a quiet...

Premiering worldwide on Netflix this week after its debut in Japanese theaters last month, Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash is the first film in a planned trilogy adapting original Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino’s trio of novels from 1989-1990, following the exploits of Hathaway Noa 12 years after the events of Char’s Counterattack. And it’s a terrific start to this new film series, offering...

Two years ago today, Weekly Suit Gundam was born, and what a wild ride it’s been! Just as we did on its first anniversary, we’re using the show’s birthday to take stock of everything we’ve reviewed up to now. With a particular focus on the “Year Two” shows – namely G Saviour, 0080: War in the Pocket, 0083: Stardust Memory, The 08thMS Team, Gundam SEED, Gundam SEED Destiny, Gundam 00, and MS IGLOO...

This week, we have a quick little bonus episode for you, with an excerpt from this week’s Weekly Stuff Podcast, where we talked about two major pieces of Gundam news from the past few weeks: The announcement that Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway will be debuting worldwide on Netflix very soon, on July 1st, and the reveal of a brand new Gundam SEED movie coming from the original creative team. We knew...

This time, we’re taking a detour into one of the most obscure corners of Gundam animation, with the 6-episode CGI OVA MS IGLOO and its 3-episode sequel series MS IGLOO 2: Gravity Well. Originally produced for the Bandai museum in Japan, the first series suffers from repetitive storytelling, thin plotting, and some of the worst 3D CGI animation the early 2000s had to offer, and on its own, there’s...

With both seasons of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 reviewed, it’s time for the third and final piece of the 00 tapestry: Mobile Suit Gundam 00 the Movie: A Wakening of the Trailblazer, the 2010 feature-film follow-up/finale that brings a close to the world of Gundam 00 and introduces the world of Gundam to extraterrestrial life for the first time. It’s a wild, strange, defiantly singular movie, and one of...

After its stupendous first season, Gundam 00 has a lot to live up to in its back half, and we find it more than rises to the challenge with an incredibly smart, exciting, affecting, and entertaining second season, bringing the TV portion of this Gundam experience to a rousing close. Set 4 years after the first season, in a world that increasingly resembles some of Gundam ’s most recognizable arche...

Gundam moves boldly into the era of HD, widescreen, and 21st century geopolitics with Mobile Suit Gundam 00, an absolutely terrific installment that’s wickedly smart, wildly exciting, and features some of the best characters and world-building of the entire franchise. It’s also the first Gundam series to split itself into seasons, so on today’s episode we’re covering Season 1 – Episodes 1-25 – whi...

This time, we’re taking a look at a curious oddity in the history of Gundam – Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation film trilogy from 2005 and 2006, which saw the Gundam creator returning to the classic sequel series and compiling it into three feature films, just as he had done for the original series in 1981, but now 20 years later, with much shorter run times, and, due t...

The day of reckoning has arrived – at last, it is time to review perhaps the most controversial show in the Gundam pantheon: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, the baffling, confounding, infuriating, utterly fascinating sequel to Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Set two years later with both new and returning characters, Destiny tries to be two different, contradictory shows at once: a challenging sequel qu...