Unrequited thoughts and the wish to be free.
Gad Guard plays several hundred years in the future. The resources of the Earth runs out, and the progression of the human race has stagnated. The world is now divided into Units and is a mirror of the world beginning of the 20th Century.
The main character of the story, Sanada Hajiki, lives with his family in the worst part of a city. The "Night Town", where poverty and criminality are at home. One day he comes across a "Gad" a mysterious stone which turns right before his eyes into a mecha, Techode, who can only be controlled by Hajiki and has seemingly an own will.
But he is not the only one to have such an encounter, shortly after that incident he meets other people who have also their own Techode.
The first remarkable point is the different style of this anime. A lot of the setup borrows from the world as we know it from the early 20th Century and so is the music style used in the show, relying heavily on Jazz tunes.
Setting this aside the beginning of the story may sound familiar and indeed it's something often used in mecha anime. A random hot blooded teenager encountering a mecha and turning out as a genius pilot saving the world. But already here we have a lot of differences in Gad Guard. First and formost the mecha is a giant robo, something not too common nowadays, that together with the milieu is reminiscent of classics in the giant robo genre, such as Tetsujin 28-go.
Of course the first thing one would expect now would be a revival of this rather forgotten subgenre, with many references and known techniques poured in along the way. But unfortunatly the gross of the series feels like the scriptwriters didn't really know what to do with all of that and settled most often for a lot of running around and talking between the characters before finally moving the plot already in the last quarter of the series, where it becomes rather rushed.
Character interaction and many talks aren't bad per se, quite the contrary, they are a good tool to give characters depth and develop them. Unfortunatly the interactions in Gad Guard most often let the viewer question the sanity and/or age of the characters.
A good example is one particular thread in the end. You get lines like: "Is he your father?" a few seconds later "But he is your father." another minute later "He may know about your father." and it continues with stuff like "Don't you want to ask your father what he did all this time?", "He may know about your father." and "Is that man your father?"
I'm not sure whether the dialogue was intended to make fun of the viewers or was just the result or a random algorithm to make up sentences.
Although some of the characters are pretty likeable the story itself jumps around too much, delivers too much repetition of dialogues and there's just about none development for most of the characters.
The animation contributes its part to that. While the style is good, this bonus point is quickly wasted by dreadful animation. It seems like the budget went for the most part into the opening/ending animations and the cgi parts, while the rest was animated with the least possible effort. Throughout the show you have almost never completly animated sequences. Only the smallest possible part is changed from frame to frame, and if that isn't possible they simply switch to a new set, which results in painful movement, or should I say non-movement. Most of the time characters are floating more or less like ghosts through the show or just randomly make jumps. A fluid animation? Not here.
There is also an impressive amount of errors in continuity and placement between frames, in one frame you have characters stand one meter from each other apart, in another perspective it becomes 20 meter. Things disappear between pans, doors and cars change directions. It's almost laughable if it weren't that sad that it's still possible to make that many errors. All of this makes me think they never bothered to actually employ animation directors and just let the staff on each episode draw everything in a hurry.
The script itself never bothers with details as well. As an example, in one scene a truck with people shooting at one of the main characters appears, he attempts to flee but when he turns around he sees the man he just talked with is dead. Now he spends ~25 seconds standing there, looking back while the camera pans out. But what about the truck, you don't hear any weapon noise, nor does anybody shoot at him, after all those seconds he finally decides to escape, but from who? The truck mysteriously disappeared from the middle of the street after all.
And the show is full of such animation and script errors, which detracts a lot from enjoyment. Yes there are a few really good sequences, but they are so spare that you have almost to search with a magnifier for them.
At least such hickups don't happen for sound effects. And the music itself is top-notch. The jazz tunes deliver and contribute in most scenes.
The same applies for the opening, Boomerang Boogie and ending, Song for My Buffalo both by PE'Z, which have also impressive animation, something I wished for the whole show.
The voice actors, despite the lines they have to read, are making the best out of it. In fact they managed to deliver exact the same illogical stuff over and over but with different intonations, expressing different attitudes, which made the dialogue much less painful.
Overall, despite all of these faults, I actually enjoyed watching it a bit. Yes, the animation was bad and distracting, same for the script, but the pleasant and fitting music and the enjoyable characters as well as some parts of the story continued to pull me through the show. Surely, the characters aren't exactly outstanding, nor do they develop a lot, but they are nice to see through the story. I also cheered the whole time for the two more important characters, Hajiki (Suzumura Kenichi; Asuka Shinn in GSD, Rakushun in Juuni Kokuki, Tohno Shiki in Tsukihime) and Arashi (Orikasa Fumiko; Meyrin Hawke in GSD, Pacifica Casull in Scrapped Princess, Ciel in Tsukihime), to get finally together, they just worked too good as a pair.
The finale was moreover quite satisfying, binding pretty much all loose ties, seemingly that wasn't made up as they went with the show, at least unlike the rest. The only thing that bothered me was the ending, it ended perfectly 17 minutes into the last episode but they had to a add a completely out-of-place segment after that, which detracted from the perfect ending.
Gad Guard is pretty much the perfect example for everything that's wrong with GONZO.
Impressive first episode with detoriating animation afterwards, impressive opening and ending wasting most of the show's budget, overabundance of cgi, a lot of style without really knowing what to do with it, impressive music throughout the whole show, prolongued and pointless script and interactions between characters, countless wasted potential, coolness which never is used, wasted characters, wasted development, ideas not continiously followed through, making up a lot as the story progresses and much more.
