April 30, 2021

Mecha Anime deserves more Respect! Here's Why!

Mecha Anime deserves more Respect! Here's Why!

Mecha anime has been a huge influence on block buster programs such as Power Rangers and yet the amount of Mecha animes being made has dropped significantly with only 3 Mecha animes being made in 2020.  Why is this?

While I can’t say for sure why the decline in Mecha Anime shows but I can speculate as to why.

Here are few reasons:

Story

Mecha anime stories are very much the same these days and have not kept up with the times. When Mobile Suite Gundam Wing first came out, it was an innovative story, full of political warfare which at times was more exciting than the fights (okay maybe not) but still very good to see. This formula worked very well, so much so, Gundam was able to build a massive franchise of the show, spouting multiple different variations of Gundam anime series.

Some of the new Mecha anime stories, have tried to replicate this and have not fared so well, the last great Mecha anime story I can think of is probably Code Geass.The other shows, try to get the story so write that they fail to make the Mecha shine. Even, Gundam noticed that their story lines were getting a bit tired and hence decided to pivot with a more contemporary story in Gundam Build Fighters.

Animation Cost

Mecha anime is probably the hardest and most expensive anime to make due to design and complexity as it relates to animating and drawing every frame of Mecha. This actually also works against Mecha anime as we have seen some very bad Mecha anime in the form of CGI to save on time and cost which detracts and does not help the genre in general.

More focus needed on the Mecha

As I say in the podcast episode about this topic. There is a reason why Formula is still popular today as it was 50 years ago or so. It focuses on the car and the driver.

Most of these new Mecha animes are about war and using mecha’s as a form of weapons to assert authority or to inspire a revolution. This is done and played out. We need Mecha anime like Gundam Build fighters which mainly focuses on the Mecha and the pilot. Perhaps do it in a competition style so we can see the pilot evolve his skills and the engineers, innovate on the Mecha.

Ultimately it comes down to Mecha anime being character driven, weebs resonate more with characters than they do with the story, hence why you see people dress up as their favourite characters in anime conventions and so on.

To listen to the full podcast conversation of Why we think Mecha Anime deserves respect – listen here.

What do you think? Does Mecha anime deserve more respect?  Leave a comment below or message us via our contact section, you can also leave a voice note for us via the orange microphone button on our website. Make a great constructive point and we will play the voice note on a future Suuuper Anime podcast episode.

Thanks for reading.