Generator Gawl Collection

Review Date: 2005 May 07 04:30

Reviewed by: Azure

Released by: ADV Films UK

Age Rating: 12

Region: 2 - UK

Length: 300 minutes

Subtitles: English

Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1
Japanese 2.0 Stereo

Summary

You live in the future; the world is a complete mess and you have the opportunity to change things by travelling back in time. Things can of course get messy fast, as Generator Gawl's main heroes find out. The series follows Gawk, Koji, and Ryo as they fight to stop the scientific discovery that leads their own evil future, as well as desperately trying to maintain their cover. A bit difficult when giant mech like creatures 'the generators' are running around stomping on the city.

Review

Gawl has a strong Evangelion feel to it, with the tone of the early episodes matching the opening ones of Eva. There's even a strong link in character design with the main female protagonist Masami looking worryingly like Asuka. There's even a Rei-alike lurking in the backgrounds in many of the school scenes. A lot of the themes of Eva are explored in Gawl too, especially the theme of free will versus fate. Gawl treats this subject matter in a very different way, and is certainly much "lighter". The music however is average, and isn't particularly memorable. The animation quality is reasonable but is certainly not top end.

As a whole, Gawl is a nicely written Sci-Fi show, in a particularly satisfying albeit slightly dated way. The main fights are about the right length with a generous amount of destruction. They don't dominate the action like some other shows in the mech genre, with the focus much more on the characters relationships and struggles.

Generator Gawl is actually much more enjoyable dubbed. The Japanese track seems dull in comparison, and the dialogue seems much focused on shelling out the incredibly dull facts sacrificing the developing character relations. The dub spices things up a little; fleshing out the series with some much needed humour. The English voice cast are superb and carry off the mixture of humour and serious dialogue perfectly. Vic Mignogna stands out particularly as Gawl, the shows slightly goofy hero. He makes Gawl likeable essential if you really want to stick through the end.

Whilst hardly revolutionary, Gawl is enjoyable which is really what counts at the end of the day. It's well paced with very little filler. Happily it also concludes properly, and at twelve episodes is not overlong. The DVDs also include a few basic extras like character designs and clean openings. Gawl is a solid and nicely executed series well worth any fans time; fans of traditional sci- fi anime especially will not be disappointed.

Rating: 8/10