This Review Contains Spoilers for Turn A Gundam https://www..com/watch?v=7wVDghsz3IY As of this writing Ive watched fourhundredfortyfour episodes as well as six movies of the Gundam series. This information isnt to boast its simply to let you all know that when I say that Turn A Gundam is the best Gundam entry that Ive seen its not a light declaration. Turn A Gundam has the glorious combination of a grippingly fresh story interesting mecha designs memorable music beautiful art and great themes to make it stand above its many many series in the Gundam family thats been going strong for forty years now. Its one thing to be a favorite and its another to be the best. Compared to one another the latter implies that youre liked though not necessarily that you have good qualities. Sure you probably havedecent enough qualities to gain favor but the latter has more connotations of objective excellence that you do something so well so much better than others that there is no question that youre a shining example to look up to to aspire to be. Its telling if we look how big the favorites club is compared to the best club. My favorite Gundam shows are Zeta Gundam Turn A Gundam IronBlooded Orphans G Gundam and 08th MS Team. The best Gundam shows Ive seen are Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Turn A Gundam. 820http://i.ur.com/WvTz9DS.png Debuting April 9 1999 Turn A Gundam marked the return of series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino whos last Gundam show was 1993s Victory Gundam. Tomino had high ambitions with this series for he said it would tie together every Gundam series thus far. I think he did a pretty good job. Turn A Gundam details the conflict between the citizens of Earth with technology roughly on par with our world circa 1918 and the military force of the Moon with technology roughly on par with what weve come to expect from a typical Gundam show whove landed on the planet claiming that as their ancestral homeland they have a right to it. The story is primarily focused around Loran Cehack a member of the moonrace who has lived on the Earth for the past few years and considers it home and its inhabitants his people. Loran must try his best to deescalate the conflict using the weapon he stumbled upon. Thanks to its sheer power the weapon is the Earth militias best bet against the moonrace. That weapon colloquially known as the White Doll is the eponymous mobile suit the Turn A Gundam. 520https://i0.wp.com/otakujournalist.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/turna.png?resize=6402C465 There are so many things that make this show so great Im not sure where to start. Perhaps Ill start off with someone a bit strange: the music. I say its a strange place to start because with few exceptions the music of a Gundam show isnt really notable to me. While theres always at least one track that I enjoy the soundtrack as a whole generally doesnt make an impression on me. This couldnt be farther from the case with Turn A Gundam. This is thanks to the talented Yoko Kanno the composer of the OST. The tracks are so varied from the ethereal Moon to the rockinfluenced Air Plant the soundtrack never sounds homogenous. I suppose one thing that the songs share is that in general they sound very beautiful. There arent many tracks that sound violent or intense. A lot of the tracks seem to speak towards the inherent beauty of Earth and life itself. On the flipside the ethereal nature of Moon also serves to paint the moonrace as beautiful but in an inherently alien way this is helped by the fact that Moon is rendered in Yoko Kannos fictional language. By the end of the series the moonrace as a whole has been humanized and thus Moons Cocoonhttps://www..com/watch?v=A2NkIJyRylw a reprise of moon is sung in Japanese. But I love the music on a purely surface level too. It just seems like a lot more care was put into the OST than most Gundam shows. If you couldnt tell I absolutely love Moon which becomes somewhat of a leitmotif. It never fails to tug on my heartstrings. The art design is similarly beautiful. The art reminds me of a painting and looking at the covers for the original DVDs its clear thats what they were going for. 520http://www.nozomientertainment.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/07/turnagundammscreenshot01.jpg While the shows art isnt quite that paintinglike its still lovely with its soft edges and colors. Particular attention is paid to the backgrounds which often do resemble watercolor paintings. 520https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/gundam/images/9/99/TurnAGundamDVD7.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20190114194506This show is an absolute treat for the eyes. Ive heard Turn A Gundam described as if Ghibli made a Gundam show and the more I think about it the more it makes sense. Theres of course the beautiful music and art that Ive described but Id say TurnA is also Ghibliesque in tone and theme. As I hinted at Turn A Gundam is quite pastoral moreso than any Gundam show that came before. Instead of the gorn or urbanization that is associated with Earth in prior shows Earth is absolutely lush. We spend a lot of time going through the shows beautiful mountains forests and plains. This show unlike many other Gundam shows seems to tell us this is what the Earth looks like without war not this is what the Earth looks like because of war. The sentiment is roughly the same but the former creates a much more positive welcoming viewingexperience. Like most Ghibli films the tone is relatively lighthearted. Although the show does have menacing elements theyre a lot less emphasized than other Gundam shows. Death is similarly deemphasized in this show. Dont get me wrong its still there and it still looms but I feel this is more due to the precedent set by previous shows than by the tone of the show itself. I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of a bloodbath at the end of the show. The lighthearted tone of the show also colors its very structure. Unlike the brisk continuous Zeta Gundam Turn A Gundam meanders with episodes being quite selfcontained during the first 2/3rds of the show. The pace picks up later but there never really is much in the way of cliffhangers. While some might find fault in this I think it really well for this particular show. Its just one way that it ends up being a more unique Gundam show. 520http://www.animateddivots.net/images/turnagundam.jpg And if I had to describe Turn A Gundam in a word that would probably be it: unique. The mechanical designs of Syd Mead are odd yet intriguing. The Turn A certainly wont be mistaken for any other Gundam and the new mobile suits dont look like mobile suits but thats why I love them. Harry Ord is a wellrounded fresh character who is a Char Clonehttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CharClone by the barest of technicalities. This shows primary setting is Earth as opposed to space it begins and ends on Earth only a short fragment of its runtime takes place off of it. Yet we dont have to hear how humanity is weighed down by Earths gravity the show seems optimistic that mankind will do just fine on Earth. Another unique aspect of the show is the general goal of the main characters: instead of trying to end a war theyre trying to prevent it from occurring in the first place. The fact that this Gundam show is less about fighting is perfectly encapsulated by its partaking of mundane tasks such as transporting livestock and doing laundry. Then theres the fact that Loran the protagonist at a certain point stops being the main character because his arc finishes. Turn A Gundam then becomes much more about the changes we see in Diana and Kihel. Its a small point to make but I appreciate it since it makes the anime more complex than just primarily focusing on Loran throughout. 520https://thesilentgrovehome.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/tumblrm9ovkaEZrX1rohfjwo11280.jpg?w=1100 I can talk about uniqueness until the cows come home but it would amount to very little if the uniqueness didnt do anything for the show. In the context of the greater Gundam meta series Turn As uniqueness is what makes it so great. All the things I talked about serve to make Turn A Gundam subservive. That can seem like a dirty word to some. Subversion inherently involves a breach of trust but in the subversion laying in the very loose series of Gundam rather than in the show itself the subversion feels like a relief instead of a betrayal. Not bound to ideas of what a Gundam show should be Turn A Gundam feels very fresh. All of its attributes create a feelgood show that offers something that most Gundam shows dont. I should stress that I think Turn A Gundam holds up on its own. As a show celebrating the goodness of man Turn A Gundam should prove effective and uplifting even if youre new to Gundam. Still I believe that Gundam fans get a lot more out of the show and its themes were specifically catered to serve as a counterpoint to dark shows such as Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. I can assure you the joy I experienced when watching the ending would not be possible without watching every Gundam that released prior. The characters are a treat to watch. As I said before people besides Loran get a chance to shine and I mean a lot of characters. Nearly everyone has depth and get some chance to develop. Harry Ord is one of my favorite characters. How cant you love someone who dresses like this520https://66.media.tumblr.com/13318fa0a717f61bc885f987526075c9/tumblrn0v2yumRaE1sutszko1500.jpg and says stuff like this?520https://i.ur.com/F0E1KcA.jpg Another aspect of Turn A Gundam that makes it so so excellent is also a major point of contention: the Dark History and the ensuing Moonlight Butterfly. Being as brief and simple as possible Turn A Gundam reveals that all Gundam settings up to its debutUC FC AC AW are connected. Furthermore its revealed that human history came to an end at the conclusion of a long and arduous war where the Turn A Gundam unleashed its most devastating ability the Moonlight Butterfly which spread nano machines across the solar system destroying all forms of advanced technology and sending humanity back to the stoneage. Furthermore Turn A is supposed to be the Grand Finalehttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrandFinale for the Gundam franchise so even installments that debut after are meant to chronologically proceed it. Were not sure if all the series are part of a single timeline or if separate universes converged all thats known is due to seeing various images/videos from various Gundam shows all the proceeding Gundam shows were canon to the universe of Turn A. I love this for one because I enjoy the nods to all the shows that came before making the show feel like its for everyone. Its really cool to see that all these shows ended up being more connected than you think being a way to loosely wrap up the franchise. I dont write fanfiction anymore but if I did Id probably write for Turn A because the series opens up so many possibilities compared to other Gundam shows due to how many questions are raised after were given a framework of the worlds past and future. A criticism Ive heard about this development is that its depressing: all of the happy endings of the various shows were overwritten by the fact that Turn A ensures that in the farfuture of every Gundam show horrific war will break out followed by the cataclysmic Moonlight Butterfly. The problem with this argument at least for me is that I felt this way before watching Turn A. At least in regards to the Universal Century the hopeful endings of Unicorn ZZ and Chars Counterattack were mitigated by the fact that I knew further down the line come Victory Gundam the Earth Sphere would be in shambles. Byy the time of GSaviour the Earth Federation will have collapsed. This feeling of hopelessness is less pronounced in the various AUs but theres always the possibility of another conflict breaking out. And even on a meta level there will always be a new Gundam show. I think that Turn A actually ensures that Gundam as a whole ends on a high note because its meant to be the final show in the timeline and it ends on such a happy note. No matter how gruesome it gets itll be okay in the end. I dont like to think that everything the other Gundam protagonists do will lead to the Moonlight Butterfly I like to think it leads to the end of Turn A. 520https://66.media.tumblr.com/34170b699c14bac3c8442b09a7d64179/tumblronw5ihWTYW1vlmn9wo1400.gifv The ending for Turn A Gundam was great. I feared that the ending might be rushed or nonexistent. As the minutes of the final episode flew by I imagined it would be like the ending of Zeta or the original Mobile Suit Gundam which were quite abrupt. To my delight Turn A treats viewers to an epilogue that wraps off the series nicely. We see all of the surviving characters carry on with their lives each with a relatively happy ending except for poor Sochie. During the scene the powerful track Moons Cocoon plays. The entire ending sequence made me pretty emotional. Fittingly for whats supposed to be a finale to the Gundam series this is a beautiful ending. You may be wondering why Ive brought up Zeta Gundam several times. Simply put prior to Turn A I considered Zeta the Gold Standard in terms of Gundam shows. Nearly everything about it is exceptional and I looked for aspects of Zeta in subsequent shows. I see very little of Zeta in Turn A yet I still love it. Why you ask? I see Zeta Gundam as the pinnacle of what makes Gundam Gundam. Its the best of what Gundam is. Turn A meanwhile is the best of what Gundam can be. Turn A does such an amazing job of showing that the advent of a Gundam doesnt bring with it strife. Turn A Gundam shows me the merits of more episodic mecha shows. Turn A Gundam shows me that I can still derive joy in Gundam shows without a bunch of spectacular battles. I acknowledge that part of my love for Turn A is that its novel. If another Gundam show does what Turn A does better then I may have to reassess my score but as is I love its distinctiveness and its positive vibe given that its canonically the last Gundam show. In short theres a time and place for dark shows and theres a time and place for light shows. Zeta does the former really well while Turn A does the latter really well. 520https://66.media.tumblr.com/8b0744d33f1e489ceefdcceeecc6a060/tumblrnnudj2J1og1rjxyrgo1400.gifv For all the praise I heap on this show it does have some distinct downsides. For one as much as I love its uniqueness naturally if you have very particular feelings of what you want your Gundam show to do you might not like the liberties that this show takes with the formula. Its really hard to gauge if someone else would like this show or not considering I love both Zeta and this show. I suppose if you love everything in an archetypal Gundam show does and dislike anything that errs from that either in aesthetic or tone then you might not like Turn A Gundam. The pacing is a sticking point. The show starts off slow and while it picks up it generally stays slow. Like I said the show fosters a bit of a relaxed tone there arent ay cliffhangers and the episodes are relatively selfcontained. This might lead to viewers being a bit bored if theyre used to a show that blazes forward instead of cruising along. The fact that one might feel as though they dont need to watch the next episode might cause them to not watch it at all. If youre not devoted to finishing it you might get bored. Granted the characters and plot are still interesting just perhaps not the most gripping at the beginning. I will say that hindsight is 20/20 the ending really colored my view of the show and while I certainly liked the show during the beginning I couldnt have predicted Id like it more than Zeta. While I felt this was a lot more interesting than previous episodic Gundam shows for one I liked the characters and setting more it should be noted that I completed three manga and eleven anime in the time it took me to get around to finishing Turn A. As I acknowledge it wasnt the most engaging at times Ill have to dock some points. 620http://i.ur.com/neA1P5H.jpg But at the end of the day its not enough to kill my enjoyment of the show by any measure. This is the pinnacle of Gundam and Id implore any fan of the series to give it a shot. The mega franchise of Gundam isnt going anywhere anytime soon. New movies shows games gunpla ang manga are just beyond the horizon. When the day does come however Turn A will remain a great way to finish things off. Its a perfect show for the end of such a long franchise dealing with war: bitter but sweet. The storm is over. The streets may be flooded the buildings on fire from the lightning but there is rainbow water for the new plants to drink and most importantly hope for the future after a past filled with strife. I hope this review makes it clear not only how much I love this anime but how it makes me feel so good inside. 200https://i.ur.com/Op2VO7L.png https://www..com/watch?v=anq1ROp9w