Review: "Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom" is a treat from another era
Review: "Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom" is a treat from another era
Better late than never, indeed
For better and for worse, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom is a product of a different era. The film is a direct sequel to two of the most popular TV series in the Gundam franchise – 2002’s Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and 2004’s Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny – and absolutely feels like it fell through a wormhole from twenty years ago to wind up in 2024. Its character designs, animation, music, storytelling, and direction are all more or less a dead ringer for the first Gundam works of the 21st century, and generally harken back to a period of anime very different than the one we’re living in now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Director Mitsuo Fukuda a production team filled with returning Gundam SEED veterans could have made a movie that felt like it updated Gundam SEED for the 2020s and the modern anime landscape, or they could have made one that felt like a direct extension of the sub-series they kicked off over two decades ago, warts and all. They clearly chose the latter path, and while it took me a while to adjust to its look and rhythms, I eventually settled into Gundam SEED Freedom’s wavelength – and when I did, I found myself falling in love all over again.
Of course, Gundam SEED has always been something of a weird beast. It was the first Gundam animated in a standard-definition digital workflow, but far from feeling cutting edge, the series showcases a lot of the limitations of that transitionary period, and subsequent attempts to ‘remaster’ it for HD have only made it look worse. The show also took its time playing its hand, starting out as a fairly direct reworking of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s original Gundam from 1979 – and working in plenty of stylistic nods to that earlier era of anime, including split-screens and inserts to show mobile suits and their pilots at the same time – but slowly and surely revealing itself to be a very different creature. By its second half, SEED had come into its own as one of the most confident, rousing entries in the series, and in Japan was one of the biggest hits Gundam has ever produced. The first Gundam written by a woman – Chiaki Morosawa – SEED engaged with shojō tropes and character types to strong effect, and expanded the audience in ways that presaged the recent success of 2022’s Witch from Mercury. Unfortunately, the sequel series from 2004, Gundam SEED Destiny, was a mess of a production that squandered both its original cast and a promising new protagonist, and fell so far apart by the end that it barely dragged itself over the finish line at all (the third-from-last episode is partially a recap special). Gundam SEED Freedom was always intended to continue, resolve, and – presumably – redeem the series, with work on the film stretching back to 2006. Sadly, Morosawa had fallen ill near the end of production on Destiny, and never fully recovered; she seemingly completed a draft of the script, but ultimately passed away in 2016. Fukuda, the director, was her husband, and SEED had always been a partnership between them; he ultimately completed her script and directed the film, now released eighteen years on from its conception.
Narratively, Freedom is both a direct sequel to Destiny and a redux of the major conflict and themes that series never managed to fully wrap its hands around. It doesn’t erase the events of Destiny – that show’s erstwhile protagonist Shinn Asuka is on the team here, and the great Shuichi Ikeda reprises his role as antagonist Chairman Durandal in a few beyond-the-grave moments – but effectively re-tells them in a more concise and competent package, with this film’s antagonists once again trying to implement the ‘Destiny’ plan – a form of social engineering where a person’s genes will be used to determine their entire life path – and using the massive ‘Requiem’ space laser. In Freedom, though, the story works, and gives us some insight as to why Morosawa and Fukuda wanted to employ these ideas in the first place. The script connects the threat of the ‘Destiny’ plan to the series’ overriding central conflict: what aspiring peacekeepers should do about humanity’s perpetual tendency towards violent conflict. The ‘Destiny’ plan is a way to avoid war, but it is also a form of authoritarian subjugation. And unlike in Destiny, the heroes of Gundam SEED Freedom are actually made to meaningfully grapple with that distinction.
Here, Freedom also takes a mulligan on the single most frustrating aspect of Destiny: the characterization of original SEED protagonists Kira Yamato and Lacus Clyne, bafflingly portrayed in the sequel series as radical pacifists sitting on the sidelines and refusing to engage with the world outside of the cockpit of a mobile suit. While Freedom features most of the surviving characters from SEED and Destiny, it very much puts Kira and Lacus front and center, and immediately gives them their humanity back. They are both actively involved in the world’s politics, and beset by doubt and confusion as to whether their actions are righteous. Their personalities, wants, desires, and faults have been restored to them, where both were reduced to robots in Destiny (returning voice actors Sōichirō Hoshi and Rie Tanka are both fantastic here), and through them, Fukuda and Morosawa are able to meaningfully extend the major themes of the original series. One of the best choices Freedom makes is to let Kira be imperfect, to let his doubt sometimes get the better of him; when returning deuteragonist Athrun Zala socks him in the face for nearly succumbing to defeatism, it feels unbelievably cathartic. Kira was a much more interesting and complex character than the hollow shell we saw in Destiny; in Freedom, he gets to become a hero again, and so does Lacus, both fighting to protect the hard-won future they barely managed to open up in the original SEED.
Through this central relationship, Freedom is also a love story, and a shockingly poignant one at that. The most interesting thing the film does, thematically, is to extend the challenging interpersonal dynamics of a romantic partnership to ideas of how society should be structured, arguing that how one views and acts on ideas of ‘love’ is mirrored in our politics. In the film’s riskiest scene, Lacus is nearly sexually assaulted by the film’s antagonist (Orphee Lam Tao, voiced to spectacularly despicable effect by the great Hiro Shimono); if it were done with even an ounce less sensitivity, the moment could bring the film down. Instead, it is where Morosawa’s script delivers its thesis statement: that love cannot be forced, and neither can leadership or societal betterment.
There is a maturity to this film’s depiction of romance that feels both true to this series – SEED was, after all, the first Gundam to directly depict its characters as sexual beings – and like the characters have grown up a bit since we last saw them. That Freedom is a film directed by a husband working from a script his late wife started writing nearly twenty years ago inevitably makes it all the more poignant; when characters question what love is or why we choose to love each other, or Kira and Lacus reckon with whether they can love each other and work to better the world at the same time, it doesn’t feel like platitudes, but an honest grappling with issues of the heart from two creators whose most famous works were created as a married couple.
In all this, Gundam SEED Freedom feels like it picks up directly where the series long ago left off; the ‘voice’ of Gundam SEED comes through loud and clear. That is also true of the film’s animation, but that’s a harder pill to swallow. Freedom’s visuals are frequently problematic, but it is in every way a direct extension of how SEEDhas always looked: a show born in the earliest days of digital animation that has simply never looked right in high-definition, its rigid and angular character designs and uneasy compositing of hand-drawn and CG elements firmly a product of the early 2000s. Freedom is of a piece with the original shows, and Fukuda’s directorial style is obvious from the start. But compared to the last two Gundam movies – 2021’s Hathaway’s Flash and 2022’s Cucuruz Doan’s Island, both of which are cohesive, stunning productions in different ways – Freedom is a visual mess. I simply don’t think this team cracked how to translate these early-00s character designs to modern HD animation, let alone a theatrical feature film; the result is very stiff character animation with particularly robotic lip flaps and inexpressive eyes and faces. Some characters fare better than others (Shinn looks pretty good, while Lacus suffers most of all). As for the mobile suits, they are entirely cel-shaded CG, and while the basic designs and underlying motion is often great, they don’t blend into the environment anywhere near as seamlessly as those in Hathaway, nor do they look as clean and legible as the ones in Cucuruz. Where many anime have become increasingly accomplished at integrating CG assets, Freedomfeels like a throwback to a time when every CG object sticks out like a sore thumb, and the relationship between hand drawn and digital elements is perpetually uneasy.
Your mileage may vary on how much that bothers you, of course; again, it’s absolutely of a piece with how Gundam SEED has always looked, and as in the original show, awkward animation doesn’t stop the action from being frequently outstanding. Freedom particularly excels on this front, especially in the last act, which is a maximalist action symphony representing the best of SEED and of Fukuda’s style. The battles are wildly fast, throw out crazy ideas left and right, and goes for some truly audacious visuals in its psychedelic climax, delivering a culmination that feels tonally and aesthetically true to SEED while also delivering spectacle worthy of a movie theater. Fukuda is particularly good at ship-to-ship action, a quality that returns in force here, while the overall balance between total visual chaos and finely-tuned kinetic storytelling is, at its best, positively virtuosic.
Toshihiko Sahashi’s musical score is also a throwback, sounding right out of that early-00s period, down to the samples used. In this case, that’s absolutely something to be celebrated. Sahashi brought a very different style to Gundam music when he scored SEED in 2002, blending the cinematic scope of Shigeaki Saegusa’s work on Zeta Gundam or Char’s Counterattack with the more playful instrumentation of the original Gundam, and that score made up for a lot of the show’s visual limitations. The same holds true for Freedom. This soundtrack doesn’t sound one bit like a score you would hear anywhere else in 2024, but it’s fantastic, maybe even better than the original SEED scores. We also get new opening and ending theme songs from the artists responsible for the original SEED themes – Takanori Nishikawa of T.M. Revolution and Chiaki Ishikawa of See-Saw, with the great Yuki Kajiura penning the lyrics for the closing theme – and when it comes time to break out a certain beloved insert song from the original series, well, let’s just say Freedom very much delivers the goods.
As I said at the top, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom took a little bit of time for me to warm up to; its plot probably takes a bit too long to fully kick in, its animation is a mixed bag, and it simply doesn’t move, look, or sound like anything else out there right now, a film displaced in time. By the end, I felt like most of those qualities were features, not bugs. Perhaps the highest praise I can give Freedom is that it made me viscerally remember why I loved the original Gundam SEED; it gives this story a new life, creatively redeems this world and these characters after the mess of Destiny, and brings everything to a much, much better conclusion than we got back in 2005. Of the recent spate of Gundam movies, Freedom is probably the most imperfect, but in the end it feels essential, satisfyingly closing the book on one of the most important chapters in Gundam history. This is about as true a case of “better late than never” as I can imagine.
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