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Godannar
Anime DVD Review
It's the ultimate marriage of boy, girl and robot. Literally.
Just as Dannar pilot Goh is about to march down the aisle, he's summoned into battle, but he's not going alone! His wife Anna joins the fight, and if they can mate their robots' interlocking parts, they'll form Godanner! What a totally wacky honeymoon this turns out to be!
Godannar puts a brand-new spin on the tried and true giant robot formula to create something that feels fresh and exciting. And trust us, no expense was spared to make this series absolutely rock — it looks fabulous and the animation is smooth and colorfully designed, with marvelous background art to match. Action fans will delight, and due to some completely inappropriate costume designs for the women there's a decent amount of fan-service as well.
The series is simply stunning to look at. For a television series, the production value is well above par, and while the ample bouncing bosoms can sometimes get distracting, the series handles everything as tongue-in-cheek, never taking itself very seriously, and yet, as an action series it still manages to have a fairly deep plot — but some people may never even notice as the level of action keeps the pace of the series moving at breakneck speed.
 Because of the above-par direction, or perhaps in spite of it, the series manages to poke fun at anime concepts, particularly because it eschews the "logical robot" direction most anime is going in, where the robot appears to be a logical piece of military hardware, and instead, harkens back to the days when robots made no sense at all and just seemed to be overdone killing machines meant to bash huge monsters with blazing swords. Well here, it's overdone with style and wit.
The series also cleverly pokes fun at fan service, again, by over-doing it, where no movement of a female character isn't without chest-bounce. In fact, just about everything about this anime series seems to be about excess, and trust us when we say that bigger is better. At no point does the pandering feel like pandering because the whole thing is handled so skillfully.
In the end, it's simply a big fun romp, with scads of style and armloads of humor, thrown at you with the force of a tsunami, at a pace so quick you'll need to go back and watch frame-by-frame. As monster-smashing giant robots go, this is clearly one of the best of the bunch, but please, don't take it seriously, as the whole thing is meant to be a joke.
Reviewed by Brian Cirulnick, November 2007
Below: Promotional artwork for Godannar.
Below: Character design sheets for Godannar.
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