Space Runaway Ideon - Opening Theme
Both sides learn very early on that both the earthlings and the Buff Clan are human; literally, they are the exact same species only from different home worlds somehow. In spite of this, the Buff Clan are relentless in pursuing the “Solo Ship” the space ship that houses the “Giant God” and an elaborate game of cat and mouse across the stars begins. The crew of the Solo ship use the Ideon (The Giant God) to defend themselves and the more they use the giant robot the more they learn how insanely powerful it’s abilities are.
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| The Ideon firing tens of thousands of missiles all at once. |
Of course it is much easier to feel the growing tension of war and feelings of terror when we have characters to relate to and Tomino deliveries with great characters in “Space Runaway Ideaon.”
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| Yuki Cosmo |
In fact Cosmo has a lot in common with Amuro. They are both approximately the same age, both are hot headed and need to grow up, and both do this with the backdrop of grandiose epic war in space where they are responsible for piloting the most powerful weapon on the battlefield. Both are naturally talent for commanding machinery, both are mechanically inclined, both are brave and strong young men.
However Cosmo is a fun main character because he surprises us in various was. First of all that hair, even during the eighties when this show came out giving anyone a orange afro would diminish our ability to take them seriously, it takes daring to give your main character hair like that, but Tomino did. Cosmo’s hair is one of the those things that is funny the first few times you see it, then you just get used to it, and Cosmo would not be the same with a different hair do. Also Tomino lets Cosmo be a little more bold and capable than other young male protagonists at the start. At the start of “Space Runaway Ideon” Cosmo is standing up to adults, holding his ground against them both intellectually and physically. He wins arguments against scientist and military officers and quickly establishes himself not only as the logical choice for piloting the Ideon but also as useful warrior outside the giant robot.
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| Kasha Imhof |
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| Jorden Bes |
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| Moera Fatima |
It should be noted that even though Bes pilots the third part of the Ideon initially during the Buff Clan attack he rarely pilots it again after that. As commander his responsibilities force him to commander the Solo ship during future battles. The third pilot of the Ideon for the majority of the series Moera Fatima. While Fatima does get a solid amount of character development over the course of the series he is just not as interesting as other characters we need to talk about.
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| Sheryl Formosa |
During Bes’s introduction he in highly confrontational towards the scientist Sheryl Formosa. Sheryl in many ways is the opposite of Bes. She is knowledgeable and highly intelligent; however she lacks charisma and daring. Sheryl is brave though, in fact she is reckless at times in her pursuit of knowledge and she never backs down to anyone. When Bes and her first meet this wonderful bit of dialogue occurs:
“You bitch!”
“My name is Sheryl Formosa, not ‘you bitch.’”
And here is a fun fact, Sheryl kind of is a bitch, but that is what I like about her. She makes some poor choices at times, other times she is right on the money and knows exactly what she is talking about. It makes for a great dynamic between her and Bes, Bes is bold and brave but ignorant towards the mysterious of the Ideon and Sheryl is smart and logical but untrusting and both are belligerent. Both also see the value of the other. They never really get along Bes and Sheryl but they show each other respect casually and passively multiple times throughout the series. Bes knows Sheryl is valuable because they need to unravel the mysteries of the Ideaon and Sheryl knows it is Bes’s military leadership getting them out victorious and alive from the many Buff Clan attacks.
One last character I want to mention is Karala. As mentioned earlier she is the daughter of the Buff Clan’s military leader and she comes to Solo to investigate the Giant God. Karala is important for two reasons. First she is a major plot device as she is the bridge of peace between our two people. She volunteers herself as a hostage to the Solo ship and makes every effort to show the earthlings that the Buff Clan can be reached for peace and also extends this message to her own people over and over again. She is a wonderful caring person who puts herself at insane risk for the betterment of all people. Also she is beautiful.
Karala is a cartoon character, as such her beauty ends up being even more subjective than a flesh and blood woman’s attractive qualities. In live action TV shows and movies you can convey to the audience rather easily is someone is attractive by simply casting an attractive actor, but even then people don’t always agree on what is sexy. I never understood why so many people thought Megan Fox was so hot, and I don’t expect everyone to understand my attraction to say, Sara Quin, but at least a visual effort can be made fairly easily in live action productions. The same is not as easy to accomplish in an animated feature. Yes, they can draw a woman or man is a certain way to appeal to our sexual sensibilities like Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or Holi Would (Cool World) but both of those examples are deliberate exaggerations almost to the point of comedy, or perhaps literally to the point of comedy. When creating a serious effort in animation some sense of consistency needs to be kept, meaning you cannot have one character have exaggerated features to showcase femininity or masculinity while others look reasonably realistic. You can see how this might be difficult, in fact the most difficult aspect of illustrated art most artist struggle with is variety of physical characteristics between characters. This is why all women look alike is so many comic books and cartoons, but you will notice that this is also why so many men look alike in so many comic books and cartoons.
“Space Runaway Ideon” has a very good art direction that allows for variety. Perhaps this is way Cosmo as an eccentric hair cut. This artistic talent is best on display in regards to the character Karala. She doesn’t look that much different than other female characters at a glance but you immediately identify her as a good looking woman. She is drawn with a glow about her. Her hair dark, light complexion and bright blues eyes create contrast that emphasises her other subtle features, the slenderness of her face, the large size of her eyes and the brightness of her color. Most people probably did not pick up on this, only you did pick up on it, you just did not realize it. This effect only works because Karala is the only person in the entire show to have these exact features which allows her image to stand out to us, also her appearance slowly becomes one of the more memorable ones.
But artistic ingenuity is not the only giveaway to the viewer that Karala is beautiful, there is also the way other characters act around her. Gije is initially obsessed with Karala, and while his overzealous loyalty does stem from a sense of duty it is also quite obvious that is he infatuated with her. In one of the earlier episodes Karala poses as a Solo refugee and gets a ride from two men. There is a brief moment when they are driving and both men are staring at her with smiles on their faces, no attention is drawn to this, but it is suggestive. When Karala first meets Bes there is some appropriate flirting. Men take notice of Karala in realistic ways over the course of the story, the writing does not beat into us that Karala is beautiful but passively suggests to us at irregular intervals that this is the case, and as viewers our brains pick up on this without even realising it.
Combine all this with the fact that Karala is a space princess and a wonderful human being and you have a very attractive and alluring character. Even if you do not find Karala particularly attractive yourself (I don’t she is a cartoon character) it is easy to understand why characters in “Space Runaway Ideaon” do. I just spent four paragraphs talking about Karala, I guess I really liked the character, everything about her. I like the way she was presented to us. I liked her goals in the story, and was rooting for her the whole time. I like what she represented to the story and how important of a plot device she was both literally and metaphorically. Basically Karala was a perfect character.
Still my favorite character was Cosmo, that kid had huge balls.
So to summarize “Space Runaway Ideon” is a fantastically well written story, with awesome characters, and deep symbolism throughout. Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers, and I mean right now!
In “Space Runaway Ideon” everyone dies.
And I fucking mean everyone! Everyone dies! Everything dies! All of creation is destroyed in the end! This is the series that earned Yoshiyuki Tomino the moniker of “Kill Them All.”
When I told you earlier that there is a powerful sense of escalating tension in this series, and as the story unfolds the greater the discomfort the crew of Solo ship have towards the Ideon becomes, and the danger levels in your brain rise and rise until you are freaking out while watching this anime. It is not like the end comes out of nowhere either we slowly crawl towards a Armageddon ending so when it does finally arrive you feel like “oh man we messed up. But I don’t blame us. We tried.”
In a way it is almost better to know this going into the series. Knowing that the end to this series is so impossibly tragic really lets you embrace this escalation of the plot. The war constantly worsens, the grudges between people constantly grow, and the horror of wars and the Ideon endlessly escalate. Not to over use the word but escalation is the perfect description for this series. Just when you think things cannot possibly get any worse, everyone dies. Not all at once, the battles rages and people are slowly shot down, blown up, or crushed. Then in one final blaze of rage and glory the Ideon unleashes it’s most powerful weapon and all of creation is destroyed. You might think that a robot destroying all of reality seems like a silly exaggeration of its power, but you would be wrong, wrong for two reasons. First there is the escalation factor, we see new powers of the Ideon all the time and the power of Ideon is being realized gradually and eventually the only logical step remaining is a universe ending doomsday attack. Second the plot twist.
There is something else that helps make the Ideon’s power believable, the unspoken and unexplained plot twist at the very end. The end is a flash of light and everything in existence ending, and the souls of our dead characters flying away in space to a new world to start again. It is a “what the fuck ending,” and many people are rightfully confused by it. This ending makes very little sense unless of course you understand the plot twist; the Ideon is god.
The Ideon is god and we used god’s power to fight a war. We messed up.
We kept using god’s power to protect ourselves and the more we used this power the more was revealed to us how unbelievable and terrifying god’s power is. In the end, in our darkest moments when our hero Cosmos is one of the only characters still alive and still fighting when the Ideon is struck at point blank range with a cannon that unleashes the full power of the sun (oh by the way they destroy the sun in the final battle) the Ideon finally wakes up and makes a judgement; human kind has failed. We have failed in the eyes of god and he destroys everything. Literally fucking everything!
Knowing this, the tension through the series, the escalating discomfort, the growing feuds between earthlings and Buff Clan, everything about “Space Runaway Ideon” makes perfect sense. It is brilliant really. Every crazy aspect of the show, every seemingly impossible abuse of science fiction, every convenient plot devise, every unlikely occurrence is explained in one unspoken plot development, the Ideon is god.
My mind is blown.
It is not that difficult to compare characters and plot structure between “Mobile Suit Gundam” and “Space Runaway Ideon” they have a lot in common, but then again Tomino has a lot of reoccurring themes and plot devices he likes to use throughout all his work. In the example of “Space Runaway Ideon” we see something bold from Tomino, we see an uncompromised ending of total finality. We see a disregard towards explaining the far out conclusion. We see a sadness that would not be repeated in Tomino until some of his later work in the Gundam series. It is safe to say that Tomino was very depressed when creating “Space Runaway Ideon.” The man hated writing sequels and it is often joked that by killing off the main characters he could get out of writing one, and I suspect there is some truth to that, but I feel there is something more to “Space Runaway Ideon’s” bleak ending. When dealing with the philosophical issues of cosmic war, something Tomino wrote at length about, there remained only one possible exaggeration, the destruction of the universe whole sale. If I had any recommendation on how to improve “Space Runaway Ideon” it would be only two things, two subtle things that when included would have invoked the viewers. Before destroy everything the Ideon should have spoke, it should have pronounced one word loudly “judgement.” And then after everything, maybe even after the credits we should have seen the Ideon completely restored and acting on its own it would venture to a far away planet and rebury itself, waiting for human kind to find it again.
It is highly suggestive by the ending that this is not the first time human kind has failed in the eyes of god, the Ideon that is, and there is every reason to think that when human kind rebuilds itself that is will find the Ideon again and maybe this time we will use the power of the Ideon for peace instead of war, or perhaps we will be wary of such power and respect the Ideon and leave it be.
A lot of people will not watch “Space Runaway Ideon” because of the very dark themes and very bleak ending but there is a very bright silver lining, because there is hope. Human kind will try again and again and eventually we will find cosmic peace with ourselves; it is an unavoidable eventuality. As I stated before when the terrible end finally arrives there are feelings of failure, utter failure on the part of our species, but as viewers we understand. We did not fail because humans are stupid and evil, there was a solid effort made by many characters to end this war peacefully. There were many acts of violence motivated by extreme fear that it was impossible not to empathize with. By the end when Cosmo swears uncompromised vengeance on the Buff Clan and abuses the power of the Ideon to destroy them, I was rooting for him. These mother fuckers couldn’t just leave the Solo ship alone, and by this point not only have we lost the vast majority of characters plus countless soldiers and civilians (like billions) but Earth is destroyed and so is the Buff Clan’s home world and other inhabited worlds, also the sun is destroyed. At that point the only thing left for Cosmo to do was fight for revenge.
So yeah, the human race failed, we made one too many mistakes and it ESCALATED to a dark conclusion.
But we might make it work next time.
There is hope, and not some small hope, but grand brilliant hope. We very nearly prevented our destruction multiple times during the events of “Space Runaway Ideon” and everyone dies with some knowledge of the choices they made were not perfect. I would love, just love for Tomino to write a short sequel where human kind succeeds where we failed before with Ideon, and I do not want it to be easy. I want the same tension, the same escalation but in the last moments something clicks in the minds of our heroes and they realize human kind has been here before and in a very courageous moment we reach out to each other and find a way to live in love and peace, our true nature.
There is so much to take in from “Space Runaway Ideon” it is one of the deepest pieces of fictional philosophy ever produced in cartoon format. I loved this anime, it was dark yet hopeful, and everything about it is very powerful.
Be invoked.
“You bitch!”
“My name is Sheryl Formosa, not ‘you bitch.’”
And here is a fun fact, Sheryl kind of is a bitch, but that is what I like about her. She makes some poor choices at times, other times she is right on the money and knows exactly what she is talking about. It makes for a great dynamic between her and Bes, Bes is bold and brave but ignorant towards the mysterious of the Ideon and Sheryl is smart and logical but untrusting and both are belligerent. Both also see the value of the other. They never really get along Bes and Sheryl but they show each other respect casually and passively multiple times throughout the series. Bes knows Sheryl is valuable because they need to unravel the mysteries of the Ideaon and Sheryl knows it is Bes’s military leadership getting them out victorious and alive from the many Buff Clan attacks.
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| Karala Ajiba |
Karala is a cartoon character, as such her beauty ends up being even more subjective than a flesh and blood woman’s attractive qualities. In live action TV shows and movies you can convey to the audience rather easily is someone is attractive by simply casting an attractive actor, but even then people don’t always agree on what is sexy. I never understood why so many people thought Megan Fox was so hot, and I don’t expect everyone to understand my attraction to say, Sara Quin, but at least a visual effort can be made fairly easily in live action productions. The same is not as easy to accomplish in an animated feature. Yes, they can draw a woman or man is a certain way to appeal to our sexual sensibilities like Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or Holi Would (Cool World) but both of those examples are deliberate exaggerations almost to the point of comedy, or perhaps literally to the point of comedy. When creating a serious effort in animation some sense of consistency needs to be kept, meaning you cannot have one character have exaggerated features to showcase femininity or masculinity while others look reasonably realistic. You can see how this might be difficult, in fact the most difficult aspect of illustrated art most artist struggle with is variety of physical characteristics between characters. This is why all women look alike is so many comic books and cartoons, but you will notice that this is also why so many men look alike in so many comic books and cartoons.
But artistic ingenuity is not the only giveaway to the viewer that Karala is beautiful, there is also the way other characters act around her. Gije is initially obsessed with Karala, and while his overzealous loyalty does stem from a sense of duty it is also quite obvious that is he infatuated with her. In one of the earlier episodes Karala poses as a Solo refugee and gets a ride from two men. There is a brief moment when they are driving and both men are staring at her with smiles on their faces, no attention is drawn to this, but it is suggestive. When Karala first meets Bes there is some appropriate flirting. Men take notice of Karala in realistic ways over the course of the story, the writing does not beat into us that Karala is beautiful but passively suggests to us at irregular intervals that this is the case, and as viewers our brains pick up on this without even realising it.
Combine all this with the fact that Karala is a space princess and a wonderful human being and you have a very attractive and alluring character. Even if you do not find Karala particularly attractive yourself (I don’t she is a cartoon character) it is easy to understand why characters in “Space Runaway Ideaon” do. I just spent four paragraphs talking about Karala, I guess I really liked the character, everything about her. I like the way she was presented to us. I liked her goals in the story, and was rooting for her the whole time. I like what she represented to the story and how important of a plot device she was both literally and metaphorically. Basically Karala was a perfect character.
Still my favorite character was Cosmo, that kid had huge balls.
So to summarize “Space Runaway Ideon” is a fantastically well written story, with awesome characters, and deep symbolism throughout. Stop reading now if you don’t want spoilers, and I mean right now!
In “Space Runaway Ideon” everyone dies.
And I fucking mean everyone! Everyone dies! Everything dies! All of creation is destroyed in the end! This is the series that earned Yoshiyuki Tomino the moniker of “Kill Them All.”
When I told you earlier that there is a powerful sense of escalating tension in this series, and as the story unfolds the greater the discomfort the crew of Solo ship have towards the Ideon becomes, and the danger levels in your brain rise and rise until you are freaking out while watching this anime. It is not like the end comes out of nowhere either we slowly crawl towards a Armageddon ending so when it does finally arrive you feel like “oh man we messed up. But I don’t blame us. We tried.”
In a way it is almost better to know this going into the series. Knowing that the end to this series is so impossibly tragic really lets you embrace this escalation of the plot. The war constantly worsens, the grudges between people constantly grow, and the horror of wars and the Ideon endlessly escalate. Not to over use the word but escalation is the perfect description for this series. Just when you think things cannot possibly get any worse, everyone dies. Not all at once, the battles rages and people are slowly shot down, blown up, or crushed. Then in one final blaze of rage and glory the Ideon unleashes it’s most powerful weapon and all of creation is destroyed. You might think that a robot destroying all of reality seems like a silly exaggeration of its power, but you would be wrong, wrong for two reasons. First there is the escalation factor, we see new powers of the Ideon all the time and the power of Ideon is being realized gradually and eventually the only logical step remaining is a universe ending doomsday attack. Second the plot twist.
There is something else that helps make the Ideon’s power believable, the unspoken and unexplained plot twist at the very end. The end is a flash of light and everything in existence ending, and the souls of our dead characters flying away in space to a new world to start again. It is a “what the fuck ending,” and many people are rightfully confused by it. This ending makes very little sense unless of course you understand the plot twist; the Ideon is god.
The Ideon is god and we used god’s power to fight a war. We messed up.
We kept using god’s power to protect ourselves and the more we used this power the more was revealed to us how unbelievable and terrifying god’s power is. In the end, in our darkest moments when our hero Cosmos is one of the only characters still alive and still fighting when the Ideon is struck at point blank range with a cannon that unleashes the full power of the sun (oh by the way they destroy the sun in the final battle) the Ideon finally wakes up and makes a judgement; human kind has failed. We have failed in the eyes of god and he destroys everything. Literally fucking everything!
Knowing this, the tension through the series, the escalating discomfort, the growing feuds between earthlings and Buff Clan, everything about “Space Runaway Ideon” makes perfect sense. It is brilliant really. Every crazy aspect of the show, every seemingly impossible abuse of science fiction, every convenient plot devise, every unlikely occurrence is explained in one unspoken plot development, the Ideon is god.
My mind is blown.
It is not that difficult to compare characters and plot structure between “Mobile Suit Gundam” and “Space Runaway Ideon” they have a lot in common, but then again Tomino has a lot of reoccurring themes and plot devices he likes to use throughout all his work. In the example of “Space Runaway Ideon” we see something bold from Tomino, we see an uncompromised ending of total finality. We see a disregard towards explaining the far out conclusion. We see a sadness that would not be repeated in Tomino until some of his later work in the Gundam series. It is safe to say that Tomino was very depressed when creating “Space Runaway Ideon.” The man hated writing sequels and it is often joked that by killing off the main characters he could get out of writing one, and I suspect there is some truth to that, but I feel there is something more to “Space Runaway Ideon’s” bleak ending. When dealing with the philosophical issues of cosmic war, something Tomino wrote at length about, there remained only one possible exaggeration, the destruction of the universe whole sale. If I had any recommendation on how to improve “Space Runaway Ideon” it would be only two things, two subtle things that when included would have invoked the viewers. Before destroy everything the Ideon should have spoke, it should have pronounced one word loudly “judgement.” And then after everything, maybe even after the credits we should have seen the Ideon completely restored and acting on its own it would venture to a far away planet and rebury itself, waiting for human kind to find it again.
It is highly suggestive by the ending that this is not the first time human kind has failed in the eyes of god, the Ideon that is, and there is every reason to think that when human kind rebuilds itself that is will find the Ideon again and maybe this time we will use the power of the Ideon for peace instead of war, or perhaps we will be wary of such power and respect the Ideon and leave it be.
A lot of people will not watch “Space Runaway Ideon” because of the very dark themes and very bleak ending but there is a very bright silver lining, because there is hope. Human kind will try again and again and eventually we will find cosmic peace with ourselves; it is an unavoidable eventuality. As I stated before when the terrible end finally arrives there are feelings of failure, utter failure on the part of our species, but as viewers we understand. We did not fail because humans are stupid and evil, there was a solid effort made by many characters to end this war peacefully. There were many acts of violence motivated by extreme fear that it was impossible not to empathize with. By the end when Cosmo swears uncompromised vengeance on the Buff Clan and abuses the power of the Ideon to destroy them, I was rooting for him. These mother fuckers couldn’t just leave the Solo ship alone, and by this point not only have we lost the vast majority of characters plus countless soldiers and civilians (like billions) but Earth is destroyed and so is the Buff Clan’s home world and other inhabited worlds, also the sun is destroyed. At that point the only thing left for Cosmo to do was fight for revenge.
So yeah, the human race failed, we made one too many mistakes and it ESCALATED to a dark conclusion.
But we might make it work next time.
There is hope, and not some small hope, but grand brilliant hope. We very nearly prevented our destruction multiple times during the events of “Space Runaway Ideon” and everyone dies with some knowledge of the choices they made were not perfect. I would love, just love for Tomino to write a short sequel where human kind succeeds where we failed before with Ideon, and I do not want it to be easy. I want the same tension, the same escalation but in the last moments something clicks in the minds of our heroes and they realize human kind has been here before and in a very courageous moment we reach out to each other and find a way to live in love and peace, our true nature.
There is so much to take in from “Space Runaway Ideon” it is one of the deepest pieces of fictional philosophy ever produced in cartoon format. I loved this anime, it was dark yet hopeful, and everything about it is very powerful.
Be invoked.
