Gatchaman Crowds

Another short anime in a high-tech world with fast action. There’s a special place in my heart for anime like this. Let’s have a little chat about Gatchaman Crowds!

As I jam the intro music by White Ash, I feel uplifted by this anime’s encouraging message to question the rules when it counts cause it’s delivered on almost every episode of this series. That’s the craziness our main protagonist Hajime Ichinose spends this entire anime pounding into everyone she meets.

The comedy and this whole story start when JJ (apparently a God figure of this anime) selects her to be a part of his team, Earth’s defenders a.k.a Gatchaman. The Gatchaman find themselves with mixed feelings towards their new member and her questioning of their rules. It’s fun to some and annoying to others like Sugane. Who finds himself, two-seconds from “choking a b****” (in my Wayne Brady voice) almost every episode when Ichinose literally shatters another one of the teams rules in grand fashion. 😆 Alright, enough spoiling the story. Let’s get into some other details.

Sugane, Ichinose, Joe

The artwork is ok for the world and characters when they’re not fighting but when it comes to the Gatchaman transformations, its goes up to another level. I love the different battle forms for each member and the action was just enough to understand there different abilities. OD, Jou-san, and Pai-Pai’s forms are my favs. Oddly, enough I liked the villan Berg-Katze’s battle form too which you don’t see till close to the end.

With the anime having only 12 episodes to work with, you can imagine the action got started pretty quickly and you know I love it like that. However, I still felt this anime needed a few more episodes to really get a good look at each member’s abilities especially OD’s, and Pai’s. I truly enjoyed the beautiful colors and animations of the weapons such as Ichinose cutters, OD’s wings, and Katze’s guitar to name a few.

At the title states, this is Gatchaman Crowds but what is “Crowds” exactly? I won’t go into too much detail about it but the program that allows one to summon the power of the “Crowds” is what makes this anime so interesting to me. It’s called Galax and it’s literally the most awesome concept for a social network I’ve ever seen (at least to me). I can actually see this being the true future of the internet as it gives the users what I call a “real-life” connection to each other digitally. When someone gets hurt, the Galax users in the area get a memo and those nearby who have the appropriate expertise to help get a message that their assistance is needed. Then they can rush to the scene to help voluntarily if they wish. It’s absolutely brilliant as my UK people would say.

In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t said too many bad things about this anime and that’s probably because this is my 1st experience with the Gatchaman series. I really liked it but fans of the original series going all the way back (this is the 5th installment) to the 1972 original are not big fans of it but such is anime when it’s still loved and produced after so long. I recommend you check this one out and enjoy Berg-Katze teasing as he beats the crap out these people so beautifully. Cue my evil laughter! 👿