Shin Mazinger's Epic Ancient Classical Art Style

Now that I’m an art college student, I’ve learned a bunch of boring, shitty modern art terms as well as a bunch of awesome, badass ancient art terms. Watching the first six episodes of Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-Hen On Television (don’t worry, I’ll finish it soon!) brought to mind some of these classic, epic stylings.

In ancient times, all the stories worth telling were about a parade of badasses. We had ‘epics’ – stories about men of unbelievable power, the gods that were on their side, and the women they laid with. Taking a cue from those ancient stories, the word ‘epic’ is used nowadays, especially in the last few years, to describe something that is just a bit too awesome to simply be called ‘awesome’. There are a number of anime that can be safely called ‘epic’ (Gurren Lagann has been said to parallel the Epic of Gilgamesh, even), however, Shin Mazinger is possibly trying the hardest to be spot-on with that definition. Let’s look at some of the ways…

1. The Gods Are On Your Side

In ancient stories and art, the gods were pretty much ever-present. Take Egypt, where everything managed to come back to Horus and Osiris, the supreme gods – or the Ilyad, which has as much to do with warring gods as warring men. Shin Mazinger continues this trend with great purpose, actually having the Greek god, Zeus, as a character, as well as the representation of Mazinger Z itself. Like a pharoah or ancient king, Mazinger Z is considered the ruler of robots because it IS God. And like an ancient God, it kicks ass.

2. Hieratic Scale

Okay, so it’s commonly considered that the biggest thing is the most badass. The theme of the King being way bigger than everyone else continues today (see Code Geass). We can even see in Gurren Lagann where the increasing size of the hero’s robot more or less marked the plot’s progression.  However, Shin Mazinger is willing to put hieratic scale past the boundaries of reason. The badass enemies control the biggest armies, sure, but Doctor Hell’s the most notable example – he somehow can project his body to be the size of a fucking mountain, for no other reason than to completely assure the viewer that he is THE definitive Big Bad villain.

3. Complete Disregard For Realism

Before we got all these people demanding realism from stories, what was really important to a tale was it’s level of awesomeness. I mean, which would you rather read – a cookie-cutter war story about imperial expansion (truth of the Trojan war?) or an epic tale of a ten-year war fought over a beautiful woman involving badasses and pissed-off gods? (the Ilyad as it is known.) If you said the former, you are boring. No one cares about historical accuracy! Valkyrie was a boring movie because all of it’s dramatic tension wasn’t the changing the fact that Hitler was going to live – meanwhile, Inglourious Baterds was awesome because it said ‘Fuck history, Nazis gunna die!’ (but I digress…)

Mazinger destroys all semblance of reality in the name of awesome. The bad guys include a headless dude, a half-man-half-woman, and a guy whose base is in some kind of parallel world of nothing but giant gears. The good guys have motherfucking Zeus. Characters can talk to each-other from thousands of feet away, because dramatic tension is more important than reality. Every high school gangster in Japan can congregate just so that we learn how awesome Kouji is when he hands the leader his ass. This isn’t a show where the reasons for things are pseudo-logically explained by science fiction; everything is just Fueled By Awesome.

The Man Himself - Yasuhiro Imagawa

4. The Legendary Poet

Part of what makes the Ilyad and the Odyssey so legendary is that they were introduced to the world as insanely long orally-retained poems by a blind guy named Homer. How badass do you have to be to create TWO epics, when you don’t even have sight?

Oh, but Shin Mazinger has quite the legendary background. The Mazinger series was created by the legendary Go Nagai, who is one of the most influential manga artists of all time, who practically created some of the most common genres of anime. Then we have the director of the show itself, Yasuhiro Imagawa, renowned for directing some of the greatest Super Robot anime of all time, namely Giant Robo and Mobile Fighter G Gundam. And, like Homer lacking sight, Imagawa creates masterpieces on the tiniest animation budgets. The combination of these epic forces can surely be called a legendary production.

Shin Mazinger is a brilliant show in that it is a piece of art that seeks to tell it’s story in the way that is most entertaining and awesome without being held back by modern ideas of realism and depth of plot. Truly a stylized classic.