The lead male character, young Cosmo, distinguished by the red "afro" hairstyle he sports, is an older, less conflicted character than Gundam's Amuro Ray. Still, as a fan of 1980s anime, I enjoyed watching the transforming mecha, the massive space ships, and constant flurry of explosive battles in space. In IDEON, a lot of context is removed and it's clear that huge chunks of plot are missing. The movie suffers from having to condense so much into 85 minutes, unlike the Gundam movies which had well over six hours of running time in total to play with. "Ideon" is basically just another giant robot shoot-em-up in space, although done with great skill and design. There are so many similarities between the two series that it's easy to dismiss this as a watered-down rehash of "Gundam," which offered more complexity, more attention to character development and more of a challenging narrative. Like "Gundam," "Ideon" was created and directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino and deals with a giant robotic fighting vehicle piloted by young people to defend their society from human attackers from another planet. It follows the model established by "Mobile Suit Gundam" (1979) which turned its 43 episodes into three movies, each over two hours. It includes some footage newly created just for the movie to help smooth over transitions between story arcs. THE IDEON: A CONTACT (1982) is a compilation movie condensing events from the first 32 episodes of the 39-episode Japanese animated TV series, "Space Runaway Ideon" (1980).
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