I just don't seem to be able to wrap my head around this anime and the ideas of the people at Gainax behind making it...
It seems almost like what Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill, which is a throwback to something that was mildly popular back in the 70s. Gurren Lagann seems to do the same thing, as in copying the over-the-top style and cheesy writing from the mecha anime from those days. Or they made a parody on that exact same thing by going even further into it then they did back in the 70s.
I'll admit straight away that this type of anime is not my style, especially since I'm someone that loves an anime with a great story, which is something that seems to be put into this anime as an afterthought to fill in the few seconds in between the senseless battles and fanservice.
I'll give a rundown of the scores, as I usually do.
Story: 2
There is something of a story put into this anime, but it's far from original, full of plot holes and succeeding in making as little sense as possible. The story is mainly used to drive the main characters from fight A to fight B while occasionally stopping for some fanservice. It's definitely not used to explain the events of the story, and when they try to do that it fails miserably and leaves holes in the plot large enough to fly a spaceship through.
Art: 6
It's decent to look at, although it does have quite a few repeated scenes (some even to the point of being nauseating) that are shown and reshown in several episodes. I also felt that the inclusion of "manga" style images broke the flow.
However even if the art was decent to look at the amount of cheesiness that it threw at the screen was so far over-the-top that it made me want to go and do something else that didn't include have to watch this anime, even Dragonball GT seems to be preferable over this at times...
The style of the art seems modern but the way in which it's used is fit for an anime from 30 years ago.
Sound: 6
It's decent, but like the art and the story very cheesy. The screaming out of a character's name during a death scene is SO overused, done to death and over the top that it really should become punishable by death to use it.
Characters: 2
What can I say... They are shallow, have very little character development, many seem to be included for the sole purpose of fanservice or comic relief and the amount of cliché character traits is as over-the-top as the rest of the anime.
We've got the whiny spineless emo teenager, the "I'm so cool that I'm gonna die halfway though the series" guy, the bigbreasted airhead, the faceless nameless enemy that's as 2 dimensional as can be, and so forth, and so forth.
The character design and character development are practically the worst I've ever seen.
Enjoyment: 4
Yeah, it was a load of fun action topped off with fanservice, atleast if you don't mind an almost complete lack of a coherent story and got plenty of crackers to scoop up the cheese with.
Overall: 5
It's a bit of fun, looks nice, sounds kinda nice but trips over it's own plot holes.
2 dimensional stock characters with hardly any development going on and a shaky over-the-top lack of a storyline.
In my opinion mediocre at best, which is something that Gainax seems to be specializing in lately.
