[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 1 - “AWAKENING”



Toku should be for the young.

I’m old, obviously, and I like toku, but it shouldn’t be for me. It needs to speak to children – it needs to address their concerns, argue for their futures, and provide them the road map to survive their adolescence. If there’s a universality to that experience that echoes into adulthood, or a secondary payload for adults, all the better. But the use for toku is for the young.

So I loved this first episode of Gridman, and how it takes the signifiers of nostalgia and history – the Junk Shop, the retro computer, Gridman’s corny statements about callings that don’t impart any useful or tangible information – and hands them over to a new generation, and allows them to do whatever they want with them. It’s a rejection of nostalgia as something that targets a pointless audience, and instead takes the value of the past as only something that the future can give it. These kids don’t know what Gridman is, or why it should matter, so they get to decide in what ways it might matter. It’s a show from their point of view, with the entirety of their world being the scope of the story.

That was great, how hyper (agent) focused it was on these kids, their connections. The best sequence in the episode for me was the jittery editing of the Rikka/Yuta amnesia chat in the Junk Shop. (A protagonist with narratively convenient amnesia? It’s like I never left!) It leverages the flexibility of anime pacing – this episode’s lousy with languid establishing shots, frozen reaction shots, jump cuts – to bind Rikka and Yuta together into this one brain that is as equally annoyed by his amnesia as it is committed to keeping him tethered to the world. There’s no help coming from adults (Rikka’s mom’s two moves are leaving a scene, and asking the kids to leave a scene), so we’re left with kids sort of wandering around, navigating a world that’s shrouded in mist and unanswered questions. Again, the meanings are up to them.

It’s a really good vibe. I like these kids. I like how they’re amiable, and the right amount of idiosyncratic. There’s for sure more to come in each of their backstories (Akane feels slightly too weird to just be a weird kid in school) and tons of mystery to be explored (the school’s just back at the end?!), but this episode really only works if you want to hang out with Yuta, Utsumi, and Rikka, and I totally did. Yuta’s amnesia acts as a fun way to introduce the cast, and his chemistry with Rikka (charmingly inept) and Utsumi (co-conspirator) creates a really strong base to push the main story forward – the climax of this one needs you to buy not only that Yuta would get in the Hyper Agent, but that Rikka and Utsumi would try to help him defeat the kaiju, and I completely bought it. I bought that these three kids would puzzle their way through to saving their town, and that they could do it without subsuming themselves into toku mythology and signifiers. They did it as/for a bunch of kids.

I like that this show took an old thing, and handed it over to a bunch of kids to figure out what it was, and what they should do with it. Perfect choice, and a great start.