Random Drabbles Of A Mecha Fanboy

Not content to sell existing products, the Good Smile Company and Lindenfilms are teaming to present Dandivine, the first installment of the “God of Combined” series, a planned yearly series of mecha anime akin to the Braves.

And everyone is getting on selling the toys, including Takara.

The first thing of note is that so far we don’t know much of anything about the production, just that we have a showrunner, Joe Henderson, most famous for Lucifer, but also the Stephen King miniseries 11/22/63. He is apparently a regular collaborator with Image Comics and made two comics with them, Shadecraft and Skyward, to the point he got a blurb on their website, even if right now it’s outdated.

That’s what we do know. Everything else is a mystery so far, including who is actually going to animate the thing.

So why bring up the animation? Well, long time Transformers fanboys Studio Trigger of Gurren Lagann, SSSS.Gridman, Promare, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, and Panty and Stocking fame are having a panel at Anime Expo on July 4, where they will be announcing “our new flagship show” (on top of news for Cyberpunk Edgerunners II and the new season of Delicious in Dungeon). While a long shot, many people immediately began speculating that this could be an announcement that they were animating the Energon Universe show, which would not only be a huge visual boost to the show, but would provide an immense amount of hype given that Trigger’s staff are well known as being huge fans of Transformers including making a 40th anniversary short for the franchise.

Still, we must note that Trigger probably is a long shot given how in demand they are. The most likely candidate for animation is Robert Kirkman’s in-house animation studio, Skybound Animation.

Yeah, that is the reaction I expect if it is Skybound Animation. Since being founded to produce Invincible (taking over for Canadian studio Wind Sun Sky) Skybound Animation has gathered a reputation for being overworked, underfunded, understaffed (with at one point a worker claiming only a staff of four was working on the yearly Invincible seasons), and at one point nearly causing a major international incident when they outsourced production of the season to the infamous SEK Studios in North Korea (which they deny doing purposefully). The end result is subpar animation that is the frequent subject of mockery. So yeah, not a great place to work, and one whose output has been constantly mocked and derided.

Funny enough, the lack of people and the rather strenuous pace of their output might just save the EU from being animated by Skybound Animation. With no staff to delegate a second project to, outsourcing may the only way to get out a consistent product.

Ok, so if it’s not our two initial guesses, who else is there?

Flying Bark Studios, an American based studio that has gotten a lot of praise for projects like Rise of the TMNT and the animation for the leaked Last Airbender movie has been a popular choice for animation studios when people fear picking a Japanese one would be too expensive. I think they have the talent, but they’ve never done mecha before. I also feel like them, Studio Mir (Korea) and Powerhouse Animation (Texas, USA) fall victim to the trend of “Diet Anime” where they make a sanitized version of what they think anime is, minus the things a lot of people in the Western animation industry find distasteful about anime, namely boobs.

Ok, that bit of ranting aside, Flying Bark and Mir are the general go-to choices for a Western/Korean studio. As for Eastern? Studio Orange (Trigun Stampede) have posted a few times on social media they wanted to do a mecha show, and the Robots in Disguise would fit the bill nicely. Lidenfilms is out, because they were commissioned by Takara to work on a new mecha show. And Polygon Pictures, who have done previous animated series for Hasbro/Takara, seem to be on the outs after the dismal reception of the War for Cybertron trilogy.