Gurren Lagann

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gurren Lagann opens underground, where humanity has forgotten the sky. A meek fourteen-year-old named Simon spends his days digging deeper into the earth, never once seeing the surface that his louder, brasher friend Kamina can barely stop talking about. That contrast, the quiet boy with a drill and the wild-eyed dreamer in a tattered cape, sits at the heart of a series that ran for 27 episodes on TV Tokyo between April and September of 2007.

  The show was animated by Gainax and directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a self-described fan of the mecha genre who had spent his early career doing animation work on Neon Genesis Evangelion. When he finally got his chance to make a robot series of his own, he made choices that surprised even his own staff. What was it about drills that he found so compelling? Why did the team kill their most charismatic character early enough to change the shape of the whole story? And how did a 27-episode anime from a single season of Japanese television wind up shaping a British flag design contest, inspiring the creators of Transformers: Animated, and earning a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes years after it first aired?

• 2. The World Below

  ›

  Simon lives in Giha village, a settlement carved into rock beneath the surface, with no contact with neighboring villages and no knowledge of what lies above the ceiling. The surface, according to the world Imaishi and writer Kazuki Nakashima built, belongs to the Spiral King, Lordgenome, whose army of humanoid Beastmen patrol it in machines called Gunmen, each shaped like a face.

  Animation producer Yasuhiro Takeda spent considerable time researching how people would actually live underground, though the final series uses that material only briefly. Once production began, the team lost most of their research window. The constraint may have sharpened the storytelling. The underground sequences give just enough texture, Simon's conscripted labor as a digger, the social pecking order of village life, Kamina's daily defiance of the village chief, to make the ceiling feel genuinely oppressive before it shatters.

  Kamina is introduced wearing sunglasses and a tattered cape that once belonged to his late father. He carries a nodachi he stole from Giha's chief, and his catchphrase, "just who the hell do you think I/we am/are?!", becomes the battle cry of every human who eventually follows him upward. Kamina had glimpsed the surface as a child, which makes his certainty that it exists something other than mere bravado. Simon, who has never seen it, trusts Kamina anyway.

• 3. Drills and Design

  ›

  Hiroyuki Imaishi made a deliberate choice to build the series around drills, despite knowing that choice would strain the viewer's suspension of disbelief. He also pushed for the story to feature robots exclusively, and the Gainax team made the Gunmen organic in shape rather than angular and mechanical, partly to ease the animation process.

  Episode 15 still proved exhausting. Animator Sushio called himself the "super animator" for completing it, citing the sheer number of shots it required. Settling the look of the central mech, Gurren Lagann itself, took particular care because it served as the template for every other mech that would follow it in the story's escalating scale.

  Konami director Koichi Natsume, one of the production partners, suggested early on that the series might spawn multiple sequels. Imaishi had other ideas. He finished writing the main storyline well before the final episodes went into production, and that advance planning gave the staff a stable framework to work against. Gainax president Hiroyuki Yamaga noted that the planning phase had stretched on for a long time before cameras, so to speak, rolled. That long runway allowed the team to trace Simon's arc from its underground beginning all the way to its predetermined end before a single episode aired.

• 4. Kamina's Death and Simon's Arc

  ›

  One of Lordgenome's four generals kills Kamina during the battle to capture an enemy fortress. The death arrives roughly one quarter of the way through the series, early enough that the audience had barely settled into expecting him to survive. The decision was deliberate. According to the production team, Kamina's death in the eighth episode exists specifically to shift the burden of the story onto Simon and force his development as the true main character.

  The staff continued to plan Simon's growth all the way through the final arc, engineering moments that would let him surpass the man he had been following. Yoko, a sharpshooter from the neighboring village of Littner, tries to help Simon cope after the loss. Nia, who turns out to be Lordgenome's own daughter, becomes the more lasting emotional anchor: naive, sheltered, and curious about a world her father had hidden from her, she draws Simon back from depression.

  The ending presented its own planning challenge. The staff built in from the start that Nia would fade away once the Anti-Spirals were defeated, because her existence was tied to theirs. The tragic conclusion left several staff members saddened during production. The team acknowledged that fans were not satisfied, but noted that her survival would have created narrative problems they had no clean answer to. Simon's final act is to hand his Core Drill to a younger fighter named Gimmy and walk away from his friends as a nameless vagrant, saying that his only purpose had been "to dig the tunnel to the future."

• 5. Influences and Debts

  ›

  Kazuki Nakashima named Ken Ishikawa, co-creator of Getter Robo, as one of the series' central influences in an interview. The debt becomes visible near the end of the show, where the robots grow to absurd scales in a way that echoes Ishikawa's work, particularly the manga version of Getter Robo Go. The final enemy also resembles La Gooth from Ishikawa's Records of Nothingness. Nakashima, however, wanted a more contained conclusion than Ishikawa typically wrote.

  The post-apocalyptic setting and the role of the Dai-Gurren ship drew from Combat Mecha Xabungle. The handling of the main characters paid tribute to the boxing manga Ashita no Joe, which the production staff held in high regard. Anime News Network's Jason Green traced Simon's three-stage character development across the three arcs of the series back to three earlier Gainax protagonists: Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Noriko Takaya from Gunbuster, and Ken Kubo from Otaku no Video.

  Imaishi himself had worked on Neon Genesis Evangelion before directing Gurren Lagann, and his collaboration with Nakashima began on an earlier project, Re: Cutey Honey. After that work, Imaishi decided Nakashima was the best possible writer for the mecha series he wanted to make. Imaishi later said he was struck by how much story Nakashima managed to compress into 27 episodes.

• 6. Conflicts and Controversies

  ›

  The production was not without friction. Takami Akai, an animation producer and co-founder of Gainax, announced his resignation effective the fifth episode, which aired on the 29th of April 2007. The departure followed his public response to criticism on the Japanese textboard 2channel about the fourth episode's animation style. That episode had been directed by guest director Osamu Kobayashi, and viewer complaints prompted Akai to compare reading the criticism to pressing his face against an anatomy the listener can imagine without description. Once fans discovered the comment, Akai left the company he had helped build.

  A second clash involved episode six. The series aired in a time slot aimed at younger viewers, and the sixth episode contained a subplot set around a women's bath. The television station read the script and cleared it. After seeing the finished animation, the station reversed course and refused to air it. A revised version was produced for broadcast. The original cut was later released as a special alongside the Nintendo DS game that came out in October of 2007.

• 7. Beyond Japan

  ›

  Gurren Lagann's path into Western markets was anything but straight. In North America, ADV Films initially announced a license in 2007. Bandai Entertainment took it over in 2008, and Aniplex of America acquired it in 2013. In the United Kingdom, Manga Entertainment held the license from 2007, Beez Entertainment picked it up in 2008, and Anime Limited took over in 2013.

  The Sci Fi Channel brought the series to American broadcast television on the 28th of July 2008, running it as part of the Ani-Monday block. Adult Swim added it to the Toonami block on the 16th of August 2014. Animax began airing the English version across its Southeast Asian and South Asian networks on the 22nd of May 2009, and Italian network Rai 4 broadcast it between the 24th of September 2009 and the 1st of April 2010.

  Two animated films extended the story for theatrical audiences. The first, retelling the initial arc with roughly 20 minutes of new animation, opened in Japanese theaters on the 6th of September 2008 on a limited run of 11 screens. The second, covering the back half of the series with even more new footage, followed on the 25th of April 2009. Shoko Nakagawa, who sang the opening theme for the television series, also sang the theme songs for both films. For the series' 15th anniversary, both films were shown again in theaters in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, and North American screenings of the first film were held on the 16th and the 17th of January 2024.

• 8. Legacy and Reach

  ›

  On the 11th of December 2007, a reader-submitted design based on Gurren Lagann won The Daily Telegraph's contest to redesign the British Union Flag to include the Welsh Dragon, taking 55% of the vote from Norway. The story captures something real about the series' reach: it found audiences far outside any expected demographic.

  Reviewers at Anime News Network awarded the series a full 'A' rating, with Theron Martin calling it "one of the liveliest series of the decade." IGN gave it a 9.7 out of 10. The show sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 17 reviews. The site's critic consensus describes it as a "subterranean romp" that "blazes on the screen with brilliant animation, charismatic characters, and subversive writing."

  The series' success led directly to the founding of Studio Trigger. Hiroyuki Imaishi established the studio in 2011, and as of 2021 it holds the rights to the Gurren Lagann series alongside his other Gainax-era work. Mecha designer Shigeto Koyama, who worked on the series, later contributed concept design for Baymax in the 2014 Disney film Big Hero 6, and Japanese audiences drew comparisons to Gurren Lagann upon that film's release. The creator of the animated series Victor and Valentino said in an April 2019 interview that he plays Gurren Lagann in the background while drawing, praising the storyboards as "incredibly energetic, expressive and appealing." Japa nator named it the fourth best anime of the 2000s; Paste Magazine placed it among the top 50 anime of all time.