Search - Gilgamesh: Complete Collection on DVD

Interesting, not much replay value

Feuilles Mortes | 01/03/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This anime makes great use of classical music to set moods, mostly the happy ones. The drawing style makes the characters seem more gritty, more hard. And generally the coloring scheme makes everything dark. The character development for the kids at the hotel is much thorough than with Hayato Kazmatsuri or the members of Gilgamesh. The cover text about picking a side is rather pointless with the poor character development of the people in the other groups.

I would probably draw parallels with "Evangelion", "Now and Then, Here and There", and "Texhnolyze." I also think there's quite a lot in common with "Zardoz", though the perspective is different.

The anime is pretty dark. Might be worth a rental. Once you know the plot, the replay value greatly diminishes. The lack of character development for more of the characters greatly hinders wanting to watch it many times. The ending seems rushed and most of the realizations aren't so shocking, especially with the muted emotional atmosphere of the anime."

Gilgamesh: Beautiful and thought provoking!

SpiritChild | Amherst, MA United States | 07/24/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If the 1940's and 1950's were the Golden Age of cartoons, Gilgamesh proves that contemporary anime cartoons are in their renaissance. Gilgamesh combines just about everything that I like about anime: beautiful art, creative plot, great characters with human emotion, and a wonderful soundtrack.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Gilgamesh is the story of two orphan siblings living in a post apocalyptic world, which their father destroyed. Soon they are approached by 2 battling forces, who both claim to be saving the world; the fate of the world depends on which side they choose.

Like most anime, you have to watch about 3 episodes before you realize what's really happening with the plot. For some, this series may move too slow, but I enjoy a slowly unraveling plot, and this one keeps you guessing till the end. I don't understand the low reviews: Gilgamesh is one of the best anime I have seen since "scrapped princess". I liked different style of anime in this series (the eyes have so much emotion). The ending while sad, was also incredibly rewarding and fitting."

Seriously Lacking in Many Areas

Christopher Barrett | Portland, Oregon | 03/30/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"First let me say: Gilgamesh is an anime that promises much but never delivers. The animation style is unique, but there are many glitches and often the animation quality dips when the view is farther away.

The ending is the worst of the show, without giving anything away, watch Wolf's Rain or Ergo Proxy, the endings are similar but MUCH better. The writing bogs down in many areas.

I was intrigued after the first few episodes but the story just falls apart from the second disc onward. We see a bunch of angst ridden children attempting to discover their heritage. More often, the children sit around fuming. By the end, we see 10 Gilgamesh, but really only know one or two.

Pros: Interesting concept
Cons: animation, story, characters

Viewing preference: Japanese with English subs"

Very creative series, not a lot of re-watch value for me

Gradient Vector Field | MA, USA | 08/17/2008

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I picked this anime up for two reasons. I've watched enough anime now to realize that I really do like a lot of it and I've studied a lot of ancient Sumerian/Mesopotamian history, which naturally leads to the reading of Gilgamesh. I was really curious to see what capacity that would be included in this anime. Gilgamesh does not take place in the ancient past but in the future and has more of a science fiction feel to it.

Gilgamesh is a very bleakly animated series. I say that because everything seems to be dark all the time and has a seemingly gothic element thrown into the artistic feel. Gilgamesh is centered on a catastrophic event that happened called "twin x" or XX. Strangely the series actually seems to be set in the Middle East, but it looks more like a regular modern city setting than any kind of Arabic element. Basically they found the tomb of Gilgamesh and it turns out the original tale of him being part god was true because for whatever reason it's giving off these special properties. So naturally a group of special scientists are pulled together to research this phenomenon under a corporate entity called Heaven's Gate. However, something starts to go wrong where a new life form appears in some strange test chamber. They call it Tear and it seems fairly benign, but one scientist projects that it will cause a catastrophe and no one listens to him. As a parallel to the story his nickname is Enkidu. Anyway, the last thing we see of him is that he's going into the chamber and about to come in contact with Tear when everything just explodes. It sends of this burst of radiation or something into the sky and turns the sky this shimmering color that has strange magnetic properties. The end result is that computers and other kinds of technology will no longer work. So after humanity has gotten fairly dependent on these elements they are forced to try and live without them. That's basically the entire setting we are brought into and all the above explained in pretty much the first episode.

The story really takes place a decent amount of time after twin X. The story centers on the children of Enkidu who lost their father in the accident and lost their mother shortly thereafter. So now they have nowhere to go. They stumble upon a group of children, ages fourteen and up, that have something to do with Gilgamesh and exhibit telekinetic abilities. Then some other children appear and start fighting with them. These other kids also have telekinetic powers, so there seems to be some kind of strange war. Ultimately the two children that are related to Enkidu end up in the hands of these other people and they live with this lady called the Countess who used to work at Heaven's Gate. It's a strange story and has a lot of twists. It actually has a lot of the thematic feel of a post-apocalyptic story, but actually isn't. It's pre-apocalyptic, but it feels post apocalyptic because people feel very isolated and humanity is struggling to continue on with life after they no longer have connection with the rest of the world at their fingertips. I thought the story was very well designed in that element alone. I found the characters very well developed overall and enough well written plot twists to be very intrigued by a lot of the conclusions to the questions the viewer develops throughout the series. In some ways the story is very well written and in others it kind of isn't, like you never really grasp why the kids have those special powers... or maybe I just missed it. The real black mark on this series is that the story ends very poorly in my opinion. I like how it ended, I just disliked why it ended that way.

The art is pretty good for the most part. One small part that kind of threw me off artistically is that they made a careful effort to give all their characters lips so they look more realistic. Now normally I would say this is a great idea, especially since I collect a lot of comic books and most of that art includes that feature of realism. I don't know why, but seeing it used in an anime made it feel less usual, I've already gotten used to the tiny mouth aspect of anime. I really just think it looks better because with lips the faces seem crowded to me for some reason, their mouths just look far too big. I don't know, it's a very odd reason to knock this series, but it was a stylistic element that I didn't like. Everything else was beautifully done and artistically they really capture that very bleak feel, which I suppose is sort of a foreshadowing artistic element since it's pre-apocalyptic.

I really did want to like this anime a ton. It had all the elements that I would seemingly enjoy. Extremely dark atmosphere, human society struggling to survive, accurate ancient historical representations... I really did try to get into it. As you can see by my rating it didn't really succeed. It has a lot of interesting elements and asks really tough moral/ethical questions which I usually love on a philosophical level. There's just something about Gilgamesh that didn't follow through with a major revelation. I suppose that's not accurate, there is a major revelation, but it's kind of stupid. This series did not end on a high note for me and instead tries to teach something about love in the end. For such a bleakly designed series this just felt like a rip off. Unfortunately I don't think this has very much re-watch value for me. It's like a few other series I've encountered that start off strong but just taper off in the end. While Gilgamesh does some things right it really doesn't hold together fully for me, so I wouldn't recommend to rush out and get it. It is kind of worth watching once because a lot of it is pretty good, but the conclusion will ultimately kill the high in the end."