2010: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
Dec. 31st, 2010 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs the year wears to a close, I'm taking a look back at the anime I watched in its final three months. During that time, I got well into a "fifteen anniversary project" I'd been thinking about before, in which I sorted through my collection by when everything was made and picked a particular show to rewatch an episode or two for each year. While this is of course just a taste-testing tour when it comes to reminding me of stories I've seen before, it has been sort of interesting to see styles change over time. I did, though, only got from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s in those three months... although I also kept up with watching series in a more conventional vein.
With replacement discs in hand at last, I was able not only to start watching Toradora! but also to watch through it without having to pause for the second set to arrive. I had been able to decide on ordering the nicely if distinctively packaged sets in part through noticing the enthusiasm of other people for the series, and as I watched it I could find myself agreeing with them. In the romantic comedy, the characters at first seem ordinary archetypes but develop a lot of depth as the show goes on. There's also a shift from comedy to drama and perhaps even melodrama in the process that does seem controversial to some, but I seem to have been able to handle it.
After watching a bit more of the second season of Gundam 00 via the official DVDs, getting a bit closer to the conclusion but not quite reaching it, I opened a title that had been sitting around in my "backlog" for a while. When I saw a small article in an anime magazine a few years back about a show named Rocket Girls, it sort of caught my attention, but thinking it wouldn't be likely to be licensed I went ahead and sought out "fansubs" of it. Then, it did get licensed, and I bought it still sight unseen with a sense of being obliged to only to not quite get around to it at the time... When I at last opened the DVDs, though, it turned out the first one of them was defective and I had to go back to the fansubs I'd saved more for the sake of saving them than "just in case." In any case, the show begins with a small space agency in the Solomon Islands that, when its new rocket keeps blowing up, decides to change its plans of launching a manned capsule to use a smaller rocket that needs a very light pilot, and then a Japanese teenager visits the islands searching for her deadbeat father... it's tempting enough to say "only in anime," and yet there does seem something earnest about the show, something that does seem to form a kinship with "science fiction juveniles" of complete unimpeachability. However, I do have to admit that at first something about the way the islanders were presented seemed not that refined to me, reminiscent in an unsettling way of Hollywood cartoons from "the golden age of animation"... although a few episodes in, I realised it couldn't be said "well, you know about those non-Japanese." A bit later on, I did find myself with a different worry, that I had the sense it was being laid on thick about the sympathy-inducing vulnerabilities of a new secondary character, and that after congratulating myself not that long before about being able to accept anime as it was I was at last turning into one of "those people" who never miss a chance to complain about not being able to do that... but the thought that taking in Toradora's complex characterisations at the same time was somehow affecting me, just as Gurren Lagann had perhaps overwhelmed Eureka Seven for me, might have helped me there.
With Rocket Girls finished, I went on to watching a different show through fansubs. I'd actually begun watching Gundam X, one of the last few Gundam series I still had to watch, a while before, but stopped partway through, not that interested in getting my hands on the rest of its episodes. I knew that a certain point had been made about how it had been cut short partway through in the mid-1990s, had seen some unimpressed period opinions of it, and when I started watching it one of my strongest impressions was that it somehow looked, just a bit, like one of those off-kilter "how to draw manga" books drawn on this side of the Pacific... However, I decided to make the effort again, and this time I might have been aware of a more recent comment or two wondering if Gundam X should have been the series to follow up the unexpected success of the distinctive Gundam Wing in trying to "build the franchise" over here. The "alternative universe" series might be called a "postapocalyptic Gundam" (the opening apocalypse recognisable as a more extreme version of the war in the very first Mobile Suit Gundam), but I do have to admit that any potential impressions of the series being "Mad Max in giant robots" fade as it goes on, such that it's a very different story by the end and yet more "conventional" so far as Gundam anime series go. Even so, I was somehow able, as with some other Gundam series, to just say "well, it's not perfect," and in saying that I managed to accept it. Part of that might have to do with the protagonist Garrod Ran; although "a child among adults" in this case, he doesn't overpower everyone else and seems generally cheerful and resilient. So far as being cut short partway through goes, I could tell about thirty episodes in that things were being introduced in a hurried fashion, and yet I could wonder if there was something amusing about that briskness. The series might well count as my "pleasant surprise" for the last three months.
Just after the World Series ended, I got around to some DVDs I'd had sitting around for quite a while. There's long been an undercurrent of enthusiasm among some people on the "Anime on DVD" message board for a baseball anime named Princess Nine, although with time came a slight wryness about how they seemed the only people so interested in it. I eventually decided I'd try and see the series, but discovered that the collection of it had just gone out of print. Moving quickly, I managed to buy up the DVDs used through vendors with listings on amazon.com. Once I had them, though, I was watching the different baseball anime Touch, and I decided I shouldn't put the two series in direct competition. After Touch, though, I was watching the baseball anime Cross Game and Taisho Baseball Girls, and then Big Windup... At last, though, I was able to start Princess Nine, which features the daughter of a late pro ball pitcher who's recruited for a girl's team intended to compete with boys' teams at the famous Japanese high school baseball competition, the Koshien. (I suppose the rule change invoked in the series would have been useful for one character in Cross Game...) The series starts off in dramatic fashion, with overpowering plays and built-up head-to-head confrontations, and while it was a bit different in its own way from the varied other baseball anime I'd seen before I was able to enjoy it. I did, though, know from hearsay that the series ends with a sequel "required" so far as its sports angle goes and yet never produced, but wondered after it was all over how things could be continued, with the built-in character issues more or less resolved with something of a shift towards melodramatic romance in which "the heart is the hardest muscle to train." Of course, that sort of thought doesn't always stop people...
A release I'd been anticipating for a while reached me with the first half of the Dirty Pair TV series. In this case, though, I was rewatching it, and I might have wondered a little about a juxtaposition between the (relatively) "casualty-light" TV series and the impression I had formed about Dirty Pair years before, that some way would always be found to kill off everyone around the interstellar troubleshooters Kei and Yuri but "it's never their fault." As much as that impression had unsettled me, in wondering if it had been formed by the novels that had preceded the TV series (and then wondering both just how and what North American fans had heard about those novels and everything else years ago), I also wondered if there was the possibility some might complain about things being "toned down," the cardinal sin in bringing anime across the Pacific. The thought never really bothered me, though; I suppose the series was still easy to just enjoy.
I happened to watch another series from the 1980s in fansub format, the Starship Troopers OVA. Unlike the once-infamous live-action movie of the late 1990s, the anime did include "power armour," and yet some intangible factor seemed left out of the machinery, just as a lot of Robert A. Heinlein's novel was also missing, from the flogging of civilians and soldiers to the "History and Moral Philosophy" courses in which veterans effortlessly brush aside objections to the government veterans put together and hold voting power in after the collapse of the "XXth Century" government and military. It left me thinking that the plot of the novel which brought to an end Heinlein's writing of "science fiction juveniles" and started him expounding on opinions fans can make a big deal of in fanzine letter columns or online to say they're tough-minded was indeed not that distinctive on its own. (There are other somewhat unimpressed opinions of the anime as well, although not dwelling very much on what got left out...)
Right before heading home for Christmas vacation, itself sort of a vacation from watching anime, I managed to watch a fansub of the Macross Frontier movie. I wouldn't call it a condensation of part of the TV series, but in reusing a few sequences here and there it doesn't redesign everything the way Macross: Do You Remember Love did for good or ill. In the process, it actually became sort of interesting, tweaking character dynamics and even managing to be more direct at points. Of course, with another movie still to go, people might yet wind up complaining the "obvious" choice still didn't "win" the love triangle that never quite got resolved in the TV series, and I did wind up with the suspicion the movie wouldn't change anyone's opinions of the series itself, but there did seem something there for me beyond the still very impressive eye candy.
With replacement discs in hand at last, I was able not only to start watching Toradora! but also to watch through it without having to pause for the second set to arrive. I had been able to decide on ordering the nicely if distinctively packaged sets in part through noticing the enthusiasm of other people for the series, and as I watched it I could find myself agreeing with them. In the romantic comedy, the characters at first seem ordinary archetypes but develop a lot of depth as the show goes on. There's also a shift from comedy to drama and perhaps even melodrama in the process that does seem controversial to some, but I seem to have been able to handle it.
After watching a bit more of the second season of Gundam 00 via the official DVDs, getting a bit closer to the conclusion but not quite reaching it, I opened a title that had been sitting around in my "backlog" for a while. When I saw a small article in an anime magazine a few years back about a show named Rocket Girls, it sort of caught my attention, but thinking it wouldn't be likely to be licensed I went ahead and sought out "fansubs" of it. Then, it did get licensed, and I bought it still sight unseen with a sense of being obliged to only to not quite get around to it at the time... When I at last opened the DVDs, though, it turned out the first one of them was defective and I had to go back to the fansubs I'd saved more for the sake of saving them than "just in case." In any case, the show begins with a small space agency in the Solomon Islands that, when its new rocket keeps blowing up, decides to change its plans of launching a manned capsule to use a smaller rocket that needs a very light pilot, and then a Japanese teenager visits the islands searching for her deadbeat father... it's tempting enough to say "only in anime," and yet there does seem something earnest about the show, something that does seem to form a kinship with "science fiction juveniles" of complete unimpeachability. However, I do have to admit that at first something about the way the islanders were presented seemed not that refined to me, reminiscent in an unsettling way of Hollywood cartoons from "the golden age of animation"... although a few episodes in, I realised it couldn't be said "well, you know about those non-Japanese." A bit later on, I did find myself with a different worry, that I had the sense it was being laid on thick about the sympathy-inducing vulnerabilities of a new secondary character, and that after congratulating myself not that long before about being able to accept anime as it was I was at last turning into one of "those people" who never miss a chance to complain about not being able to do that... but the thought that taking in Toradora's complex characterisations at the same time was somehow affecting me, just as Gurren Lagann had perhaps overwhelmed Eureka Seven for me, might have helped me there.
With Rocket Girls finished, I went on to watching a different show through fansubs. I'd actually begun watching Gundam X, one of the last few Gundam series I still had to watch, a while before, but stopped partway through, not that interested in getting my hands on the rest of its episodes. I knew that a certain point had been made about how it had been cut short partway through in the mid-1990s, had seen some unimpressed period opinions of it, and when I started watching it one of my strongest impressions was that it somehow looked, just a bit, like one of those off-kilter "how to draw manga" books drawn on this side of the Pacific... However, I decided to make the effort again, and this time I might have been aware of a more recent comment or two wondering if Gundam X should have been the series to follow up the unexpected success of the distinctive Gundam Wing in trying to "build the franchise" over here. The "alternative universe" series might be called a "postapocalyptic Gundam" (the opening apocalypse recognisable as a more extreme version of the war in the very first Mobile Suit Gundam), but I do have to admit that any potential impressions of the series being "Mad Max in giant robots" fade as it goes on, such that it's a very different story by the end and yet more "conventional" so far as Gundam anime series go. Even so, I was somehow able, as with some other Gundam series, to just say "well, it's not perfect," and in saying that I managed to accept it. Part of that might have to do with the protagonist Garrod Ran; although "a child among adults" in this case, he doesn't overpower everyone else and seems generally cheerful and resilient. So far as being cut short partway through goes, I could tell about thirty episodes in that things were being introduced in a hurried fashion, and yet I could wonder if there was something amusing about that briskness. The series might well count as my "pleasant surprise" for the last three months.
Just after the World Series ended, I got around to some DVDs I'd had sitting around for quite a while. There's long been an undercurrent of enthusiasm among some people on the "Anime on DVD" message board for a baseball anime named Princess Nine, although with time came a slight wryness about how they seemed the only people so interested in it. I eventually decided I'd try and see the series, but discovered that the collection of it had just gone out of print. Moving quickly, I managed to buy up the DVDs used through vendors with listings on amazon.com. Once I had them, though, I was watching the different baseball anime Touch, and I decided I shouldn't put the two series in direct competition. After Touch, though, I was watching the baseball anime Cross Game and Taisho Baseball Girls, and then Big Windup... At last, though, I was able to start Princess Nine, which features the daughter of a late pro ball pitcher who's recruited for a girl's team intended to compete with boys' teams at the famous Japanese high school baseball competition, the Koshien. (I suppose the rule change invoked in the series would have been useful for one character in Cross Game...) The series starts off in dramatic fashion, with overpowering plays and built-up head-to-head confrontations, and while it was a bit different in its own way from the varied other baseball anime I'd seen before I was able to enjoy it. I did, though, know from hearsay that the series ends with a sequel "required" so far as its sports angle goes and yet never produced, but wondered after it was all over how things could be continued, with the built-in character issues more or less resolved with something of a shift towards melodramatic romance in which "the heart is the hardest muscle to train." Of course, that sort of thought doesn't always stop people...
A release I'd been anticipating for a while reached me with the first half of the Dirty Pair TV series. In this case, though, I was rewatching it, and I might have wondered a little about a juxtaposition between the (relatively) "casualty-light" TV series and the impression I had formed about Dirty Pair years before, that some way would always be found to kill off everyone around the interstellar troubleshooters Kei and Yuri but "it's never their fault." As much as that impression had unsettled me, in wondering if it had been formed by the novels that had preceded the TV series (and then wondering both just how and what North American fans had heard about those novels and everything else years ago), I also wondered if there was the possibility some might complain about things being "toned down," the cardinal sin in bringing anime across the Pacific. The thought never really bothered me, though; I suppose the series was still easy to just enjoy.
I happened to watch another series from the 1980s in fansub format, the Starship Troopers OVA. Unlike the once-infamous live-action movie of the late 1990s, the anime did include "power armour," and yet some intangible factor seemed left out of the machinery, just as a lot of Robert A. Heinlein's novel was also missing, from the flogging of civilians and soldiers to the "History and Moral Philosophy" courses in which veterans effortlessly brush aside objections to the government veterans put together and hold voting power in after the collapse of the "XXth Century" government and military. It left me thinking that the plot of the novel which brought to an end Heinlein's writing of "science fiction juveniles" and started him expounding on opinions fans can make a big deal of in fanzine letter columns or online to say they're tough-minded was indeed not that distinctive on its own. (There are other somewhat unimpressed opinions of the anime as well, although not dwelling very much on what got left out...)
Right before heading home for Christmas vacation, itself sort of a vacation from watching anime, I managed to watch a fansub of the Macross Frontier movie. I wouldn't call it a condensation of part of the TV series, but in reusing a few sequences here and there it doesn't redesign everything the way Macross: Do You Remember Love did for good or ill. In the process, it actually became sort of interesting, tweaking character dynamics and even managing to be more direct at points. Of course, with another movie still to go, people might yet wind up complaining the "obvious" choice still didn't "win" the love triangle that never quite got resolved in the TV series, and I did wind up with the suspicion the movie wouldn't change anyone's opinions of the series itself, but there did seem something there for me beyond the still very impressive eye candy.