2011: My Second Quarter in Anime
Jul. 2nd, 2011 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I decided it might be fun not just to go on another cruise but to go on one starting in Japan, I was aware I wouldn't be spending that much time in the country but could still hope it might do something to broaden my awareness of it; I wouldn't say I see it just as "that place anime and manga comes from," but there does seem something to "a more balanced perspective," even if just on general principles. However, a series of unfortunate events made the cruise line cut out all the en-route stops in Japan, and it took me just a little while to come to terms with the thought "well, at least I can still say I was there."
In my one jet-lagged and perhaps briefer than it could have been foray off the ship while it was moored in Kobe, though, I did happen into an electronics store with floors of anime-related models above the televisions, computers, and appliances, and that stroke of luck might have at once made the abbreviated hours-long visit "pay off" in some strange way even if it might not have counted as "broadening." Visiting South Korea, too, gave me a feeling of similarities to what I'd seen of Japan, a neat rejoinder to the too-easy impressions of the island nation as somehow "unique" and "non-threatening yet amusingly strange." As for the rest of the cruise, though, even on the sea days I seemed busy enough to treat it as not just a vacation from work but from watching anime. That puts a gap in the middle of this every-three-months look back at what I've seen, but I was occupied enough watching on either side of it.
It did so happen, though, that just as I was logged in at the airport waiting to leave for my vacation and taking one last chance to look at sites before I went on a strict daily timer so far as connection time went, I saw an announcement that Chris Beveridge, who had created the "Anime on DVD" site and then sold it to a larger entertainment site, was striking out on his own again to create a new independent site. Having said not that long ago that the "Anime on DVD forums" factored in my longevity as an anime fan, I have to admit I was concerned how things would turn out. I didn't have the time to properly register for the new forums on "The Fandom Post" until I got back from vacation, by which time the old forums had slowed down to a considerable degree; however, many people seemed to have migrated to the new ones by the time I signed up. Some of the more determined high-standards "importers" have stuck with the old forums, though, which does seem to change the complexion on both sides of the divide without detracting from either.
I did seem to spend a certain amount of time in the past three months watching "fansubs" of varying type, freshness, and "undergroundness." The lengthy Dougram did continue to hold my interest even as the protagonists in its opening credits (which I had seen before the series itself and might have given me a skewed impression of what it would be like just through the clothes they were wearing) wound up part of a larger, more political struggle against colonial oppression. That new focus, though, made me think of a different "mecha anime" from just a few years later, Zeta Gundam, which had also made claims of being "a struggle against political oppression" but which had, to me, the somewhat maddening quality of having as many seemingly significant events that didn't seem to have any impact episodes later in its political arena as in its character-based one. The thought did build in me that Dougram, in its own unassuming way, might appeal to me more than a few other mecha anime from the 1980s that might have got off on the wrong foot by being sold as "so much better than what's being made nowadays." As well, I was still aware of how its mechanical designs had been used in the early years of Battletech, and a little amused by the differences between what had been made of them and how they were presented in the anime. For one example, I'd been waiting to see a design that got turned into a massive "assault BattleMech" in a game that seems to emphasise armour and weaponry over speed; in Dougram, it was more an "arctic" model, no more distiguished against the heroic model of the opening credits than anything else, that spent most of its time zipped into enormous jumpsuits.
In the extended crisis that shattered the old certainties of the anime market over here (yet may yet have led to a strange, weedy regrowth), ADV Films lost the rights to Gurren Lagann, a series I had been interested in seeing. Intent on somehow supporting that company anyway, I ordered a series called Moonlight Mile, in which two manly-men mountaineers knock off the last of the Seven Summits and then decide going into space will be their next challenge. The series ended on a "continued in the manga" cliffhanger, though, and ADV wound up in further difficulty that it emerged from as "Section 23/Sentai Filmworks," the follow-up "second season" of Moonlight Mile lost in the shuffle. When a group did get around to "fansubbing" the second season, I sought it out. In it, the fresh-minted astronauts finally get to the Moon (it was almost tempting to see something significant in how long they were taking to get there), and the manliness of having one or the other of them bed a woman in practically every episode did seem a bit less extravagant now (I did sort of find myself thinking all those series in which teenaged or even college-aged protagonists can't quite get lucky weren't that bad after all), but things did wind up in another "continued in the manga" cliffhanger.
After a long delay, the last two episodes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica did air at last, and I was one of those impressed with the conclusion as building off the developments and twists that had gone before. As it turns out, it's just been announced that it's going to be available for sale over here too. I then kept managing to watch new series, or one of them anyway, in the somewhat oddly named Tiger & Bunny. It's a take on "superheroes" with, just perhaps, some overtones of "the odd perspective from a different country," where the heroes have corporate sponsors rather than their own homemade heraldy and camera crews trailing them to rank their heroism for reality TV. However, a fundamental sincerity is soon shining, which does downplay thoughts of it staying a spoof or deconstruction. It also happens that a lot of the heroes tend towards wearing variants on "power armour," the better to animate them using computer graphics, but people seem to be more or less coping with that by now.
When I did get around to opening some DVDs out of my "backlog," I picked out Aria: The Animation, which I liked enough to already have posted about, and Madlax. That series was by the people who made the "girls with guns" title Noir, and I might have been expecting obvious similarities between the two, but the new series did seem distinctive. Of the two characters in the opening credits, only one (Madlax herself) carries a gun in a civil war-torn Southeast Asian country; the other, Margaret Burton, seems a normal high school student in "Nafrece," which just happens to have an Eiffel Tower (or maybe it's the "Fefeil Tower" or something similar), and at first the two seem to have no connection to each other. The point of the anime, of course, is establishing that connection, but along the way there are mind-control books, mysterious characters making mysterious comments, and criminal organizations of overbearing power. I might have been amused by Margaret's personal maid Eleanor, but in part because I was reminded of how "maids" used to be what people were panicking over as thrown into everything just to make it sell.
In my one jet-lagged and perhaps briefer than it could have been foray off the ship while it was moored in Kobe, though, I did happen into an electronics store with floors of anime-related models above the televisions, computers, and appliances, and that stroke of luck might have at once made the abbreviated hours-long visit "pay off" in some strange way even if it might not have counted as "broadening." Visiting South Korea, too, gave me a feeling of similarities to what I'd seen of Japan, a neat rejoinder to the too-easy impressions of the island nation as somehow "unique" and "non-threatening yet amusingly strange." As for the rest of the cruise, though, even on the sea days I seemed busy enough to treat it as not just a vacation from work but from watching anime. That puts a gap in the middle of this every-three-months look back at what I've seen, but I was occupied enough watching on either side of it.
It did so happen, though, that just as I was logged in at the airport waiting to leave for my vacation and taking one last chance to look at sites before I went on a strict daily timer so far as connection time went, I saw an announcement that Chris Beveridge, who had created the "Anime on DVD" site and then sold it to a larger entertainment site, was striking out on his own again to create a new independent site. Having said not that long ago that the "Anime on DVD forums" factored in my longevity as an anime fan, I have to admit I was concerned how things would turn out. I didn't have the time to properly register for the new forums on "The Fandom Post" until I got back from vacation, by which time the old forums had slowed down to a considerable degree; however, many people seemed to have migrated to the new ones by the time I signed up. Some of the more determined high-standards "importers" have stuck with the old forums, though, which does seem to change the complexion on both sides of the divide without detracting from either.
I did seem to spend a certain amount of time in the past three months watching "fansubs" of varying type, freshness, and "undergroundness." The lengthy Dougram did continue to hold my interest even as the protagonists in its opening credits (which I had seen before the series itself and might have given me a skewed impression of what it would be like just through the clothes they were wearing) wound up part of a larger, more political struggle against colonial oppression. That new focus, though, made me think of a different "mecha anime" from just a few years later, Zeta Gundam, which had also made claims of being "a struggle against political oppression" but which had, to me, the somewhat maddening quality of having as many seemingly significant events that didn't seem to have any impact episodes later in its political arena as in its character-based one. The thought did build in me that Dougram, in its own unassuming way, might appeal to me more than a few other mecha anime from the 1980s that might have got off on the wrong foot by being sold as "so much better than what's being made nowadays." As well, I was still aware of how its mechanical designs had been used in the early years of Battletech, and a little amused by the differences between what had been made of them and how they were presented in the anime. For one example, I'd been waiting to see a design that got turned into a massive "assault BattleMech" in a game that seems to emphasise armour and weaponry over speed; in Dougram, it was more an "arctic" model, no more distiguished against the heroic model of the opening credits than anything else, that spent most of its time zipped into enormous jumpsuits.
In the extended crisis that shattered the old certainties of the anime market over here (yet may yet have led to a strange, weedy regrowth), ADV Films lost the rights to Gurren Lagann, a series I had been interested in seeing. Intent on somehow supporting that company anyway, I ordered a series called Moonlight Mile, in which two manly-men mountaineers knock off the last of the Seven Summits and then decide going into space will be their next challenge. The series ended on a "continued in the manga" cliffhanger, though, and ADV wound up in further difficulty that it emerged from as "Section 23/Sentai Filmworks," the follow-up "second season" of Moonlight Mile lost in the shuffle. When a group did get around to "fansubbing" the second season, I sought it out. In it, the fresh-minted astronauts finally get to the Moon (it was almost tempting to see something significant in how long they were taking to get there), and the manliness of having one or the other of them bed a woman in practically every episode did seem a bit less extravagant now (I did sort of find myself thinking all those series in which teenaged or even college-aged protagonists can't quite get lucky weren't that bad after all), but things did wind up in another "continued in the manga" cliffhanger.
After a long delay, the last two episodes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica did air at last, and I was one of those impressed with the conclusion as building off the developments and twists that had gone before. As it turns out, it's just been announced that it's going to be available for sale over here too. I then kept managing to watch new series, or one of them anyway, in the somewhat oddly named Tiger & Bunny. It's a take on "superheroes" with, just perhaps, some overtones of "the odd perspective from a different country," where the heroes have corporate sponsors rather than their own homemade heraldy and camera crews trailing them to rank their heroism for reality TV. However, a fundamental sincerity is soon shining, which does downplay thoughts of it staying a spoof or deconstruction. It also happens that a lot of the heroes tend towards wearing variants on "power armour," the better to animate them using computer graphics, but people seem to be more or less coping with that by now.
When I did get around to opening some DVDs out of my "backlog," I picked out Aria: The Animation, which I liked enough to already have posted about, and Madlax. That series was by the people who made the "girls with guns" title Noir, and I might have been expecting obvious similarities between the two, but the new series did seem distinctive. Of the two characters in the opening credits, only one (Madlax herself) carries a gun in a civil war-torn Southeast Asian country; the other, Margaret Burton, seems a normal high school student in "Nafrece," which just happens to have an Eiffel Tower (or maybe it's the "Fefeil Tower" or something similar), and at first the two seem to have no connection to each other. The point of the anime, of course, is establishing that connection, but along the way there are mind-control books, mysterious characters making mysterious comments, and criminal organizations of overbearing power. I might have been amused by Margaret's personal maid Eleanor, but in part because I was reminded of how "maids" used to be what people were panicking over as thrown into everything just to make it sell.