Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles
Feb. 10th, 2007 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerSince my last post on Robotech actually got noticed, I've decided to set down my reactions to "Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles," which arrived in the mail at last in a shipment of anime DVDs. The anime discs went into my backlog, but I was intent on watching The Shadow Chronicles as soon as possible... if not without a bit of apprehension as I started taking off the shrink wrap. How would I react as anticipation came to an end at last... and yet, in the end, I had the feeling it had been enjoyable. I even wondered about attaching the word "surprisingly"... although "oddly" just perhaps seemed to fit too.
I had heard that The Shadow Chronicles started not where Robotech had left off two decades before, but in fact during its final episode. Intent, perhaps, on not letting this somehow get to me with thoughts of "running time burned up rehashing," I had wondered if this would give a chance to introduce the characters in action instead of starting off with a lot of setup. There was some setup at the start as it was, though, but things got moving before what seemed too terribly long. It may be that, in order to "lower my expectations" to the point where they couldn't help but be met, I was going into The Shadow Chronicles with thoughts in mind of Robotech II: The Sentinels, a sort of video appendix that salvaged the three episodes of animation that had been finished for a Robotech spinoff meant to be sixty-five episodes long before the project ground to a halt. When I did see The Sentinels on an earlier "bonus features" DVD, I had the impression that its somehow unimpressive animation was all setup...
As for the animation in The Shadow Chronicles, the computer animation used for spaceships and space battles was obviously computer animation, and not enormously detailed. The drawn animation used for the characters looked solid enough in my eyes. It was true that I'd heard that all the female characters were drawn "top-heavy," and at one point I thought I was lucky that this was an original English language animation; I didn't have to keep glancing towards the lower half of the screen to read subtitles but also get a stronger dose of "fanservice" than I really wanted... One other point that kept catching me, though, was that there seemed just a bit more effort taken than in a lot of anime I've seen to show the characters' teeth inside their lips when their mouths were open; it looked a little odd somehow. With all of that said, though, the character designs had an acceptably and even pleasantly modern quality to them for me.
As far as the voice acting went, I'd been interested in hearing that Mark Hamill had a role as a veteran fighter pilot. With that said (and trying, on what might be just a whim now, not to give too much away); I was a little surprised that his role wasn't as long as I'd somehow been expecting. I was also interested, in a somewhat different way, to hear Tony Oliver reprise his role as Rick Hunter after twenty years. The older Rick seen at last didn't sound a whole lot like his younger self, though. Again, I do have to note that his role wasn't as long as I'd been expecting, but more on that later.
I had heard that the main character of "Robotech: The New Generation," Scott Bernard (who did sound pretty much like he had before to me), was in "the wrong fighter" during the first part of The Shadow Chronicles. Once I'd decided to accept that, though, I was struck by a larger difference. At the end of "The New Generation," all of the heroes enter the enemy stronghold to discuss things with their adversary; in The Shadow Chronicles, just one of them does. The dialogue that follows is more or less repeated from The New Generation, and that led me to the conclusion that this wasn't just an "unseen scene," but a different version of the story... and then I surprised myself by accepting that, too. A decade ago, when delving into Robotech fandom online, I had fallen in with a group of people who rejected all the spinoff books and comics and role-playing games for taking various liberties with the particulars of the original series. I've worried that conclusion might demonstrate (as if I need to give any more proof) that I can't tell good stuff from bad, just so long as it's the same medium... but I've also considered that I've always had an "out." The various changes of the novels, I had told myself, sanded off broader interpretations, narrowed characterisations to white hats and black hats, and invoked grandiose, story-overwhelming forces to try and paper over ambiguities that might be addressed in a less extreme fashion... they weren't just "changes." For some reason, The Shadow Chronicles continued to work for me.
I also found myself wondering if the compressed character list, as lonely as it made the Earth seem (even if Scott at least managed to mention that he'd been fighting alongside others) had some small advantages of its own. The new pilots introduced didn't seem overwhelmed and outnumbered by a swarm of high-ranking officers left over from previous wars, as the new pilots of The Sentinels have often seemed to me. Nor was there a sense that everybody who'd survived up to that point had to appear, as might be described with the novel that wrapped up the Robotech novels, "The End of the Circle." (I've seen some people with pretty strong allergic reactions to it; my own has never seemed quite as bad, but I do have to admit I dislike how it revoked what seemed the "transcendent" conclusion of The New Generation novels and I've suspected that the cast isn't able to accomplish much beyond waiting until a super-scientist sacrifices himself to solve everything.) Of the new pilots, I was kind of interested in Maia Sterling, if perhaps just because I kept contrasting her to what seems the corresponding character in the novels, Aurora Sterling, who wound up a fast-growing psychic superchild in part possibly because that was the only way she would fit into the timeline as the novels worked themselves out... Too, for some reason I was convinced that not everyone knew Scott when he joined the others, which was sort of welcome in an odd way after suspicions that everybody in the novels is connected to everyone else before anything even starts.
There was technobabble in the dialogue, and there were cryptic and threatening pronouncements from enigmatic hostile figures (who to me bore a touch of "The End of the Circle," but only just), but as for me I was convinced there were also an old and welcome unifying theme of Robotech, of ending fighting by coming to understand your enemies. Of course, should we be so lucky to see more animation, I can wonder if the new threat will stay just a threat... but that, I suppose, I can still hold in the future. In a small way, we've faced a joke in that we've seen the SDF-3 (which I personally think looks a lot better than it used to) and Rick Hunter, and then they were taken away. Still, for me Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is somehow a bit more than the sum of its parts... because it's Robotech, something that might cut it off from people not fans to begin with? Perhaps, but for the moment I'm content enough not to delve into things.
I had heard that The Shadow Chronicles started not where Robotech had left off two decades before, but in fact during its final episode. Intent, perhaps, on not letting this somehow get to me with thoughts of "running time burned up rehashing," I had wondered if this would give a chance to introduce the characters in action instead of starting off with a lot of setup. There was some setup at the start as it was, though, but things got moving before what seemed too terribly long. It may be that, in order to "lower my expectations" to the point where they couldn't help but be met, I was going into The Shadow Chronicles with thoughts in mind of Robotech II: The Sentinels, a sort of video appendix that salvaged the three episodes of animation that had been finished for a Robotech spinoff meant to be sixty-five episodes long before the project ground to a halt. When I did see The Sentinels on an earlier "bonus features" DVD, I had the impression that its somehow unimpressive animation was all setup...
As for the animation in The Shadow Chronicles, the computer animation used for spaceships and space battles was obviously computer animation, and not enormously detailed. The drawn animation used for the characters looked solid enough in my eyes. It was true that I'd heard that all the female characters were drawn "top-heavy," and at one point I thought I was lucky that this was an original English language animation; I didn't have to keep glancing towards the lower half of the screen to read subtitles but also get a stronger dose of "fanservice" than I really wanted... One other point that kept catching me, though, was that there seemed just a bit more effort taken than in a lot of anime I've seen to show the characters' teeth inside their lips when their mouths were open; it looked a little odd somehow. With all of that said, though, the character designs had an acceptably and even pleasantly modern quality to them for me.
As far as the voice acting went, I'd been interested in hearing that Mark Hamill had a role as a veteran fighter pilot. With that said (and trying, on what might be just a whim now, not to give too much away); I was a little surprised that his role wasn't as long as I'd somehow been expecting. I was also interested, in a somewhat different way, to hear Tony Oliver reprise his role as Rick Hunter after twenty years. The older Rick seen at last didn't sound a whole lot like his younger self, though. Again, I do have to note that his role wasn't as long as I'd been expecting, but more on that later.
I had heard that the main character of "Robotech: The New Generation," Scott Bernard (who did sound pretty much like he had before to me), was in "the wrong fighter" during the first part of The Shadow Chronicles. Once I'd decided to accept that, though, I was struck by a larger difference. At the end of "The New Generation," all of the heroes enter the enemy stronghold to discuss things with their adversary; in The Shadow Chronicles, just one of them does. The dialogue that follows is more or less repeated from The New Generation, and that led me to the conclusion that this wasn't just an "unseen scene," but a different version of the story... and then I surprised myself by accepting that, too. A decade ago, when delving into Robotech fandom online, I had fallen in with a group of people who rejected all the spinoff books and comics and role-playing games for taking various liberties with the particulars of the original series. I've worried that conclusion might demonstrate (as if I need to give any more proof) that I can't tell good stuff from bad, just so long as it's the same medium... but I've also considered that I've always had an "out." The various changes of the novels, I had told myself, sanded off broader interpretations, narrowed characterisations to white hats and black hats, and invoked grandiose, story-overwhelming forces to try and paper over ambiguities that might be addressed in a less extreme fashion... they weren't just "changes." For some reason, The Shadow Chronicles continued to work for me.
I also found myself wondering if the compressed character list, as lonely as it made the Earth seem (even if Scott at least managed to mention that he'd been fighting alongside others) had some small advantages of its own. The new pilots introduced didn't seem overwhelmed and outnumbered by a swarm of high-ranking officers left over from previous wars, as the new pilots of The Sentinels have often seemed to me. Nor was there a sense that everybody who'd survived up to that point had to appear, as might be described with the novel that wrapped up the Robotech novels, "The End of the Circle." (I've seen some people with pretty strong allergic reactions to it; my own has never seemed quite as bad, but I do have to admit I dislike how it revoked what seemed the "transcendent" conclusion of The New Generation novels and I've suspected that the cast isn't able to accomplish much beyond waiting until a super-scientist sacrifices himself to solve everything.) Of the new pilots, I was kind of interested in Maia Sterling, if perhaps just because I kept contrasting her to what seems the corresponding character in the novels, Aurora Sterling, who wound up a fast-growing psychic superchild in part possibly because that was the only way she would fit into the timeline as the novels worked themselves out... Too, for some reason I was convinced that not everyone knew Scott when he joined the others, which was sort of welcome in an odd way after suspicions that everybody in the novels is connected to everyone else before anything even starts.
There was technobabble in the dialogue, and there were cryptic and threatening pronouncements from enigmatic hostile figures (who to me bore a touch of "The End of the Circle," but only just), but as for me I was convinced there were also an old and welcome unifying theme of Robotech, of ending fighting by coming to understand your enemies. Of course, should we be so lucky to see more animation, I can wonder if the new threat will stay just a threat... but that, I suppose, I can still hold in the future. In a small way, we've faced a joke in that we've seen the SDF-3 (which I personally think looks a lot better than it used to) and Rick Hunter, and then they were taken away. Still, for me Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is somehow a bit more than the sum of its parts... because it's Robotech, something that might cut it off from people not fans to begin with? Perhaps, but for the moment I'm content enough not to delve into things.