2013: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
Dec. 31st, 2013 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs this year rolled to a close I was still watching a good number of new anime series through online streaming and still chipping away at the discs I've piled up. Along with that routine, I also had the chance to try a strategy I've been waiting a while for, ordering anime from the end-of-year sales of the online store I've long frequented in quantities grandiose enough to meet their raised free shipping threshold. All of a sudden, I wasn't lacking for "shows I wanted to get," even if some part of that might have either having forgotten or plain managing to ignore the reasons tossed out on the message board I frequent to disdain an assortment of domestic releases.
I led off at the beginning of October still thinking in terms of "getting to sequels" as I had all this year, although the definition of "sequel" was stretching a bit with El Cazador de la Bruja. It was made by the same people who'd made the "girls with guns" series Noir and Madlax, and like them paired a slightly older experienced gunslinger (the Mexican bounty hunter Nadie) with a younger, more mysterious companion (the blonde-haired Ellis) suitable for plunging them into mysterious complications. While as may often be the case I'd seen complaints from some things were wearing thin in the premise by now, I did manage to find this third series interesting myself. A "road trip" structure in the first half closes in on the main characters and the recurring supporting characters as the conspiracies deepen, and in both cases I seemed accepting enough; I might have been amusing myself by wondering if my own unfamiliarity with Mexico somehow meshes with a potential unfamiliarity on the part of the Japanese creators, though.
As I was starting into that series, I was getting further into The Rose of Versailles, conscious again of how the focus shifts from the historical nobles to the fictional witnesses to the dawning of the French Revolution. Knowing the series's director had changed halfway through helped point up the shift, although at times I can start to wonder if there are enough things brought in over forty episodes covering twenty years of history to make the series seem a shifting collection of loose-linked tales. With it finished, I did get around to some "scanlations" of the original manga, and had the impression it had focused even more on the young Marie Antionette and less on the casually gender-bending Oscar François de Jarjayes to begin with.
Watching those shows on DVD did keep me from taking in quite as many new series through official online streaming as some, but then with discs piled up I'm just as conscious of how following new series cuts into my old habits. In any case, I did think I'd found an adequate and not overwhelming number of new shows to watch in the past three months. I was pleased to have an interesting initial description and the chance to watch it come together for the latest series from the studio Kyoto Animation (although to show I'm "in the know" I could have snappily abbreviated that to "KyoAni"), who made a name for themselves with series like Clannad, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and K-ON! In the last little while, though, their series have either been on streaming services I don't have a subscription to or just seem to have premises I'm not quite interested in. Hearing they were adding some more action to their more familiar elements got my attention, though, and I started watching Beyond the Boundary. At first, beyond the expected finesse to the animation I just had the impression the "rules" for the story of monster hunters seemed sort of complicated. Then, though, I started getting the uncertain feeling the specific and troubling word "skeevy" applied to some of the interpersonal situations set up among some of the younger monster hunters, I believe right before other people started using that word too. It was possible, of course, that people getting worked up about this once more produced a "it can't be that bad" counterreaction in me, but as with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya I did get the feeling the show was very conscious of how it invokes things and themes now a little too familiar for some but didn't bother to "subvert" them. Things did pick up near the conclusion as pieces fit together, but might have once more been a little problematic at the very end.
Comments that Golden Time featured characters out of high school were enough to get my attention; hearing the show was based on a work by the person who'd created Toradora helped me finalize the decision to start watching it. As with that previous show, it starts off as a romantic comedy, this time set at a university, and for some indeterminable reason I found its main female character Koko appealing to me beyond a "sum of the parts" way. Her character design in and of itself wasn't as pleasant for me as some and her personality had dangerous, obsessive edges, but maybe her name alone played some small role in the mix (for all that there was also a character named Linda in the show). As the show rolled on, though, the romantic melodrama did start seeming to squeeze out the comedy; by its midway mark, though, the show might have been bearing that new weight better.
I was willing to start watching one more "baseball anime" to add to those I've already taken in. Some comments about Ace of the Diamond suggested it was a "typical sports anime"; that, though, might have just made me think I'd been lucky enough to have seen atypical baseball anime series before, from the "girls can play too" exercises of Taisho Baseball Girls and Princess Nine to the relationship and tragedy-driven Touch and Cross Game, both made from manga by Mitsuru Adachi, to Big Windup with its more psychologically quirky characters more suitable for pairing off for those who see things that way. This show seems to be striking a balance between the raw potential of its lead and the necessity for him to practice and accept advice from those more experienced; the size of the team of the high school he goes to at the start of the series and the competitions to get on the first string might add something too. The force all emotions sometimes seem expressed with, though, can be somewhere between interesting and exhausting. In any case, watching this series and thinking back to the other baseball anime I've seen does make me wonder, in a probably far-too-simplistic way, about whether these series concentrate on the side of the "defence" as centred around the pitcher (or the pitcher matched with a catcher), and whether an American "baseball story" would seem to increase the emphasis on the lone batter hitting home runs. (Of course, Peanuts could give equal focus to the hundreds of runs scored against Charlie Brown's pitching as compared to the zeros he and his team leave on the scoreboard.)
A while ago, I wound up slogging through the original Infinite Stratos, interested in watching a "mecha musume" series with girls in partial powered armour but seeing everyone else watching it getting annoyed with the lone male romantic interest scratching his head in confusion over why the girls are always so mad at him for missing the point of their interest. It had seemed by the end of the series, though, that there might be a bit more plot setting in, and it had sold well enough in Japan for a sequel to roll around in time. As that sequel got under way, though, all that happened was that a new girl had been added and everyone else kept fighting over their oblivious romantic interest. Despite some bits of plot metered out in the first episodes and avoiding what anyone else was thinking of it, by halfway through the series I had the impression the simple relief to see each episode over was overpowering even how it made whatever followed look good by comparison, and left it unfinished without a backwards glance.
Galilei Donna also caught my attention; it seemed a while since I'd seen a "picaresque odyssey," this one featuring three sisters who were descendents of Galileo Galilei (although they seem much more Japanese than Italian, and by the end Galileo seemed to be presented rather more like the current pop-cultural idea of Leonardo da Vinci as an inventor before his time). As with other stories I recall of late, it seems to deal with fears of global warming only obliquely by having the world gripped by snow and the sisters being chased by colourful air pirates and theatening corporate types. The series looked good, but in some unfortunate reverse alchemy did seem to first some and then many to be less than the sum of its parts, swinging between sentimentality, brutality, and outright fantasy. A few episodes before the end, I took the dangerous step of no longer looking at what other people were saying about it, and then a day before the last episode was to air, I just had the feeling I could skip it, with the odd thought I might look back just a little more fondly on it if I just took it as given that the sisters defeated those not redeemable, rescued their parents, and saved the whole world. Even that, of course, wasn't an ideal conclusion.
I lamented only earlier this year how, after other people turned on a succession of mecha series I'd been watching so that I seemed to pick up on their disillusionment and drop them partway through, I wound up so leery of reactions to the contemporary genre I just couldn't bring myself to start watching three different new series this year. When Gundam Build Fighters showed up, though, hope had once more sprung eternal, and that despite how the previous long-format Gundam series had been one I'd abandoned not quite a quarter of the way into it, back when Gundam Age just seemed sort of obvious and sort of dull, a little in advance of it developing the bad habit of killing off some female characters just to motivate the male characters and making the rest of the female characters sort of ineffectual in the increasingly aggravated opinions of those still watching, well in advance of the apparent concluding indignity of the third of its generational protagonists "levelling up" to the point where he'd only disable his opponents, not kill them, something that had driven people to distraction with previous series. This new series at least sounded different. I know, as do many other people, how an integral part of the whole franchise is selling plastic model kits of its "Mobile Suits"; Gundam Build Fighters, building on a slightly earlier, self-contained OVA with somewhat different "rules," set up a world where its protagonists build those models only to use them for simulated battle not for high ideology or simple survival but just to qualify for grand tournaments. That in itself does remind me of how I haven't yet watched the series G Gundam, the original "alternative universe Gundam" and a far more grandiose "tournament anime" from what I've heard; after a certain period when people were still dwelling on it being "different," I did manage to buy the DVD collections before it was too late, only to wind up with the strange conviction I ought to hold at least one "popular" Gundam series still at the point where I could watch it. As I got into Gundam Build Fighters, though, I started enjoying it; it seemed fun to me in a way Gundam series haven't quite been for years, indeed something new in the face of complaints about well-worn formulae; that the series preceding it seem to have taken themselves pretty seriously hadn't been much of a problem for me at the time, of course, but at least this indeed does seem different. Beyond the cavalcade of customized mobile suits in the context-free battle settings, there do seem enough winks and nods to the rest of the franchise (and enough admissions that it represents only part of a whole) that it "fits in" for me. However, after the first episode I did stop seeking out other opinions about it, always a little concerned there was something about each new episode someone somewhere might disagree with. I just hoped the comments I saw in passing would stay positive, hoped the comments I was noticing really would be positive on a second look. There are enough mysteries and machinations to the tournament that I can wonder how much fun things will be in the end, but for now at least it's one of the series I most look forward to every week.
As for the other new series I'm most interested in every week, it had seemed to start with the opposite problem of a certain weight of expectations. The people who made Gurren Lagann have started a new studio, one of the things they worked on there first being Little Witch Academia, a short subject I liked enough to contribute to the Kickstarter to extend the second instalment of and then go the lengths of ordering the English-subtitled Blu-Ray from Japan. Kill la Kill was, of course, very different from that all-ages fantasy, being a "school battle" story I was a little concerned at the very beginning might be weighed down by its "familiar" setting. As it got under way, though, it didn't take me long to be convinced there wasn't much "conventional" about it, at once subverting and following its own rules with verve and talking school uniforms that transform into exhibitionistic battle costumes. Whether further transformations await in the second half, as some people seem convinced, remain to be seen, but I suppose I'm interested enough in the show to imagine myself buying what I expect to be a pricy video release of it.
Along with all those new series, I kept watching Space Brothers. While in some ways it might be getting a little hard to say something new about a series that stays steady and reliable, there was the interesting touch of the streaming site Crunchyroll setting up a manga reading service that included the original manga for the anime. It's been nice to revisit the beginning of the story from this new perspective, but where in certain other cases I've found the art in manga to have more "personality" than the more mass-produced visuals of the anime made from it, the first chapters of the Space Brothers manga did look a bit "off-model" to me somehow. As the volumes rolled by, though, the characters did seem to start looking more like I expected them to, and the backgrounds also filled in as well.
Finishing the series I'd been watching on DVD near the end of these three months did let me squeeze a few more things in. With the thought of beginning to wrap up my sequel-watching push, I went back to the spinoff series My Otome and opened up its own follow-ups. My Otome Zwei was a short sequel, one which did seem a little more built around giving the secondary characters their own action showpieces than anything else more profound; there were times, though, when I still felt uncertain about the special rules they got to operate by. My Otome 0 ~S.ifr~ was set years before the series, with an almost all-new set of characters who all seem to operate at high power, which tied in with what I'd heard before about how it might work best as a final instalment.
Having sorted out a little more elegant way to connect my portable computer to my big TV than I'd used before, thoughts of getting to some of the "fansubs" I've piled up as surely as official and much more respectable DVDs came to fruition a little faster than I'd imagined at first when I managed to acquire all the episodes of a series that had caught my attention through its direct connection to an earlier series I'd also seen as a fansub. While I watched Battle of the Planets when I was quite young, I missed altogether the other anime series brought over here to try and cash in on the Star Wars boom until I first went online and started hearing about a cartoon named Star Blazers. I grew to understand it had brought its own group of pioneers into anime fandom over here, although the sense some of those people saw Star Blazers as "the one whose changes from the original were permissable because they'd started with it" and therefore rejected Robotech might not have started me off on the best foot. Only a few years after that discovery, though, I had the chance to watch Star Blazers through a very early official streaming experiment, but only a few episodes in I had the troubling sense the dubbing had become almost as "creative" as Voltron's in claiming nobody was actually being killed on screen and stopped. A few years after that, however, as I was starting to find older series fansubbed, I happened on Space Battleship Yamato itself and started watching it, fitting it into my apparent, perhaps self-gratifying ability to move between older and newer series and enjoy all of them. I did eventually buy DVDs of the Yamato movies, trying to at least start making up for having watched all those fansubs. Now, ahead of the rumours that one day an anime will be made of the Gundam the Origin manga, there's the new series Space Battleship Yamato 2199. At first, it did seem an updated direct adaptation of the original episodes, but once the space battleship was outside the solar system (presented with what we've learned in the years since the original) things got more distinct yet. I had the feeling of perfect understanding why this new series was impressing fans I might have imagined would be inclined to identify most of all with "old anime"; it did feel quite well done, updating many things about the show without ever seeming to belittle the old. At the same time, while I was interested to see more female characters added to the cast, I could see how they might seem to fit into familiar modern categories at first glance, to say nothing of the curve-hugging jumpsuits they still wear as uniforms. In being impressed, though, I did have to face how I'd just got my hands on video files made from Blu-Ray discs given English subtitles over in Japan, discs a number of fans over here have already made a big point of saying they've imported. It does seem the discs are going to be released over here as "Star Blazers 2199"; most people seem grudgingly able to accept a changed title but are still troubled at the mere possibility of the names in the subtitles being changed to the "localized," space-operatic ones of Star Blazers so that they don't match the Japanese names being said. There's also the question of whether the discs will be any cheaper in the end than just importing them in the first place.
To close out the year, I managed to see a few movies. The third Madoka Magica movie interested me when I saw it at the movies, although I still have to acknowledge how it acknowledges yet clashes with what seem typical character-pairing impulses. I also managed to watch Lupin the Third: The Mystery of Mamo, a movie that preceded even Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro and seemed closer in spirit to the disreputable thief of the original manga and the very first television episodes. By the time the movie was over it did seem to be going in odd directions, but I did happen to notice an odd sort of premonition of Akira in the next decade.
I led off at the beginning of October still thinking in terms of "getting to sequels" as I had all this year, although the definition of "sequel" was stretching a bit with El Cazador de la Bruja. It was made by the same people who'd made the "girls with guns" series Noir and Madlax, and like them paired a slightly older experienced gunslinger (the Mexican bounty hunter Nadie) with a younger, more mysterious companion (the blonde-haired Ellis) suitable for plunging them into mysterious complications. While as may often be the case I'd seen complaints from some things were wearing thin in the premise by now, I did manage to find this third series interesting myself. A "road trip" structure in the first half closes in on the main characters and the recurring supporting characters as the conspiracies deepen, and in both cases I seemed accepting enough; I might have been amusing myself by wondering if my own unfamiliarity with Mexico somehow meshes with a potential unfamiliarity on the part of the Japanese creators, though.
As I was starting into that series, I was getting further into The Rose of Versailles, conscious again of how the focus shifts from the historical nobles to the fictional witnesses to the dawning of the French Revolution. Knowing the series's director had changed halfway through helped point up the shift, although at times I can start to wonder if there are enough things brought in over forty episodes covering twenty years of history to make the series seem a shifting collection of loose-linked tales. With it finished, I did get around to some "scanlations" of the original manga, and had the impression it had focused even more on the young Marie Antionette and less on the casually gender-bending Oscar François de Jarjayes to begin with.
Watching those shows on DVD did keep me from taking in quite as many new series through official online streaming as some, but then with discs piled up I'm just as conscious of how following new series cuts into my old habits. In any case, I did think I'd found an adequate and not overwhelming number of new shows to watch in the past three months. I was pleased to have an interesting initial description and the chance to watch it come together for the latest series from the studio Kyoto Animation (although to show I'm "in the know" I could have snappily abbreviated that to "KyoAni"), who made a name for themselves with series like Clannad, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and K-ON! In the last little while, though, their series have either been on streaming services I don't have a subscription to or just seem to have premises I'm not quite interested in. Hearing they were adding some more action to their more familiar elements got my attention, though, and I started watching Beyond the Boundary. At first, beyond the expected finesse to the animation I just had the impression the "rules" for the story of monster hunters seemed sort of complicated. Then, though, I started getting the uncertain feeling the specific and troubling word "skeevy" applied to some of the interpersonal situations set up among some of the younger monster hunters, I believe right before other people started using that word too. It was possible, of course, that people getting worked up about this once more produced a "it can't be that bad" counterreaction in me, but as with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya I did get the feeling the show was very conscious of how it invokes things and themes now a little too familiar for some but didn't bother to "subvert" them. Things did pick up near the conclusion as pieces fit together, but might have once more been a little problematic at the very end.
Comments that Golden Time featured characters out of high school were enough to get my attention; hearing the show was based on a work by the person who'd created Toradora helped me finalize the decision to start watching it. As with that previous show, it starts off as a romantic comedy, this time set at a university, and for some indeterminable reason I found its main female character Koko appealing to me beyond a "sum of the parts" way. Her character design in and of itself wasn't as pleasant for me as some and her personality had dangerous, obsessive edges, but maybe her name alone played some small role in the mix (for all that there was also a character named Linda in the show). As the show rolled on, though, the romantic melodrama did start seeming to squeeze out the comedy; by its midway mark, though, the show might have been bearing that new weight better.
I was willing to start watching one more "baseball anime" to add to those I've already taken in. Some comments about Ace of the Diamond suggested it was a "typical sports anime"; that, though, might have just made me think I'd been lucky enough to have seen atypical baseball anime series before, from the "girls can play too" exercises of Taisho Baseball Girls and Princess Nine to the relationship and tragedy-driven Touch and Cross Game, both made from manga by Mitsuru Adachi, to Big Windup with its more psychologically quirky characters more suitable for pairing off for those who see things that way. This show seems to be striking a balance between the raw potential of its lead and the necessity for him to practice and accept advice from those more experienced; the size of the team of the high school he goes to at the start of the series and the competitions to get on the first string might add something too. The force all emotions sometimes seem expressed with, though, can be somewhere between interesting and exhausting. In any case, watching this series and thinking back to the other baseball anime I've seen does make me wonder, in a probably far-too-simplistic way, about whether these series concentrate on the side of the "defence" as centred around the pitcher (or the pitcher matched with a catcher), and whether an American "baseball story" would seem to increase the emphasis on the lone batter hitting home runs. (Of course, Peanuts could give equal focus to the hundreds of runs scored against Charlie Brown's pitching as compared to the zeros he and his team leave on the scoreboard.)
A while ago, I wound up slogging through the original Infinite Stratos, interested in watching a "mecha musume" series with girls in partial powered armour but seeing everyone else watching it getting annoyed with the lone male romantic interest scratching his head in confusion over why the girls are always so mad at him for missing the point of their interest. It had seemed by the end of the series, though, that there might be a bit more plot setting in, and it had sold well enough in Japan for a sequel to roll around in time. As that sequel got under way, though, all that happened was that a new girl had been added and everyone else kept fighting over their oblivious romantic interest. Despite some bits of plot metered out in the first episodes and avoiding what anyone else was thinking of it, by halfway through the series I had the impression the simple relief to see each episode over was overpowering even how it made whatever followed look good by comparison, and left it unfinished without a backwards glance.
Galilei Donna also caught my attention; it seemed a while since I'd seen a "picaresque odyssey," this one featuring three sisters who were descendents of Galileo Galilei (although they seem much more Japanese than Italian, and by the end Galileo seemed to be presented rather more like the current pop-cultural idea of Leonardo da Vinci as an inventor before his time). As with other stories I recall of late, it seems to deal with fears of global warming only obliquely by having the world gripped by snow and the sisters being chased by colourful air pirates and theatening corporate types. The series looked good, but in some unfortunate reverse alchemy did seem to first some and then many to be less than the sum of its parts, swinging between sentimentality, brutality, and outright fantasy. A few episodes before the end, I took the dangerous step of no longer looking at what other people were saying about it, and then a day before the last episode was to air, I just had the feeling I could skip it, with the odd thought I might look back just a little more fondly on it if I just took it as given that the sisters defeated those not redeemable, rescued their parents, and saved the whole world. Even that, of course, wasn't an ideal conclusion.
I lamented only earlier this year how, after other people turned on a succession of mecha series I'd been watching so that I seemed to pick up on their disillusionment and drop them partway through, I wound up so leery of reactions to the contemporary genre I just couldn't bring myself to start watching three different new series this year. When Gundam Build Fighters showed up, though, hope had once more sprung eternal, and that despite how the previous long-format Gundam series had been one I'd abandoned not quite a quarter of the way into it, back when Gundam Age just seemed sort of obvious and sort of dull, a little in advance of it developing the bad habit of killing off some female characters just to motivate the male characters and making the rest of the female characters sort of ineffectual in the increasingly aggravated opinions of those still watching, well in advance of the apparent concluding indignity of the third of its generational protagonists "levelling up" to the point where he'd only disable his opponents, not kill them, something that had driven people to distraction with previous series. This new series at least sounded different. I know, as do many other people, how an integral part of the whole franchise is selling plastic model kits of its "Mobile Suits"; Gundam Build Fighters, building on a slightly earlier, self-contained OVA with somewhat different "rules," set up a world where its protagonists build those models only to use them for simulated battle not for high ideology or simple survival but just to qualify for grand tournaments. That in itself does remind me of how I haven't yet watched the series G Gundam, the original "alternative universe Gundam" and a far more grandiose "tournament anime" from what I've heard; after a certain period when people were still dwelling on it being "different," I did manage to buy the DVD collections before it was too late, only to wind up with the strange conviction I ought to hold at least one "popular" Gundam series still at the point where I could watch it. As I got into Gundam Build Fighters, though, I started enjoying it; it seemed fun to me in a way Gundam series haven't quite been for years, indeed something new in the face of complaints about well-worn formulae; that the series preceding it seem to have taken themselves pretty seriously hadn't been much of a problem for me at the time, of course, but at least this indeed does seem different. Beyond the cavalcade of customized mobile suits in the context-free battle settings, there do seem enough winks and nods to the rest of the franchise (and enough admissions that it represents only part of a whole) that it "fits in" for me. However, after the first episode I did stop seeking out other opinions about it, always a little concerned there was something about each new episode someone somewhere might disagree with. I just hoped the comments I saw in passing would stay positive, hoped the comments I was noticing really would be positive on a second look. There are enough mysteries and machinations to the tournament that I can wonder how much fun things will be in the end, but for now at least it's one of the series I most look forward to every week.
As for the other new series I'm most interested in every week, it had seemed to start with the opposite problem of a certain weight of expectations. The people who made Gurren Lagann have started a new studio, one of the things they worked on there first being Little Witch Academia, a short subject I liked enough to contribute to the Kickstarter to extend the second instalment of and then go the lengths of ordering the English-subtitled Blu-Ray from Japan. Kill la Kill was, of course, very different from that all-ages fantasy, being a "school battle" story I was a little concerned at the very beginning might be weighed down by its "familiar" setting. As it got under way, though, it didn't take me long to be convinced there wasn't much "conventional" about it, at once subverting and following its own rules with verve and talking school uniforms that transform into exhibitionistic battle costumes. Whether further transformations await in the second half, as some people seem convinced, remain to be seen, but I suppose I'm interested enough in the show to imagine myself buying what I expect to be a pricy video release of it.
Along with all those new series, I kept watching Space Brothers. While in some ways it might be getting a little hard to say something new about a series that stays steady and reliable, there was the interesting touch of the streaming site Crunchyroll setting up a manga reading service that included the original manga for the anime. It's been nice to revisit the beginning of the story from this new perspective, but where in certain other cases I've found the art in manga to have more "personality" than the more mass-produced visuals of the anime made from it, the first chapters of the Space Brothers manga did look a bit "off-model" to me somehow. As the volumes rolled by, though, the characters did seem to start looking more like I expected them to, and the backgrounds also filled in as well.
Finishing the series I'd been watching on DVD near the end of these three months did let me squeeze a few more things in. With the thought of beginning to wrap up my sequel-watching push, I went back to the spinoff series My Otome and opened up its own follow-ups. My Otome Zwei was a short sequel, one which did seem a little more built around giving the secondary characters their own action showpieces than anything else more profound; there were times, though, when I still felt uncertain about the special rules they got to operate by. My Otome 0 ~S.ifr~ was set years before the series, with an almost all-new set of characters who all seem to operate at high power, which tied in with what I'd heard before about how it might work best as a final instalment.
Having sorted out a little more elegant way to connect my portable computer to my big TV than I'd used before, thoughts of getting to some of the "fansubs" I've piled up as surely as official and much more respectable DVDs came to fruition a little faster than I'd imagined at first when I managed to acquire all the episodes of a series that had caught my attention through its direct connection to an earlier series I'd also seen as a fansub. While I watched Battle of the Planets when I was quite young, I missed altogether the other anime series brought over here to try and cash in on the Star Wars boom until I first went online and started hearing about a cartoon named Star Blazers. I grew to understand it had brought its own group of pioneers into anime fandom over here, although the sense some of those people saw Star Blazers as "the one whose changes from the original were permissable because they'd started with it" and therefore rejected Robotech might not have started me off on the best foot. Only a few years after that discovery, though, I had the chance to watch Star Blazers through a very early official streaming experiment, but only a few episodes in I had the troubling sense the dubbing had become almost as "creative" as Voltron's in claiming nobody was actually being killed on screen and stopped. A few years after that, however, as I was starting to find older series fansubbed, I happened on Space Battleship Yamato itself and started watching it, fitting it into my apparent, perhaps self-gratifying ability to move between older and newer series and enjoy all of them. I did eventually buy DVDs of the Yamato movies, trying to at least start making up for having watched all those fansubs. Now, ahead of the rumours that one day an anime will be made of the Gundam the Origin manga, there's the new series Space Battleship Yamato 2199. At first, it did seem an updated direct adaptation of the original episodes, but once the space battleship was outside the solar system (presented with what we've learned in the years since the original) things got more distinct yet. I had the feeling of perfect understanding why this new series was impressing fans I might have imagined would be inclined to identify most of all with "old anime"; it did feel quite well done, updating many things about the show without ever seeming to belittle the old. At the same time, while I was interested to see more female characters added to the cast, I could see how they might seem to fit into familiar modern categories at first glance, to say nothing of the curve-hugging jumpsuits they still wear as uniforms. In being impressed, though, I did have to face how I'd just got my hands on video files made from Blu-Ray discs given English subtitles over in Japan, discs a number of fans over here have already made a big point of saying they've imported. It does seem the discs are going to be released over here as "Star Blazers 2199"; most people seem grudgingly able to accept a changed title but are still troubled at the mere possibility of the names in the subtitles being changed to the "localized," space-operatic ones of Star Blazers so that they don't match the Japanese names being said. There's also the question of whether the discs will be any cheaper in the end than just importing them in the first place.
To close out the year, I managed to see a few movies. The third Madoka Magica movie interested me when I saw it at the movies, although I still have to acknowledge how it acknowledges yet clashes with what seem typical character-pairing impulses. I also managed to watch Lupin the Third: The Mystery of Mamo, a movie that preceded even Hayao Miyazaki's The Castle of Cagliostro and seemed closer in spirit to the disreputable thief of the original manga and the very first television episodes. By the time the movie was over it did seem to be going in odd directions, but I did happen to notice an odd sort of premonition of Akira in the next decade.