2007: My First 4 Months in Anime
May. 1st, 2007 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
After setting down a few thoughts on all of the anime I watched over the course of the last year, I started wondering about doing that more often. Unfortunately, I never quite got around to writing out "first quarter" thoughts at the start of April... but it did occur to me that I could at least talk about the first four months of the year. All in all, I think I've actually enjoyed my anime watching a bit more in those months than I did for much of last year.
For a lot of last year, I was more or less focusing on chewing through just four lengthy series, some of them fairly old. It may be that the sameness started to get to me, but it may also be that I had been oversold on some of the series through the opinions of other fans... opinions that could seem to me in ungrateful moments to carry undertones of "Watch this classic and see the modern trash you thought was good for what it is!" I don't especially like being told to watch something just to show something else up, and that may have led to some slight friction between what I was seeing and ungrateful speculation on what might have been "better yet" about even it. One ambiguous step that I took early this year was just stopping altogether reading one anime board, at its best a cool, thoughtful second perspective on both overblown hype and quality titles, but at its worst a conclave of bitter burnout cases who seemed able to appreciate only the titles of their own formative years. The worst moments seemed to predominate, and so I stopped reading, as I've done at other times in other circumstances. From time to time I do wonder about that second perspective, but not that often any more.
On the other hand, I did start off this year chewing through a lengthy series, one fairly old. My attempt last year to rewatch Zeta Gundam to conquer my ambiguous feelings about something proclaimed a classic took quite a while and didn't go quite that well. This year, though, I had DVDs that I knew worked, DVDs I ran through "ripping" software to combine with clips of the original opening and closing themes to create a personal edition more free than before of links to all the fan complaints about an inadequate release. I watched one episode a day (but had to accelerate just a little bit at the end after I realised I would have to be away the weekend I had intended to finish it), and got through the series for the third time... still willing, alas, to be difficult about specific moments of plot and character development, although I did manage to get over some frustration about halfway through about how it was taking up a lot of viewing time that could have gone to rewatching a whole list of other series I've felt more free to enjoy on their own merits. By the time I was finished with the marathon, I was a little burned out on thoughts of doing anything similar with even those. Still, it was done, and right now I'm not troubled by thoughts of "having" to do it again next year. With it concluded, I even managed to watch "fansubs" of three movies officially cut down from the fifty half-hour episodes of the series. This has happened several times with different Gundam series, and while some people find some of those movies understandably yet bizarrely choppy, I somehow enjoyed the Zeta Gundam movies more than the series. They omitted some of the specific moments that had preyed on me during my viewing of the series, and offered a lot of impressive new animation. (That new animation is juxtaposed against animation twenty years old, though, and while it's not like the styles don't match at all, I'm convinced that no anime fan who watches the Zeta Gundam movies without complaining about them can make any comment against the computer animation of the Star Wars Special Editions for it "not matching" the old modelwork...)
My experiment combining DVD and downloaded content with Zeta Gundam did leave me wondering about trying to replace a passage of music changed in the new release of the late-1980s Original Video Animation series Gunbuster... and then, somehow, I managed to just shrug the whole matter off and watch the rest of the six-episode series. All in all, I see no need to make the series any less subtly overblown and enjoyable than when I watched it at my university's anime club a decade ago. (Its main characters, in "Powerpuff Girls" style, are my post icon.) Back then, mind you, I had first heard of Gunbuster by hearing that a small group of fans had used it to make a parody "fandub" continuing Robotech. I still haven't seen that parody, but I did happen to find the legendary lost Robotech: The Movie... and I proceeded from that to a genuine official continuation made at very long last, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. It may be that I outright chose to enjoy it, rather than to become offended by it, but if nothing else it seems to show that every time I think I should just put Robotech behind me as a strange anime-esque experiment of the 1980s, something about it (even if it's nothing more than pondering different perspectives on how to "read" and interpret a work) pulls me back to it. (Interestingly enough, in the very process of preparing this post I noticed a review of it on the "SF Weekly" site. It can be critical, quite sharply so at times, and yet I found it thoughtful in the way an aggreived fan complaint can't quite seem to be to me.)
I also watched a different, slightly older, less well-known OVA from the 1980s, Iczer-One. Again, outside influences may have drawn me to it: it was worked into a vast opus of flaming self-insertion fanfiction along with everything else of about the same age, something I've grappled with in MSTings. All in all, I'm now quite aware of how it was subtly twisted towards irreverent self-aggrandisment just like everything else the fanfic's heroic college students took on. Other than that, at some times it had the strange leaps of a dream and at other times it had all the nastiness of a nightmare, leading to a general feeling that it was a good example of the first anime titles promoted as such in North America, and how the bright claims that they were unlike any cartoons you might see on Saturday morning had a dark side in that those cartoons just happened to bleed in red rivers and get naked, not always at the same time...
After all of that discussion of old anime, as if things really haven't changed for me, I'm reminded again of how I realised late last year that I was indeed watching some new anime that had happened to get on a TV channel I actually get. Fullmetal Alchemist came to a conclusion somewhat open-ended yet quite satisfying for me, but with that the schedule changed. Eureka 7, which I had quite warmed up to bit by bit, was moved to a later time slot, although I think it's actually in reruns here. In any case, I've ordered the DVDs of it. It was replaced by a series called Gundam Seed Destiny, one of the many "alternative universe" series that followed up on the very complicated story Zeta Gundam wound up fitting into. I had quite enjoyed its predecessor, Gundam Seed, aware perhaps of potential flaws others seem merely obsessed with but quite liking its characters... the only problem is that Seed Destiny is spoken of in tones of amplified horror. Nobody likes its new characters, except that they get pushed offscreen partway through to bring back the old characters, except that they're messed up too, except that things just plain run out of steam partway through in a welter of stock footage. I almost felt challenged to watch it myself, to take up the perilous challenge of extracting enjoyment in the face of complaints (as opposed to crunching up against being ordered to appreciate something else), but wound up declining as before, still intent on concluding that Gundam Seed ended for its characters with "and they lived happily ever after." (For some reason, there seems an odd resonance for me between my positive feelings about the story and characters of Gundam Seed and my positive feelings about the story and characters of Robotech.) On the other hand, I'm now watching fansubs of the direct sequel to Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, and that series has attracted its own moderate horror over the years for starting with a good deal of ridiculousness. I'm not that far from disagreeing with that. (The Zeta Gundam movies end more conclusively and just a little more happily than the series did, but seem in the process to write ZZ Gundam out of their continuity.)
I've worked through some DVDs of newer anime as well, though. I came to quite enjoy Kaleido Star, a series about a bubbly young performer joining an acrobatic performance circus; after mentioning numerous series where giant robots must be piloted for the fate of the world, it made for a very pleasant change of pace. I'm also continuing Zipang, a series remininscent of North American stories I've heard of where modern soldiers are flung back in time to World War II... only to face a situation naturally more ambiguous than the self-confident descendents of the Allies would ever worry about... and found myself interested in Serial Experiments Lain, when I got around to digging it out of my "backlog." It's actually not quite that brand-new any more, but speculation about existence in an online world skewed from our own hasn't quite dated yet. Too, for once I was challenged instead of just overwhelmed by having to guess at figuring things out for myself.
For a lot of last year, I was more or less focusing on chewing through just four lengthy series, some of them fairly old. It may be that the sameness started to get to me, but it may also be that I had been oversold on some of the series through the opinions of other fans... opinions that could seem to me in ungrateful moments to carry undertones of "Watch this classic and see the modern trash you thought was good for what it is!" I don't especially like being told to watch something just to show something else up, and that may have led to some slight friction between what I was seeing and ungrateful speculation on what might have been "better yet" about even it. One ambiguous step that I took early this year was just stopping altogether reading one anime board, at its best a cool, thoughtful second perspective on both overblown hype and quality titles, but at its worst a conclave of bitter burnout cases who seemed able to appreciate only the titles of their own formative years. The worst moments seemed to predominate, and so I stopped reading, as I've done at other times in other circumstances. From time to time I do wonder about that second perspective, but not that often any more.
On the other hand, I did start off this year chewing through a lengthy series, one fairly old. My attempt last year to rewatch Zeta Gundam to conquer my ambiguous feelings about something proclaimed a classic took quite a while and didn't go quite that well. This year, though, I had DVDs that I knew worked, DVDs I ran through "ripping" software to combine with clips of the original opening and closing themes to create a personal edition more free than before of links to all the fan complaints about an inadequate release. I watched one episode a day (but had to accelerate just a little bit at the end after I realised I would have to be away the weekend I had intended to finish it), and got through the series for the third time... still willing, alas, to be difficult about specific moments of plot and character development, although I did manage to get over some frustration about halfway through about how it was taking up a lot of viewing time that could have gone to rewatching a whole list of other series I've felt more free to enjoy on their own merits. By the time I was finished with the marathon, I was a little burned out on thoughts of doing anything similar with even those. Still, it was done, and right now I'm not troubled by thoughts of "having" to do it again next year. With it concluded, I even managed to watch "fansubs" of three movies officially cut down from the fifty half-hour episodes of the series. This has happened several times with different Gundam series, and while some people find some of those movies understandably yet bizarrely choppy, I somehow enjoyed the Zeta Gundam movies more than the series. They omitted some of the specific moments that had preyed on me during my viewing of the series, and offered a lot of impressive new animation. (That new animation is juxtaposed against animation twenty years old, though, and while it's not like the styles don't match at all, I'm convinced that no anime fan who watches the Zeta Gundam movies without complaining about them can make any comment against the computer animation of the Star Wars Special Editions for it "not matching" the old modelwork...)
My experiment combining DVD and downloaded content with Zeta Gundam did leave me wondering about trying to replace a passage of music changed in the new release of the late-1980s Original Video Animation series Gunbuster... and then, somehow, I managed to just shrug the whole matter off and watch the rest of the six-episode series. All in all, I see no need to make the series any less subtly overblown and enjoyable than when I watched it at my university's anime club a decade ago. (Its main characters, in "Powerpuff Girls" style, are my post icon.) Back then, mind you, I had first heard of Gunbuster by hearing that a small group of fans had used it to make a parody "fandub" continuing Robotech. I still haven't seen that parody, but I did happen to find the legendary lost Robotech: The Movie... and I proceeded from that to a genuine official continuation made at very long last, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. It may be that I outright chose to enjoy it, rather than to become offended by it, but if nothing else it seems to show that every time I think I should just put Robotech behind me as a strange anime-esque experiment of the 1980s, something about it (even if it's nothing more than pondering different perspectives on how to "read" and interpret a work) pulls me back to it. (Interestingly enough, in the very process of preparing this post I noticed a review of it on the "SF Weekly" site. It can be critical, quite sharply so at times, and yet I found it thoughtful in the way an aggreived fan complaint can't quite seem to be to me.)
I also watched a different, slightly older, less well-known OVA from the 1980s, Iczer-One. Again, outside influences may have drawn me to it: it was worked into a vast opus of flaming self-insertion fanfiction along with everything else of about the same age, something I've grappled with in MSTings. All in all, I'm now quite aware of how it was subtly twisted towards irreverent self-aggrandisment just like everything else the fanfic's heroic college students took on. Other than that, at some times it had the strange leaps of a dream and at other times it had all the nastiness of a nightmare, leading to a general feeling that it was a good example of the first anime titles promoted as such in North America, and how the bright claims that they were unlike any cartoons you might see on Saturday morning had a dark side in that those cartoons just happened to bleed in red rivers and get naked, not always at the same time...
After all of that discussion of old anime, as if things really haven't changed for me, I'm reminded again of how I realised late last year that I was indeed watching some new anime that had happened to get on a TV channel I actually get. Fullmetal Alchemist came to a conclusion somewhat open-ended yet quite satisfying for me, but with that the schedule changed. Eureka 7, which I had quite warmed up to bit by bit, was moved to a later time slot, although I think it's actually in reruns here. In any case, I've ordered the DVDs of it. It was replaced by a series called Gundam Seed Destiny, one of the many "alternative universe" series that followed up on the very complicated story Zeta Gundam wound up fitting into. I had quite enjoyed its predecessor, Gundam Seed, aware perhaps of potential flaws others seem merely obsessed with but quite liking its characters... the only problem is that Seed Destiny is spoken of in tones of amplified horror. Nobody likes its new characters, except that they get pushed offscreen partway through to bring back the old characters, except that they're messed up too, except that things just plain run out of steam partway through in a welter of stock footage. I almost felt challenged to watch it myself, to take up the perilous challenge of extracting enjoyment in the face of complaints (as opposed to crunching up against being ordered to appreciate something else), but wound up declining as before, still intent on concluding that Gundam Seed ended for its characters with "and they lived happily ever after." (For some reason, there seems an odd resonance for me between my positive feelings about the story and characters of Gundam Seed and my positive feelings about the story and characters of Robotech.) On the other hand, I'm now watching fansubs of the direct sequel to Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, and that series has attracted its own moderate horror over the years for starting with a good deal of ridiculousness. I'm not that far from disagreeing with that. (The Zeta Gundam movies end more conclusively and just a little more happily than the series did, but seem in the process to write ZZ Gundam out of their continuity.)
I've worked through some DVDs of newer anime as well, though. I came to quite enjoy Kaleido Star, a series about a bubbly young performer joining an acrobatic performance circus; after mentioning numerous series where giant robots must be piloted for the fate of the world, it made for a very pleasant change of pace. I'm also continuing Zipang, a series remininscent of North American stories I've heard of where modern soldiers are flung back in time to World War II... only to face a situation naturally more ambiguous than the self-confident descendents of the Allies would ever worry about... and found myself interested in Serial Experiments Lain, when I got around to digging it out of my "backlog." It's actually not quite that brand-new any more, but speculation about existence in an online world skewed from our own hasn't quite dated yet. Too, for once I was challenged instead of just overwhelmed by having to guess at figuring things out for myself.