![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Taking the "Age Twelve" Challenge
My scattershot but still time-swallowing “manual inspection” of online feeds, which I’ve alluded to before, had me notice some people finding “anime that came out when they were twelve.” I suppose the question had first been posed as subtle corporate promotion of the movie A Silent Voice, the main characters of which had started at twelve, but all the same I got to wondering what I’d find, being older than a good many anime fans out there (if still not quite as old as some). To name the titles, of course, is to give away just how old I am.
I headed off to the Wikipedia categories I’d looked through to help remember and place “personal standout anime” of the past decade, then clicked back and back until I’d got to the year I was twelve. My first glance didn’t seem all that encouraging, though: out of the handful of TV series I recognized the names of, the one I’d actually watched through in all the years since then was Transformers Masterforce, which had taken a long step away from “Transformers as I’d known it at the time” towards “more obviously anime” but which still seemed sort of lightweight.
After a moment, though, I managed to tell myself the year had been a time of Original Video Animation, and found my way to an associated category. Seeing Gunbuster was a definite, immediate boost; even with my usual reluctance to proclaim a “favourite of favourites” at the seeming risk of diminishing everything else, Hideaki Anno’s Gainax production does have its charms. I also noticed the Patlabor OVAs had begun the same year, a more decorous mecha series perhaps.
The third category of movies sported a perhaps even more considerable lineup. Akira and My Neighbor Totoro both came out the same year, and if Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack isn’t spoken of in anywhere near the same breath as either of the first two varied titles it’s kept up some significance in its franchise over the years. The original Legend of the Galactic Heroes adaptation also began that year, and Grave of the Fireflies got my attention too even if I can’t make a point of having watched it; I have a DVD of the movie from back when Central Park Media was still in business, but certain comments the movie’s conclusion is so wrenching it’s hard to see more than once have held me back for many unfortunate years.
All in all I’d turned up a list sufficient to make a decent “decadal review” instalment, and yet it did feel a little arbitrary. I didn’t see any of that anime until I was much closer to twenty-two than twelve, even if I’ve come to wonder in the years since if having had to wait until university pushed back the thought of “growing out of a teenaged diversion” until I was very well hooked. When I was twelve, too, Robotech and Voltron, and Thunder Sub and Saber Rider too, had gone off the air, with North American fans of anime and manga regrouping and gathering strength in places I was too young to be aware of; I was just reading the Robotech novels and supposing an era of kind-of-neat cartoons, far too linked with “program-length commercials” in the end, had passed beyond my reach. There’s also the wrinkle that for all that might be said about “varying cultures, varying acceptances,” I have to suppose Gunbuster and Akira would have been a bit much for the twelve-year-old I’d been. In thinking a bit more about it, though, I did consider that while “twelve years old” had first seemed somehow in between “kids’ stuff” and “teenager-aimed,” at least some anime series, while involving “young teenaged protagonists,” ought still to appeal to twelve-year-olds in an aspirational way.
I headed off to the Wikipedia categories I’d looked through to help remember and place “personal standout anime” of the past decade, then clicked back and back until I’d got to the year I was twelve. My first glance didn’t seem all that encouraging, though: out of the handful of TV series I recognized the names of, the one I’d actually watched through in all the years since then was Transformers Masterforce, which had taken a long step away from “Transformers as I’d known it at the time” towards “more obviously anime” but which still seemed sort of lightweight.
After a moment, though, I managed to tell myself the year had been a time of Original Video Animation, and found my way to an associated category. Seeing Gunbuster was a definite, immediate boost; even with my usual reluctance to proclaim a “favourite of favourites” at the seeming risk of diminishing everything else, Hideaki Anno’s Gainax production does have its charms. I also noticed the Patlabor OVAs had begun the same year, a more decorous mecha series perhaps.
The third category of movies sported a perhaps even more considerable lineup. Akira and My Neighbor Totoro both came out the same year, and if Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack isn’t spoken of in anywhere near the same breath as either of the first two varied titles it’s kept up some significance in its franchise over the years. The original Legend of the Galactic Heroes adaptation also began that year, and Grave of the Fireflies got my attention too even if I can’t make a point of having watched it; I have a DVD of the movie from back when Central Park Media was still in business, but certain comments the movie’s conclusion is so wrenching it’s hard to see more than once have held me back for many unfortunate years.
All in all I’d turned up a list sufficient to make a decent “decadal review” instalment, and yet it did feel a little arbitrary. I didn’t see any of that anime until I was much closer to twenty-two than twelve, even if I’ve come to wonder in the years since if having had to wait until university pushed back the thought of “growing out of a teenaged diversion” until I was very well hooked. When I was twelve, too, Robotech and Voltron, and Thunder Sub and Saber Rider too, had gone off the air, with North American fans of anime and manga regrouping and gathering strength in places I was too young to be aware of; I was just reading the Robotech novels and supposing an era of kind-of-neat cartoons, far too linked with “program-length commercials” in the end, had passed beyond my reach. There’s also the wrinkle that for all that might be said about “varying cultures, varying acceptances,” I have to suppose Gunbuster and Akira would have been a bit much for the twelve-year-old I’d been. In thinking a bit more about it, though, I did consider that while “twelve years old” had first seemed somehow in between “kids’ stuff” and “teenager-aimed,” at least some anime series, while involving “young teenaged protagonists,” ought still to appeal to twelve-year-olds in an aspirational way.