2022: My Second Quarter in Anime
Jul. 1st, 2022 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerDaydreaming ahead to a grand episode-sampling project at the start of next year, but still “waiting to be certain production’s actually complete” right now, left me somewhere in a marking-time middle watching anime in the past three months. For all that I was always a bit cautious about “pitching your instant judgment in with everyone else’s every week,” I have been wondering about trying to catch up to the crowd at last. The only problem was I was still working my way through enough titles to make getting to all the new series that had managed to catch my eye too steep an addition, so I stayed in my careful groove at least one more time.
As my viewing plans for these three months firmed up I was aware I was still managing to sample particular titles from a variety of calendrical decades. The one hole I had to fill was the 1990s, and I settled on something I’d had waiting for a while, the Blu-Ray of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. I had seen it before, first in parts as one “latest new thing” back at my university’s anime club and then on DVD in the “Bandai Entertainment” days, but I was willing to get back to it once more. A lengthy OVA series made as the first “alternative universe Gundams” were appearing on TV, this title sticks with the original “Universal Century” setting and returns to that story’s original “One Year War,” with a small unit of Mobile Suits operating in some kind of Southeast Asian setting. I started off slightly intrigued by the main characters all having being assigned to their mecha rather than lucking into them in the initial crisis, and the mechanical animation was impressive. (I suppose I got to the point of taking for granted the Mobile Suits walking rather than sporting advanced features invoking animation tricks that would keep them from having to move their legs.) As the series progressed, through, I did get to wondering how often the team was on its own and battling similarly small groups of Zeon Mobile Suits rather than being some sort of “heavy armour spearhead” (doubtless animating a large-scale battle like that would have needed an exceptional amount of effort in the late 1990s, and the modern alternative might only provoke complaints about “resorting to computer animation”). The story hinges on “a connection across the front lines,” but just might have left me wondering about “getting to the real development there a bit late and a bit suddenly.”
I also kept watching through the late-1970s super robot action of Daimos. The romantic couple established at the beginning of the series in fact spent most of the series separated from each other, if in ways that do change as the plot twists accumulate. In noticing the series developing “some humans are blinkered to the point of blind aggressiveness” to go alongside “some aliens are willing to work towards coexistence,” I did get to wondering a bit about some of the things now made a big deal of as “the innovations ahead of their time of Gundam” having been anticipated even alongside more outlandish super robots familiar for their time. That might have been stronger to mind, though, because where once I’d supposed the last few episodes of Daimos would have to wait for another “quarterly summary,” I was stuck with some extra time towards the end of these months and decided to push harder at this series and get it finished up.
In the sixth series of the baseball saga Major, its star pitcher Goro had returned to the American Major Leagues (if leagues that use neither actual team nor league names themselves) as a rookie. By this point what the show’s story is, with its melodramatic twists and turns, was pretty clear to me. I was quite willing too to find interest in Goro’s diverse teammates and rivals, so long as I didn’t dwell too much on there not seeming all that much different between these “pro athletes” and the idealistic Japanese students of earlier series. It could be that the series being from the first decade of this century (although this sixth series just crosses the production line into the second decade) made it stand out for me; at times in the past it had been all too tempting to risk agreeing with certain complaints that anime from those years had been “narrowing to high school settings at once mundane yet unrealistic to chase an all too limited audience for the sake of a few years of steady profits.” In any case, being able to follow along from “it manages to transcend the more limited ‘early-digital’ production values from around the turn of the century” to “it’s looking a bit more modern” was something in itself. I suppose I could stretch things too far in making claims to “hidden rewards,” though; the only reason I was able to watch the series was because people had been “fansubbing” it back then. The opening and closing credits of the sixth series gave a sense of the story acknowledging its beginning as it closed in on its end. That end did include a “time-skip” end credits sequence that had me wonder if there’d been more material in the original manga and whether the time skipped over really could have been filled out one sports season at a time. However, I was able to follow up with a few OVAs filling in those glimpses (although the “home uniforms” just happened to change to “away uniforms” on the ultimate stage) and starting to set up the next generation again. At this point I could get to the more recent follow-up that, in being briefly talked up, had turned my attention towards Major at last, but I have to admit that for the moment I’d be just as fine using those steady time slots in my weekly schedule for something new and different.
I polished off the final episodes of City Hunter 2. By this point, the series might have become enough of a known quantity to me, amiable and acceptable, that it’s not easy to come up with something new, concise, and specific about it. My previous impressions of lots of two-episode stories and a developing depth of feeling between Ryo the City Hunter and his assistant Kaori are still strong in my mind. Two shorter City Hunter series were ready to be viewed as I finished this lengthy show, but the thought did enter my mind to use the time I’d been watching it to be sure I got through some other shows as well. That might not have helped when trying to say something here.
Along with making a big deal of The Orbital Children, Netflix did also start streaming the now about fifteen-year-old series that had made Mitsuo Iso a name to demonstrate the depth and subtlety of your interest in anime. Very aware of how I’d kept missing chances to even buy that older series on DVD or Blu-Ray for the sake of “free shipping” (something that’s just been discontinued to my country from the online anime store I’ve stuck with for years, although I’m wondering if a cross-border middle-man service I’ve just been pointed to might actually work out and save some money), I resolved to watch Den-noh Coil. (That’s not the only way to romanize its title; The Orbital Children’s info block on Netflix itself used “Dennou.”) My first thought was “a series like this will be twelve, maybe thirteen episodes long; I’ll watch one episode a week.” After I’d started it, though, I realised it was twenty-six episodes long; maybe “being old” affects it that way, too. It does look not quite as sharp picture-wise as current anime, and the character designs of its grade school kids do have a cartoony edge of simplicity to them tempting thoughts of “deliberate effort to avoid certain connotations of ‘anime style.’” I’d known the series involved ubiquitous “augmented reality” glasses, matter-of-factly presented from its first moments and glimpsing strange glitches along the seams of the system in a world seemingly without much else in the way of fancy “augmentation.” Perhaps it was easier to take this by itself than the thoroughly networked elements of The Orbital Children, even if I’ve told myself “when ‘seemingly realistic space travel,’ ‘grand artificial intelligence extensions to current computing,’ and ‘transcendence itself’ got put together in 1968, you were fine with that...” At the same time, though, I do keep fearing if having got online in the mid-1990s and having been too lazy to sign up for most multimedia network services until some were quite intent on ringing caution bells leaves me a little disconnected from some of the explorations and escapes in this show; I keep thinking “if they just take their glasses off, they won’t notice a lot of what’s happening.” (There was one scene where two of the kids did “turn their glasses off” to enter a potentially risky zone, which is apparently better for the hardware’s stored data than “just not looking through it.”)
More than a decade ago, I watched an anime called Rocket Girls. It featured teenaged Japanese schoolgirls being launched into orbit because their weight was all the working rocket of a small space agency could lift. I’d grinned and told myself “only in anime” (although I’d later learned the series had been adapted from two novels, and read them in translation). All these years later, that feeling came back when I saw advance notices of an anime the title of which wound up translated as Irina, the Vampire Cosmonaut (which, as it turns out, also has novels). The actual series didn’t attract much in the way of good attention and I didn’t start watching it as soon as it was finished, but another three months later I had run across a halfway positive comment. At that point one of my interests beyond anime was enough to make me take a chance on it.
This series might dodge the necessity of absolute historical accuracy through being set in “a world not quite our own,” familiar enough to me from other anime. The “not the Soviet Union’s” space program is intent on making one last test of its first space capsule and booster with someone more human than a dog yet still expendable, and dragoons a teenaged girl vampire (somewhat more durable in sunlight yet more “realistically” limited than the traditional sort of vampire). A young cosmonaut candidate named Lev, with too much idealism for his own good, is assigned as Irina’s handler and told to not get attached to her, but of course things turn out more complicated than that. There was enough detail in the show’s hardware to get me thinking again of how The Wings of Honneamise had gone to great lengths designing a unique human culture but wound up pretty much with a Vostok capsule and rocket. The divergence I felt safest in feeling amused by, perhaps, was the “Chief Designer” looking a bit more rugged and nattily dressed than Sergey Korolev, although I was quite willing to accept a few more female characters (beyond Irina) in roles outside “reality.” While a certain comment had left me a little apprehensive about the end of this series, it did work a bit better for me than I’d imagined. However, I did wind up with the feeling this was one of those anime that always look a little drab and even a bit “off.”
The Shinkalion giant robot franchise does seem quite successful. Its lengthy original anime was followed by a sequel, and I took care to accumulate the “fansubs” of Shinkalion Z, although I still waited until that new series was over (after less time than the original, if still a good run compared to a lot of other anime) before starting to watch it. There were a good number of distinctive-looking shinkansen bullet trains to transform into giant robots, but the original series did in the end seem to run through all of them. The new series fiddles with the designs of the robots, but also takes more ordinary passenger trains and turns them into replacement power-up limbs. Once I’d taken that change in, though, I did get to wondering how much else the new series offered. I’d kept dwelling on how there weren’t a lot of girl characters alongside the spiky-haired grade school boy pilots, but the sequel series had even less of a young female presence. However, an interesting complication did develop around the thirteen-episode mark as this series’ “adversary transforming train” showed up at last, and guest stars familiar and unexpected showed up afterwards.
In the first three months of this year I did see people complaining there weren’t many new standout series. Just one show there seemed to attract real positivity, and that was the one show from those months I decided to watch once My Dress-Up Darling was finished. I did have a few odd thoughts starting off about settling on a show involving “cosplay” given that just doesn’t seem to grab me the way it obviously does for so many other fans... in “real life,” at least. There is the thought “is it different when it’s an anime character dressing up as other anime characters?”, but that just leads straight on to worries about “being too interested in drawings.”
In any case, the series began with a teenaged schoolboy named Wakana Gojo who seems rather old-fashioned and hides his interest in traditional Japanese hina dolls, which he’s apprenticing to make. When one of the popular girls in class, Marin Kitagawa, happens on that secret, Wakana’s fears are blasted away when Marin is most interested in him being able to sew. She gets him to start making cosplay costumes. Most of the properties Marin is interested in had a certain “fanservicey” sleaziness to them, and that could leave me with an impression she was “too good to be true” (perhaps a less loaded term than the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” that did come to mind even as a few other comments used it too, just as there are dodges around “Mary Sue.”) It’s not that long until we start seeing things from Marin’s point of view as well, though, and that pushed back my first impressions even if the first thing I really caught about her was how hard she was falling for Wakana. With an attractive young woman changing into revealing outfits, many comments insisted the series had moved beyond mere “fanservice” to full-blown “ecchi,” and yet it had a deft enough touch, a firm enough statement of that classic theme “whatever you do, do to the utmost of your ability,” and impressive enough production values I did get past worries over that as well.
As I kept working my way through Urusei Yatsura I began to suspect I had to be getting to the episodes that had aired around when the third movie of the franchise had opened. At the same time, though, I was wondering about the new adaptation set to premiere in another three months, and if I would rather see it a bit more as itself than in sudden succession from later episodes of the original anime. I decided at last to leave off at a point where I could return to the original with another movie; I still haven’t got to the single episode I remember having seen at university (not at the anime club there, mind). There are times I imagine the first people over here to have seen this part of the anime speculating about “a foreign culture’s different rhythms,” but keep having to wonder if the stretched-out setups of the episodes I’ve been watching for a while might have at least a bit of “once, two chapters of manga were being adapted per episode, but now just one chapter is being adapted per episode and things can’t move quite as fast...”
As my viewing plans for these three months firmed up I was aware I was still managing to sample particular titles from a variety of calendrical decades. The one hole I had to fill was the 1990s, and I settled on something I’d had waiting for a while, the Blu-Ray of Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. I had seen it before, first in parts as one “latest new thing” back at my university’s anime club and then on DVD in the “Bandai Entertainment” days, but I was willing to get back to it once more. A lengthy OVA series made as the first “alternative universe Gundams” were appearing on TV, this title sticks with the original “Universal Century” setting and returns to that story’s original “One Year War,” with a small unit of Mobile Suits operating in some kind of Southeast Asian setting. I started off slightly intrigued by the main characters all having being assigned to their mecha rather than lucking into them in the initial crisis, and the mechanical animation was impressive. (I suppose I got to the point of taking for granted the Mobile Suits walking rather than sporting advanced features invoking animation tricks that would keep them from having to move their legs.) As the series progressed, through, I did get to wondering how often the team was on its own and battling similarly small groups of Zeon Mobile Suits rather than being some sort of “heavy armour spearhead” (doubtless animating a large-scale battle like that would have needed an exceptional amount of effort in the late 1990s, and the modern alternative might only provoke complaints about “resorting to computer animation”). The story hinges on “a connection across the front lines,” but just might have left me wondering about “getting to the real development there a bit late and a bit suddenly.”
I also kept watching through the late-1970s super robot action of Daimos. The romantic couple established at the beginning of the series in fact spent most of the series separated from each other, if in ways that do change as the plot twists accumulate. In noticing the series developing “some humans are blinkered to the point of blind aggressiveness” to go alongside “some aliens are willing to work towards coexistence,” I did get to wondering a bit about some of the things now made a big deal of as “the innovations ahead of their time of Gundam” having been anticipated even alongside more outlandish super robots familiar for their time. That might have been stronger to mind, though, because where once I’d supposed the last few episodes of Daimos would have to wait for another “quarterly summary,” I was stuck with some extra time towards the end of these months and decided to push harder at this series and get it finished up.
In the sixth series of the baseball saga Major, its star pitcher Goro had returned to the American Major Leagues (if leagues that use neither actual team nor league names themselves) as a rookie. By this point what the show’s story is, with its melodramatic twists and turns, was pretty clear to me. I was quite willing too to find interest in Goro’s diverse teammates and rivals, so long as I didn’t dwell too much on there not seeming all that much different between these “pro athletes” and the idealistic Japanese students of earlier series. It could be that the series being from the first decade of this century (although this sixth series just crosses the production line into the second decade) made it stand out for me; at times in the past it had been all too tempting to risk agreeing with certain complaints that anime from those years had been “narrowing to high school settings at once mundane yet unrealistic to chase an all too limited audience for the sake of a few years of steady profits.” In any case, being able to follow along from “it manages to transcend the more limited ‘early-digital’ production values from around the turn of the century” to “it’s looking a bit more modern” was something in itself. I suppose I could stretch things too far in making claims to “hidden rewards,” though; the only reason I was able to watch the series was because people had been “fansubbing” it back then. The opening and closing credits of the sixth series gave a sense of the story acknowledging its beginning as it closed in on its end. That end did include a “time-skip” end credits sequence that had me wonder if there’d been more material in the original manga and whether the time skipped over really could have been filled out one sports season at a time. However, I was able to follow up with a few OVAs filling in those glimpses (although the “home uniforms” just happened to change to “away uniforms” on the ultimate stage) and starting to set up the next generation again. At this point I could get to the more recent follow-up that, in being briefly talked up, had turned my attention towards Major at last, but I have to admit that for the moment I’d be just as fine using those steady time slots in my weekly schedule for something new and different.
I polished off the final episodes of City Hunter 2. By this point, the series might have become enough of a known quantity to me, amiable and acceptable, that it’s not easy to come up with something new, concise, and specific about it. My previous impressions of lots of two-episode stories and a developing depth of feeling between Ryo the City Hunter and his assistant Kaori are still strong in my mind. Two shorter City Hunter series were ready to be viewed as I finished this lengthy show, but the thought did enter my mind to use the time I’d been watching it to be sure I got through some other shows as well. That might not have helped when trying to say something here.
Along with making a big deal of The Orbital Children, Netflix did also start streaming the now about fifteen-year-old series that had made Mitsuo Iso a name to demonstrate the depth and subtlety of your interest in anime. Very aware of how I’d kept missing chances to even buy that older series on DVD or Blu-Ray for the sake of “free shipping” (something that’s just been discontinued to my country from the online anime store I’ve stuck with for years, although I’m wondering if a cross-border middle-man service I’ve just been pointed to might actually work out and save some money), I resolved to watch Den-noh Coil. (That’s not the only way to romanize its title; The Orbital Children’s info block on Netflix itself used “Dennou.”) My first thought was “a series like this will be twelve, maybe thirteen episodes long; I’ll watch one episode a week.” After I’d started it, though, I realised it was twenty-six episodes long; maybe “being old” affects it that way, too. It does look not quite as sharp picture-wise as current anime, and the character designs of its grade school kids do have a cartoony edge of simplicity to them tempting thoughts of “deliberate effort to avoid certain connotations of ‘anime style.’” I’d known the series involved ubiquitous “augmented reality” glasses, matter-of-factly presented from its first moments and glimpsing strange glitches along the seams of the system in a world seemingly without much else in the way of fancy “augmentation.” Perhaps it was easier to take this by itself than the thoroughly networked elements of The Orbital Children, even if I’ve told myself “when ‘seemingly realistic space travel,’ ‘grand artificial intelligence extensions to current computing,’ and ‘transcendence itself’ got put together in 1968, you were fine with that...” At the same time, though, I do keep fearing if having got online in the mid-1990s and having been too lazy to sign up for most multimedia network services until some were quite intent on ringing caution bells leaves me a little disconnected from some of the explorations and escapes in this show; I keep thinking “if they just take their glasses off, they won’t notice a lot of what’s happening.” (There was one scene where two of the kids did “turn their glasses off” to enter a potentially risky zone, which is apparently better for the hardware’s stored data than “just not looking through it.”)
More than a decade ago, I watched an anime called Rocket Girls. It featured teenaged Japanese schoolgirls being launched into orbit because their weight was all the working rocket of a small space agency could lift. I’d grinned and told myself “only in anime” (although I’d later learned the series had been adapted from two novels, and read them in translation). All these years later, that feeling came back when I saw advance notices of an anime the title of which wound up translated as Irina, the Vampire Cosmonaut (which, as it turns out, also has novels). The actual series didn’t attract much in the way of good attention and I didn’t start watching it as soon as it was finished, but another three months later I had run across a halfway positive comment. At that point one of my interests beyond anime was enough to make me take a chance on it.
This series might dodge the necessity of absolute historical accuracy through being set in “a world not quite our own,” familiar enough to me from other anime. The “not the Soviet Union’s” space program is intent on making one last test of its first space capsule and booster with someone more human than a dog yet still expendable, and dragoons a teenaged girl vampire (somewhat more durable in sunlight yet more “realistically” limited than the traditional sort of vampire). A young cosmonaut candidate named Lev, with too much idealism for his own good, is assigned as Irina’s handler and told to not get attached to her, but of course things turn out more complicated than that. There was enough detail in the show’s hardware to get me thinking again of how The Wings of Honneamise had gone to great lengths designing a unique human culture but wound up pretty much with a Vostok capsule and rocket. The divergence I felt safest in feeling amused by, perhaps, was the “Chief Designer” looking a bit more rugged and nattily dressed than Sergey Korolev, although I was quite willing to accept a few more female characters (beyond Irina) in roles outside “reality.” While a certain comment had left me a little apprehensive about the end of this series, it did work a bit better for me than I’d imagined. However, I did wind up with the feeling this was one of those anime that always look a little drab and even a bit “off.”
The Shinkalion giant robot franchise does seem quite successful. Its lengthy original anime was followed by a sequel, and I took care to accumulate the “fansubs” of Shinkalion Z, although I still waited until that new series was over (after less time than the original, if still a good run compared to a lot of other anime) before starting to watch it. There were a good number of distinctive-looking shinkansen bullet trains to transform into giant robots, but the original series did in the end seem to run through all of them. The new series fiddles with the designs of the robots, but also takes more ordinary passenger trains and turns them into replacement power-up limbs. Once I’d taken that change in, though, I did get to wondering how much else the new series offered. I’d kept dwelling on how there weren’t a lot of girl characters alongside the spiky-haired grade school boy pilots, but the sequel series had even less of a young female presence. However, an interesting complication did develop around the thirteen-episode mark as this series’ “adversary transforming train” showed up at last, and guest stars familiar and unexpected showed up afterwards.
In the first three months of this year I did see people complaining there weren’t many new standout series. Just one show there seemed to attract real positivity, and that was the one show from those months I decided to watch once My Dress-Up Darling was finished. I did have a few odd thoughts starting off about settling on a show involving “cosplay” given that just doesn’t seem to grab me the way it obviously does for so many other fans... in “real life,” at least. There is the thought “is it different when it’s an anime character dressing up as other anime characters?”, but that just leads straight on to worries about “being too interested in drawings.”
In any case, the series began with a teenaged schoolboy named Wakana Gojo who seems rather old-fashioned and hides his interest in traditional Japanese hina dolls, which he’s apprenticing to make. When one of the popular girls in class, Marin Kitagawa, happens on that secret, Wakana’s fears are blasted away when Marin is most interested in him being able to sew. She gets him to start making cosplay costumes. Most of the properties Marin is interested in had a certain “fanservicey” sleaziness to them, and that could leave me with an impression she was “too good to be true” (perhaps a less loaded term than the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” that did come to mind even as a few other comments used it too, just as there are dodges around “Mary Sue.”) It’s not that long until we start seeing things from Marin’s point of view as well, though, and that pushed back my first impressions even if the first thing I really caught about her was how hard she was falling for Wakana. With an attractive young woman changing into revealing outfits, many comments insisted the series had moved beyond mere “fanservice” to full-blown “ecchi,” and yet it had a deft enough touch, a firm enough statement of that classic theme “whatever you do, do to the utmost of your ability,” and impressive enough production values I did get past worries over that as well.
As I kept working my way through Urusei Yatsura I began to suspect I had to be getting to the episodes that had aired around when the third movie of the franchise had opened. At the same time, though, I was wondering about the new adaptation set to premiere in another three months, and if I would rather see it a bit more as itself than in sudden succession from later episodes of the original anime. I decided at last to leave off at a point where I could return to the original with another movie; I still haven’t got to the single episode I remember having seen at university (not at the anime club there, mind). There are times I imagine the first people over here to have seen this part of the anime speculating about “a foreign culture’s different rhythms,” but keep having to wonder if the stretched-out setups of the episodes I’ve been watching for a while might have at least a bit of “once, two chapters of manga were being adapted per episode, but now just one chapter is being adapted per episode and things can’t move quite as fast...”