2022: My Third Quarter in Anime
Oct. 1st, 2022 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThat much more prone in recent months to thinking ahead to what anime I’ll watch once I’ve got through what I’m viewing now, I happened to reflect on plans to spend the last weeks of September on a bus tour. With certain preparations, I’d be able to follow certain series on the road; others would have to be dealt with before leaving. In the end, though, I decided to just finish everything in advance; “taking a vacation from daily viewing” could seem a bit appealing too. When we had to be bumped to a slightly later tour that might have become a bit easier, but I then had to consider how I’d been hoping to at last get back to watching some upcoming shows as they streamed and would now have to catch up on them and, perhaps, not post this summary at the very beginning of October. Then, it turned out the tour had to be cut short, and I returned to my routines and a summary I’d already been typing up. Where sometimes the jumble of titles I report on is organized by the order I began watching them in three months ago, here they’re organized by the order I finished them in.
I’ve been contemplating watching Mob Psycho 100 again (and making at least a little use of all the “Blu-Rays of shows I’ve already seen” I keep buying) for a while now, such that my intentions there might have built up again in actual advance of becoming really aware a third instalment of the series is about to premiere. Once that was clear in my mind, however, I supposed I’d have to return to not just the first but the second instalment, and get through both of them in just two months. The series was altogether capable of supporting that brisk-for-me pace. I enjoyed both the bursts of quite impressive psychic-battles animation and the deceptively simple character designs that might well suit that; the humour of the series might have been even funnier for me than before even as I pondered whether it might be “dark” at first glance but have a solid core of positivity on more exposure. Getting to the second instalment did have me wondering about characters from late in its first part reappearing late in the follow-up and whether I’d quite got that on first viewing. I did, though, also wonder if those first two instalments were enough of a “complete story” to leave things wide open in the impending continuation.
I’ve been thinking for a while about watching some anime movies, but never quite finding the time for that even if I might add “I’ve found the time to watch movies not anime.” At last, though, I did manage to open Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. I’ve seen a few other films directed by him, but long enough ago that I was a bit conscious a general mood might have shifted since then and other anime fans may not seem quite as ready to worry out loud “who’s going to make respectable anime (movies) other than Satoshi Kon/now that he’s dead?” I was also aware that even if “not finding the time for anime movies” has something to do with it I haven’t gone back to the movies of Hosoda I’ve watched.
Belle involves “fanciful avatars in a virtual world” (which brought Hosoda’s earlier Summer Wars to mind); when a gloomy high school girl named Suzu (the reason why her mood’s so depressed is established in solid fashion through some early flashbacks) finds she can sing again in that other world, she gets to the point of grand success only for a monstrous beast to crash one of her concerts. The English title more than the Japanese title hints at some “Beauty and the Beast” mixed in along the way (with a definite nod to an earlier animated film from the other side of the Pacific). This leads to a transition back from “grand online success” to “helping on a personal scale in the real world.” While I am stuck wondering if “detached and analytical evaluation” could make a big deal of things including “what’s there to do in that virtual world beyond show off your avatar and go to concerts?” to the point of brushing off emotional impact, something about that impact did make Belle interesting in the end for me, more so than I can remember Summer Wars winding up as and enough to get me hoping I might yet return to it one day (even if returning to Summer Wars as well might clarify my thoughts).
Realizing Den-noh Coil was twice as long as I’d supposed “a series about grade school kids poking at the glitchy fringes of an enigmatic other world laid over their ‘real’ one via their near-future augmented reality glasses” would be, at a moment when I’d set my viewing schedule for a previous quarter and didn’t suppose I could step this single show up to “two episodes a week” as with other “older and longer” series I’ve been watching of late, did leave me wondering for a while if “the pace people would have first seen it at, after all” would somehow be too sedate for me. As I worked into its second half, though, I became willing to think it not “slow-paced” but “a slow build” not quite escaping what ability I do have to keep track of complex and subtle elements. In getting used to the “not ‘typically attractive anime character’ designs,” I did have to consider how the show’s large cast includes not just an “old grandmother” (with a good bit of “hacking prowess”) but also a young woman who tears around on a motorbike while wearing a body-hugging black racing suit (although when she does change out of it I then had to confront how she changes into a high school uniform). Things did build to the point where I could get past the brushoff “...they could take their glasses off, or at least power them down, right?” That led me to pick up my viewing pace for the final episodes, the very last of which included a good bit of explanation of certain long-enigmatic elements and motivations but also emotional satisfaction. While I don’t want to push claims about “anime that can be said to be different from the norm” to the point of “my selective taste is better,” this change of pace was interesting. It was also a reason to keep subscribing to Netflix for that much longer.
As Shinkalion Z was shorter than the considerable, year-plus length of its predecessor “shinkansen bullet trains transform into giant robots piloted by spiky-haired grade school boys” series (although still long enough for these days to point out it remained aimed at a young audience), I decided to slow down my viewing pace and stretch its remaining episodes out over two and a half months. The series still kept my attention that way, and my interest in it picked up further from the first episodes when I might have been taking the most note of tweaks to its formula. One thing that helped there, if not the only thing, was when a girl character I’d known would show up (she’s a reference to an older train-related anime I know about but haven’t got around to watching) turned out to have more of a role to play than I’d first supposed. The conclusion did happen to play up “collect all of the add-on accessory toys, kids!” while still keeping up with “scanning square code blocks with smartphones”; I supposed I grinned and accepted all of because it was part of a “giant robot (starter?) series,” if a series that had be seen “fansubbed” (which might have then offered slight protection from brushoffs piling up).
When the new adaptation of Legend of the Galactic Heroes had left off a few years before, I suppose I’d been ready to think “it’s as good a point in the story to leave off unfinished as any” and not thought all that much about it afterwards. Die Neue These picking up again did get my attention. Watching through its third block of episodes, I think it was getting past the point of “constant comparison to memories of the original.” At the same time, though, this part of the story keeps me ambiguous about Reinhard von Lohengramm turning out to be not just a military genius but a skilled state administrator even as the mechanisms on the other side of the story to keep decisions for civilians being made in the public interest have broken down. It is somewhat different from science fiction that invokes interstellar states and then shrugs and supposes “democracy” has vanished into the distant past. Even so, while I’m sure I don’t know as much history as Yang Wen-li, I do have my suspicions about “the surrender of will to figures you’ve only been convinced are perfect leaders.” When the story had got past that and assorted other machinations, though, it moved on to full-scale space opera battle. That engagement left off on a cliffhanger, which brings back to mind questions of just when adaptations can be abandoned, but I understand at least some more of the story is in the process of being animated.
A series called Spy x Family attracted a lot of positive attention for being a good adaptation of its manga, so I started watching its assembled episodes. It involves a top agent with the cover name of Loid Forger being sent “to the East” to try and discover war plans. The best way to do that is to make contact with an elusive high-ranking official who’s said to sometimes appear at his son’s elite school. To do that, Loid sets up a family by adopting a tiny moppet named Anya (who just happens to be telepathic) and arranging a separate-bedrooms marriage of convenience with a wholesomely attractive civil servant named Yor Briar (who just happens to be a master assassin, although who gives her those orders isn’t clear yet). There’s an early-1960s feel to the world of the series (while avoiding the laziest impressions of what “the East” was like back then, even if the general design might have made me sensitive to anachronisms like Anya’s “spy cartoon” being taped on a reel-to-reel video recorder, in colour no less, and a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup). I would say even so that the elaborate and comedic machinations that arrange the domesticity of the Forger family are an important part of the show for playing against impressions of “James Bond chic” and all its countless imitations from that time. The story doesn’t quite wind up “isn’t Anya adorable?”, and that part of it doesn’t quite wind up “aren’t her adventures at school endearing?” With more episodes coming up, though, I will have to see what more happens.
“A Japanese dub of some of the original computer animation” and “(brief) manga adaptations and spinoffs” were amusing enough to hear about (the problem sometimes, I fear, was going from announcements to experience), but “a full-scale animated series produced in Japan” seemed that much more of a sign even an “anime-esque” show can make its own crossing of the Pacific to where the genuine stuff it’s a mere “take” on comes from to begin with. As much as RWBY: Ice Queendom intrigued me to begin with, though, I guess I got to wondering if “waiting to be certain it’s all available for viewing” would mean dismissive judgments from others accumulating as well. I’d been telling myself for a while that one day I could dare watching anime as it streams again; this could at least be the beginning of that.
After all these years it may still be my first perception (rather than actual proof) of RWBY as “a shoestring production amazing for having been made at all” blurs lines that should remain distinct to “effort for the simple love of its inspiration” and leaves me indulgent. Unlike the assorted manga, Ice Queendom didn’t quite seem dismissible straight off as “handed to journeymen,” but that might have had its own influence on how I looked at it. I suppose its character designs had more “character” than typical (official) efforts to draw by hand the computer-animated show’s cast, and yet sometimes that distinctiveness could get to looking odd. That had something to do with the rings in their irises and tiny white pupils, perhaps. The early episodes had some all-out animation in service of reprising our original introductions to the characters, although by the third episode the story did seem to be racing to get past some significant moments also familiar to me. At that it was on not to some “alternative reality,” as first glimpses of “winter-weight outfits” might have enticed daydreams of, but a mere “untold tale.” It involved Weiss, one of the four main characters, being infected by yet another strange development on “the monsters of Grimm.” Her new and still-tentative friends had to be helped into her surreal dreamscape to save her. Here, perhaps, I might have wound up with the thought the series being set where it was in the larger story was one chance to see someone absent later on, but that character didn’t have the chance to really show off. I was ready to suppose Weiss was the one character whose awkward family life could be explored in skewed form straight off without actually affecting anything. A nagging sense accumulated, though, of those dream explorations being a bit languid and ready to retrace steps starting off, and the show resorting to a bit of computer animation for a character in one battle scene didn’t help a sense of the production running down. A bit more energy did gather at the close of the dream, which was followed by one last episode working back into the existing story (with some “this was terribly embarrassing; don’t mention it to anyone!” insistences). As the series had started some people had commented about having fallen away from the original computer animation over the years. I do have to admit to having found fresh hope in a recent comment that story would indeed be continuing.
I’d noticed early announcements of a “girls golfing” series called Birdie Wing, but there, perhaps, I might have been all too aware of complaints about how many recent “girls’ sports” anime, when they do get made at all, have turned out real crummy one way or another. For all that I wouldn’t dismiss the “Original Net Animation” Sorairo Utility as part of that unfortunate roster, its own tale of girls playing golf had been rather brief. When Birdie Wing did show up, though, a different and enticing sort of reaction began to appear. The show seemed to be an “over the top take” on its subject, and while I can suppose that’s not what many of those complaining really want to see, anime with doses of “straight-faced, matter-of-fact absurdity” do seem to have quite appealed to me. I’m always glad to see another one of them has been made.
Birdie Wing begins with a teenaged golfer named Eve in a country called “Nafrece” (which had me thinking back to the anime Madlax for the first time in quite a while), who plays high-stakes rounds entangled with underworld powers and fabulous yet lethal bets for the sake of her “found family” of young women and girls. One of her companions there just happens to accumulate “Gunpla” model kits, and there are subtler Gundam references to be found. What might have really amused me, though, was the awareness the corporate controller of the brand is now “Bandai Namco,” and one other young woman in the series just happens to have a Pac-Man on her golf balls. Amid peculiar opponents and underground bunkers that can elaborately set up random golf holes, Eve does manage all the same to meet a young Japanese woman her age named Aoi who plays much more legitimate golf (with the Pac-Man balls I’ve already mentioned). For all of the twists, turns, and changes in the series, I did get to wondering if the opening credits (which had a theme song I somehow didn’t like as much as many others but can stick in my head even so) had “just too many characters in it.” Then, just before I ran out of episodes to watch, I did discover the series should be continuing after a break of some months. I’m not quite certain if the early episodes will just provide a certain lingering flavour to more apparently conventional golf action in what’s to come, but it does seem possible I might yet keep enjoying even that.
After an excess of caution following news of a “hacking incident” delaying production, I got around at last to Delicious Party Pretty Cure. As the third Pretty Girl magical girl series I’ve seen, I did start off with the casual judgment “it looks more like Healin’ Good than Tropical Rouge,” based on the number of magical girls, their magical assistants, and the general costume design. There were some unusual and distinctive twists to the setup all the same. This show involves trying to rescue cute “recipe spirits” being captured by “phantom thieves”; however, I couldn’t help but dwell on the fights against the monsters of the week always taking place in a consistent magical battlespace, even if it looks a bit more interesting than the drab hemispherical area of Shinkalion. With the recipe spirits being abducted from a city filled with restaurants (divided into “Japanese,” “Western,” and “Chinese” sectors that seem to follow the colour coding of the show’s three Pretty Cures), I suppose I can understand there not being much “real-world” room for battles that involve attacks like the “500 Kilocalorie Punch” and “Peppery Sandwich Press.” There’s plenty of Japanese comfort food in the series, even if I have to admit my understanding of it has been picked up morsel by morsel as much through anime as any more authoritative and respectable source, and not through actual experience. Although in years gone by I did join a few groups from work going out to nearby Japanese restaurants, the thought of doing more of that by myself might have raised unfortunate fears of threading a perilous course between “so what’s becoming too obsessed with the country?” and “would I really enjoy raising my standards via ‘legitimate’ culture to where I give up on anime?” There’s also the matter of being too parsimonious to eat out anywhere very often, even as I’ve bought anime faster than I can watch it for years...
I was happy to get reacquainted with the animated denizens of Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. The mobile game they also feature in, in somewhat different form, has added three additional “school idols” during its run. In the two storylines that had introduced them at length through short “visual novel” segments, they had started out as close to existential threats to the club as it stood. That had unfortunately made one of them outright unpopular among fans, even if I was surprised to discover that in retrospect; to me, the wealthy arrival from Hong Kong Lanzhu (one of a full three characters from overseas now in this story) had seemed merely oblivious as to why she hadn’t been able to buy her way to everyone liking her and accepting her as in charge before the familiar “power of friendship” story went into effect. The anime did seem to try and tone down that sense of threat.
Once everything had settled down, the story had wound up with more than twice as many singing characters as in the first series of Love Live Superstar (although I do understand the second series of that part of the franchise is now adding a full four school idols to bring its group up to a more familiar size). Along with all of those high school girls, the anime also included the “baker’s dozenth” backstage song writer of the group given her own character and appearance in the anime, some siblings and longtime friends who’ve also appeared in the mobile game, and a good many school idols from other schools drawn from the previous mobile game’s “low-ranking extras.” Even so, the sense of “competition against rivals for the sake of being judged the best” isn’t as pronounced in this series as in the rest of the franchise. The series at least began to deal with its considerable cast by setting up “units,” in the other subfranchises perhaps more ways to arrange additional voice actress concerts that don’t involve synchronizing nine schedules, but here perhaps a way for everyone to get to perform without needing a “song of the week.” Where the previous subfranchises had just formed units of three, here we get “the four ‘cute’ girls” (in varying ways), “the two ‘sexy’ girls” (in different ways), and “the three left over.” All of it did seem to diminish the insistence of the previous Nijigasaki series that just about everyone started with a “best pal” connection you were invited to fantasize into a “slash” pairing. On the other hand, there was one bit of bait in this series that actually amused me, when the aspiring actress Shizuku told the backstage wonder Yuu she’d been imagining casting the other two girls of her unit in “Beauty and the Beast,” but couldn’t decide which girl should be the dominating Beast. Yuu, who’d managed to get in a compromising situation in the previous series springing from those two girls just mentioned, more or less agreed with Shizuku.
The subgroup concerts might have diminished without eliminating the music-video sense from the previous Nijigasaki series of someone starting to sing and appearing in costume at once. Those performances continued to include interjected glimpses of the mobile game’s elaborate costumes, presented there via the easier-to-produce methods of single illustrations and computer animation; some of this anime’s computer animation seemed as good to me as this franchise has ever managed in the sense of not looking askew compared to everything else. As with other parts of Love Live I suppose I have to say this series was more pleasant than profound, but I can at least say it was quite pleasant.
With Daimos finished and the “Robot Romance Trilogy” complete, I went straight on to another late-1970s “super robot” anime I’ve seen merely associated with the trilogy. Tadao Nagahama, the director of Combattler V, Voltes V, and Daimos, had worked on Daltanious too but not in the same central role. Beyond that, I suppose I was very aware of another bit of passed-along trivia insisting “Daltanious could have been Voltron.” The story went that the people who’d made Voltron had seen a sales reel for Daltanious and supposed they could “localize” it for American syndication, but in asking for the animation something got jumbled somewhere to the point that all that came across was “robot lion”; the slightly newer Golion was sent instead and, so the story continues, World Events Productions knew at once they’d lucked into something much better. As I kept contemplating the story I did get to the point of wondering if it was the sort of gratifying tale passed from fan to fan regardless of actual truth; I eventually followed a link in a Wikipedia article to a newspaper piece that matched the tale.
Daltanious begins in a Japanese city devastated by invading aliens from space; I was at least inclined to consider “the end of World War II” as something the people who’d made it could have lived through. While the war in this series hasn’t quite ended, the world beyond the city doesn’t often come up. A small group of orphaned teenagers and children (and a pig) stumble upon an older and different alien ship and rouse an irascible old man from suspended animation; he manages to get the two teenaged boys of the group piloting a robot and a generic aerial craft that combine with a huge robot lion (with an animalistic mind of its own) into the super robot Daltanious. Some of my first thoughts, I’ll admit, were that Golion’s more fanciful distant-world setting was more amenable to localization than the casual Japanese background of Daltanious, to say nothing of the “space princess” of the later series fitting in more to the post-Star Wars era. That only two of the seven youths get to pilot parts of Daltanious might be open to chiding criticism (although the others do find ways to get involved in the story beyond just “watching battles from the control room” or “being held hostage by the bad guys.”) I’m also conscious Daltanious starts out as a sillier show than the “Robot Romance Trilogy” series became, even if I’m tempted towards the foolish boast of saying I’ve piled up enough experience to at least shrug off “silliness.” After a while, I did even start to wonder if Daltanious had less footage of outright gruesomeness seeming to demand awkward explaining-away voiceovers than my old impressions of Voltron have left me with. In the end I got to thinking that trying to imagine “Daltanious as Voltron” while dealing with memories of the original isn’t quite fair. I did, though, also get to wondering if some sheaf of the unknowable realities where Daltanious did become Voltron overlap with some sheaf of the unknowable realities where Marvel Comics editors and writers didn’t provide the backstory for Hasbro’s shuffling together of the Japanese Diaclone and Micro Change transforming-robot toys, but rather for a previous effort from a smaller toy company called Knickerbocker planning a line called Mysterians, made up of simple blocks that turned into awkward robots and four little transforming trucks and cars that just happened to wind up in the Micro Change line to eventually become Autobots. There was also the awareness the newspaper article mentioned Dairugger and Albegas had been asked for alongside Daltanious. Even though I’ve let thoughts of a different combination of anime sketch out claims of “generational progression” I did wonder if World Events Production would have tried to lead off with what we know as “the other Voltron,” run into problems with Albegas not being what kids were used to, and end up with Daltanious the enigmatic “third Voltron” glimpsed on toy shelves but never on TV...
I’ve been contemplating watching Mob Psycho 100 again (and making at least a little use of all the “Blu-Rays of shows I’ve already seen” I keep buying) for a while now, such that my intentions there might have built up again in actual advance of becoming really aware a third instalment of the series is about to premiere. Once that was clear in my mind, however, I supposed I’d have to return to not just the first but the second instalment, and get through both of them in just two months. The series was altogether capable of supporting that brisk-for-me pace. I enjoyed both the bursts of quite impressive psychic-battles animation and the deceptively simple character designs that might well suit that; the humour of the series might have been even funnier for me than before even as I pondered whether it might be “dark” at first glance but have a solid core of positivity on more exposure. Getting to the second instalment did have me wondering about characters from late in its first part reappearing late in the follow-up and whether I’d quite got that on first viewing. I did, though, also wonder if those first two instalments were enough of a “complete story” to leave things wide open in the impending continuation.
I’ve been thinking for a while about watching some anime movies, but never quite finding the time for that even if I might add “I’ve found the time to watch movies not anime.” At last, though, I did manage to open Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. I’ve seen a few other films directed by him, but long enough ago that I was a bit conscious a general mood might have shifted since then and other anime fans may not seem quite as ready to worry out loud “who’s going to make respectable anime (movies) other than Satoshi Kon/now that he’s dead?” I was also aware that even if “not finding the time for anime movies” has something to do with it I haven’t gone back to the movies of Hosoda I’ve watched.
Belle involves “fanciful avatars in a virtual world” (which brought Hosoda’s earlier Summer Wars to mind); when a gloomy high school girl named Suzu (the reason why her mood’s so depressed is established in solid fashion through some early flashbacks) finds she can sing again in that other world, she gets to the point of grand success only for a monstrous beast to crash one of her concerts. The English title more than the Japanese title hints at some “Beauty and the Beast” mixed in along the way (with a definite nod to an earlier animated film from the other side of the Pacific). This leads to a transition back from “grand online success” to “helping on a personal scale in the real world.” While I am stuck wondering if “detached and analytical evaluation” could make a big deal of things including “what’s there to do in that virtual world beyond show off your avatar and go to concerts?” to the point of brushing off emotional impact, something about that impact did make Belle interesting in the end for me, more so than I can remember Summer Wars winding up as and enough to get me hoping I might yet return to it one day (even if returning to Summer Wars as well might clarify my thoughts).
Realizing Den-noh Coil was twice as long as I’d supposed “a series about grade school kids poking at the glitchy fringes of an enigmatic other world laid over their ‘real’ one via their near-future augmented reality glasses” would be, at a moment when I’d set my viewing schedule for a previous quarter and didn’t suppose I could step this single show up to “two episodes a week” as with other “older and longer” series I’ve been watching of late, did leave me wondering for a while if “the pace people would have first seen it at, after all” would somehow be too sedate for me. As I worked into its second half, though, I became willing to think it not “slow-paced” but “a slow build” not quite escaping what ability I do have to keep track of complex and subtle elements. In getting used to the “not ‘typically attractive anime character’ designs,” I did have to consider how the show’s large cast includes not just an “old grandmother” (with a good bit of “hacking prowess”) but also a young woman who tears around on a motorbike while wearing a body-hugging black racing suit (although when she does change out of it I then had to confront how she changes into a high school uniform). Things did build to the point where I could get past the brushoff “...they could take their glasses off, or at least power them down, right?” That led me to pick up my viewing pace for the final episodes, the very last of which included a good bit of explanation of certain long-enigmatic elements and motivations but also emotional satisfaction. While I don’t want to push claims about “anime that can be said to be different from the norm” to the point of “my selective taste is better,” this change of pace was interesting. It was also a reason to keep subscribing to Netflix for that much longer.
As Shinkalion Z was shorter than the considerable, year-plus length of its predecessor “shinkansen bullet trains transform into giant robots piloted by spiky-haired grade school boys” series (although still long enough for these days to point out it remained aimed at a young audience), I decided to slow down my viewing pace and stretch its remaining episodes out over two and a half months. The series still kept my attention that way, and my interest in it picked up further from the first episodes when I might have been taking the most note of tweaks to its formula. One thing that helped there, if not the only thing, was when a girl character I’d known would show up (she’s a reference to an older train-related anime I know about but haven’t got around to watching) turned out to have more of a role to play than I’d first supposed. The conclusion did happen to play up “collect all of the add-on accessory toys, kids!” while still keeping up with “scanning square code blocks with smartphones”; I supposed I grinned and accepted all of because it was part of a “giant robot (starter?) series,” if a series that had be seen “fansubbed” (which might have then offered slight protection from brushoffs piling up).
When the new adaptation of Legend of the Galactic Heroes had left off a few years before, I suppose I’d been ready to think “it’s as good a point in the story to leave off unfinished as any” and not thought all that much about it afterwards. Die Neue These picking up again did get my attention. Watching through its third block of episodes, I think it was getting past the point of “constant comparison to memories of the original.” At the same time, though, this part of the story keeps me ambiguous about Reinhard von Lohengramm turning out to be not just a military genius but a skilled state administrator even as the mechanisms on the other side of the story to keep decisions for civilians being made in the public interest have broken down. It is somewhat different from science fiction that invokes interstellar states and then shrugs and supposes “democracy” has vanished into the distant past. Even so, while I’m sure I don’t know as much history as Yang Wen-li, I do have my suspicions about “the surrender of will to figures you’ve only been convinced are perfect leaders.” When the story had got past that and assorted other machinations, though, it moved on to full-scale space opera battle. That engagement left off on a cliffhanger, which brings back to mind questions of just when adaptations can be abandoned, but I understand at least some more of the story is in the process of being animated.
A series called Spy x Family attracted a lot of positive attention for being a good adaptation of its manga, so I started watching its assembled episodes. It involves a top agent with the cover name of Loid Forger being sent “to the East” to try and discover war plans. The best way to do that is to make contact with an elusive high-ranking official who’s said to sometimes appear at his son’s elite school. To do that, Loid sets up a family by adopting a tiny moppet named Anya (who just happens to be telepathic) and arranging a separate-bedrooms marriage of convenience with a wholesomely attractive civil servant named Yor Briar (who just happens to be a master assassin, although who gives her those orders isn’t clear yet). There’s an early-1960s feel to the world of the series (while avoiding the laziest impressions of what “the East” was like back then, even if the general design might have made me sensitive to anachronisms like Anya’s “spy cartoon” being taped on a reel-to-reel video recorder, in colour no less, and a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup). I would say even so that the elaborate and comedic machinations that arrange the domesticity of the Forger family are an important part of the show for playing against impressions of “James Bond chic” and all its countless imitations from that time. The story doesn’t quite wind up “isn’t Anya adorable?”, and that part of it doesn’t quite wind up “aren’t her adventures at school endearing?” With more episodes coming up, though, I will have to see what more happens.
“A Japanese dub of some of the original computer animation” and “(brief) manga adaptations and spinoffs” were amusing enough to hear about (the problem sometimes, I fear, was going from announcements to experience), but “a full-scale animated series produced in Japan” seemed that much more of a sign even an “anime-esque” show can make its own crossing of the Pacific to where the genuine stuff it’s a mere “take” on comes from to begin with. As much as RWBY: Ice Queendom intrigued me to begin with, though, I guess I got to wondering if “waiting to be certain it’s all available for viewing” would mean dismissive judgments from others accumulating as well. I’d been telling myself for a while that one day I could dare watching anime as it streams again; this could at least be the beginning of that.
After all these years it may still be my first perception (rather than actual proof) of RWBY as “a shoestring production amazing for having been made at all” blurs lines that should remain distinct to “effort for the simple love of its inspiration” and leaves me indulgent. Unlike the assorted manga, Ice Queendom didn’t quite seem dismissible straight off as “handed to journeymen,” but that might have had its own influence on how I looked at it. I suppose its character designs had more “character” than typical (official) efforts to draw by hand the computer-animated show’s cast, and yet sometimes that distinctiveness could get to looking odd. That had something to do with the rings in their irises and tiny white pupils, perhaps. The early episodes had some all-out animation in service of reprising our original introductions to the characters, although by the third episode the story did seem to be racing to get past some significant moments also familiar to me. At that it was on not to some “alternative reality,” as first glimpses of “winter-weight outfits” might have enticed daydreams of, but a mere “untold tale.” It involved Weiss, one of the four main characters, being infected by yet another strange development on “the monsters of Grimm.” Her new and still-tentative friends had to be helped into her surreal dreamscape to save her. Here, perhaps, I might have wound up with the thought the series being set where it was in the larger story was one chance to see someone absent later on, but that character didn’t have the chance to really show off. I was ready to suppose Weiss was the one character whose awkward family life could be explored in skewed form straight off without actually affecting anything. A nagging sense accumulated, though, of those dream explorations being a bit languid and ready to retrace steps starting off, and the show resorting to a bit of computer animation for a character in one battle scene didn’t help a sense of the production running down. A bit more energy did gather at the close of the dream, which was followed by one last episode working back into the existing story (with some “this was terribly embarrassing; don’t mention it to anyone!” insistences). As the series had started some people had commented about having fallen away from the original computer animation over the years. I do have to admit to having found fresh hope in a recent comment that story would indeed be continuing.
I’d noticed early announcements of a “girls golfing” series called Birdie Wing, but there, perhaps, I might have been all too aware of complaints about how many recent “girls’ sports” anime, when they do get made at all, have turned out real crummy one way or another. For all that I wouldn’t dismiss the “Original Net Animation” Sorairo Utility as part of that unfortunate roster, its own tale of girls playing golf had been rather brief. When Birdie Wing did show up, though, a different and enticing sort of reaction began to appear. The show seemed to be an “over the top take” on its subject, and while I can suppose that’s not what many of those complaining really want to see, anime with doses of “straight-faced, matter-of-fact absurdity” do seem to have quite appealed to me. I’m always glad to see another one of them has been made.
Birdie Wing begins with a teenaged golfer named Eve in a country called “Nafrece” (which had me thinking back to the anime Madlax for the first time in quite a while), who plays high-stakes rounds entangled with underworld powers and fabulous yet lethal bets for the sake of her “found family” of young women and girls. One of her companions there just happens to accumulate “Gunpla” model kits, and there are subtler Gundam references to be found. What might have really amused me, though, was the awareness the corporate controller of the brand is now “Bandai Namco,” and one other young woman in the series just happens to have a Pac-Man on her golf balls. Amid peculiar opponents and underground bunkers that can elaborately set up random golf holes, Eve does manage all the same to meet a young Japanese woman her age named Aoi who plays much more legitimate golf (with the Pac-Man balls I’ve already mentioned). For all of the twists, turns, and changes in the series, I did get to wondering if the opening credits (which had a theme song I somehow didn’t like as much as many others but can stick in my head even so) had “just too many characters in it.” Then, just before I ran out of episodes to watch, I did discover the series should be continuing after a break of some months. I’m not quite certain if the early episodes will just provide a certain lingering flavour to more apparently conventional golf action in what’s to come, but it does seem possible I might yet keep enjoying even that.
After an excess of caution following news of a “hacking incident” delaying production, I got around at last to Delicious Party Pretty Cure. As the third Pretty Girl magical girl series I’ve seen, I did start off with the casual judgment “it looks more like Healin’ Good than Tropical Rouge,” based on the number of magical girls, their magical assistants, and the general costume design. There were some unusual and distinctive twists to the setup all the same. This show involves trying to rescue cute “recipe spirits” being captured by “phantom thieves”; however, I couldn’t help but dwell on the fights against the monsters of the week always taking place in a consistent magical battlespace, even if it looks a bit more interesting than the drab hemispherical area of Shinkalion. With the recipe spirits being abducted from a city filled with restaurants (divided into “Japanese,” “Western,” and “Chinese” sectors that seem to follow the colour coding of the show’s three Pretty Cures), I suppose I can understand there not being much “real-world” room for battles that involve attacks like the “500 Kilocalorie Punch” and “Peppery Sandwich Press.” There’s plenty of Japanese comfort food in the series, even if I have to admit my understanding of it has been picked up morsel by morsel as much through anime as any more authoritative and respectable source, and not through actual experience. Although in years gone by I did join a few groups from work going out to nearby Japanese restaurants, the thought of doing more of that by myself might have raised unfortunate fears of threading a perilous course between “so what’s becoming too obsessed with the country?” and “would I really enjoy raising my standards via ‘legitimate’ culture to where I give up on anime?” There’s also the matter of being too parsimonious to eat out anywhere very often, even as I’ve bought anime faster than I can watch it for years...
I was happy to get reacquainted with the animated denizens of Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. The mobile game they also feature in, in somewhat different form, has added three additional “school idols” during its run. In the two storylines that had introduced them at length through short “visual novel” segments, they had started out as close to existential threats to the club as it stood. That had unfortunately made one of them outright unpopular among fans, even if I was surprised to discover that in retrospect; to me, the wealthy arrival from Hong Kong Lanzhu (one of a full three characters from overseas now in this story) had seemed merely oblivious as to why she hadn’t been able to buy her way to everyone liking her and accepting her as in charge before the familiar “power of friendship” story went into effect. The anime did seem to try and tone down that sense of threat.
Once everything had settled down, the story had wound up with more than twice as many singing characters as in the first series of Love Live Superstar (although I do understand the second series of that part of the franchise is now adding a full four school idols to bring its group up to a more familiar size). Along with all of those high school girls, the anime also included the “baker’s dozenth” backstage song writer of the group given her own character and appearance in the anime, some siblings and longtime friends who’ve also appeared in the mobile game, and a good many school idols from other schools drawn from the previous mobile game’s “low-ranking extras.” Even so, the sense of “competition against rivals for the sake of being judged the best” isn’t as pronounced in this series as in the rest of the franchise. The series at least began to deal with its considerable cast by setting up “units,” in the other subfranchises perhaps more ways to arrange additional voice actress concerts that don’t involve synchronizing nine schedules, but here perhaps a way for everyone to get to perform without needing a “song of the week.” Where the previous subfranchises had just formed units of three, here we get “the four ‘cute’ girls” (in varying ways), “the two ‘sexy’ girls” (in different ways), and “the three left over.” All of it did seem to diminish the insistence of the previous Nijigasaki series that just about everyone started with a “best pal” connection you were invited to fantasize into a “slash” pairing. On the other hand, there was one bit of bait in this series that actually amused me, when the aspiring actress Shizuku told the backstage wonder Yuu she’d been imagining casting the other two girls of her unit in “Beauty and the Beast,” but couldn’t decide which girl should be the dominating Beast. Yuu, who’d managed to get in a compromising situation in the previous series springing from those two girls just mentioned, more or less agreed with Shizuku.
The subgroup concerts might have diminished without eliminating the music-video sense from the previous Nijigasaki series of someone starting to sing and appearing in costume at once. Those performances continued to include interjected glimpses of the mobile game’s elaborate costumes, presented there via the easier-to-produce methods of single illustrations and computer animation; some of this anime’s computer animation seemed as good to me as this franchise has ever managed in the sense of not looking askew compared to everything else. As with other parts of Love Live I suppose I have to say this series was more pleasant than profound, but I can at least say it was quite pleasant.
With Daimos finished and the “Robot Romance Trilogy” complete, I went straight on to another late-1970s “super robot” anime I’ve seen merely associated with the trilogy. Tadao Nagahama, the director of Combattler V, Voltes V, and Daimos, had worked on Daltanious too but not in the same central role. Beyond that, I suppose I was very aware of another bit of passed-along trivia insisting “Daltanious could have been Voltron.” The story went that the people who’d made Voltron had seen a sales reel for Daltanious and supposed they could “localize” it for American syndication, but in asking for the animation something got jumbled somewhere to the point that all that came across was “robot lion”; the slightly newer Golion was sent instead and, so the story continues, World Events Productions knew at once they’d lucked into something much better. As I kept contemplating the story I did get to the point of wondering if it was the sort of gratifying tale passed from fan to fan regardless of actual truth; I eventually followed a link in a Wikipedia article to a newspaper piece that matched the tale.
Daltanious begins in a Japanese city devastated by invading aliens from space; I was at least inclined to consider “the end of World War II” as something the people who’d made it could have lived through. While the war in this series hasn’t quite ended, the world beyond the city doesn’t often come up. A small group of orphaned teenagers and children (and a pig) stumble upon an older and different alien ship and rouse an irascible old man from suspended animation; he manages to get the two teenaged boys of the group piloting a robot and a generic aerial craft that combine with a huge robot lion (with an animalistic mind of its own) into the super robot Daltanious. Some of my first thoughts, I’ll admit, were that Golion’s more fanciful distant-world setting was more amenable to localization than the casual Japanese background of Daltanious, to say nothing of the “space princess” of the later series fitting in more to the post-Star Wars era. That only two of the seven youths get to pilot parts of Daltanious might be open to chiding criticism (although the others do find ways to get involved in the story beyond just “watching battles from the control room” or “being held hostage by the bad guys.”) I’m also conscious Daltanious starts out as a sillier show than the “Robot Romance Trilogy” series became, even if I’m tempted towards the foolish boast of saying I’ve piled up enough experience to at least shrug off “silliness.” After a while, I did even start to wonder if Daltanious had less footage of outright gruesomeness seeming to demand awkward explaining-away voiceovers than my old impressions of Voltron have left me with. In the end I got to thinking that trying to imagine “Daltanious as Voltron” while dealing with memories of the original isn’t quite fair. I did, though, also get to wondering if some sheaf of the unknowable realities where Daltanious did become Voltron overlap with some sheaf of the unknowable realities where Marvel Comics editors and writers didn’t provide the backstory for Hasbro’s shuffling together of the Japanese Diaclone and Micro Change transforming-robot toys, but rather for a previous effort from a smaller toy company called Knickerbocker planning a line called Mysterians, made up of simple blocks that turned into awkward robots and four little transforming trucks and cars that just happened to wind up in the Micro Change line to eventually become Autobots. There was also the awareness the newspaper article mentioned Dairugger and Albegas had been asked for alongside Daltanious. Even though I’ve let thoughts of a different combination of anime sketch out claims of “generational progression” I did wonder if World Events Production would have tried to lead off with what we know as “the other Voltron,” run into problems with Albegas not being what kids were used to, and end up with Daltanious the enigmatic “third Voltron” glimpsed on toy shelves but never on TV...