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2022: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
So far as “drifting back to the way you used to do things” goes, three months ago I was once again contemplating having put myself three months behind everyone else watching new anime series for a good many seasons. The singular case or two in seasons just past I did relinquish “waiting for the all-clear from other fans” I’m afraid I did get more or less stung by production delays or just plain curdling opinions. However, with my grand (or just grandiose) plans to “watch sample episodes from all the years since Mighty Atom got on TV” leading to thoughts of “trying to concentrate just on that to better experience time’s march,” wondering about winding up six months behind everyone else had me thinking it might be time for a bigger gamble at last. It just might have helped that not that many shows from the season just complete seemed to have wound up attracting real enthusiasm; there was anticipation for a certain number of impending series, though.
As for a show I was already watching and an older show by decades, too, the comments that “Daltanious could have been Voltron” did keep swinging through my head. Getting further into the series, though, might have brought those comments back to mind just because I was now running into moments that did seem like they’d either have had “this isn’t what it looks like” voiceovers laid over them or just been clipped out of a “localized” cartoon. Even so, that in itself could have at last started bringing Daltanious closer in apparent and obvious spirit to the “Robot Romance Trilogy” it had followed. Then, there was a plot twist that did have me thinking at first of a certain almost contemporaneous live-action movie, even if I’d reminded myself the story and script of The Empire Strikes Back had been written that much earlier than it had started filming before reaching the episode of Daltanious that had clarified the revelation and diminished the resemblance. In any case developing the antagonist was another step towards the Robot Romance Trilogy, even if there were now times I missed both the initial silliness and how the number of good guys (reminding me of the familiar roles of “the five-person team,” but with two “little guys” at different poles of the “smarts versus active” spread and both a teenaged and a little “girl”) had allowed stories that hadn’t needed “tragic depth” to the strange-looking enemy commanders. At the end of the series (which had gone a great distance from a war-ravaged Japanese city that had sometimes left me wondering how it would have been “localized”), there did happen to be one more plot twist that this time had me thinking of a certain and perhaps more desperate plot twist in one of the Star Wars movies I don’t watch every year. Then, I got to the final episode, and things didn’t quite turn out the way I’d been suspicious about.
One last good thing about “having delayed watching something” was that I was able to pick up right away from the cliffhanger at the end of the previous block of Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These episodes. The resolution to that space opera battle arrived in short order; I just happened to notice a reviewer who had been waiting seem a little annoyed at that. From there, the story’s attention shifted back to assorted machinations and the exploitation of those schemes, building towards the next onslaught on the ever-crumbling side of the galaxy (which removed another character I hadn’t quite expected to meet that fate at that point) and another “to be continued” ending, if not quite so abrupt as the previous one. It’s another step towards “halfway through the original novels,” if still not there yet.
The second block of Spy x Family episodes were as charming as the first, although even a better awareness of just what the series was might not have kept some one-shot (or even “two stories per episode”) outings from feeling a bit lightweight. At one point, I did start thinking some of the cars in the show were as much from the 1970s as the 1960s. A few more characters did get added to the cast, including a big dog I’d noticed from the manga covers (the dog just happens to have precognition) and a fellow agent with a carefully concealed crush on Loid Forger. At the end of these episodes, there was even a bit of movement towards the ostensible goal of all of the spywork and peculiar family situations in the show; that might have picked up my feelings at the last moment.
“Netflix-exclusive anime” seems to have accumulated such a negative and offputting reputation among too many fans by this point that I was actually surprised when a just-shorter-than-normal series called Cyberpunk Edgerunners started off with some positive reactions. Always trying to find something more to justify staying subscribed to Netflix and coming to the end of its latest run of “Love Death + Robots” episodes (I suppose I could do with a bit more variety in their animation beyond a lot of “realistic computer animation,” and sometimes the “adult content” can feel there for its own crank-up-the-rating sake for me; beyond that, I’ve got to thinking it might be nice to have a branded anthology of the short stories I understand most episodes are adapted from), I got around to the anime. There’d been a certain number of comments the series was much more impressive than having been based on a notoriously underbaked-on-release video game might have seemed to threaten (which mixed a good number of names apparently from outside Japan into the credits and characters alike). I then sorted out the video game had been based on a role-playing game, which sometimes had me pondering RPGs boiling down “genre fiction” into a rules-based syrup to be reconstituted by its players. Beyond that I was conscious not just of certain “big titles” from the early years of “anime known to be anime” fandom over here, but of the foundational works of cyberpunk fiction itself approaching and passing their fourth decade. (There’s the thought, too, that forty years before those works marked the establishment of the previous genre certainties they were “punk” reactions to...)
The assorted bright colour accents splashed through the grim nights of this new series, less “neon” (or even the 1990s take on that) than a “3-bit palette” to me, might have made it look just a little more modern than “those old OVAs.” That the brutal, “don’t get attached to the characters” action involved more “cyborg-enhanced battles in an unpleasant ‘real’ world” than “cyberspace infiltrations” (although there was certainly a bit of that) could have made the series seem just a little different than my own expectations of “a genre recapitulation.” It might also have helped in an odd way that there was more than one femme fatale among the antihero protagonists, with quite a bit of variety in their designs such that I was ready to suppose “there’s something for more unconventional tastes too” (if only because I knew my own reactions seemed pretty “conventional.”) The show had defaulted to its Japanese audio when I’d started watching it; I did wonder if the slangy, foul-mouthed dialogue in the subtitles quite matched the terminology I could pick out from the spoken words, although the assorted “phone calls” were hard to follow because they used “in-video” subtitles with much smaller type than the (now-missing) words at the bottom of the screen. As ever relinquishing the invitation to “binge” a Netflix series and not starting my affected episode-a-week viewing pace the moment the series was available either, I think I might have become aware the perpetual stylishly grim mood of the show wouldn’t lead to a happy ending before becoming certain of that just from what was happening on screen. However, there was an ever so slightly different unhappiness to the ending than I’d been bracing myself for, one that might at least have not left just “viewers” unhappy (and perhaps making up their own continuations from an absolutely blank slate). Whether that made a real difference to my own final reactions might still be uncertain; they weren’t quite “the journey has to make up for the destination,” anyway.
News of a new Gundam series did have me grappling with the thought that regardless of how well hope springs eternal for me, it’s all too easy to suppose the general consensus is “they come in as heroes but go out as bums.” Still, advance notices that The Witch From Mercury would have “a female main character” did attract some extra attention. After a “prologue episode” with familiar mecha action in space linking the heroine at an early age to a powerful yet enigmatic Gundam Mobile Suit, things jumped ahead to the now-teenaged Suletta Mercury entering a space academy. By the end of the first episode she’d managed to fight a duel in her Aerial Gundam for the sake of rescuing another teenaged girl, and more than that she’d been told she was now that other girl Miorine’s groom. A great deal of attention (and a certain number of references to Revolutionary Girl Utena, before some people started insisting Suletta’s pretty frazzled outside of combat as distinct from the rather competent and confident Utena) gathered around the series. Unfortunately, for all that I seemed willing to take things as they came I was conscious those things might not turn out the undeniable way a great many people seemed to be hoping for, and that was one more way the series might “go out a bum.” In any case, though, the Mobile Suit duels were impressive (and just might have been seen as carrying something of the “Build” subfranchise(s) into a more conventional Gundam series) and varied, and after adding “corporate machinations” to the goings-on at school the action just might have been starting to go a bit further again at the end of the year.
Continuing into Delicious Party Pretty Cure, I did get to thinking certain important story beats were already quite familiar from the two Pretty Cure series I’ve already finished. The unique touches I’d already identified still remained, of course, but as these three months wore on I did start getting the uneasy feeling the drawings weren’t as good-looking to me as they’d once been, and every so often the subtitles started to look stilted. (Having supposed what’s very noticeable in a “scanlation” of manga or all but unreadable in a fan translation of a “light novel” seems more bearable for me with “fansubs,” I was a little concerned that might point out how much this one particular show’s translation was impacting me.) In the nick of time the animation did pick up again, though (at the moment of another familiar story beat that happens to establish some new stock footage for future episodes, even if I’m now wondering when I might get to them.)
Right after having completed one Love Live series, I could move straight on to a different continuation featuring a different set of singing “school idols,” who I don’t have steady exposure to via mobile games. After having built my previous reactions to Love Live Superstar around the small novelty of there being just five singers in their group, though, I’ve got to admit to some initial uncertainty over notices its second block of episodes would introduce four more singing characters. After waiting through their run (or nearly; I recall they’d been scheduled just a little out of synch with the familiar season boundaries), however, I had managed to notice some positive reactions. As I got around to the new episodes myself, the new characters becoming “school idols” a few at a time did make things more interesting for me as the later recruits emerged from mere “comedic outsider peculiarity.” I might also have taken a certain amount of personal attention in one of them starting off obsessed with “money” (she uses the English word) in the form of ad revenue payouts for her streaming videos; back in the very first Love Live series I’d noticed how excited some of its characters had become on noticing merchandise with their pictures on it in a “school idol fan shop,” only to end up wondering about “unauthorized use and uncompensated labour.” In any case, with the group expanded and a new rival elbowing aside the friendly challengers than before there was some impact to the series. I did also keep noticing the nudges to “notice how close these two girls are?” but just sort of sliding away from pushing my imagination along (or seeking out lurid “fanworks”) with some perpetual mix of embarrassment, wistful yet ambiguous thoughts like “does every ‘friendship’ have to be interpreted like that?”, and detachment towards “workplace romances” “when there’s no other options in sight.” Things did end on a sudden cliffhanger; my understanding is there’s going to be not “just” a movie to follow but another full season, even if I’m left wondering how many more characters might join the school and the group in a new story year.
I’d resolved to open one of the many series I have waiting on home video to watch alongside the more recent streaming series, and had settled on a particular title. Just as I’d picked the old DVD set off the shelf and was poised to start tearing off its shrinkwrap, though, I noticed it was just a few episodes longer than the familiar “twelve to thirteen” standard I’d expected. That would have made it just a little harder to finish with those constraints on viewing in the new year already set in my mind. I did some quick checking of discs within that moment’s grasp and decided to open Taisho Baseball Girls instead. It had been some time since I’d seen it back in the days of “fansubs”; it being licensed for release over here had seemed surprising enough I’d felt obligated to buy a copy and willing even to imagine that might be a “vote for something I’d liked.” I’d never quite got around to watching the discs until now, though. There was the somewhat unfortunate thought that this show remains the most consistently good-looking “girls playing baseball” series I’m aware of. It also stands out for being set in the past, near the end of the “Taisho Era,” the Japanese imperial reign spanning from just before World War I to the middle of the 1920s perhaps more familiar now from Demon Slayer. From my perhaps still ill-informed perspective I can suppose the Taisho era might be a more appealing “mix of traditional Japanese designs and now-quaint Western borrowings” than the years that followed as Japan became ever more mired in trying to conquer China and Southeast Asia. However, I can at least imagine an argument being made the cheerful schoolgirls of the series, some in sailor-suit uniforms and some still in traditional garb, starting to get into something “boys do” because one of them wants to prove something to a particular boy were, like other people, unaware of decisions being made that would bring them out of the eye of a storm. That their coach is an enthusiastic blonde American woman teaching at their school could sharpen the question “what happened to everyone twenty years later?” One lighter thought I chewed on as if for distraction was how many of the hairstyles of the girls (and a boy or two, too) were anachronistic, even supposing “bowl cuts must have been the standard back then” was another ill-informed oversimplification. The storyline of steady practice leading to efforts to counter brawn with finesse stayed appealing; I might even have been a bit more forgiving now of episodes in the back half of the series that started to drift away from baseball, if in some part because I could find more interest in a brief presentation of the live narration used in Japanese silent movie theatres. While the conclusion could be seen as “it’s not so much about winning the game as winning respect,” I still had the feeling there could have been more to the story, if only through starting to establish other girls’ baseball teams (even if every one of the nine players might not have seemed altogether as distinct as the inevitable nine girls of a Love Live series manage to get). I understand this series adapted novels, but it came out well before translating those novels became a commercial possibility.
Watching through the two previous Mob Psycho 100 series to get ready for the oncoming third did leave me wondering where these new episodes might begin. As it turned out, there had been something from the very end of the second series to work with, and that built into some significant impact. From there things did become a bit lighter before getting more complicated again for the main character Mob and everyone else, with the production values staying impressive. (I remember awed reports that everything had been finished before the first new episode had aired.) The conclusion, which had one little bit of “a rabbit out of a hat,” might not have been “for all time”; at the same time, it was obvious the characters had moved forward enough to be obvious, and the character work in this series is more or less as much a part of what impresses everyone as the production values.
While I’d become interested in an unusual number of new series so far as I can go, a new thought did start nagging at me all the same. Everything that had caught my attention was linked to an established franchise, a big and well-promoted production, or both. I started looking a little harder at the start-of-the-season previews, and noticed some people were a bit impressed by a series called Do It Yourself! It did seem a “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” show; as with other examples of that I do end up watching, the “cute thing” managed to appeal to me. There was a sketchiness to the character designs that made them just a bit different than ordinary “cute girls,” too. I settled into a show about an accident-prone girl named Serufu (her name turns into a punning take on the title) with adhesive bandages a permanent part of her character design (and who has a dog, a cat, and a pig who cowers every time dinner conversation praises a pork dish) who stumbles into a one-member school club doing woodwork and handicrafts and starts helping to recruit other students, working towards a reconciliation with the girl next door who goes to a more technical high school in a time just a little into the future. I suppose it did raise some “the most I ever manage about doing this sort of stuff is daydream” feelings in me, but even that didn’t quite overshadow the general pleasantness.
One more big production I’d made plans to watch was called Chainsaw Man. I’d noticed artwork of its original manga’s characters showing up in an image feed or two, which had helped to get my attention. The story began with a maltreated youth named Denji enslaved by debt to Japanese gangsters and working with his one pal, a “devil” that’s a cross between a cartoon puppy and a chainsaw, only to be betrayed by the gangsters. At their last extremity the devil manages to merge with Denji, who regenerates the bits of himself he’d sold off and also gets a pull-cord dangling from just below his sternum; when pulled, his head turns into a demonic chainsaw and more chainsaw blades attach to his arms. (This doesn’t happen in every episode.) He’s recruited from the resulting bloodbath made of the gangsters by an enigmatically appealing woman for an official devil hunter organization. Still a youth of uncomplicated desires, Denji begins working with an assortment of ever so slightly peculiar people and other beings in “Men In Black”-type suits. I was interested enough to begin with, but watching the show alongside many other people did start to give me the impression a lot of them thought something all but undefinable wasn’t quite extreme enough compared to their understanding of the manga (which I began glancing at the covers of in the bookstore, but haven’t quite started buying yet). As the show wore along the action did seem to pick up a bit for me at least, but I am still toying with the thought of getting into the manga.
It did turn out that I didn’t watch every series that had piqued my interest at the start of these three months, and after noting the spaces open in my schedule all of a sudden I realised I could shuffle that time around and watch a movie every week. My thoughts jumped next to leading into my TV-episode project by starting with a recent movie and working backwards decade by decade. It was that much more “a tiny sample” than “one episode a year,” but I did manage to see a few movies I hadn’t seen before and return to a few I hadn’t seen for a while. Then, at the very end of the year, I had the chance to overshoot my mark, head back more than sixty years into the past, and start forward again with some theatrical shorts (although they were longer than “one reel.”) The Kitten’s Doodles and The Kitten’s Studio were animated by people at Toei just before and as their plans for theatrical features were getting under way. At what seems the real risk of “dropping names but revealing I don’t really understand anything I’m talking about,” the shorts started off seeming more in the gentle Disney tradition than the hyperactive standard of that moment of MGM and Warner Brothers, but I did get to thinking they had a certain amount of UPA’s “graphic design” sense as well. The second also just happened to seem to look ahead to just how important “robots” might appear to have got for Japanese animation, and I’m very tempted to suppose some people might place that much more weight than I did on a certain take on “advanced technology being used to churn out an artlike substitute.” Tales of a Street Corner had been made by Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Productions just before he got into television animation. I have to admit, though, to starting it with impressions now hard to source some people hadn’t been that impressed by it at the time. For me it started off slow-paced but with plenty of “1960s graphic design” making good use of limited animation; partway through (and after a few moments of design sure to raise modern eyebrows) there was a twist that went hard in on “a significant message.” That might have made the piece more interesting, if in a peculiar way.
As for a show I was already watching and an older show by decades, too, the comments that “Daltanious could have been Voltron” did keep swinging through my head. Getting further into the series, though, might have brought those comments back to mind just because I was now running into moments that did seem like they’d either have had “this isn’t what it looks like” voiceovers laid over them or just been clipped out of a “localized” cartoon. Even so, that in itself could have at last started bringing Daltanious closer in apparent and obvious spirit to the “Robot Romance Trilogy” it had followed. Then, there was a plot twist that did have me thinking at first of a certain almost contemporaneous live-action movie, even if I’d reminded myself the story and script of The Empire Strikes Back had been written that much earlier than it had started filming before reaching the episode of Daltanious that had clarified the revelation and diminished the resemblance. In any case developing the antagonist was another step towards the Robot Romance Trilogy, even if there were now times I missed both the initial silliness and how the number of good guys (reminding me of the familiar roles of “the five-person team,” but with two “little guys” at different poles of the “smarts versus active” spread and both a teenaged and a little “girl”) had allowed stories that hadn’t needed “tragic depth” to the strange-looking enemy commanders. At the end of the series (which had gone a great distance from a war-ravaged Japanese city that had sometimes left me wondering how it would have been “localized”), there did happen to be one more plot twist that this time had me thinking of a certain and perhaps more desperate plot twist in one of the Star Wars movies I don’t watch every year. Then, I got to the final episode, and things didn’t quite turn out the way I’d been suspicious about.
One last good thing about “having delayed watching something” was that I was able to pick up right away from the cliffhanger at the end of the previous block of Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These episodes. The resolution to that space opera battle arrived in short order; I just happened to notice a reviewer who had been waiting seem a little annoyed at that. From there, the story’s attention shifted back to assorted machinations and the exploitation of those schemes, building towards the next onslaught on the ever-crumbling side of the galaxy (which removed another character I hadn’t quite expected to meet that fate at that point) and another “to be continued” ending, if not quite so abrupt as the previous one. It’s another step towards “halfway through the original novels,” if still not there yet.
The second block of Spy x Family episodes were as charming as the first, although even a better awareness of just what the series was might not have kept some one-shot (or even “two stories per episode”) outings from feeling a bit lightweight. At one point, I did start thinking some of the cars in the show were as much from the 1970s as the 1960s. A few more characters did get added to the cast, including a big dog I’d noticed from the manga covers (the dog just happens to have precognition) and a fellow agent with a carefully concealed crush on Loid Forger. At the end of these episodes, there was even a bit of movement towards the ostensible goal of all of the spywork and peculiar family situations in the show; that might have picked up my feelings at the last moment.
“Netflix-exclusive anime” seems to have accumulated such a negative and offputting reputation among too many fans by this point that I was actually surprised when a just-shorter-than-normal series called Cyberpunk Edgerunners started off with some positive reactions. Always trying to find something more to justify staying subscribed to Netflix and coming to the end of its latest run of “Love Death + Robots” episodes (I suppose I could do with a bit more variety in their animation beyond a lot of “realistic computer animation,” and sometimes the “adult content” can feel there for its own crank-up-the-rating sake for me; beyond that, I’ve got to thinking it might be nice to have a branded anthology of the short stories I understand most episodes are adapted from), I got around to the anime. There’d been a certain number of comments the series was much more impressive than having been based on a notoriously underbaked-on-release video game might have seemed to threaten (which mixed a good number of names apparently from outside Japan into the credits and characters alike). I then sorted out the video game had been based on a role-playing game, which sometimes had me pondering RPGs boiling down “genre fiction” into a rules-based syrup to be reconstituted by its players. Beyond that I was conscious not just of certain “big titles” from the early years of “anime known to be anime” fandom over here, but of the foundational works of cyberpunk fiction itself approaching and passing their fourth decade. (There’s the thought, too, that forty years before those works marked the establishment of the previous genre certainties they were “punk” reactions to...)
The assorted bright colour accents splashed through the grim nights of this new series, less “neon” (or even the 1990s take on that) than a “3-bit palette” to me, might have made it look just a little more modern than “those old OVAs.” That the brutal, “don’t get attached to the characters” action involved more “cyborg-enhanced battles in an unpleasant ‘real’ world” than “cyberspace infiltrations” (although there was certainly a bit of that) could have made the series seem just a little different than my own expectations of “a genre recapitulation.” It might also have helped in an odd way that there was more than one femme fatale among the antihero protagonists, with quite a bit of variety in their designs such that I was ready to suppose “there’s something for more unconventional tastes too” (if only because I knew my own reactions seemed pretty “conventional.”) The show had defaulted to its Japanese audio when I’d started watching it; I did wonder if the slangy, foul-mouthed dialogue in the subtitles quite matched the terminology I could pick out from the spoken words, although the assorted “phone calls” were hard to follow because they used “in-video” subtitles with much smaller type than the (now-missing) words at the bottom of the screen. As ever relinquishing the invitation to “binge” a Netflix series and not starting my affected episode-a-week viewing pace the moment the series was available either, I think I might have become aware the perpetual stylishly grim mood of the show wouldn’t lead to a happy ending before becoming certain of that just from what was happening on screen. However, there was an ever so slightly different unhappiness to the ending than I’d been bracing myself for, one that might at least have not left just “viewers” unhappy (and perhaps making up their own continuations from an absolutely blank slate). Whether that made a real difference to my own final reactions might still be uncertain; they weren’t quite “the journey has to make up for the destination,” anyway.
News of a new Gundam series did have me grappling with the thought that regardless of how well hope springs eternal for me, it’s all too easy to suppose the general consensus is “they come in as heroes but go out as bums.” Still, advance notices that The Witch From Mercury would have “a female main character” did attract some extra attention. After a “prologue episode” with familiar mecha action in space linking the heroine at an early age to a powerful yet enigmatic Gundam Mobile Suit, things jumped ahead to the now-teenaged Suletta Mercury entering a space academy. By the end of the first episode she’d managed to fight a duel in her Aerial Gundam for the sake of rescuing another teenaged girl, and more than that she’d been told she was now that other girl Miorine’s groom. A great deal of attention (and a certain number of references to Revolutionary Girl Utena, before some people started insisting Suletta’s pretty frazzled outside of combat as distinct from the rather competent and confident Utena) gathered around the series. Unfortunately, for all that I seemed willing to take things as they came I was conscious those things might not turn out the undeniable way a great many people seemed to be hoping for, and that was one more way the series might “go out a bum.” In any case, though, the Mobile Suit duels were impressive (and just might have been seen as carrying something of the “Build” subfranchise(s) into a more conventional Gundam series) and varied, and after adding “corporate machinations” to the goings-on at school the action just might have been starting to go a bit further again at the end of the year.
Continuing into Delicious Party Pretty Cure, I did get to thinking certain important story beats were already quite familiar from the two Pretty Cure series I’ve already finished. The unique touches I’d already identified still remained, of course, but as these three months wore on I did start getting the uneasy feeling the drawings weren’t as good-looking to me as they’d once been, and every so often the subtitles started to look stilted. (Having supposed what’s very noticeable in a “scanlation” of manga or all but unreadable in a fan translation of a “light novel” seems more bearable for me with “fansubs,” I was a little concerned that might point out how much this one particular show’s translation was impacting me.) In the nick of time the animation did pick up again, though (at the moment of another familiar story beat that happens to establish some new stock footage for future episodes, even if I’m now wondering when I might get to them.)
Right after having completed one Love Live series, I could move straight on to a different continuation featuring a different set of singing “school idols,” who I don’t have steady exposure to via mobile games. After having built my previous reactions to Love Live Superstar around the small novelty of there being just five singers in their group, though, I’ve got to admit to some initial uncertainty over notices its second block of episodes would introduce four more singing characters. After waiting through their run (or nearly; I recall they’d been scheduled just a little out of synch with the familiar season boundaries), however, I had managed to notice some positive reactions. As I got around to the new episodes myself, the new characters becoming “school idols” a few at a time did make things more interesting for me as the later recruits emerged from mere “comedic outsider peculiarity.” I might also have taken a certain amount of personal attention in one of them starting off obsessed with “money” (she uses the English word) in the form of ad revenue payouts for her streaming videos; back in the very first Love Live series I’d noticed how excited some of its characters had become on noticing merchandise with their pictures on it in a “school idol fan shop,” only to end up wondering about “unauthorized use and uncompensated labour.” In any case, with the group expanded and a new rival elbowing aside the friendly challengers than before there was some impact to the series. I did also keep noticing the nudges to “notice how close these two girls are?” but just sort of sliding away from pushing my imagination along (or seeking out lurid “fanworks”) with some perpetual mix of embarrassment, wistful yet ambiguous thoughts like “does every ‘friendship’ have to be interpreted like that?”, and detachment towards “workplace romances” “when there’s no other options in sight.” Things did end on a sudden cliffhanger; my understanding is there’s going to be not “just” a movie to follow but another full season, even if I’m left wondering how many more characters might join the school and the group in a new story year.
I’d resolved to open one of the many series I have waiting on home video to watch alongside the more recent streaming series, and had settled on a particular title. Just as I’d picked the old DVD set off the shelf and was poised to start tearing off its shrinkwrap, though, I noticed it was just a few episodes longer than the familiar “twelve to thirteen” standard I’d expected. That would have made it just a little harder to finish with those constraints on viewing in the new year already set in my mind. I did some quick checking of discs within that moment’s grasp and decided to open Taisho Baseball Girls instead. It had been some time since I’d seen it back in the days of “fansubs”; it being licensed for release over here had seemed surprising enough I’d felt obligated to buy a copy and willing even to imagine that might be a “vote for something I’d liked.” I’d never quite got around to watching the discs until now, though. There was the somewhat unfortunate thought that this show remains the most consistently good-looking “girls playing baseball” series I’m aware of. It also stands out for being set in the past, near the end of the “Taisho Era,” the Japanese imperial reign spanning from just before World War I to the middle of the 1920s perhaps more familiar now from Demon Slayer. From my perhaps still ill-informed perspective I can suppose the Taisho era might be a more appealing “mix of traditional Japanese designs and now-quaint Western borrowings” than the years that followed as Japan became ever more mired in trying to conquer China and Southeast Asia. However, I can at least imagine an argument being made the cheerful schoolgirls of the series, some in sailor-suit uniforms and some still in traditional garb, starting to get into something “boys do” because one of them wants to prove something to a particular boy were, like other people, unaware of decisions being made that would bring them out of the eye of a storm. That their coach is an enthusiastic blonde American woman teaching at their school could sharpen the question “what happened to everyone twenty years later?” One lighter thought I chewed on as if for distraction was how many of the hairstyles of the girls (and a boy or two, too) were anachronistic, even supposing “bowl cuts must have been the standard back then” was another ill-informed oversimplification. The storyline of steady practice leading to efforts to counter brawn with finesse stayed appealing; I might even have been a bit more forgiving now of episodes in the back half of the series that started to drift away from baseball, if in some part because I could find more interest in a brief presentation of the live narration used in Japanese silent movie theatres. While the conclusion could be seen as “it’s not so much about winning the game as winning respect,” I still had the feeling there could have been more to the story, if only through starting to establish other girls’ baseball teams (even if every one of the nine players might not have seemed altogether as distinct as the inevitable nine girls of a Love Live series manage to get). I understand this series adapted novels, but it came out well before translating those novels became a commercial possibility.
Watching through the two previous Mob Psycho 100 series to get ready for the oncoming third did leave me wondering where these new episodes might begin. As it turned out, there had been something from the very end of the second series to work with, and that built into some significant impact. From there things did become a bit lighter before getting more complicated again for the main character Mob and everyone else, with the production values staying impressive. (I remember awed reports that everything had been finished before the first new episode had aired.) The conclusion, which had one little bit of “a rabbit out of a hat,” might not have been “for all time”; at the same time, it was obvious the characters had moved forward enough to be obvious, and the character work in this series is more or less as much a part of what impresses everyone as the production values.
While I’d become interested in an unusual number of new series so far as I can go, a new thought did start nagging at me all the same. Everything that had caught my attention was linked to an established franchise, a big and well-promoted production, or both. I started looking a little harder at the start-of-the-season previews, and noticed some people were a bit impressed by a series called Do It Yourself! It did seem a “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” show; as with other examples of that I do end up watching, the “cute thing” managed to appeal to me. There was a sketchiness to the character designs that made them just a bit different than ordinary “cute girls,” too. I settled into a show about an accident-prone girl named Serufu (her name turns into a punning take on the title) with adhesive bandages a permanent part of her character design (and who has a dog, a cat, and a pig who cowers every time dinner conversation praises a pork dish) who stumbles into a one-member school club doing woodwork and handicrafts and starts helping to recruit other students, working towards a reconciliation with the girl next door who goes to a more technical high school in a time just a little into the future. I suppose it did raise some “the most I ever manage about doing this sort of stuff is daydream” feelings in me, but even that didn’t quite overshadow the general pleasantness.
One more big production I’d made plans to watch was called Chainsaw Man. I’d noticed artwork of its original manga’s characters showing up in an image feed or two, which had helped to get my attention. The story began with a maltreated youth named Denji enslaved by debt to Japanese gangsters and working with his one pal, a “devil” that’s a cross between a cartoon puppy and a chainsaw, only to be betrayed by the gangsters. At their last extremity the devil manages to merge with Denji, who regenerates the bits of himself he’d sold off and also gets a pull-cord dangling from just below his sternum; when pulled, his head turns into a demonic chainsaw and more chainsaw blades attach to his arms. (This doesn’t happen in every episode.) He’s recruited from the resulting bloodbath made of the gangsters by an enigmatically appealing woman for an official devil hunter organization. Still a youth of uncomplicated desires, Denji begins working with an assortment of ever so slightly peculiar people and other beings in “Men In Black”-type suits. I was interested enough to begin with, but watching the show alongside many other people did start to give me the impression a lot of them thought something all but undefinable wasn’t quite extreme enough compared to their understanding of the manga (which I began glancing at the covers of in the bookstore, but haven’t quite started buying yet). As the show wore along the action did seem to pick up a bit for me at least, but I am still toying with the thought of getting into the manga.
It did turn out that I didn’t watch every series that had piqued my interest at the start of these three months, and after noting the spaces open in my schedule all of a sudden I realised I could shuffle that time around and watch a movie every week. My thoughts jumped next to leading into my TV-episode project by starting with a recent movie and working backwards decade by decade. It was that much more “a tiny sample” than “one episode a year,” but I did manage to see a few movies I hadn’t seen before and return to a few I hadn’t seen for a while. Then, at the very end of the year, I had the chance to overshoot my mark, head back more than sixty years into the past, and start forward again with some theatrical shorts (although they were longer than “one reel.”) The Kitten’s Doodles and The Kitten’s Studio were animated by people at Toei just before and as their plans for theatrical features were getting under way. At what seems the real risk of “dropping names but revealing I don’t really understand anything I’m talking about,” the shorts started off seeming more in the gentle Disney tradition than the hyperactive standard of that moment of MGM and Warner Brothers, but I did get to thinking they had a certain amount of UPA’s “graphic design” sense as well. The second also just happened to seem to look ahead to just how important “robots” might appear to have got for Japanese animation, and I’m very tempted to suppose some people might place that much more weight than I did on a certain take on “advanced technology being used to churn out an artlike substitute.” Tales of a Street Corner had been made by Osamu Tezuka’s Mushi Productions just before he got into television animation. I have to admit, though, to starting it with impressions now hard to source some people hadn’t been that impressed by it at the time. For me it started off slow-paced but with plenty of “1960s graphic design” making good use of limited animation; partway through (and after a few moments of design sure to raise modern eyebrows) there was a twist that went hard in on “a significant message.” That might have made the piece more interesting, if in a peculiar way.