Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1968
Jan. 6th, 2023 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs it turned out it was back to black-and-white for at least one more series, the first anime version of Cyborg 009. The five monochrome TV anime I’ve sampled this year aren’t quite everything of that ilk I’ve watched, and I have just a bit more black-and-white anime still unviewed. A part of me has already begun contemplating “the black-and-white anime aesthetic”; another part of me wants to split that lump and acknowledge different styles and staffs within it, if only because of certain thoughts of being told to remember that by hypothetical others. I suppose I want to contrast this black-and-white animation to American works from the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, even if a few of the anime I’ve sampled had enough wavering brightness to their existing prints to get me thinking of “before the 1960s” anyway.
Cyborg 009 (or this version of it, to be precise) did look “cartoonier” than I’d thought it might; it was an appealing, anime-style cartooniness anyway. Remembering a comment from the Flying Phantom Ship commentary that movie also drew on original work from Shotaro Ishinomori does have me considering comments I’ve made before about “anime style gelling” in these closing years of the decade. The first episode took a while for any of its cyborg superheroes to show up, and in a way I appreciated there not being any formal introduction to them. Not all of the nine cyborgs implied by the title and glimpsed in the opening sequence appeared, although I retain the unfortunate consciousness their diversity is a matter of drawings offence could easily be taken in even before roles start being parsed. In not overloading myself with episodes to try and type up thoughts about afterwards I didn’t mind the series starting with a one-episode story, but that did have me wondering about whether any attempt could be made to imply its zap guns and explosions are aimed at a slightly different audience than the action of Mighty Atom and Big X from a few years before, or whether there’s just been a shift from “audience-identification characters” to “aspirational characters.”
Cyborg 009 (or this version of it, to be precise) did look “cartoonier” than I’d thought it might; it was an appealing, anime-style cartooniness anyway. Remembering a comment from the Flying Phantom Ship commentary that movie also drew on original work from Shotaro Ishinomori does have me considering comments I’ve made before about “anime style gelling” in these closing years of the decade. The first episode took a while for any of its cyborg superheroes to show up, and in a way I appreciated there not being any formal introduction to them. Not all of the nine cyborgs implied by the title and glimpsed in the opening sequence appeared, although I retain the unfortunate consciousness their diversity is a matter of drawings offence could easily be taken in even before roles start being parsed. In not overloading myself with episodes to try and type up thoughts about afterwards I didn’t mind the series starting with a one-episode story, but that did have me wondering about whether any attempt could be made to imply its zap guns and explosions are aimed at a slightly different audience than the action of Mighty Atom and Big X from a few years before, or whether there’s just been a shift from “audience-identification characters” to “aspirational characters.”