Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1969
Jan. 7th, 2023 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn putting black-and-white anime behind me for the second time and for good at least so far as this whistle-stop tour’s been planned, I am able to think back and suppose the series I sampled for the first time turned out more interesting than “I made it through half an hour; that’s another box ticked off.” In moving on to a series in colour I’ve already seen before but which is the only one from its year I have access to (and it’s just about in “its year” and that year’s decade by courtesy again, having premiered in December), I am returning to something that quite impressed me over its length and let me jump to certain conclusions. “Anime features teenagers because they’re its theoretical audience” is one thing; when those teenagers happen to spend most of their time in Japanese high schools that can irk English-language fans; Attack No. 1 happening to be set in “real world” secondary education gave me a sense some significant part of “anime as we know it” had snapped into place earlier than I’d known.
Taking in just one episode meant I’d only got to the resolution of the main character Kozue Ayuhara to whip the school delinquents (relatively speaking) she’d been hanging out with into shape and take on the proper volleyball team to prove something; there were some lingering moments earlier on as Kozue tries to explain her current lifestyle to an upright boy at her school. The series went on a long way from there and featured many more characters (as I recall, everyone surrounding Kozue in this first episode sort of goes their own way before the series ends). At times the first-episode character designs could come across as awkward in animation, but I suppose not quite having expected on first viewing to see 1960s Japanese teenagers out for personal enjoyment (and “go-go dancing”), with the potential correction of this attitude a matter of waiting for self-actualization and discovery rather than moralizing, shook up enough casual assumptions of mine I could keep going from there.
My enthusiasm about this series does have to be balanced against the risks of “proselytization can get annoying.” Since having seen it I did hear about a documentary about the Japanese women’s volleyball team at the 1964 Olympics, the gold-medal victory of which was an inspiration for Attack No. 1’s original manga, which uses some footage from the anime for purposes of illustration. Whether that nudged anyone else to the point of tracking down fansubs is uncertain at best; certainly, the sheer length of the series could be a problem in trying to build up to legitimate translated release (and “my reactions are only validated when others have them too”).
Taking in just one episode meant I’d only got to the resolution of the main character Kozue Ayuhara to whip the school delinquents (relatively speaking) she’d been hanging out with into shape and take on the proper volleyball team to prove something; there were some lingering moments earlier on as Kozue tries to explain her current lifestyle to an upright boy at her school. The series went on a long way from there and featured many more characters (as I recall, everyone surrounding Kozue in this first episode sort of goes their own way before the series ends). At times the first-episode character designs could come across as awkward in animation, but I suppose not quite having expected on first viewing to see 1960s Japanese teenagers out for personal enjoyment (and “go-go dancing”), with the potential correction of this attitude a matter of waiting for self-actualization and discovery rather than moralizing, shook up enough casual assumptions of mine I could keep going from there.
My enthusiasm about this series does have to be balanced against the risks of “proselytization can get annoying.” Since having seen it I did hear about a documentary about the Japanese women’s volleyball team at the 1964 Olympics, the gold-medal victory of which was an inspiration for Attack No. 1’s original manga, which uses some footage from the anime for purposes of illustration. Whether that nudged anyone else to the point of tracking down fansubs is uncertain at best; certainly, the sheer length of the series could be a problem in trying to build up to legitimate translated release (and “my reactions are only validated when others have them too”).