krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
[personal profile] krpalmer
Back in 2010’s previous personal tour of anime through the years, by the time I got to an episode from 1983 I’d sampled six giant robot and mecha series in a row, and watched two episodes of Gatchaman and two episodes of Space Battleship Yamato before them perhaps in some part to make up for not having anything from 1973 or 1975 available then. I’d moved on to Cat’s Eye with, I recall, some element of “finally, a little closer to reality (in anime terms, anyway).” This time around, after having tried to seek out a bit more variety, I was willing to take in the first episode a mecha anime. However, that episode happens to have been something of a personal reproach for quite some time...

Armored Trooper VOTOMS came out on DVD long enough ago that it turned up in the very first “anime watched in this span of time” review I posted to this journal (or rather, back on Livejournal). Anything I didn’t record then seems more a matter of recollection than remembering, but my impression is that I managed to watch an official sample episode of it, where a young soldier in a science fiction war grinding to a end is tossed into a shady mission storming a space fortress of its own side. Finally told to stay behind and guard a junction after asking too many anguished questions, he happens on a mysterious casket with a bald and naked woman in it whose eyes open. After that the mission’s other participants blast his compact mecha out into space, and when he’s picked up by another ship from his own side it’s only to be tortured for information he doesn’t even know. At last, he manages a daring escape into a basically post-apocalyptic world, and at that point I supposed the series would amount to “Chirico Cuvie is out for answers... and revenge.”

As my recollections continue, though, in the rest of the series I got around to watching on DVD Chirico seemed a more passive and reactive figure just sort of being buffeted around by events, acquaintances, and a general inability to stop fighting. The compact VOTOMS mecha, although “disposable” in a way the mecha of protagonists often aren’t, began to irk me a bit for being animated so often moving with wheels in their feet, even if this might demonstrate “animation cheats in mechanical animation” aren’t some “recent” failing. (I suppose my real problem came from having watched a more recent anime first where the mecha also had wheels in their feet and never seemed that formidable, even if this might have been meant to set up “it’s about unaided people, not machinery.”) Maybe all of this just demonstrates I never quite had the deft patience to pick up on “subtlety”; watching the first episode again had me acknowledging just what could appeal to particular others. In any case, I’m much more willing to tell myself “it’s my fault, not the anime’s” than with, say, Zeta Gundam. I am conscious VOTOMS seems about as close as I’ve ever known “mecha anime” to get to the different constraints of “English-language science fiction,” and where some mecha anime series made just before it had their designs (for larger mecha) licensed (if in finally uncertain circumstances) to start Battletech I know a different “giant robot RPG,” Heavy Gear, could be seen as taking design inspiration from this particular show.

July 2025

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