Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1989
Jan. 27th, 2023 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFor my final sample of anime from the 1980s, I dug out and opened at last a DVD box set of a series not quite as notable now as other titles from its time but still connected to manga, at least. Yawara! adapted a manga by Naoki Urasawa, who nowadays seems a rather respectable manga artist. Sometimes, though, “respectability” threatens to get entangled with “the sort of manga that doesn’t get adapted into anime.” I at least recall seeing comments this “judo series” acquitted itself well against Ranma 1/2’s “anything-goes martial arts” when they both got on the air in Japan around the same time. The adaptation of a Rumiko Takahashi manga was licensed over here long before Yawara!, though, and that seemed to make a difference...
While Ranma 1/2 was “the sort of show so popular my university’s anime club didn’t need to show it,” I do remember seeing at least an episode or two of Yawara! there. Some years after that, AnimEigo licensed it, but their first box set didn’t sell well and there weren’t any more. Eventually I did buy a marked-down copy (and have to allude to this not being “all of the series I’ll ever be able to see.”) In any case, while AnimEigo pretty much went into hibernation after the box set, “being a small company supported by someone who’s well off in part through an early computer game franchise” helped it stick around to the point of some recent Kickstarter-funded “license rescues.”
The art style of the Yawara! anime was relatively simple, and also “cartoony” in a different way than the specifically appealing (“too appealing”?) way of a good amount of other anime. With that aside, the first episode set up its main character Yawara’s skill at judo, how she has some problems getting along with her spry grandfather, and comedic complications developing from there as time counted down towards the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. I did start to get the feeling what I did see at the anime club wasn’t very far removed from the first episode. The question as ever is when I’ll get around to watching the next episodes in the series now.
As for other and more recent manga from Naoki Urasawa, after reading Monster, 20th Century Boys, and Pluto I have to admit to losing track of further releases from him. Not that long ago, though, I received a tracking notice for a shipment from the anime and manga store Right Stuf that mentioned two cartons were on the way. When I opened the second, I found some manga I hadn’t ordered, including volumes of a new series from Urasawa, Asadora! I did contact the company about this but didn’t get back clear instructions about returning the mis-shipped manga; at last, I started ordering the other volumes of Asadora! It just happens to have no blurbs on its cover describing what to expect in the story, which makes me reluctant to describe myself why I’m now kind of interested in it (beyond mentioning that while Urasawa’s style remains not “specifically appealing,” it’s certainly interesting in its own way.)
While Ranma 1/2 was “the sort of show so popular my university’s anime club didn’t need to show it,” I do remember seeing at least an episode or two of Yawara! there. Some years after that, AnimEigo licensed it, but their first box set didn’t sell well and there weren’t any more. Eventually I did buy a marked-down copy (and have to allude to this not being “all of the series I’ll ever be able to see.”) In any case, while AnimEigo pretty much went into hibernation after the box set, “being a small company supported by someone who’s well off in part through an early computer game franchise” helped it stick around to the point of some recent Kickstarter-funded “license rescues.”
The art style of the Yawara! anime was relatively simple, and also “cartoony” in a different way than the specifically appealing (“too appealing”?) way of a good amount of other anime. With that aside, the first episode set up its main character Yawara’s skill at judo, how she has some problems getting along with her spry grandfather, and comedic complications developing from there as time counted down towards the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. I did start to get the feeling what I did see at the anime club wasn’t very far removed from the first episode. The question as ever is when I’ll get around to watching the next episodes in the series now.
As for other and more recent manga from Naoki Urasawa, after reading Monster, 20th Century Boys, and Pluto I have to admit to losing track of further releases from him. Not that long ago, though, I received a tracking notice for a shipment from the anime and manga store Right Stuf that mentioned two cartons were on the way. When I opened the second, I found some manga I hadn’t ordered, including volumes of a new series from Urasawa, Asadora! I did contact the company about this but didn’t get back clear instructions about returning the mis-shipped manga; at last, I started ordering the other volumes of Asadora! It just happens to have no blurbs on its cover describing what to expect in the story, which makes me reluctant to describe myself why I’m now kind of interested in it (beyond mentioning that while Urasawa’s style remains not “specifically appealing,” it’s certainly interesting in its own way.)