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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1990
In observing “fandoms” of long-running things it can get all too tempting to suppose that with the passage of time some might do better to detach not just from what annoys them now but also from what’s still to come to see if they can stick with what they have liked. I suppose I’ve pulled a ripcord or two myself, and in at least one case I do seem to have stuck with a subset of the past for all that it’s not the subset a lot of other people had long made a big deal of holding up as the reproach to everything else. In other cases I’ve been more tolerant, or adaptable, or just plain “undiscerning,” but for all that I began this year with hopes of flitting past a full sixty years of anime and coming out unscathed I was conscious one dividing line has been drawn right between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, with the death of a monarch closing the “Showa era” (although Yawara! was already a “Heisei era series”) and the crash of the Nikkei stock exchange noted too. For that matter, over here anime was shifting from “something you had to have the right contacts to really know about” to “something you could put money down in exchange for.” As if to mark this moment, I watched the first episode of a series I’ve seen more than one notable figure be indignant towards...
If it was just a matter of including a “Hideaki Anno and Gainax” series in the tour for the sake of invoking those names there were a few other options than Nadia. For all that “watching the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to invite watching the second,” and that was something I did back in 2010, I’d watched the first episode of Nadia during that tour as well. While my personal list of “notable titles” from that year is still small, I do have other choices now. If it was just a matter of “watching something with a subtler stature than Evangelion’s” there is “KareKano”/His and Her Circumstances, but there I have to admit a different title from its year promised being able to think back to other series already sampled. In the end it could have just been a matter of defiance towards received opinion, regardless of “defiance” sometimes being “foolish...”
One of the criticisms of Nadia I’ve seen is how much of it can be recognized as drawn from previous works, some of which I’ve already included in this tour. In seeing and choosing to be interested in a full-hearted defence of “Star Wars references previous works” to the point of “it references so many that becomes unique in itself,” though, I might have got to the point of thinking “and it’s interesting that Hideaki Anno does the same thing, in works other than Nadia too...” (Too, perhaps, that’s more personally satisfying than the smug comments that we’re to connect Yoshiyuki Tomino to George Lucas as “the idea guys who should leave the actual work to better artists,” even with where that led in the end...) As for the actual series, its first episode only begins to set up the full cast of characters, but that opening action was interesting in itself. I’d thought years before that Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s character designs, in anticipating Evangelion’s (just as Nadia’s cool-and-warm moods might anticipate the later series, and perhaps even stand out a bit from previous works if in “a certain way”) made this show seem a bit less “dated,” although now I am conscious of “like every other bit of anime, the Evangelion series doesn’t look like it once did when it was on the cutting edge” comments. I suppose Shiro Sagisu’s music itself very much anticipates Evangelion at a few moments.
In sampling this series I am conscious of all of the recommendations over the years about just what episodes stuck in its middle can and should be skipped, even with extra comments about little bits of them being relevant to the conclusion. It’s meant I’ve never seen every moment of the show, but I suppose with all the other series sampled up to this point that have raised thoughts of wanting to continue, there might even be an “every little bit helps” thought somewhere.
If it was just a matter of including a “Hideaki Anno and Gainax” series in the tour for the sake of invoking those names there were a few other options than Nadia. For all that “watching the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to invite watching the second,” and that was something I did back in 2010, I’d watched the first episode of Nadia during that tour as well. While my personal list of “notable titles” from that year is still small, I do have other choices now. If it was just a matter of “watching something with a subtler stature than Evangelion’s” there is “KareKano”/His and Her Circumstances, but there I have to admit a different title from its year promised being able to think back to other series already sampled. In the end it could have just been a matter of defiance towards received opinion, regardless of “defiance” sometimes being “foolish...”
One of the criticisms of Nadia I’ve seen is how much of it can be recognized as drawn from previous works, some of which I’ve already included in this tour. In seeing and choosing to be interested in a full-hearted defence of “Star Wars references previous works” to the point of “it references so many that becomes unique in itself,” though, I might have got to the point of thinking “and it’s interesting that Hideaki Anno does the same thing, in works other than Nadia too...” (Too, perhaps, that’s more personally satisfying than the smug comments that we’re to connect Yoshiyuki Tomino to George Lucas as “the idea guys who should leave the actual work to better artists,” even with where that led in the end...) As for the actual series, its first episode only begins to set up the full cast of characters, but that opening action was interesting in itself. I’d thought years before that Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s character designs, in anticipating Evangelion’s (just as Nadia’s cool-and-warm moods might anticipate the later series, and perhaps even stand out a bit from previous works if in “a certain way”) made this show seem a bit less “dated,” although now I am conscious of “like every other bit of anime, the Evangelion series doesn’t look like it once did when it was on the cutting edge” comments. I suppose Shiro Sagisu’s music itself very much anticipates Evangelion at a few moments.
In sampling this series I am conscious of all of the recommendations over the years about just what episodes stuck in its middle can and should be skipped, even with extra comments about little bits of them being relevant to the conclusion. It’s meant I’ve never seen every moment of the show, but I suppose with all the other series sampled up to this point that have raised thoughts of wanting to continue, there might even be an “every little bit helps” thought somewhere.