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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1991
In trying to find anime series to stand in for a whole year of production I’ve gone back to a certain number of shows I haven’t seen for a while. After thinking Dear Brother would be a decent choice for its year, I did wind up realising it hasn’t been quite as long since I watched it, and that by its close its girls’ high school melodrama had gone in a direction or two I hadn’t quite cared for. I suppose I tried to escape that thought by connecting “attempting to make a certain deal not just of single series, but of ‘sample episodes’” with how I’d seen the first episode of Dear Brother many years before the actual series.
The short-lived venture Anime Sols had tried to stream old anime series to build up subscriptions to DVD releases. After paying into Creamy Mami without actually having watched the samples, I’d thought I ought to at least get past “taking interest just in the comments of other people” and make an effort to sample Dear Brother. The whole series had been funded in the end, but Anime Sols had shut down afterwards; I’d let the DVDs just sort of sit in another bout of “perhaps it’s better to have titles praised by others to be watched rather than to have watched them only to find yourself with nothing else as enthused about to be seen for the first time...” Then, Discotek had licensed the series on Blu-Ray (it seems to have made a success of “older anime” one way or another) but with the warning the license wouldn’t last for long; I’d started the series in part through the thought it would mean a better chance to have “defective discs” replaced (although that doesn’t seem to have happened as often in this Blu-Ray era as it did back with DVDs).
This third time around the first episode I did get to thinking a half-smirking thought I’d had the first time, specifically that there was something “mannish” to some of the older students the fresh-faced heroine of the series Nanako meets at her new school, had faded away. Maybe this shouldn’t be taken as cropping up “in the place” of that older impression, but I did wind up reflecting both on the series making heavy but interesting use of “still frames” (the opening credits are pretty much a matter of pans, zooms, and fades, a contrast at least to impressions of other series having impressive animation there for the sake of propping up simpler work in their bodies) and of apparently ordinary first encounters given great airs of impending significance. I was also thinking back to how the anime’s director Osamu Dezaki had helped adapt a previous manga by Riyoko Ikeda (although, checking that later, I saw he’d worked on the back half of The Rose of Versailles) and had directed Aim for the Ace! before that. Having moved step by step between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s just had me thinking the look of Dear Brother would have stood out more after a sudden jump.
The short-lived venture Anime Sols had tried to stream old anime series to build up subscriptions to DVD releases. After paying into Creamy Mami without actually having watched the samples, I’d thought I ought to at least get past “taking interest just in the comments of other people” and make an effort to sample Dear Brother. The whole series had been funded in the end, but Anime Sols had shut down afterwards; I’d let the DVDs just sort of sit in another bout of “perhaps it’s better to have titles praised by others to be watched rather than to have watched them only to find yourself with nothing else as enthused about to be seen for the first time...” Then, Discotek had licensed the series on Blu-Ray (it seems to have made a success of “older anime” one way or another) but with the warning the license wouldn’t last for long; I’d started the series in part through the thought it would mean a better chance to have “defective discs” replaced (although that doesn’t seem to have happened as often in this Blu-Ray era as it did back with DVDs).
This third time around the first episode I did get to thinking a half-smirking thought I’d had the first time, specifically that there was something “mannish” to some of the older students the fresh-faced heroine of the series Nanako meets at her new school, had faded away. Maybe this shouldn’t be taken as cropping up “in the place” of that older impression, but I did wind up reflecting both on the series making heavy but interesting use of “still frames” (the opening credits are pretty much a matter of pans, zooms, and fades, a contrast at least to impressions of other series having impressive animation there for the sake of propping up simpler work in their bodies) and of apparently ordinary first encounters given great airs of impending significance. I was also thinking back to how the anime’s director Osamu Dezaki had helped adapt a previous manga by Riyoko Ikeda (although, checking that later, I saw he’d worked on the back half of The Rose of Versailles) and had directed Aim for the Ace! before that. Having moved step by step between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s just had me thinking the look of Dear Brother would have stood out more after a sudden jump.