Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1998
Feb. 5th, 2023 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerSome years are a little trickier than others when it comes to picking one single series to watch one single episode from to try to “represent the anime of its time.” As I settled on returning to one episode I’d sampled back in 2010, I was aware of two other quite notable shows from its year, and of the perhaps-convoluted reasons stuck in my mind for stepping past them again. On a somewhat more positive note, going back to Cardcaptor Sakura would let me point out Sailor Moon reconfiguring “magical girls” into “teenaged superheroines drawing on team patterns from live-action shows” wasn’t a “from now on” change to the whole genre.
All three of the shows from 1998 I’d wound up supposing solid choices had shown up in my university’s anime club when I’d still been going there. I’d also got around to buying them on DVD not that many years after that. While His and Her Circumstances could have represented “Hideaki Anno and Gainax” as I’d supposed not that long ago, I also suppose that once you’ve got past a sample episode there’s the matter of it just sort of trailing off amid flying rumours of disagreements with the original manga artist (and condemnations of just where the manga wound up after it had addressed the loosest ends of the anime). Cowboy Bebop cast a long shadow of “what anime ought to be” for a considerable number of people. There, though, I’m stuck admitting that after having caught bits of it at my university’s anime club I’d bought up its DVDs at a time when I supposed my purchases had to be selective, only to be caught partway through them by a sad report that the American TV broadcast had had an episode with a tongue-in-cheek appearance of the space shuttle Columbia crash into grim real-world news, and couldn’t quite get back to them for a while myself. When I did months later, I just happened to be caught in a wide-area blackout, and after that some unfortunate element of superstition has seemed to get in the way of ever revisiting the series again.
As for the series I did get back to, one of my stronger memories of Cardcaptor Sakura from the anime club started with sitting through the last episodes of the original Berzerk adaptation (which I’d only bothered with glimpses of before) so that I could describe the conclusion to a friend who couldn’t see it himself. After that conclusion turned out to be pretty harrowing, I suppose it might have been a deliberate scheduling decision of the club to show Cardcaptor Sakura next and deliver something sugary and reviving. As I got around a few years later to a big bundle of most of its DVDs, though, I guess I did start grappling with a perpetual feeling that Sakura and her fourth-grade friends lived more responsible, grown-up, and somehow drab lives than seemed quite right for me. Maybe that feeling only betrays having been coddled in my own youth, but it was something of a sticking point (although it didn’t stop me from managing to get the last DVDs before they weren’t available any more). Returning to the beginning of the series now, I did try to acknowledge that feeling to help deal with it. Sakura’s show of temper at the teasing of her big brother might have been a bit of an antidote, and all in all the series looked and sounded appealing even as I supposed the clock was running out on “conventional cel animation” in anime production. I also happened to notice she started off rather reluctant to charge into action and start capturing the magical cards she’d released by accident, although once she had got into the thick of that action she was able to handle it.
All three of the shows from 1998 I’d wound up supposing solid choices had shown up in my university’s anime club when I’d still been going there. I’d also got around to buying them on DVD not that many years after that. While His and Her Circumstances could have represented “Hideaki Anno and Gainax” as I’d supposed not that long ago, I also suppose that once you’ve got past a sample episode there’s the matter of it just sort of trailing off amid flying rumours of disagreements with the original manga artist (and condemnations of just where the manga wound up after it had addressed the loosest ends of the anime). Cowboy Bebop cast a long shadow of “what anime ought to be” for a considerable number of people. There, though, I’m stuck admitting that after having caught bits of it at my university’s anime club I’d bought up its DVDs at a time when I supposed my purchases had to be selective, only to be caught partway through them by a sad report that the American TV broadcast had had an episode with a tongue-in-cheek appearance of the space shuttle Columbia crash into grim real-world news, and couldn’t quite get back to them for a while myself. When I did months later, I just happened to be caught in a wide-area blackout, and after that some unfortunate element of superstition has seemed to get in the way of ever revisiting the series again.
As for the series I did get back to, one of my stronger memories of Cardcaptor Sakura from the anime club started with sitting through the last episodes of the original Berzerk adaptation (which I’d only bothered with glimpses of before) so that I could describe the conclusion to a friend who couldn’t see it himself. After that conclusion turned out to be pretty harrowing, I suppose it might have been a deliberate scheduling decision of the club to show Cardcaptor Sakura next and deliver something sugary and reviving. As I got around a few years later to a big bundle of most of its DVDs, though, I guess I did start grappling with a perpetual feeling that Sakura and her fourth-grade friends lived more responsible, grown-up, and somehow drab lives than seemed quite right for me. Maybe that feeling only betrays having been coddled in my own youth, but it was something of a sticking point (although it didn’t stop me from managing to get the last DVDs before they weren’t available any more). Returning to the beginning of the series now, I did try to acknowledge that feeling to help deal with it. Sakura’s show of temper at the teasing of her big brother might have been a bit of an antidote, and all in all the series looked and sounded appealing even as I supposed the clock was running out on “conventional cel animation” in anime production. I also happened to notice she started off rather reluctant to charge into action and start capturing the magical cards she’d released by accident, although once she had got into the thick of that action she was able to handle it.