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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1999
As I sample my last bit of anime from the 1990s I’m still managing to come back to a series I recall seeing some of at my university’s anime club. In between graduating and landing a first job, and indeed in between that experience-building temporary position and another contract job, I kept heading back and staying with friends and acquaintances still at school so that I could keep taking in the club’s shows. It was cheaper than buying videotapes or the very first anime DVDs available over here. As for the particular series I’d settled on sampling all these years later, though, I don’t recall having seen the first episode of The Big O before.
Long having understood the animation studio Sunrise had worked on some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (one of the “animation renaissance” shows that had kept up my interest in the art form through high school while I was still sorting out “not only had Robotech come from Japan, other things like it were still being made,” even if I never quite got to the point of searching out those early tapes), I was ready once more to see the resemblance between it and The Big O. There’s no single “anime style,” of course, not even a set style for any particular year. Beyond the apparently simple eyes of the characters, I was also ready to say there were certain recognizable “anime” touches to the artwork in The Big O. Perhaps a sense of anime “flattening out” in general at the time, with less shading on characters than there’d been at the start of the decade, could help there.
At the same time, I did get to wondering about the main character Roger Smith not having quite the same superheroic uprightness as Batman. The story in the first episode of The Big O was just a little harder to grasp at points than Batman episodes, and maybe that has something to do with the general worldbuilding of this series. Things getting to the point of giant robots showing up all of a sudden just might have helped there, even if I had been starting to think “now this could be a series to point to when trying to insist ‘giant robots’ aren’t the single point of every show with that label.” The first episode did end with a cliffhanger, though, which doesn’t quite match my impressions of what I did see once upon a time at the anime club. Long-standing mutterings about “the series didn’t really end, even with more episodes made after it did well on TV over here” did have something to do with my not having returned to The Big O until now, but now I’m stuck at least wondering about having still one more thing to follow up on at some point.
Long having understood the animation studio Sunrise had worked on some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (one of the “animation renaissance” shows that had kept up my interest in the art form through high school while I was still sorting out “not only had Robotech come from Japan, other things like it were still being made,” even if I never quite got to the point of searching out those early tapes), I was ready once more to see the resemblance between it and The Big O. There’s no single “anime style,” of course, not even a set style for any particular year. Beyond the apparently simple eyes of the characters, I was also ready to say there were certain recognizable “anime” touches to the artwork in The Big O. Perhaps a sense of anime “flattening out” in general at the time, with less shading on characters than there’d been at the start of the decade, could help there.
At the same time, I did get to wondering about the main character Roger Smith not having quite the same superheroic uprightness as Batman. The story in the first episode of The Big O was just a little harder to grasp at points than Batman episodes, and maybe that has something to do with the general worldbuilding of this series. Things getting to the point of giant robots showing up all of a sudden just might have helped there, even if I had been starting to think “now this could be a series to point to when trying to insist ‘giant robots’ aren’t the single point of every show with that label.” The first episode did end with a cliffhanger, though, which doesn’t quite match my impressions of what I did see once upon a time at the anime club. Long-standing mutterings about “the series didn’t really end, even with more episodes made after it did well on TV over here” did have something to do with my not having returned to The Big O until now, but now I’m stuck at least wondering about having still one more thing to follow up on at some point.