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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2001
It’s an odd temptation to bring up the old, half-joshing debates over “so what year does ‘the twenty-first century’ really begin with?” when admitting my entirely personal list of “memorable anime of the year” is as thin on titles in 2001 as in the year 2000. I’ve watched a few series from that later year including the moody and oddly stylish girls-with-guns adventure Noir and the original Fruits Basket adaptation (which I sampled back in 2010), but as popular as I know they once were neither of them quite seem to grab me now. A year that included Spirited Away doesn’t seem altogether devoid of merit, but having been watching TV and OVA episodes up to now I did want to keep sticking with something relatively short. I wound up watching the first Alien Nine OVA, getting very much near the end of an era in doing so.
The ambiguous adventures of elementary-school girls who wear winged aliens with unsettling powers on their heads and try to hunt down more threatening extraterrestrial beasts that get on to their school grounds did continue in a manga, and when I bought the DVD I got the manga with it. For all of the slightly amplified body horror of the manga, though, it didn’t really “end” either. Maybe you could interpret the “it just is” unpleasantness of the story as an indictment of “systems” without the perhaps-familiar kick to go out and try to overthrow it on the chance of something better emerging from destruction this time, or at least question stories where world-shaking machinations emerge from the all too ordinary. I did get to pondering what connection the alien beasts had to Pokemon and its surroundings for all that that’s always been “something after my own time,” but after that I also began to wonder about the constant snivelling of the central girl in the story, selected to hunt aliens by her class, having something in connection with the constellation of “post-Evangelion anime” I’m a bit more familiar with. That does have some connection to the question that just came to mind.
In any case I have been wondering a bit about this stretch of “not too much catching my attention” only emerging in retrospect. In this more impatient time, where new anime series line up every three months, to have coasted for so long might have raised worries. Maybe the wider perspective can be appreciated. I also found some pleasantness in the old U.S. Manga Corps/Central Park Media DVD including a “Bandai Visual presents Emotion” logo sequence, which still manages to bring days at my university’s anime club to mind.
The ambiguous adventures of elementary-school girls who wear winged aliens with unsettling powers on their heads and try to hunt down more threatening extraterrestrial beasts that get on to their school grounds did continue in a manga, and when I bought the DVD I got the manga with it. For all of the slightly amplified body horror of the manga, though, it didn’t really “end” either. Maybe you could interpret the “it just is” unpleasantness of the story as an indictment of “systems” without the perhaps-familiar kick to go out and try to overthrow it on the chance of something better emerging from destruction this time, or at least question stories where world-shaking machinations emerge from the all too ordinary. I did get to pondering what connection the alien beasts had to Pokemon and its surroundings for all that that’s always been “something after my own time,” but after that I also began to wonder about the constant snivelling of the central girl in the story, selected to hunt aliens by her class, having something in connection with the constellation of “post-Evangelion anime” I’m a bit more familiar with. That does have some connection to the question that just came to mind.
In any case I have been wondering a bit about this stretch of “not too much catching my attention” only emerging in retrospect. In this more impatient time, where new anime series line up every three months, to have coasted for so long might have raised worries. Maybe the wider perspective can be appreciated. I also found some pleasantness in the old U.S. Manga Corps/Central Park Media DVD including a “Bandai Visual presents Emotion” logo sequence, which still manages to bring days at my university’s anime club to mind.