Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2002
Feb. 9th, 2023 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRight after admitting to an arid patch of anime still able to perk up my interest, I’m getting to a year where a solid crop of titles can do just that. It wasn’t altogether difficult to decide on just one series from among them to sample. I was quite ready to head back to the anime adaptation of Azumanga Daioh.
For some time now I’ve looked at the “cute girls doing cute things” series I do watch with the thought “the hobby that makes each show distinctive is also a way to differentiate them from Azumanga Daioh.” As soon as I’d gone back to that particular series, though, I did get to thinking it contained enough out-and-out comedy to not quite feel like a “cute girls...” prototype any more. For that matter, too, I hadn’t remembered there were male students with speaking roles in the high school classroom Azumanga Daioh’s rather more memorable and wacky girls occupied. I suppose it’s just possible I had occasional thoughts about “the challenges of translating comedy,” which had me thinking of my omnibus of Kiyohiko Azuma’s original manga (I have both an “ADV Manga” omnibus and a later Yen Press volume, but I have to admit to only having read the second, remembering certain mutterings ADV had been too free with their “localization...”) Thinking of the “four-panel” manga then has me thinking of Peanuts, and of “The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show” as a different segment-based adaptation, which ran one weekday noon half-hour a week for a year the same year as my youthful exposure to “Thunder Sub.”
Watching this first episode, I did get to wondering about just how many characters it would introduce to us, much less get to bouncing off each other. In the end, though, it did manage to introduce “Osaka,” which was something for all that I know things got that much more peculiar later on. I could at least suppose this animation on an old DVD didn’t look quite as drab as I’d been concerned “early digital animation” might look in retrospect. Maybe I’ve just happened to run into a problem title or two on either side of a decade or so lately enough for that concern to have stuck in my mind; of course, I’m not that far into the decade in question yet.
For some time now I’ve looked at the “cute girls doing cute things” series I do watch with the thought “the hobby that makes each show distinctive is also a way to differentiate them from Azumanga Daioh.” As soon as I’d gone back to that particular series, though, I did get to thinking it contained enough out-and-out comedy to not quite feel like a “cute girls...” prototype any more. For that matter, too, I hadn’t remembered there were male students with speaking roles in the high school classroom Azumanga Daioh’s rather more memorable and wacky girls occupied. I suppose it’s just possible I had occasional thoughts about “the challenges of translating comedy,” which had me thinking of my omnibus of Kiyohiko Azuma’s original manga (I have both an “ADV Manga” omnibus and a later Yen Press volume, but I have to admit to only having read the second, remembering certain mutterings ADV had been too free with their “localization...”) Thinking of the “four-panel” manga then has me thinking of Peanuts, and of “The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show” as a different segment-based adaptation, which ran one weekday noon half-hour a week for a year the same year as my youthful exposure to “Thunder Sub.”
Watching this first episode, I did get to wondering about just how many characters it would introduce to us, much less get to bouncing off each other. In the end, though, it did manage to introduce “Osaka,” which was something for all that I know things got that much more peculiar later on. I could at least suppose this animation on an old DVD didn’t look quite as drab as I’d been concerned “early digital animation” might look in retrospect. Maybe I’ve just happened to run into a problem title or two on either side of a decade or so lately enough for that concern to have stuck in my mind; of course, I’m not that far into the decade in question yet.