Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2004
Feb. 11th, 2023 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPushing further into the first decade of the millennium, my latest choice from among my options for one year gets entangled with “titles that were merely popular in their time.” For that matter, there seemed to have been mixed feelings towards My-HiME from the start, with insinuations of this “high school girls in mecha-beast and supernatural-power battles” series having meandered into a corner it left only by pulling a moth-eaten rabbit from a hat. I recall a few more enthusiastic comments noting it having been made by the animation studio Sunrise only to promptly proclaim it “an effort to make up for the Gundam Seed subfranchise,” and that didn’t help me very much either.
Compared to another series from its year, though, I did get to thinking that since I’m only watching “first episodes” (which does keep leaving me wondering about “making too big a deal of any actual accomplishment here”) My-HiME at least left me thinking its first episode had been pretty good when I did get around to it for the first time. Opening up a more recent Blu-Ray set, however (even if the set’s a mere suggestion the show didn’t just “leave a cautionary example floating,” perhaps), now left me with a straight-off impression that this was indeed one of those “now-old” series I’d kept dwelling on where the digital animation is clean to the point of thick-lined sterility and the character designs in animation just don’t look quite right in some hard-to-define way. (The back of the set did mention Sunrise also having animated Code Geass and Love Live, the second title being an odd one for me to think of at first even if, in acknowledging “lots of attractive girls with characters distinctively drawn in a few strokes,” my thoughts could wander to strange yet hypothetical works of fanfiction...) Pushing on, though, I did get to the action bursting out of ominous portents, and my interest did pick up from there, with some of the characters we’d already been introduced to finding the courage to stand up and function among high stakes despite not having immediate powers of their own to deploy. The end of the episode did get to the high school of the series, which gets to a sense of a certain enduring period in anime forever embedding “explosive action” among “a safe and comforting setting.” Looked at that way, acknowledging My-HiME is acknowledging a part of the sweep of anime. I’m at least wondering, too, about going back to the spinoff manga rather than the anime itself this time around.
Compared to another series from its year, though, I did get to thinking that since I’m only watching “first episodes” (which does keep leaving me wondering about “making too big a deal of any actual accomplishment here”) My-HiME at least left me thinking its first episode had been pretty good when I did get around to it for the first time. Opening up a more recent Blu-Ray set, however (even if the set’s a mere suggestion the show didn’t just “leave a cautionary example floating,” perhaps), now left me with a straight-off impression that this was indeed one of those “now-old” series I’d kept dwelling on where the digital animation is clean to the point of thick-lined sterility and the character designs in animation just don’t look quite right in some hard-to-define way. (The back of the set did mention Sunrise also having animated Code Geass and Love Live, the second title being an odd one for me to think of at first even if, in acknowledging “lots of attractive girls with characters distinctively drawn in a few strokes,” my thoughts could wander to strange yet hypothetical works of fanfiction...) Pushing on, though, I did get to the action bursting out of ominous portents, and my interest did pick up from there, with some of the characters we’d already been introduced to finding the courage to stand up and function among high stakes despite not having immediate powers of their own to deploy. The end of the episode did get to the high school of the series, which gets to a sense of a certain enduring period in anime forever embedding “explosive action” among “a safe and comforting setting.” Looked at that way, acknowledging My-HiME is acknowledging a part of the sweep of anime. I’m at least wondering, too, about going back to the spinoff manga rather than the anime itself this time around.