Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2005
Feb. 12th, 2023 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerTwo “action series” in a row might not have seemed all that bad if not for bumping into memories of negative reactions entangling both of them. That could, though, have made moving on to the first episode of Aria the Animation a bit more welcome. It hasn’t been that long since I returned to that series through a Kickstarter-funded box set, if at a moment when I thought I did need to watch something long held up as “relaxing.” Since then I haven’t quite managed to get to the follow-up series also included in the box, much less the original manga. I recall the translation of it had been started twice by two different companies only to grind to a stop unfinished both times before the third attempt, years later, had proved lucky.
Aria still looks a bit aged now compared to more recent series, but the thorough pleasantness of its clean-scrubbed replica Venice on a just about flooded post-terraforming Mars, with young women training to take over the tourist gondolas of their somewhat older female mentors (and a certain number of eccentric “cartoon reaction faces”), goes to some length to make up for that. The first episode’s self-contained story, while it might seem gentle enough with its concluding message of learning to like something unloved before, even happens to contain a more exciting sequence. I am recalling now once seeing this episode suggested as one of “three episodes to watch to try and fit the whole anime in a nutshell,” the other two being the fifteenth of “Aria the Natural,” “In the Center of That Large Circle,” and the fourth of “Aria the Origination,” “Those Who Aim for Tomorrow.” I’m still not quite resolved yet to “take in even that much to excuse picking up the manga at last,” though.
Aria still looks a bit aged now compared to more recent series, but the thorough pleasantness of its clean-scrubbed replica Venice on a just about flooded post-terraforming Mars, with young women training to take over the tourist gondolas of their somewhat older female mentors (and a certain number of eccentric “cartoon reaction faces”), goes to some length to make up for that. The first episode’s self-contained story, while it might seem gentle enough with its concluding message of learning to like something unloved before, even happens to contain a more exciting sequence. I am recalling now once seeing this episode suggested as one of “three episodes to watch to try and fit the whole anime in a nutshell,” the other two being the fifteenth of “Aria the Natural,” “In the Center of That Large Circle,” and the fourth of “Aria the Origination,” “Those Who Aim for Tomorrow.” I’m still not quite resolved yet to “take in even that much to excuse picking up the manga at last,” though.