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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2006
Having tried to quick-step year by year “through anime” once before, I had my previous set of episodes ready to hand as I considered what shows to sample this time, but did keep thinking that to make too big a deal of “back then I watched that, but now I’m watching this” could get tedious. Still, when I got what to sample from 2006 I did reflect on having previously returned to an episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, if not its first (or even its other first, which only brings to mind all the indignation from those who’d picked up on the show straight off, settled on a particular “fansub” group, and wound up complaining the licensed release over here hadn’t been put together with the utmost care the series obviously demanded). Now, I just seem stuck with the impression of once having seen a comment that show might now be in a “you had to be there” place, and how I’d just about been there only for later jumping through the “watch it in this order if you want the real experience” hoops to not have left as much of a mark on me as with its early fans. I suppose it’s a little too tempting now, even after having read the trailed-off series of original novels in translation, to wonder about the series further marking “anime not quite getting clear of high school.” It might not have been only because of that, though, that this time around I scheduled a different series called Strain (or Soukou no Strain, or Str.A.In: Strategic Armored Infantry). Not only is it “science fiction set in the future and outer space,” it lets me go through a decade by the calendar and still include a mecha series.
With all of the lumps what mecha series have got made in recent years have taken, Strain not having attracted an awful lot of attention one way or another is mildly heartening in its own way. I suppose this time around I did ponder how, as its first episode started on “a planet that looks old-fashioned,” its young main character Sara had a definite attachment to her big brother. It is, though, an attachment threatened by him about to travel light-years away in a universe where an interstellar war involves “time dilation” such that she’ll no longer be alive when he comes back. She resolves to join the military herself and follow him, and the rest of the episode involves her coming close to graduation while piloting a mecha. This now happens to use computer animation, although this series also happens to be the first “TV widescreen” show I’ve seen in this tour, if still played off an undistinguished DVD (from a set beginning to move towards “cutting the corners that had been around a few years before” to perhaps at least try to compete with the domestic shows that sold in greater numbers but included more episodes). A sudden attack by the more intimidating-looking enemy ends in tragedy, the invocation of a bit of previous worldbuilding to leave Sara worse off yet going forward, and the establishment of a driving force to keep her moving even so. So far as I can apply the “historical perspective” anime made about now seems to need to not have how it now looks get in the way, Strain did have a pretty interesting first episode.
With all of the lumps what mecha series have got made in recent years have taken, Strain not having attracted an awful lot of attention one way or another is mildly heartening in its own way. I suppose this time around I did ponder how, as its first episode started on “a planet that looks old-fashioned,” its young main character Sara had a definite attachment to her big brother. It is, though, an attachment threatened by him about to travel light-years away in a universe where an interstellar war involves “time dilation” such that she’ll no longer be alive when he comes back. She resolves to join the military herself and follow him, and the rest of the episode involves her coming close to graduation while piloting a mecha. This now happens to use computer animation, although this series also happens to be the first “TV widescreen” show I’ve seen in this tour, if still played off an undistinguished DVD (from a set beginning to move towards “cutting the corners that had been around a few years before” to perhaps at least try to compete with the domestic shows that sold in greater numbers but included more episodes). A sudden attack by the more intimidating-looking enemy ends in tragedy, the invocation of a bit of previous worldbuilding to leave Sara worse off yet going forward, and the establishment of a driving force to keep her moving even so. So far as I can apply the “historical perspective” anime made about now seems to need to not have how it now looks get in the way, Strain did have a pretty interesting first episode.