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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2018
A lot of titles from 2018 got onto my list of “personal standout anime” made up just a year later. Even at the time I was drawing it up, though, I did wonder if I’d relaxed my standards after the thinner years just previous for the sake of presenting an impressive-looking retrospective near the end of the decade. At the time it wasn’t hard to make a top pick, but as I sorted out I’d get to this year this time around on a weekend I did start wondering about making a double feature of it. The only nagging problem was the B-title that kept coming to mind threatened to feel “brought up for the wrong reasons, especially when associated with something so impressive.” In the end, however, I forced back my misgivings and went straight from A Place Further than the Universe to Harukana Receive.
With my top pick, I knew it took a number of episodes for its quartet of teenaged schoolgirls to assemble and set sail with an expedition of adults for Antarctica. Even returning to just one episode was enough to get me oddly intrigued with its art style including thick white outlines around the characters (which might have given them a bit more “depth”), the relative mundanity of the Japan it begins in, and the stylized penguins to be noticed every so often. The first struggles of the first character we meet to catch up on making the most of her youth and “cut class to go somewhere she’s never gone” were interesting in themselves even before she picks up an envelope dropped by another girl rushing past her in the train station and finds a million yen inside it. (I’m aware how the “divide by a hundred” foreign-exchange rule of thumb makes that less impressive than it looks, but it still seems an awful lot of money to be carrying in an envelope; at the same time, I do have an impression interest rates in Japan had been so low at the time it was easy to be discouraged from keeping money in a bank.) When Mari does start talking with Shirase about the second girl’s plans to follow her mother to where she vanished in Antarctica and Shirase keeps bringing up how many other people can be discouraging about it, I did get to considering my recurring thoughts that this series got my attention and impressed me simply because its story was more interesting than “hanging out in high school,” but still felt plausible. The conclusion of the first episode did have me recalling certain recent exposures to modern bullet trains in anime, anyway.
One thought that kept coming to mind about going back to Harukana Receive in this tour was admitting that I’m not opposed to the most familiar definitions of “fanservice,” regardless of concern about less savoury admissions packed half-knowing or reluctant to articulate into that, for all that I’m now ready to suppose anime isn’t the most effective delivery mechanism for it. Beyond one particular scene as Haruka gets to the ocean surrounding Okinawa, though, I actually did start to think maybe I wasn’t gawking quite as much at the swimsuits beach volleyball just happens to involve as actually getting caught up in the story driven by a ruptured beach volleyball partnership between Haruka’s short cousin Kanata and the champion player Narumi, who’s ready to go all-out against a beach volleyball novice even if this doesn’t discourage Haruka, who makes a few claims she’s good at sports in general. In getting to a third “volleyball anime,” I was a little conscious I hadn’t managed to see any baseball anime, which I’d included in my 2010 tour. So far as “maybe an anime title will stick in the mind more even by leading into manga,” though, I was a bit conscious again of the relative peculiarities of the manga’s art. (So far as other ways to be remembered go, people kept complaining there’s been no home video release for A Place Further than the Universe. There were announcements just a few months ago that a European anime distributor was dubbing it even if I’m still left wondering about “prices further than I’m willing to pay...”)
With my top pick, I knew it took a number of episodes for its quartet of teenaged schoolgirls to assemble and set sail with an expedition of adults for Antarctica. Even returning to just one episode was enough to get me oddly intrigued with its art style including thick white outlines around the characters (which might have given them a bit more “depth”), the relative mundanity of the Japan it begins in, and the stylized penguins to be noticed every so often. The first struggles of the first character we meet to catch up on making the most of her youth and “cut class to go somewhere she’s never gone” were interesting in themselves even before she picks up an envelope dropped by another girl rushing past her in the train station and finds a million yen inside it. (I’m aware how the “divide by a hundred” foreign-exchange rule of thumb makes that less impressive than it looks, but it still seems an awful lot of money to be carrying in an envelope; at the same time, I do have an impression interest rates in Japan had been so low at the time it was easy to be discouraged from keeping money in a bank.) When Mari does start talking with Shirase about the second girl’s plans to follow her mother to where she vanished in Antarctica and Shirase keeps bringing up how many other people can be discouraging about it, I did get to considering my recurring thoughts that this series got my attention and impressed me simply because its story was more interesting than “hanging out in high school,” but still felt plausible. The conclusion of the first episode did have me recalling certain recent exposures to modern bullet trains in anime, anyway.
One thought that kept coming to mind about going back to Harukana Receive in this tour was admitting that I’m not opposed to the most familiar definitions of “fanservice,” regardless of concern about less savoury admissions packed half-knowing or reluctant to articulate into that, for all that I’m now ready to suppose anime isn’t the most effective delivery mechanism for it. Beyond one particular scene as Haruka gets to the ocean surrounding Okinawa, though, I actually did start to think maybe I wasn’t gawking quite as much at the swimsuits beach volleyball just happens to involve as actually getting caught up in the story driven by a ruptured beach volleyball partnership between Haruka’s short cousin Kanata and the champion player Narumi, who’s ready to go all-out against a beach volleyball novice even if this doesn’t discourage Haruka, who makes a few claims she’s good at sports in general. In getting to a third “volleyball anime,” I was a little conscious I hadn’t managed to see any baseball anime, which I’d included in my 2010 tour. So far as “maybe an anime title will stick in the mind more even by leading into manga,” though, I was a bit conscious again of the relative peculiarities of the manga’s art. (So far as other ways to be remembered go, people kept complaining there’s been no home video release for A Place Further than the Universe. There were announcements just a few months ago that a European anime distributor was dubbing it even if I’m still left wondering about “prices further than I’m willing to pay...”)