Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2021
Feb. 28th, 2023 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFor the penultimate year of my personal and far from definitive tour through a certain stretch of anime, I decided to try one more double feature. Eighty-Six had been impressive, and in certain ways reassuring and a relief that a recent “mecha anime” (or just about, given the piloted “ground-level one-person combat machines on legs” aren’t “humanoid” or even “bipedal”) hadn’t wound up under a suffocating cloud of disdain. At the same time, Super Cub had been very pleasant (and just a bit of a commercial for Honda motor vehicles), so the thought of acknowledging what breadth anime does offer was tempting.
After finishing the Eighty-Six anime I went on to the original novels in translation. While I stopped commenting on them here after the second volume, at the moment I’ve finished eight of them (and still have three waiting to be read), the twists of the story with its steadily expanding setting and cast holding up over the sometimes stodgy prose. Going back to where it had all started for me, I was inclined to view things through a sense of what I’d picked up perhaps not until the first novel, simply noting how certain elements would have been enigmatic at the time even for those paying more attention to throwaway comments about synthetic versus actual food on the home front and certain cautions about the “Para-RAID” long-range communications device. At the same time, I did notice some “anime original” events elaborating on our introductions to Major Vladilena “Lena” Milizé and the frontline pilots of Spearhead Squadron she doesn’t greet by voice alone until the very end of the episode. Getting to see some of the characters who hadn’t been illustrated in the first novel and wouldn’t be illustrated afterwards also had a certain significance for me.
The more mundane real-world setting of Super Cub, and how it became a little more colourful for a few instants when the gloomy, perhaps-orphaned high school student Koguma gets on her new low-cost used motorbike, were a good change of pace. There still seems something between awkward and cheap about the full-body travelling shots using computer animation, but I suppose we can’t have everything. So far as the first episode offered drama it was in Koguma not being able to start her Cub after stopping at a convenience store during a midnight ride to get more experience without trucks blasting past her (just before that I did notice a four-wheeled Honda of the model I drive passing her), but in remembering the storekeeper who’d sold her the motorbike had mentioned where to find the manual she was able to engage her reserve supply of gas and get to a filling station. Things worked out in a self-contained way, but I did notice a few sights along the way that would be developed in later episodes.
After finishing the Eighty-Six anime I went on to the original novels in translation. While I stopped commenting on them here after the second volume, at the moment I’ve finished eight of them (and still have three waiting to be read), the twists of the story with its steadily expanding setting and cast holding up over the sometimes stodgy prose. Going back to where it had all started for me, I was inclined to view things through a sense of what I’d picked up perhaps not until the first novel, simply noting how certain elements would have been enigmatic at the time even for those paying more attention to throwaway comments about synthetic versus actual food on the home front and certain cautions about the “Para-RAID” long-range communications device. At the same time, I did notice some “anime original” events elaborating on our introductions to Major Vladilena “Lena” Milizé and the frontline pilots of Spearhead Squadron she doesn’t greet by voice alone until the very end of the episode. Getting to see some of the characters who hadn’t been illustrated in the first novel and wouldn’t be illustrated afterwards also had a certain significance for me.
The more mundane real-world setting of Super Cub, and how it became a little more colourful for a few instants when the gloomy, perhaps-orphaned high school student Koguma gets on her new low-cost used motorbike, were a good change of pace. There still seems something between awkward and cheap about the full-body travelling shots using computer animation, but I suppose we can’t have everything. So far as the first episode offered drama it was in Koguma not being able to start her Cub after stopping at a convenience store during a midnight ride to get more experience without trucks blasting past her (just before that I did notice a four-wheeled Honda of the model I drive passing her), but in remembering the storekeeper who’d sold her the motorbike had mentioned where to find the manual she was able to engage her reserve supply of gas and get to a filling station. Things worked out in a self-contained way, but I did notice a few sights along the way that would be developed in later episodes.