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Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2022
Sixty days later, the seventy-third half-hour (give or take) instalment from a sixty-fourth anime series (TV and OVA), with a “short TV episode” and a theatrical short added in too, brought me to the end of my offbeat odyssey. It did take me a while to decide on my final sample. Last year’s anime did seem easier to feel altogether confident about than 2019’s had at the end of its year, but I suppose things were different when it came to the thought of picking one single (first) episode to represent the year, be impressive in itself, and perhaps even serve as the more positive kind of “the adventure will continue” stopping point.
My first thought had been “I don’t know, maybe My Dress-Up Darling.” I also thought a bit of Birdie Wing, which would let me bring up “appealingly absurd anime” again, and yet that series had merely left off, with the thought “will those Gundam references somehow invoke those Gundam series that came back from hiatus only to have everyone else turn up their noses at them?” After that I did acknowledge the “girls with guns” series Lycoris Recoil had been popular, but there I’d be bumping into it having been licensed by Aniplex of America and my enduring petty resentment towards that company’s “hardly anyone buys anime on disc any more; those who might will dig deep to show their devotion” strategy. It’s shaped in a certain small way what anime I haven’t seen over the past decade or more, and more than that brings me a little too close to just how I started this tour and all those warnings that “anime is not a right.”
Then, I did get to thinking of a series from the last three months of last year I hadn’t jumped on straight off despite the sudden urge to “watch something not established or well-promoted or both,” but which had wound up seeming quite popular as well. It was easy enough to notice online fan art of the pink-haired teenaged schoolgirl in a pink zippered tracksuit jacket of Bocchi the Rock!, and I made a decision to make that my end point.
A certain part of me kept remembering K-ON! and how I’d wound up lost somewhere in the middle between “moe: threat or menace?” and “‘KyoAni’s’ latest triumph!” This later series might look “cartoonier,” but it did start off in an atypical way when its main character Hitori Gotou spent years practicing the guitar only for “social media followers” to not turn into social confidence. Her fragile speaking voice contrasted with her worked-up internal monologue then had me thinking of “No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!”, the manga of which has shed the “laughed-at disasters” of its anime adaptation for a more ambling “things can get sort of better” amiability. Sheer luck did get Hitori roped into a band (and provided her with the stage name “Bocchi”); I’ve only seen hearsay of where things will go from here, but at least I hope it’ll keep up how this particular opening was indeed an engaging conclusion.
For all the thoughts of watching single episodes amounting to a stunt, all in all I do seem to have wound up finding the experience enjoyable. The worry that popped up here and there that certain stretches of anime, uninterrupted by the jumps to different periods I’m more familiar with, would either become “too good by themselves to allow for change” or “become so arid as to leave me at last in the nostalgic void so many others seem to wind up in” didn’t materialize. Although I knew certain episodes had been picked more because they’d mark a year than because I knew from experience what followed had appealed (and had uncertain thoughts sneak up on me once not that long ago), all the “it would be nice to keep going, but when?” reactions I felt might even have got me to thinking “even if no further anime is made, or at least appeals to you, or something, sixty years does seem something you could go back to and through.” That, though, did have me remembering again all the warnings of doom that have been cropping up for years, touching on “what if ‘computer animation’ squeezes out the character drawings?” and “what if outsourcing all the in-betweens bootstraps complete replacement, except with different ideological correctness weighing on it?” These days, too, “the last human-drawn artworks are being fed into corporate-controlled neural networks” is popping up as a fresh concern. That would seem bad; “what if small groups can make whole series that look as good as anything with corporate backing?” might seem better, but in also seeming to lie still further in the future raises “things might not get that far, despite your permitting the first unsavoury step” concerns. Beyond that are still wilder dreams of “what if producing a whole series winds up something anyone who can write a fanfic can manage?”, but at that point things get to “is that the end of ‘shared experiences?’”, which might in the end be too much to think about here.
Managing to post about every night’s episode was as much something as watching them, perhaps. It wasn’t so much of a profound strain as I’d sometimes thought “a post at least every seven days” got to, but very often I’d think the day after I’d forgotten to type out a thought I’d had before. In the end, getting back to “full series” and “waiting for quarterly reviews” alike both seem welcome.
1963: Mighty Atom (Astro Boy)
1964: Big X
1965: Wonder Three (The Amazing 3)
1966: Sally the Witch
1967: Mach Go Go Go (Speed Racer)
1968: Cyborg 009
1969: Attack No. 1
1970: Tomorrow’s Joe
1971: Lupin the Third
1972: Mazinger Z
1973: Aim for the Ace!
1974: Chargeman Ken!; Heidi, Girl of the Alps; Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers)
1975: Raideen
1976: Candy Candy
1977: Attack on Tomorrow
1978: Future Boy Conan
1979: The Rose of Versailles
1980: Space Runaway Ideon
1981: Urusei Yatsura
1982: Minky Momo
1983: Armored Trooper VOTOMS
1984: Giant Gorg
1985: Dirty Pair
1986: Pastel Yumi
1987: Kimagure Orange Road; City Hunter
1988: Patlabor
1989: Yawara!
1990: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
1991: Dear Brother
1992: Sailor Moon
1993: Oh My Goddess!
1994: Macross Plus
1995: Slayers; On Your Mark
1996: The Vision of Escaflowne
1997: GaoGaiGar
1998: Cardcaptor Sakura
1999: The Big O
2000: FLCL
2001: Alien Nine
2002: Azumanga Daioh
2003: Fullmetal Alchemist
2004: My-HiME
2005: Aria the Animation
2006: Strain
2007: Hidamari Sketch
2008: Toradora!
2009: A Certain Scientific Railgun
2010: Princess Jellyfish
2011: Nichijou
2012: Symphogear
2013: Gundam Build Fighters
2014: Shirobako
2015: One Punch Man
2016: Flip Flappers
2017: The Ancient Magus’ Bride
2018: A Place Further than the Universe; Harukana Receive
2019: Granbelm
2020: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
2021: 86 [Eighty-Six]; Super Cub
2022: Bocchi the Rock!
My first thought had been “I don’t know, maybe My Dress-Up Darling.” I also thought a bit of Birdie Wing, which would let me bring up “appealingly absurd anime” again, and yet that series had merely left off, with the thought “will those Gundam references somehow invoke those Gundam series that came back from hiatus only to have everyone else turn up their noses at them?” After that I did acknowledge the “girls with guns” series Lycoris Recoil had been popular, but there I’d be bumping into it having been licensed by Aniplex of America and my enduring petty resentment towards that company’s “hardly anyone buys anime on disc any more; those who might will dig deep to show their devotion” strategy. It’s shaped in a certain small way what anime I haven’t seen over the past decade or more, and more than that brings me a little too close to just how I started this tour and all those warnings that “anime is not a right.”
Then, I did get to thinking of a series from the last three months of last year I hadn’t jumped on straight off despite the sudden urge to “watch something not established or well-promoted or both,” but which had wound up seeming quite popular as well. It was easy enough to notice online fan art of the pink-haired teenaged schoolgirl in a pink zippered tracksuit jacket of Bocchi the Rock!, and I made a decision to make that my end point.
A certain part of me kept remembering K-ON! and how I’d wound up lost somewhere in the middle between “moe: threat or menace?” and “‘KyoAni’s’ latest triumph!” This later series might look “cartoonier,” but it did start off in an atypical way when its main character Hitori Gotou spent years practicing the guitar only for “social media followers” to not turn into social confidence. Her fragile speaking voice contrasted with her worked-up internal monologue then had me thinking of “No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!”, the manga of which has shed the “laughed-at disasters” of its anime adaptation for a more ambling “things can get sort of better” amiability. Sheer luck did get Hitori roped into a band (and provided her with the stage name “Bocchi”); I’ve only seen hearsay of where things will go from here, but at least I hope it’ll keep up how this particular opening was indeed an engaging conclusion.
For all the thoughts of watching single episodes amounting to a stunt, all in all I do seem to have wound up finding the experience enjoyable. The worry that popped up here and there that certain stretches of anime, uninterrupted by the jumps to different periods I’m more familiar with, would either become “too good by themselves to allow for change” or “become so arid as to leave me at last in the nostalgic void so many others seem to wind up in” didn’t materialize. Although I knew certain episodes had been picked more because they’d mark a year than because I knew from experience what followed had appealed (and had uncertain thoughts sneak up on me once not that long ago), all the “it would be nice to keep going, but when?” reactions I felt might even have got me to thinking “even if no further anime is made, or at least appeals to you, or something, sixty years does seem something you could go back to and through.” That, though, did have me remembering again all the warnings of doom that have been cropping up for years, touching on “what if ‘computer animation’ squeezes out the character drawings?” and “what if outsourcing all the in-betweens bootstraps complete replacement, except with different ideological correctness weighing on it?” These days, too, “the last human-drawn artworks are being fed into corporate-controlled neural networks” is popping up as a fresh concern. That would seem bad; “what if small groups can make whole series that look as good as anything with corporate backing?” might seem better, but in also seeming to lie still further in the future raises “things might not get that far, despite your permitting the first unsavoury step” concerns. Beyond that are still wilder dreams of “what if producing a whole series winds up something anyone who can write a fanfic can manage?”, but at that point things get to “is that the end of ‘shared experiences?’”, which might in the end be too much to think about here.
Managing to post about every night’s episode was as much something as watching them, perhaps. It wasn’t so much of a profound strain as I’d sometimes thought “a post at least every seven days” got to, but very often I’d think the day after I’d forgotten to type out a thought I’d had before. In the end, getting back to “full series” and “waiting for quarterly reviews” alike both seem welcome.
1963: Mighty Atom (Astro Boy)
1964: Big X
1965: Wonder Three (The Amazing 3)
1966: Sally the Witch
1967: Mach Go Go Go (Speed Racer)
1968: Cyborg 009
1969: Attack No. 1
1970: Tomorrow’s Joe
1971: Lupin the Third
1972: Mazinger Z
1973: Aim for the Ace!
1974: Chargeman Ken!; Heidi, Girl of the Alps; Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers)
1975: Raideen
1976: Candy Candy
1977: Attack on Tomorrow
1978: Future Boy Conan
1979: The Rose of Versailles
1980: Space Runaway Ideon
1981: Urusei Yatsura
1982: Minky Momo
1983: Armored Trooper VOTOMS
1984: Giant Gorg
1985: Dirty Pair
1986: Pastel Yumi
1987: Kimagure Orange Road; City Hunter
1988: Patlabor
1989: Yawara!
1990: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
1991: Dear Brother
1992: Sailor Moon
1993: Oh My Goddess!
1994: Macross Plus
1995: Slayers; On Your Mark
1996: The Vision of Escaflowne
1997: GaoGaiGar
1998: Cardcaptor Sakura
1999: The Big O
2000: FLCL
2001: Alien Nine
2002: Azumanga Daioh
2003: Fullmetal Alchemist
2004: My-HiME
2005: Aria the Animation
2006: Strain
2007: Hidamari Sketch
2008: Toradora!
2009: A Certain Scientific Railgun
2010: Princess Jellyfish
2011: Nichijou
2012: Symphogear
2013: Gundam Build Fighters
2014: Shirobako
2015: One Punch Man
2016: Flip Flappers
2017: The Ancient Magus’ Bride
2018: A Place Further than the Universe; Harukana Receive
2019: Granbelm
2020: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
2021: 86 [Eighty-Six]; Super Cub
2022: Bocchi the Rock!