2023: My Second Quarter in Anime
Jul. 2nd, 2023 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith the whistle-stop sampling of sixty years of anime I’d been daydreaming about and mapping out for quite some time wrapped up at last in the first sixty days of this year, with this “quarter” I was back to normal. As certain series had crashed into hiatuses at the beginning of the year I had pondered “playing things safe” again, but in the end I’d reminded myself that to wait “for three months” might mean waiting that much longer again with a certain getaway coming up, and I decided to take my chances. Everything just about worked out, and in general I liked what I saw.
After pushing to catch up to the continued adaptation of Vinland Saga, in these three months I stepped back to a once-a-week viewing pace. The series stayed compelling. Part of that might have been due to continuing to not quite remember all the details of the manga, although what I couldn’t remember was by this point more or less just details in how things kept going from bad to worse for Thorfinn and the people around him as royal schemes closed in on a prosperous farm. I could at least remember most of the catharsis at the far end of it all, including the one anecdote about King Canute familiar from “schoolboy British history.” The adaptation did get to that point in the manga I’d thought would do for a “if nothing else gets translated...” moment to leave off on, and I suppose there was no immediate announcement of more anime to follow.
Vinland Saga had been my latest reason for staying subscribed to Netflix, even if every once in a while there didn’t seem to be English subtitles ready to hand on the now-available episode and I’d resorted to the simultaneous streaming on Crunchyroll. However, there did just happen to be another Netflix exclusive I was watching as fast relief from the gathering ominousness. New brief stop-motion episodes of Pui Pui Molcar, now with the subtitle Driving School, brought back part-guinea pig, part-vehicle characters and (so I gathered) a few new characters all stuck in remedial road education. That didn’t quite limit the scope of the wordless series, although I do wonder a little whether rewatching both old and new episodes (which wouldn’t require the time demands of shows with half-hour episodes) would make a few details clearer and everything more amusing.
A lot of the anime I buy these days is older and often lengthy series from Discotek, and intent on chipping away at that pile I opened a “super robot” show from the beginning of the 1980s called Galaxy Cyclone Braiger. I hadn’t really known about it before the licensing announcement. The comment it could be seen as a science fiction anime take on live-action Japanese historical dramas did get my attention. As I started watching it at last, though, I did have the uncertain feeling that if I hadn’t seen the comparison it wouldn’t have come to my own mind. I suppose I’d imagined whatever story world the action was set in would feel “space feudal,” but it seemed more modern than that, with a small group of heroes-for-hire (whose designs had me thinking a bit of Lupin the Third characters, but nevertheless aren’t utter sticklers on getting paid) battling criminal syndicates in a thoroughly space-colonized solar system. Every so often I did wonder if a subtler resemblance to the live-action dramas would have been obvious if I’d only seen them too, but that raised that ever-nagging uneasiness about how “you’ll take in great quantities of drawings capable, so some people say, of being ‘read’ various ways, but don’t pay quite so much attention to actual on-camera actors from Japan...” The super robot Braiger itself had me thinking a bit of previous super robots as they’d moved away from “science fortresses in Japan” and into space over the 1970s and a bit of the Transformers about to come. It starts as a largish car (able to “drive in space”) that transforms and enlarges into a “space jet” and then transforms into a robot, but there were certain peculiarities to its design. Braiger had a face with a mouth, but also odd red markings in between a moustache and a face guard, and mechanical claw hands where the enemy robots it would chop through near the end of many episodes might have more human fingers. It also never looked quite as good in regular animation as it did in the transformation sequence or opening credits (which had a pretty catchy theme song), and in the end that did have me thinking this show was a bit less “everything is better with giant robots” and a bit more “eventually, ‘heroes’ don’t need the trappings of superheroes...” Still, I’d been watching it at a three-episodes-per-week pace to get through it in three months, aware it was the first of three “J9 series” (here, the heroes are the “Cosmo Rangers J9”), and it seemed to hold up even at that rate.
I got around at last to Lycoris Recoil. Unfortunately, I was still aware with every episode watched of my perpetual petty resentment at Aniplex of America’s premium pricing strategy for home video for all that it’s not required to see if, indeed, “you get what you pay for” to watch the titles they control. I kept trying to push that towards the back of my mind and focus on a show in that long-standing yet not always around category “girls with guns.” It opens establishing teenaged agents hiding in plain sight, orphans raised by a secret organization to gun down potential dangers to the Japanese populace and state before they can’t be covered up. One of those “Lycoris” agents named Takina happens all of a sudden to defy her orders and not prioritize capturing a target of interest over saving the life of a fellow agent taken hostage. She’s packed out of headquarters for that, but gets sent to a charming back-streets cafe called “LycoReco,” where she meets a girl named Chisato who just happens to be a Lycoris too when she’s not serving coffee in a configured-for-working kimono outfit. Chisato has short blonde hair, a familiar enough juxtaposition against Takina’s long, straight black hair (although I did recall there were a lot of “Kei fans” among those English speakers aware of Dirty Pair, and have impressions some of them would insist to anyone who might claim to be more into Yuri that was just a matter of being swayed by superficial femininity away from honest rough edges). She also uses non-lethal ammunition and can dodge bullets fired at point-blank range with cheerful style, and I have to admit to a few thoughts of “characters so terrific they can break all the rules of the stories they’ve been put in” before things got more complicated for her. In any case this wasn’t the sort of show where “they’re charming; isn’t that enough?” is the one apparent joke, and the action animation did seem to offer more than “what of it there is...” I was conscious some would make a big deal of Takina and Chisato’s odd-couple routine without real compulsions there myself, but it did get my attention when a same-sex relationship involving the other sex showed up, even if it was as much “backstory” as anything and it didn’t end well, if without quite just getting “caught in the gears of the action.”
In picking up on Bocchi the Rock! I was picking up on how I’d decided to end my stunt tour of anime a month before. The rest of the series stayed amiable and entertaining even if it was still clear a lot of the humour (and the flair in the animation) involved the severe social anxiety of its main character and the efforts of her bandmates to help her out of that. One slightly older character who showed up partway through could be seen as embodying “the hard-rocking lifestyle” more fully and funnily. There were some really quite decent musical performances later in the series, although I suppose I’d liked the first of three end credit songs the best.
An adaptation of Yuri Is My Job! got my attention. However, I knew it had got my attention because I’d started reading the original manga only to stop a few volumes later for no better reason than “it wasn’t really grabbing me.” My thoughts started drifting to a series from the season just finished that might have seemed one more generic fantasy to start with but had appeared to attract some genuine positivity at its close with the insistence “it doesn’t just have ‘slashy innuendo’; it goes all the way!” I wound up starting The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady. The reincarnation angle around Anisphia “Anis” Wynn Palettia was much more understated and much less a matter of “lucking into another world where everything goes your way” than certain dismissals of other anime series have it. Even as she tried to invent magical contraptions to make up for not being able to just use magic the way royals are supposed to and rescued Euphyllia “Euphie” Magenta from dismissal at the hands of her own brother and the heir to the throne, though, I couldn’t escape the feeling the series still looked and indeed felt very generic. That could be as much a matter of the strange distinction the costume designs didn’t look “medieval enough,” perhaps. While there had been a comment early on that “I’m into girls, you know,” I also have to admit my usual detachment seemed in effect and I wasn’t picking up a lot of “girls’ love” impressions with other developments to get in the way. It might only have got to the point where I noticed it very near the end as the final magical complication developed. After that resolution there was a scene where the original lustful motivation or lack thereof of the main characters flipped around, enough indeed to get me nodding about the glee of others at last even if I still had the unfortunate impression “manga can get away with showing more than anime can.”
One new adaptation had received enough positive anticipation that I decided to try Skip and Loafer myself. It begins with a teenaged girl named Mitsumi travelling from a tiny village to a high school in Tokyo (where she’s staying with her aunt, who in a “no biggie” way happens to be transsexual). While her dreams of living her best high school life run into a few early bumps, she does also run into an easy-going guy named Shima. For a while, I’ll admit, I kept amusing myself with the question “now who’s ‘Skip’ and who’s ‘Loafer?’” I suppose one thing that got my attention about Mitsumi was how her character design was “plainer” than most anime characters, and that includes the female friends she winds up making at high school (even the “plain” one). What I also have to admit, though, was that just a few episodes in the general pleasantness had me thinking all of a sudden that I don’t look back on my own high school years with that much fondness. Almost as soon as I’d thought that I did start telling myself that even if I hadn’t had a lot of friends I’d still been much better off than an awful lot of other kids, and things like “never quite being able to play ‘MS-DOS computer games’ the way others could” or “only slowly coming to understand anime and manga was out there as they stayed just beyond reach” were about as trivial as they get. (I do theorize every so often that only starting to watch anime in university, which I’d say I enjoyed in general much more than high school, might have kept it from being “an interest that blazes then burns out in high school,” for good or ill.) In any case, this anime did become a bit more complicated and more interesting later on. It might not have seemed as much a “romantic comedy” as I’d imagined to start; on the other hand, I haven’t had an immediate compulsion to seek out the original manga and see where the story goes.
Seeing reports the baseball anime Mix would continue was an actual surprise. From the way the previous adaptation had ended I’d been ready to suppose there’d been some sort of “tell the audience to start reading the manga if they want to see what happens next” closing message; the only problem is baseball manga doesn’t often seem to be translated. The story picked up again with the Meisei High baseball team adding more pieces in the off-season, and I do have to admit that and the character drama and winking nods many people are aware they’re in a story was a bit less interesting than actual baseball games. There too, though, I also have to admit to continued uneasiness at the thought things between Touma and Otomi would end up with “they aren’t ‘siblings’ by blood...” Towards the end of these three months things did get to the familiar point of baseball playoffs, anyway.
As the adaptation of The Ancient Magus’ Bride resumed after some time, the title character Chise was entering the now-familiar environs of a “magical school.” I suppose I can wonder about that being a less altogether exciting place than the English countryside of the story beforehand, but she didn’t spend all her time at school. School also meant a good many characters about her age getting bits of development as various secrets about them trickle out, and I did have to recall impressions picking up new volumes of the manga could get tricky to get back up to speed on. As it turned out, too, the adaptation is going to take a break before continuing.
First reports about the latest Pretty Cure magical girl anime seemed interesting just for the excitement of some over how “the lead Pretty Cure is blue, not pink!” I decided to truck on into my fourth franchise instalment in a row with Soaring Sky Pretty Cure. It got my own attention straight off how that lead character Sora came from the latest fantasy land herself, dropped into something closer to our own world while trying to rescue a magical baby princess (who does look a little peculiar) from a blustering and occasionally gross pig-man. As fellow magical warriors begin to join up with Sora, it got my attention again when advance reports promised a “magical boy,” something that had long seemed a matter of mere amused fan speculation even with a long-standing example of something similar in Sailor Moon and some more recent groundwork preparation of sorts in the just-concluded Pretty Cure series. I thought a bit of “token girls in boys’ cartoons” of varying ages, but the magical boy character did seem quite fine to me when he was developed. I am still behind everyone else and I’m pondering further advance reports; where I am at this moment, though, I’m at least interested in how the characters are on the very edge of getting back to the fantasy land already.
Birdie Wing hadn’t so much left off on a cliffhanger as just left off in the midst of high school girls’ golf action; it resumed at its usual brazen speed and verve. There was a revelation about one of its main characters that seemed to make the slashy innuendo so many were ready to see them suffused with that much more outré; then, though, there was a comparable revelation towards the other main character that put things back more or less where they’d been. Things did seem to be building towards a long-delayed final confrontation on the links between them, but there were any number of complications thrown in the way, and in the end an apparent “tragic alternative” turned into “well, if one of them actually wins fans of the other might get upset, so let’s just push it off a bit further yet...” I suppose even this series hasn’t provided me with enough certainty about “golf-speak” to offer an appropriate “close, but” brushoff, but perhaps that helps hold me back from getting too dismissive too quickly.
The cliffhanger episode of the first half of Gundam: The Witch From Mercury had been delayed to the point where I’d decided to delay watching it during my speedy survey of sorts. Catching up to it afterwards I was impressed by the way the series was getting a bit more “conventional” so far as mecha anime goes, but I was still stuck with the thought its second half could be where things went awry again. When that second half started there’d been no obvious “mashing of a reset button,” and the action kept getting more and more intense. At the same time, I did notice there wasn’t a lot of interaction now between the frazzled mecha pilot Suletta Mercury and the youthful leader-type Miorine Rembran, the real draw of the series starting out for a good many (for all that the new opening theme was titled “Slash”), and the multiple factions all scheming away in the background could get to feel overwhelming. A specific reason to complain for others did seem to be accusations the series was jamming too much into fewer episodes than any “regular” Gundam series before it (save, I suppose, for the OVAs set in pre-established story worlds), although there I was just a bit ready to suppose “stretching things out” doesn’t always work either. The very final episode was itself delayed. At that very end, however, amid a new take on “Gundam mysticism” my immediate impressions managed to stay positive; I’m just conscious that once again I could be the last person still willing to contemplate going back to the buffet as throngs now protest outside.
Along with all of these anime series I did also get out to the movies for the first time in years to see Makoto Shikai’s Suzume. As with a good number of other anime movies I can suppose there was something “respectable” about it, but I did like the experience and thinking back to it now I’d be willing to get it on Blu-Ray with hopes of watching it again. There, though, I have to face how I’d had thoughts of getting around to other anime movies in recent months, but never quite got everything else even in a weekend day out of the way in time to watch one.
After pushing to catch up to the continued adaptation of Vinland Saga, in these three months I stepped back to a once-a-week viewing pace. The series stayed compelling. Part of that might have been due to continuing to not quite remember all the details of the manga, although what I couldn’t remember was by this point more or less just details in how things kept going from bad to worse for Thorfinn and the people around him as royal schemes closed in on a prosperous farm. I could at least remember most of the catharsis at the far end of it all, including the one anecdote about King Canute familiar from “schoolboy British history.” The adaptation did get to that point in the manga I’d thought would do for a “if nothing else gets translated...” moment to leave off on, and I suppose there was no immediate announcement of more anime to follow.
Vinland Saga had been my latest reason for staying subscribed to Netflix, even if every once in a while there didn’t seem to be English subtitles ready to hand on the now-available episode and I’d resorted to the simultaneous streaming on Crunchyroll. However, there did just happen to be another Netflix exclusive I was watching as fast relief from the gathering ominousness. New brief stop-motion episodes of Pui Pui Molcar, now with the subtitle Driving School, brought back part-guinea pig, part-vehicle characters and (so I gathered) a few new characters all stuck in remedial road education. That didn’t quite limit the scope of the wordless series, although I do wonder a little whether rewatching both old and new episodes (which wouldn’t require the time demands of shows with half-hour episodes) would make a few details clearer and everything more amusing.
A lot of the anime I buy these days is older and often lengthy series from Discotek, and intent on chipping away at that pile I opened a “super robot” show from the beginning of the 1980s called Galaxy Cyclone Braiger. I hadn’t really known about it before the licensing announcement. The comment it could be seen as a science fiction anime take on live-action Japanese historical dramas did get my attention. As I started watching it at last, though, I did have the uncertain feeling that if I hadn’t seen the comparison it wouldn’t have come to my own mind. I suppose I’d imagined whatever story world the action was set in would feel “space feudal,” but it seemed more modern than that, with a small group of heroes-for-hire (whose designs had me thinking a bit of Lupin the Third characters, but nevertheless aren’t utter sticklers on getting paid) battling criminal syndicates in a thoroughly space-colonized solar system. Every so often I did wonder if a subtler resemblance to the live-action dramas would have been obvious if I’d only seen them too, but that raised that ever-nagging uneasiness about how “you’ll take in great quantities of drawings capable, so some people say, of being ‘read’ various ways, but don’t pay quite so much attention to actual on-camera actors from Japan...” The super robot Braiger itself had me thinking a bit of previous super robots as they’d moved away from “science fortresses in Japan” and into space over the 1970s and a bit of the Transformers about to come. It starts as a largish car (able to “drive in space”) that transforms and enlarges into a “space jet” and then transforms into a robot, but there were certain peculiarities to its design. Braiger had a face with a mouth, but also odd red markings in between a moustache and a face guard, and mechanical claw hands where the enemy robots it would chop through near the end of many episodes might have more human fingers. It also never looked quite as good in regular animation as it did in the transformation sequence or opening credits (which had a pretty catchy theme song), and in the end that did have me thinking this show was a bit less “everything is better with giant robots” and a bit more “eventually, ‘heroes’ don’t need the trappings of superheroes...” Still, I’d been watching it at a three-episodes-per-week pace to get through it in three months, aware it was the first of three “J9 series” (here, the heroes are the “Cosmo Rangers J9”), and it seemed to hold up even at that rate.
I got around at last to Lycoris Recoil. Unfortunately, I was still aware with every episode watched of my perpetual petty resentment at Aniplex of America’s premium pricing strategy for home video for all that it’s not required to see if, indeed, “you get what you pay for” to watch the titles they control. I kept trying to push that towards the back of my mind and focus on a show in that long-standing yet not always around category “girls with guns.” It opens establishing teenaged agents hiding in plain sight, orphans raised by a secret organization to gun down potential dangers to the Japanese populace and state before they can’t be covered up. One of those “Lycoris” agents named Takina happens all of a sudden to defy her orders and not prioritize capturing a target of interest over saving the life of a fellow agent taken hostage. She’s packed out of headquarters for that, but gets sent to a charming back-streets cafe called “LycoReco,” where she meets a girl named Chisato who just happens to be a Lycoris too when she’s not serving coffee in a configured-for-working kimono outfit. Chisato has short blonde hair, a familiar enough juxtaposition against Takina’s long, straight black hair (although I did recall there were a lot of “Kei fans” among those English speakers aware of Dirty Pair, and have impressions some of them would insist to anyone who might claim to be more into Yuri that was just a matter of being swayed by superficial femininity away from honest rough edges). She also uses non-lethal ammunition and can dodge bullets fired at point-blank range with cheerful style, and I have to admit to a few thoughts of “characters so terrific they can break all the rules of the stories they’ve been put in” before things got more complicated for her. In any case this wasn’t the sort of show where “they’re charming; isn’t that enough?” is the one apparent joke, and the action animation did seem to offer more than “what of it there is...” I was conscious some would make a big deal of Takina and Chisato’s odd-couple routine without real compulsions there myself, but it did get my attention when a same-sex relationship involving the other sex showed up, even if it was as much “backstory” as anything and it didn’t end well, if without quite just getting “caught in the gears of the action.”
In picking up on Bocchi the Rock! I was picking up on how I’d decided to end my stunt tour of anime a month before. The rest of the series stayed amiable and entertaining even if it was still clear a lot of the humour (and the flair in the animation) involved the severe social anxiety of its main character and the efforts of her bandmates to help her out of that. One slightly older character who showed up partway through could be seen as embodying “the hard-rocking lifestyle” more fully and funnily. There were some really quite decent musical performances later in the series, although I suppose I’d liked the first of three end credit songs the best.
An adaptation of Yuri Is My Job! got my attention. However, I knew it had got my attention because I’d started reading the original manga only to stop a few volumes later for no better reason than “it wasn’t really grabbing me.” My thoughts started drifting to a series from the season just finished that might have seemed one more generic fantasy to start with but had appeared to attract some genuine positivity at its close with the insistence “it doesn’t just have ‘slashy innuendo’; it goes all the way!” I wound up starting The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady. The reincarnation angle around Anisphia “Anis” Wynn Palettia was much more understated and much less a matter of “lucking into another world where everything goes your way” than certain dismissals of other anime series have it. Even as she tried to invent magical contraptions to make up for not being able to just use magic the way royals are supposed to and rescued Euphyllia “Euphie” Magenta from dismissal at the hands of her own brother and the heir to the throne, though, I couldn’t escape the feeling the series still looked and indeed felt very generic. That could be as much a matter of the strange distinction the costume designs didn’t look “medieval enough,” perhaps. While there had been a comment early on that “I’m into girls, you know,” I also have to admit my usual detachment seemed in effect and I wasn’t picking up a lot of “girls’ love” impressions with other developments to get in the way. It might only have got to the point where I noticed it very near the end as the final magical complication developed. After that resolution there was a scene where the original lustful motivation or lack thereof of the main characters flipped around, enough indeed to get me nodding about the glee of others at last even if I still had the unfortunate impression “manga can get away with showing more than anime can.”
One new adaptation had received enough positive anticipation that I decided to try Skip and Loafer myself. It begins with a teenaged girl named Mitsumi travelling from a tiny village to a high school in Tokyo (where she’s staying with her aunt, who in a “no biggie” way happens to be transsexual). While her dreams of living her best high school life run into a few early bumps, she does also run into an easy-going guy named Shima. For a while, I’ll admit, I kept amusing myself with the question “now who’s ‘Skip’ and who’s ‘Loafer?’” I suppose one thing that got my attention about Mitsumi was how her character design was “plainer” than most anime characters, and that includes the female friends she winds up making at high school (even the “plain” one). What I also have to admit, though, was that just a few episodes in the general pleasantness had me thinking all of a sudden that I don’t look back on my own high school years with that much fondness. Almost as soon as I’d thought that I did start telling myself that even if I hadn’t had a lot of friends I’d still been much better off than an awful lot of other kids, and things like “never quite being able to play ‘MS-DOS computer games’ the way others could” or “only slowly coming to understand anime and manga was out there as they stayed just beyond reach” were about as trivial as they get. (I do theorize every so often that only starting to watch anime in university, which I’d say I enjoyed in general much more than high school, might have kept it from being “an interest that blazes then burns out in high school,” for good or ill.) In any case, this anime did become a bit more complicated and more interesting later on. It might not have seemed as much a “romantic comedy” as I’d imagined to start; on the other hand, I haven’t had an immediate compulsion to seek out the original manga and see where the story goes.
Seeing reports the baseball anime Mix would continue was an actual surprise. From the way the previous adaptation had ended I’d been ready to suppose there’d been some sort of “tell the audience to start reading the manga if they want to see what happens next” closing message; the only problem is baseball manga doesn’t often seem to be translated. The story picked up again with the Meisei High baseball team adding more pieces in the off-season, and I do have to admit that and the character drama and winking nods many people are aware they’re in a story was a bit less interesting than actual baseball games. There too, though, I also have to admit to continued uneasiness at the thought things between Touma and Otomi would end up with “they aren’t ‘siblings’ by blood...” Towards the end of these three months things did get to the familiar point of baseball playoffs, anyway.
As the adaptation of The Ancient Magus’ Bride resumed after some time, the title character Chise was entering the now-familiar environs of a “magical school.” I suppose I can wonder about that being a less altogether exciting place than the English countryside of the story beforehand, but she didn’t spend all her time at school. School also meant a good many characters about her age getting bits of development as various secrets about them trickle out, and I did have to recall impressions picking up new volumes of the manga could get tricky to get back up to speed on. As it turned out, too, the adaptation is going to take a break before continuing.
First reports about the latest Pretty Cure magical girl anime seemed interesting just for the excitement of some over how “the lead Pretty Cure is blue, not pink!” I decided to truck on into my fourth franchise instalment in a row with Soaring Sky Pretty Cure. It got my own attention straight off how that lead character Sora came from the latest fantasy land herself, dropped into something closer to our own world while trying to rescue a magical baby princess (who does look a little peculiar) from a blustering and occasionally gross pig-man. As fellow magical warriors begin to join up with Sora, it got my attention again when advance reports promised a “magical boy,” something that had long seemed a matter of mere amused fan speculation even with a long-standing example of something similar in Sailor Moon and some more recent groundwork preparation of sorts in the just-concluded Pretty Cure series. I thought a bit of “token girls in boys’ cartoons” of varying ages, but the magical boy character did seem quite fine to me when he was developed. I am still behind everyone else and I’m pondering further advance reports; where I am at this moment, though, I’m at least interested in how the characters are on the very edge of getting back to the fantasy land already.
Birdie Wing hadn’t so much left off on a cliffhanger as just left off in the midst of high school girls’ golf action; it resumed at its usual brazen speed and verve. There was a revelation about one of its main characters that seemed to make the slashy innuendo so many were ready to see them suffused with that much more outré; then, though, there was a comparable revelation towards the other main character that put things back more or less where they’d been. Things did seem to be building towards a long-delayed final confrontation on the links between them, but there were any number of complications thrown in the way, and in the end an apparent “tragic alternative” turned into “well, if one of them actually wins fans of the other might get upset, so let’s just push it off a bit further yet...” I suppose even this series hasn’t provided me with enough certainty about “golf-speak” to offer an appropriate “close, but” brushoff, but perhaps that helps hold me back from getting too dismissive too quickly.
The cliffhanger episode of the first half of Gundam: The Witch From Mercury had been delayed to the point where I’d decided to delay watching it during my speedy survey of sorts. Catching up to it afterwards I was impressed by the way the series was getting a bit more “conventional” so far as mecha anime goes, but I was still stuck with the thought its second half could be where things went awry again. When that second half started there’d been no obvious “mashing of a reset button,” and the action kept getting more and more intense. At the same time, I did notice there wasn’t a lot of interaction now between the frazzled mecha pilot Suletta Mercury and the youthful leader-type Miorine Rembran, the real draw of the series starting out for a good many (for all that the new opening theme was titled “Slash”), and the multiple factions all scheming away in the background could get to feel overwhelming. A specific reason to complain for others did seem to be accusations the series was jamming too much into fewer episodes than any “regular” Gundam series before it (save, I suppose, for the OVAs set in pre-established story worlds), although there I was just a bit ready to suppose “stretching things out” doesn’t always work either. The very final episode was itself delayed. At that very end, however, amid a new take on “Gundam mysticism” my immediate impressions managed to stay positive; I’m just conscious that once again I could be the last person still willing to contemplate going back to the buffet as throngs now protest outside.
Along with all of these anime series I did also get out to the movies for the first time in years to see Makoto Shikai’s Suzume. As with a good number of other anime movies I can suppose there was something “respectable” about it, but I did like the experience and thinking back to it now I’d be willing to get it on Blu-Ray with hopes of watching it again. There, though, I have to face how I’d had thoughts of getting around to other anime movies in recent months, but never quite got everything else even in a weekend day out of the way in time to watch one.