2023: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
Dec. 31st, 2023 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThree months ago I was back to normal (again) when it came to my access to anime. More than that, people were getting enthusiastic about upcoming series. While I still had intentions of watching an older title or two at a higher tempo than usual for me, I was ready to try a number of new shows. Things didn’t work out quite that way, though.
Positive comments about a manga called Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End at the announcement of its upcoming anime adaptation had got my attention, although I did start laying in that manga then and there for after the anime showed up with a sort of “just in case” feeling. I noted the titular character of the fantasy story was an “anime elf,” identifiable as such with her excessively pointy ears. There, though, I was aware of how I still haven’t seen the OVA Record of Lodoss War, which had played its own role in establishing “anime elf design.” I just may have had more exposure to that design through a science fiction anime...
When the Frieren anime arrived, it arrived in force. Four episodes were streaming all at once, and watching my way through them chewed up the time I might have sampled other new series with. Still, I was quite willing to be impressed by Frieren. The series plays up an idea I’ve been aware of at least since first reading The Lord of the Rings, namely that elves live much longer than humans in fantasy. It begins with a quartet of adventurers having defeated a great evil. One of them, the elven mage Frieren, heads off to wander the world by herself and then reunites with her travelling companions a mere fifty years later for another great meteor shower, when the humans are elderly men and the dwarf warrior isn’t as spry as he once was. When the humans begin to die some years after that, Frieren’s usual deadpan cracks at last at the thought of having taken her companions for granted to the point of not having known them well. (Later on, there is a moment where we get a hint, in an impressive way, that Frieren’s usual way of drifting through life isn’t altogether a matter of “she’s been around for so long that nothing surprises, or indeed interests, her any more.”) She resumes travelling (carrying what struck me as an amusingly modern-looking suitcase), but now with some new companions on a more casual journey. (I suppose I do appreciate the story not turning at once to “alas and alack, heroes live just long enough to see everything they thought they’d achieved turn to ash as the exact same menaces resurface; that’s realistic.”) I did think a bit of Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms as an earlier example of animation having some advantages at showing time passing regardless of the familiar constraints of model sheets, but a recent comment that Gunbuster can be interpreted as a subtle meditation on “staying a fan while others move on” might have had me thinking of how long I’ve been watching anime and increasing Frieren’s own impact on me. While I don’t think I’ll try something like “sixty-five years since Mighty Atom” in the future, not having many alternatives in mind to what I watched in the first sixty days of this year for parts of that history, Frieren certainly feels like the kind of “personal standout anime” I could use to represent its year.
As for the remaining time at the start of October I might have committed to other new series, I’ve already mentioned deciding to use up a big chunk of it starting at a brisk pace into a giant robot anime from the early 1980s. Galactic Gale Baxingar was the second “J9 series,” following Galaxy Cyclone Braiger. From the way Braiger had ended I’d wondered if Baxingar would be as “casually interstellar” as its predecessor had been “casually interplanetary,” but it turned out to engage with a different bit of that previous conclusion and was set in a future solar system where Jupiter had been blown up and turned into three dozen Earth-like worlds grouped in colour-coded “planetary oceans.” The back of the Blu-Ray case explained Baxingar was a science fiction take on the Shinsengumi, which was much more specific than the explanation for Braiger (even if I only looked up the Wikipedia article about a special police force in the last days of the shogunate in Japan). There was more of a “space fantasy” look to the costumes, and even a bit of traditional Japanese clothing design to some of them, than in Braiger as well. As for the star giant robot, Baxingar, formed from five motorcycles of different bulk that enlarge, transform, and combine, didn’t have the especially peculiar design touches of Braiger. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the sense a lot of the giant robot battles had a sort of perfunctory, obliging-the-sponsor feeling to them and the show’s creators were more interested in political machinations in a system on the brink of major change and sword-wielding motorcycle riders (sometimes riding through the air or outer space) alike, looking forward to a time when “giant robots” wouldn’t be required in science fiction action. That does have me contemplating how there’s one last J9 series for me to watch.
I also kept watching Summer Time Rendering at the same quick pace I’d seen its first half with. The twisting action of the series stayed impressive, although in a familiar sort of “one part pulling off great feats, several parts explaining how this was justified according to the rules already established” way. One elaborate explanation as to how one character was managing her feats might not have had quite the same impact as “she’s just that good at things,” though. The series did move away from the “fanservice” I’d noticed a bit of before, and transcended a certain occasional feeling that stories that start invoking “rewriting history” somehow diminish those many characters who get rewritten to the point of not remembering the bad things now escaped; its conclusion offered enough breathing space that what might have felt perfunctory and familiar at briefer length wound up pretty satisfying.
When some series resumed streaming I was at least able to make the time for them. I was conscious people had begun to sour on Spy x Family sticking with a spy-spoof setup now charming yet lightweight and depending on the two adults of the Forger family not realising what the other was really up to. There are a certain number of times I have to admit to finding anime series uninteresting part of the way through as compared to first guesses or even getting fed up with “certain characters can’t realise things or everything will have to change” setups, and yet in this particular case I still seemed more positive towards this show. It did, in any case, get around to a “plot arc” I’d seen people enthuse about from the original manga, where Yor Forger got to guard a small child (and his mother) as part of her own hidden life as a top assassin. This part of the story was set on an ocean liner, one I could compare to current “slab-sided stacks of balconies” and think “now that’s a ship”; on the other hand, the liner looked to have more wood inside it than I quite associate with “the last ocean liners” of the 1960s. With the action wrapped up things went straight back to “charming yet lightweight,” and that did seem to irk some people at once.
The Ancient Magus’ Bride picked up again with something I could remember from reading the manga, with Chise and her fellow students sealed within their magical school due to the theft of a powerful and ominous magical text. This did seem to leave things stretched out for me, and I kept remembering how I could have trouble getting back up to speed with each new volume of the manga. When the stasis shattered all of a sudden and at last the explanation was both not surprising and a surprise; what was more surprising, perhaps, was that the action left the school behind along with many, if not all, of the characters introduced there. (I then looked back to the last volume of manga I’d read before deciding to save new volumes unread until this latest anime adaptation was finished, and was surprised again that the “beginning of the end” had in fact been presented there, and I just hadn’t remembered it.) While there was a certain amount of actual deus ex machina in the conclusion and a certain amount of plot threads left loose for potential future development, things did wind up more satisfying than I just might have thought during the stretched-out earlier episodes.
Continuing to watch Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, I got to as significant a midway-through development in the story as the magical girl franchise does seem to include, noted how it matched a development in each of the three franchise instalments I’ve seen before this one, and yet found myself thinking this series appealed some extra little bit to me. This feeling was right alongside continuing to note the “role-playing toys” being advertised through regular use and supposing they’d be rather battery-powered. Although I’m still behind everyone else in watching this series (I only got to a “Halloween episode” in December), I do have the awareness I’m getting closer to its end. The title of the next Pretty Cure series has been announced, with other people supposing it’ll be dog-themed or at least animal-themed; with the way this series has been appealing to me, though, I have to admit to toying with thoughts of going back to one of the much older instalments of the franchise, perhaps even the one (or two) a “years later” sequel to has just been streaming.
A brief three-episode “Original Net Animation” managed to mash together the various “Gundam Build” subfranchises from the ten years since the first of them had surprised the world. By this point the whole model-kit-promoting subfranchise was able to just reference itself, and I’m aware some people were more annoyed by Gundam Build Metaverse than I was. The main character, who lives (in the real world) in a large and somehow “American” house, just happens to run (in the online world) into the main characters from previous series. I’ll admit I was tickled when one of them, who’d previously built a full eight “power-up” sets for his Gundam but named them after planets, had a new set that just happened to be named after Pluto. All of the references and hard-selling of the wondrousness of building “Gunpla” didn’t quite distract from a story that didn’t need to try and present “an existential crisis” or even “winning a competition.”
Another manga by Naoki Urasawa getting an anime adaptation seemed a big deal, nudging against shrugs that “some manga is too good for mere anime to try and boil it down.” When Pluto showed up on Netflix, I realised its episodes were longer than the familiar “not quite half an hour,” refraining from slicing up the events of the manga volumes I’ve read (and read again). That seemed to increase the respectability of the whole endeavour, even if this did make it just a bit harder to schedule watching it. I was somewhat inclined to reflect on how, once two of “the Earth’s mightiest robots” have been destroyed by a mysterious and ominous force, several of the remaining mightiest robots look like middle-aged men, and some of them have middle-aged wives and sometimes children. Partway through all of this, though, I had to admit that all of a sudden I didn’t feel quite as engaged as other opinions seen had been making a big deal of.
That really did bother me, given I had no solid reason for why my interest was flagging. It might only have had something to do with “having already seen the story as manga and remembering much of what was about to happen.” There was also, perhaps, the thought that the series was taking on “big” ideas involving artificial intelligence. That brought up the tension between “it’s both nihilistic and tiresome to have ‘technology going wrong’ all the time” and “aren’t there certain unpleasant connotations to ‘constraining’ a mind so that it can only do ‘good?’”, and yet also raised that old sense of superiority fans of “written science fiction” deployed against “visual science fiction,” which might lead to “the ideas would be better developed through great quantities of prose.” (So far as that goes, for all that I suppose it wouldn’t count for much in the judgment of written science fiction fans, I have got to reading the “Vivy Prototype” novels in translation as if this somehow makes up for never buying anime from Aniplex of America. I did get to thinking that the novels, in making a point of “not being a precise adaptation of the anime,” did offer some explanations and indeed satisfaction I might have missed the first time around...)
Some other examples of respectable anime I’d struggled to really engage with came to mind. I suppose my mind drifted in more raffish directions, but then I thought almost at once there’s really not a lot of “trashy good fun” anime out there (as opposed to just “trashily made”); indeed, you just about have to turn to manga for that as well... I might have managed to relax a bit and feel more engaged with the concluding instalments of Pluto, anyway; it was a rather larger “sixtieth anniversary of Mighty Atom on TV” tribute than what I’d managed all by myself.
Discovering there’d been two short Cyborg 009 theatrical features made just before the original black-and-white TV anime had been intriguing all by itself. I suppose it had been tempting to turn a growing awareness of theatrical animation made in Japan for some years before and after Mighty Atom getting on TV into thoughts of “a separate and more respectable tradition”; learning that had started drawing on manga sooner than I’d expected meant another reconfiguration of mental models towards tying things together. As it turned out, I’d also been able to watch the Cyborg 009 movies “fansubbed,” although some of the translations were pretty stilted. The first of them had offered the origin story I’d noted the absence of on TV, then hurried on past that. It was something to have not just colour but widescreen precede the black-and-white TV show, although the designs of the two apparent core heroes, Cyborg 009 himself and the lone female cyborg of the group Cyborg 003, had looked the most peculiar to start with.
With the way I’d been watching things a limited number of days opened up approaching the end of the year; looking for something that didn’t involve too many separate episodes, I thought of the Gundam the Origin OVAs. I’d watched a collection of four of them some time ago, and then another collection of two more lengthy episodes was released, at which point the thought of “leading into them by rewatching their predecessors” had seemed to demand time I’d never quite managed to open until now. I had wondered starting off if the episodes to be watched again would be quite as interesting once I’d got past the first of them (which has a young Casval Rem Deikun, later to become the antihero of Gundam Char Aznable, commandeering the weapons of a primitive Guntank to blast open a path to escape), but they did seem to turn out satisfying again. I did notice occasional examples of “characters brushing by each other years before they have their more familiar first meetings in the established story,” which might have led to a thought or two about the tension between “your own imagination, or its potential at least” and “someone else’s imagination, but given actual form” when it comes to previously half-shaped parts of a story. As for the episodes I hadn’t got around to until now, they presented a full-scale science fiction war, and could be seen as now leading straight into the very first Gundam anime.
Once I’d finished the Cyborg 009 movies I went on to the theatrical conclusion of another title I’d watched in the previous quarter and opened my Blu-Ray set of the Love Live movie at last. I did think a bit about how more time had passed between finishing the second set of episodes of the original series and this than when I’d raced through those episodes for the first time to get ready for a special screening of the movie near me. The movie still seemed satisfying, though. I did think a little about how it was now my best shot at consistently good-looking (drawn) animation of the original Love Live characters, but then found some slight and odd amusement in how the orange and red hair of the characters Rin and Maki didn’t seem quite as brightly coloured as I’d always supposed them to be. There was a bit more to the story, too, than just “a trip without supervision to an exotic locale” (I don’t think the dialogue ever quite said “New York City”) and “big concluding performances” as I’d remembered from before. With that, I did get to thinking about the other casts of characters in the franchise.
Watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, I had started wondering if having read the comics years ago quite put me in the mental space where I could call animation taking off from it, even if made by a Japanese studio, “anime” regardless of what anyone else said. I then couldn’t quite write up a post about it at once on finishing the series, and began typing up my thoughts among the rest of this quarterly review. When I finished that some days before the end of the year, though, I sliced off my comments and made a separate post from them. I can at least add that I do hope to one day try out the Japanese voice acting Netflix didn’t default to in this case.
Positive comments about a manga called Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End at the announcement of its upcoming anime adaptation had got my attention, although I did start laying in that manga then and there for after the anime showed up with a sort of “just in case” feeling. I noted the titular character of the fantasy story was an “anime elf,” identifiable as such with her excessively pointy ears. There, though, I was aware of how I still haven’t seen the OVA Record of Lodoss War, which had played its own role in establishing “anime elf design.” I just may have had more exposure to that design through a science fiction anime...
When the Frieren anime arrived, it arrived in force. Four episodes were streaming all at once, and watching my way through them chewed up the time I might have sampled other new series with. Still, I was quite willing to be impressed by Frieren. The series plays up an idea I’ve been aware of at least since first reading The Lord of the Rings, namely that elves live much longer than humans in fantasy. It begins with a quartet of adventurers having defeated a great evil. One of them, the elven mage Frieren, heads off to wander the world by herself and then reunites with her travelling companions a mere fifty years later for another great meteor shower, when the humans are elderly men and the dwarf warrior isn’t as spry as he once was. When the humans begin to die some years after that, Frieren’s usual deadpan cracks at last at the thought of having taken her companions for granted to the point of not having known them well. (Later on, there is a moment where we get a hint, in an impressive way, that Frieren’s usual way of drifting through life isn’t altogether a matter of “she’s been around for so long that nothing surprises, or indeed interests, her any more.”) She resumes travelling (carrying what struck me as an amusingly modern-looking suitcase), but now with some new companions on a more casual journey. (I suppose I do appreciate the story not turning at once to “alas and alack, heroes live just long enough to see everything they thought they’d achieved turn to ash as the exact same menaces resurface; that’s realistic.”) I did think a bit of Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms as an earlier example of animation having some advantages at showing time passing regardless of the familiar constraints of model sheets, but a recent comment that Gunbuster can be interpreted as a subtle meditation on “staying a fan while others move on” might have had me thinking of how long I’ve been watching anime and increasing Frieren’s own impact on me. While I don’t think I’ll try something like “sixty-five years since Mighty Atom” in the future, not having many alternatives in mind to what I watched in the first sixty days of this year for parts of that history, Frieren certainly feels like the kind of “personal standout anime” I could use to represent its year.
As for the remaining time at the start of October I might have committed to other new series, I’ve already mentioned deciding to use up a big chunk of it starting at a brisk pace into a giant robot anime from the early 1980s. Galactic Gale Baxingar was the second “J9 series,” following Galaxy Cyclone Braiger. From the way Braiger had ended I’d wondered if Baxingar would be as “casually interstellar” as its predecessor had been “casually interplanetary,” but it turned out to engage with a different bit of that previous conclusion and was set in a future solar system where Jupiter had been blown up and turned into three dozen Earth-like worlds grouped in colour-coded “planetary oceans.” The back of the Blu-Ray case explained Baxingar was a science fiction take on the Shinsengumi, which was much more specific than the explanation for Braiger (even if I only looked up the Wikipedia article about a special police force in the last days of the shogunate in Japan). There was more of a “space fantasy” look to the costumes, and even a bit of traditional Japanese clothing design to some of them, than in Braiger as well. As for the star giant robot, Baxingar, formed from five motorcycles of different bulk that enlarge, transform, and combine, didn’t have the especially peculiar design touches of Braiger. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the sense a lot of the giant robot battles had a sort of perfunctory, obliging-the-sponsor feeling to them and the show’s creators were more interested in political machinations in a system on the brink of major change and sword-wielding motorcycle riders (sometimes riding through the air or outer space) alike, looking forward to a time when “giant robots” wouldn’t be required in science fiction action. That does have me contemplating how there’s one last J9 series for me to watch.
I also kept watching Summer Time Rendering at the same quick pace I’d seen its first half with. The twisting action of the series stayed impressive, although in a familiar sort of “one part pulling off great feats, several parts explaining how this was justified according to the rules already established” way. One elaborate explanation as to how one character was managing her feats might not have had quite the same impact as “she’s just that good at things,” though. The series did move away from the “fanservice” I’d noticed a bit of before, and transcended a certain occasional feeling that stories that start invoking “rewriting history” somehow diminish those many characters who get rewritten to the point of not remembering the bad things now escaped; its conclusion offered enough breathing space that what might have felt perfunctory and familiar at briefer length wound up pretty satisfying.
When some series resumed streaming I was at least able to make the time for them. I was conscious people had begun to sour on Spy x Family sticking with a spy-spoof setup now charming yet lightweight and depending on the two adults of the Forger family not realising what the other was really up to. There are a certain number of times I have to admit to finding anime series uninteresting part of the way through as compared to first guesses or even getting fed up with “certain characters can’t realise things or everything will have to change” setups, and yet in this particular case I still seemed more positive towards this show. It did, in any case, get around to a “plot arc” I’d seen people enthuse about from the original manga, where Yor Forger got to guard a small child (and his mother) as part of her own hidden life as a top assassin. This part of the story was set on an ocean liner, one I could compare to current “slab-sided stacks of balconies” and think “now that’s a ship”; on the other hand, the liner looked to have more wood inside it than I quite associate with “the last ocean liners” of the 1960s. With the action wrapped up things went straight back to “charming yet lightweight,” and that did seem to irk some people at once.
The Ancient Magus’ Bride picked up again with something I could remember from reading the manga, with Chise and her fellow students sealed within their magical school due to the theft of a powerful and ominous magical text. This did seem to leave things stretched out for me, and I kept remembering how I could have trouble getting back up to speed with each new volume of the manga. When the stasis shattered all of a sudden and at last the explanation was both not surprising and a surprise; what was more surprising, perhaps, was that the action left the school behind along with many, if not all, of the characters introduced there. (I then looked back to the last volume of manga I’d read before deciding to save new volumes unread until this latest anime adaptation was finished, and was surprised again that the “beginning of the end” had in fact been presented there, and I just hadn’t remembered it.) While there was a certain amount of actual deus ex machina in the conclusion and a certain amount of plot threads left loose for potential future development, things did wind up more satisfying than I just might have thought during the stretched-out earlier episodes.
Continuing to watch Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, I got to as significant a midway-through development in the story as the magical girl franchise does seem to include, noted how it matched a development in each of the three franchise instalments I’ve seen before this one, and yet found myself thinking this series appealed some extra little bit to me. This feeling was right alongside continuing to note the “role-playing toys” being advertised through regular use and supposing they’d be rather battery-powered. Although I’m still behind everyone else in watching this series (I only got to a “Halloween episode” in December), I do have the awareness I’m getting closer to its end. The title of the next Pretty Cure series has been announced, with other people supposing it’ll be dog-themed or at least animal-themed; with the way this series has been appealing to me, though, I have to admit to toying with thoughts of going back to one of the much older instalments of the franchise, perhaps even the one (or two) a “years later” sequel to has just been streaming.
A brief three-episode “Original Net Animation” managed to mash together the various “Gundam Build” subfranchises from the ten years since the first of them had surprised the world. By this point the whole model-kit-promoting subfranchise was able to just reference itself, and I’m aware some people were more annoyed by Gundam Build Metaverse than I was. The main character, who lives (in the real world) in a large and somehow “American” house, just happens to run (in the online world) into the main characters from previous series. I’ll admit I was tickled when one of them, who’d previously built a full eight “power-up” sets for his Gundam but named them after planets, had a new set that just happened to be named after Pluto. All of the references and hard-selling of the wondrousness of building “Gunpla” didn’t quite distract from a story that didn’t need to try and present “an existential crisis” or even “winning a competition.”
Another manga by Naoki Urasawa getting an anime adaptation seemed a big deal, nudging against shrugs that “some manga is too good for mere anime to try and boil it down.” When Pluto showed up on Netflix, I realised its episodes were longer than the familiar “not quite half an hour,” refraining from slicing up the events of the manga volumes I’ve read (and read again). That seemed to increase the respectability of the whole endeavour, even if this did make it just a bit harder to schedule watching it. I was somewhat inclined to reflect on how, once two of “the Earth’s mightiest robots” have been destroyed by a mysterious and ominous force, several of the remaining mightiest robots look like middle-aged men, and some of them have middle-aged wives and sometimes children. Partway through all of this, though, I had to admit that all of a sudden I didn’t feel quite as engaged as other opinions seen had been making a big deal of.
That really did bother me, given I had no solid reason for why my interest was flagging. It might only have had something to do with “having already seen the story as manga and remembering much of what was about to happen.” There was also, perhaps, the thought that the series was taking on “big” ideas involving artificial intelligence. That brought up the tension between “it’s both nihilistic and tiresome to have ‘technology going wrong’ all the time” and “aren’t there certain unpleasant connotations to ‘constraining’ a mind so that it can only do ‘good?’”, and yet also raised that old sense of superiority fans of “written science fiction” deployed against “visual science fiction,” which might lead to “the ideas would be better developed through great quantities of prose.” (So far as that goes, for all that I suppose it wouldn’t count for much in the judgment of written science fiction fans, I have got to reading the “Vivy Prototype” novels in translation as if this somehow makes up for never buying anime from Aniplex of America. I did get to thinking that the novels, in making a point of “not being a precise adaptation of the anime,” did offer some explanations and indeed satisfaction I might have missed the first time around...)
Some other examples of respectable anime I’d struggled to really engage with came to mind. I suppose my mind drifted in more raffish directions, but then I thought almost at once there’s really not a lot of “trashy good fun” anime out there (as opposed to just “trashily made”); indeed, you just about have to turn to manga for that as well... I might have managed to relax a bit and feel more engaged with the concluding instalments of Pluto, anyway; it was a rather larger “sixtieth anniversary of Mighty Atom on TV” tribute than what I’d managed all by myself.
Discovering there’d been two short Cyborg 009 theatrical features made just before the original black-and-white TV anime had been intriguing all by itself. I suppose it had been tempting to turn a growing awareness of theatrical animation made in Japan for some years before and after Mighty Atom getting on TV into thoughts of “a separate and more respectable tradition”; learning that had started drawing on manga sooner than I’d expected meant another reconfiguration of mental models towards tying things together. As it turned out, I’d also been able to watch the Cyborg 009 movies “fansubbed,” although some of the translations were pretty stilted. The first of them had offered the origin story I’d noted the absence of on TV, then hurried on past that. It was something to have not just colour but widescreen precede the black-and-white TV show, although the designs of the two apparent core heroes, Cyborg 009 himself and the lone female cyborg of the group Cyborg 003, had looked the most peculiar to start with.
With the way I’d been watching things a limited number of days opened up approaching the end of the year; looking for something that didn’t involve too many separate episodes, I thought of the Gundam the Origin OVAs. I’d watched a collection of four of them some time ago, and then another collection of two more lengthy episodes was released, at which point the thought of “leading into them by rewatching their predecessors” had seemed to demand time I’d never quite managed to open until now. I had wondered starting off if the episodes to be watched again would be quite as interesting once I’d got past the first of them (which has a young Casval Rem Deikun, later to become the antihero of Gundam Char Aznable, commandeering the weapons of a primitive Guntank to blast open a path to escape), but they did seem to turn out satisfying again. I did notice occasional examples of “characters brushing by each other years before they have their more familiar first meetings in the established story,” which might have led to a thought or two about the tension between “your own imagination, or its potential at least” and “someone else’s imagination, but given actual form” when it comes to previously half-shaped parts of a story. As for the episodes I hadn’t got around to until now, they presented a full-scale science fiction war, and could be seen as now leading straight into the very first Gundam anime.
Once I’d finished the Cyborg 009 movies I went on to the theatrical conclusion of another title I’d watched in the previous quarter and opened my Blu-Ray set of the Love Live movie at last. I did think a bit about how more time had passed between finishing the second set of episodes of the original series and this than when I’d raced through those episodes for the first time to get ready for a special screening of the movie near me. The movie still seemed satisfying, though. I did think a little about how it was now my best shot at consistently good-looking (drawn) animation of the original Love Live characters, but then found some slight and odd amusement in how the orange and red hair of the characters Rin and Maki didn’t seem quite as brightly coloured as I’d always supposed them to be. There was a bit more to the story, too, than just “a trip without supervision to an exotic locale” (I don’t think the dialogue ever quite said “New York City”) and “big concluding performances” as I’d remembered from before. With that, I did get to thinking about the other casts of characters in the franchise.
Watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, I had started wondering if having read the comics years ago quite put me in the mental space where I could call animation taking off from it, even if made by a Japanese studio, “anime” regardless of what anyone else said. I then couldn’t quite write up a post about it at once on finishing the series, and began typing up my thoughts among the rest of this quarterly review. When I finished that some days before the end of the year, though, I sliced off my comments and made a separate post from them. I can at least add that I do hope to one day try out the Japanese voice acting Netflix didn’t default to in this case.