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2024: My First Quarter in Anime
At the start of this year I’d picked up on a few upcoming anime series that seemed interesting to me from their first descriptions and the comments of a few other people. More than that, I could find the time to properly begin watching all of them. Having only managed both those things during one quarter of last year, I did feel as if things were coming back together at last. Even so, I suppose a few familiar risks were returning too. The benefit of “watching anime as it streams” would seem to be augmenting the experience by joining discussions about it and picking up on the interest of others. That can skew into “my good taste is demonstrated by picking shows everyone else likes,” though, and then the problem becomes that if-and-when smirking shrugs about “Sturgeon’s Law” apply, watching everyone else sour on things, or even bumping into casual brushoff postmortems, can get pretty dispiriting. Even so, the wrinkle of not being as exposed to the comments of others as I once was aside, I did seek a certain solace in still getting around to a good number of “older” titles from previous seasons or decades.
As I retrieved the “standard definition on Blu-Ray” disc of the third and final “J9” giant robot series from the early 1980s, I was wondering if I’d be left guessing once more at just how it was supposed to invoke something broad or whether I’d at least be able again to look up something specific. Then, I saw Around the World in Eighty Days mentioned on the back of Galactic Whirlwind Sasuraiger’s case. That did give me the motivation to get around to reading a new translation of the Jules Verne novel I’d bought some time before. (Complaints about the nineteenth-century and now public domain translations of Verne’s novels diminishing his rightful reputation in the English-speaking world might have some small bearing on the never-ending efforts of certain people to come up with new ways to take offense at “official” translations from Japanese.) In the case of Sasuraiger, its story begins a few centuries again after the previous J9 series, although its fashions might look that much more “1980s” than even in the first series. A man nicknamed IC Blues, a bit older than certain familiar complaints about “anime characters” dwell on, is about to break the bank at an outer space casino. When a criminal overlord with the even more peculiar name of Bloody God (who has an evil-looking cat and is always coloured blue to indicate lurking in the shadows) starts threatening Blues over this, the younger man manages to arrange a double-or-nothing bet where he’ll race to burn his name into fifty planets now counted in the solar system (he does eventually get as far out as Pluto, but mostly deals with “new Earths made from the explosion-scattered material of Jupiter” rather than “small but pleasingly spherical worlds in the outer distance”) inside of one Earth year. Blues manages to put together a crew of skilled yet casual people (quite recognizable as reprising roles from the original J9 series, although the familiar two younger people are no longer “brother and sister” but now eloping sweethearts), and they commandeer what looks like a nineteenth-century steam train but which can fly through space and transform into the giant robot Sasuraiger. (The train itself, which I eventually understood has its own name of J9-III, is enormous compared to actual locomotives, rather than enlarging as it transforms as the previous J9 series arranged things.) Sasuraiger seems to reflect changing styles in giant robot design through not having the same look as its predecessors; it’s equipped with a masked and visored head and carries a rifle rather than a sword. (Somewhere along the way, the contrast between the antique style of J9-III and the design of Sasuraiger and the characters alike had me wondering what this series might have looked like had it overlapped with “steampunk” being named, or even had it settled on the more contemporary “outer space Western.”) It also only battles robots its size or larger every once in a while, but for me there was still something pretty satisfying in seeing it lay waste to the more miscellaneous machinery of the criminal forces it keeps running into on the “planets of the week.” I suppose Sasuraiger was neither the worst-looking or the best-looking robot series of its era (it’s kind of tempting to say the original Macross fills both those categories for me); finishing it did leave me still with a certain number of Discotek releases in that genre to watch.
Along with pushing through that giant robot series in three months I was also devoting attention to an even earlier show in that genre, although there were times I amused myself with the thought I was “just” going back a mere fifty years to Getter Robo. I’d long understood it to be a foundational series, prominent in the Super Robot Wars games and inspiring following shows. It did feature “combination,” with three arrowhead-like flying machines that can link up in three different ways to make three altogether different robots, each with an intimidating and inhuman countenance. (The flying machines do “morph” enough combining to have me suppose they wouldn’t have worked as toys at the time and the robots were sold assembled and untransformable.) One has an enormous conical drill on one arm, which brought Gurren Lagann to mind at once; then, after beginning to watch Getter Robo I noticed a moment in Qualia the Purple where Yukari (who “sees all humans, aside from herself, as robots”) is asked just what looks especially appealing to her about what seems a rather ordinary high school boy to other eyes and she answers “his drills.” (She then just happens to mention certain girls have drills too.) The series does seem more a matter of “which robot will be deployed against the cyborg dinosaur monster of the week” than “how will the evolved dinosaurs from an underground empire try and stop Getter Robo from assembling?” I do sort of have the feeling at the midway point that the character I find the most interesting is the big dumb comedy relief pilot Musashi, although I can also suppose that a series involving narrow escapes and giant robot mayhem isn’t just a matter of “interesting characters.”
I did want to get back to watching anime I also had volumes of the manga it had been adapted from waiting until I’d got through the potentially watered-down adaptation, and started into Heavenly Delusion. People had complained about having to watch it on a streaming service that doesn’t offer a lot of other anime, and about how it had been titled there in the holier-than-thou yet perhaps easier-to-miss way of just using the romanji version of its original Japanese title. The series is set after an apocalypse left carefully unspecified; handfuls of people are left in worn-down cities and empty countrysides, still scavenging here and there although paper money is being used as a medium of exchange. (I could imagine it’s difficult to make, anyway.) The complication that might get in the way of “surely they’d have started rebuilding by now” and “surely even this sort of scavenging life can’t last” alike is that strange nightmare-chimera monsters roam the night and the shadows. Two young people are on a journey anyway chasing strange rumours; I supposed the one who’s a hired gun (with a battery-powered zap gun that can usually fire a few blasts) was a woman until the young man with the rumours to chase, assuming that too and trying for a kiss after a narrow escape, is told “I’m a guy inside.” In this case, it seems to have to do with a twisted transplantation involving a boy half-eaten by a monster and his older sister’s body. Every so often, the action cuts to a group of kids and youths in a closed-in but high-tech facility, which brought the beginning of The Promised Neverland to mind without invoking the same mood of fairy tale mixed with horror. The animation could look impressive, but after beginning to watch the series I guess I became that much more aware of complaints that something still unspecific to me in the last episodes inflicted a serious injury on the positive feelings of many. I decided not to watch the last two episodes “right away,” wondering if the manga I already have pushes past the point that bothered people and if I’d manage to get past it myself. The two halves of the story might have been at the point of converging then.
There’d been attempts years ago to translate and publish all of the Aria manga that had kept burning out midway through, raising gloomy grumbles from certain fans about the original source for the much-loved anime having been consigned to fates either illegitimate or untranslated. Then, years later, one more push resulted in deluxe volumes being released, but as I accumulated them I also had the Blu-Ray re-release of the anime to return to. I’d decided it was more than time to start watching some of the anime again, although I remained a little conscious I’d last turned to it in October of 2020, when it had been a little too easy to imagine it a last, desperate medicine against or just an escape from the world coming apart at the seams. That’s not to say I opened up Aria the Natural at the start of this year with the exact same feelings, of course, but I did wind up deciding to just watch half of that part of the anime and then leave the rest “for later.” That seemed easy enough due to the episodic nature of the small adventures of apprentice female gondoliers in a replica Venice (with enough Japanese cultural details mixed in to make it all too easy to start thinking in an amused way about “tailoring for a target audience”) on a terraformed world now almost unidentifiable as Mars; one of the most obvious developments was the characters changing from their long-sleeved winter uniforms to their lighter summer uniforms, although there were a few episodes that could be said to show the secondary character Alice lightening up. I was conscious of the upscaled Blu-Ray looking as if it was stuck in what seems to me to be a sort of visual valley for anime made around then, but maybe that feeling wasn’t so bad with the last few episodes I watched.
As for one other anime I had the original manga of waiting until I’d finished watching it, and which had managed to get in the way of beginning other series at the end of last year, I was becoming aware that some people were complaining about that manga for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End losing something ineffable as it ran on. The anime itself had Frieren and her latest travelling companions coming to a point where one of the magic users among them would have to be officially certified at the highest level before they could continue on their lengthy road. This meant quite a few other characters being introduced to also take magical tests, but in my case I found those characters interesting, which made the two lengthy trials they pushed through interesting as well. I have to admit that one thing I found interesting (but not the only or largest thing) was how, after taking calm note that Frieren and her apprentice Fern wear very sedate and respectable outfits, some (but only some) of the new female characters did show more skin. The anime wrapped up with Frieren and company on their way again and the new characters appearing to head in their own directions; for the moment, I am ready to go on to the manga.
At the start of the year I had some time open to watch some movies I’d had waiting for some time. The first one I settled on was influenced by also having managed to buy the novelization for Weathering With You. It’s possible that now that movie no longer has to be “an undeniable step up from anything Makoko Shinkai has made before given it’s his latest work,” and that seemed to help me in general. I did get to thinking I hadn’t really remembered some of its secondary characters, who now just might have seemed a slight antidote of sorts to those certain familiar complaints about anime being stuck focusing on “teenagers” regardless of the main characters themselves. At the end I might even have now been ready to see some reactions of one main character to the movie’s conclusion as being a bit more involved than “oh well, that happened.”
I’d added a movie called For Whom the Alchemist Exists, streaming on Crunchyroll, to my queue there on something of a lark, then had it visible there for quite some time. When I got around to it at last I noted it was fantasy just as I’d expected, with things like an alchemist speeding around on a brass motorcycle. When the alchemical weapon of summoning great figures from the past didn’t work out and the characters in desperate circumstances tried a different summoning that had a very ordinary Japanese schoolgirl fall off a bridge and wind up in the fantasy world, though, all of a sudden I was realising “good grief, it’s isekai!” This was a different sort of precipitation than my assumptions of the current decried works that amount to “all of a sudden a teenaged guy has overwhelming power and has to hold off potential girlfriends with a stick,” but there perhaps I was thinking “and girls aren’t allowed to just wield overwhelming power all of a sudden?” Still, within its limited bounds the movie did seem to wind up decently satisfying.
The new adaptation of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels started a week before many other series got under way. I’d already been thinking that if this anime would reach a more conclusive point in the story it would have to push through four novels where the first adaptation had only had to go through three, and I did notice the fourth novel was knocked off in just two episodes. My general reactions might have stayed “ah, it’s good enough,” thus leaving me considering a certain comment once seen that “you’re only allowed the opinions you can defend.” I can have the thought that this particular story isn’t one where “I like it because I’m represented in it,” but both its content and its initial presentation worked well enough to add together. One thing I did ponder about this adaptation was that, even as Tomozaki was being needled by his enigmatic mentor to “get a girlfriend,” the novels had left me altogether ready to suppose he was smitten with one particular character because of the way his internal monologue kept describing her. In the anime there’s not quite as much voiceover (despite thoughts voiceover is somehow more acceptable in animation and anime in particular than in live action), and there was an odd temptation to suppose other people, at least, would be readier to see some peculiar interactions with a different character and react with thoughts of her being the “obvious” choice. There were even a few moments where she was the single character on screen, even if this might have only amounted to “building up tragic-figure pathos.” With the adaptation running to thirteen episodes rather than just twelve, in the end the novel that brought things to the more conclusive point did get a bit more space for adaptation, and that did seem to offer sufficient satisfaction for me.
A series called Metallic Rouge started off with a fair bit of attention. I noted it was a genuine interplanetary science fiction story, but on realising its title character could turn into a warrior robot (thus making her more capable than an oppressed subclass of classically restrained and visually obvious robots) I had the immediate reaction that robot design just didn’t look very attractive. (The robot designs glimpsed in certain illustrations for Qualia the Purple did look different that way.) Had that in fact had me stop watching then and there, perhaps I’d been able to boast. Instead, I just kept watching only to become aware most other vocal opinions of the series had curdled over time amid complaints about so much stuff being jammed in that none of it seemed developed in a satisfying way. It might be summed up without proper explanation with the quote from Peanuts “there’s no heavier burden than a great potential!” Although not having been “blown away” by the first episode might have meant that for a while I wasn’t indignant the way so many others had become, I did wind up in that most unfortunate of places, skipping out on the last episodes just to have a bit more time for other things including starting to type up this summary.
Just enough of a hopeful first comment about Sengoku Youko showed up for me to take a chance on it. It being adapted from a manga (that I haven’t read yet) by Satoshi Mizukami, who’d contributed to Planet With, was enough to get my attention, but the comment that it looked better than the apparently quite diffident adaptation of Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer was what I needed to start watching this new series. (Instead of watching the Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime I’d gone back to the original manga, only to find myself trailing off partway through.) Sengoku Youko is set in an antique Japan (not altogether “timeless” when primitive firearms happen to show up), with a wandering swordsman of no particular talent falling in with an idealistic fox-girl supernatural being and a less pleasant young man who can get powered up for battle. That action animation was indeed good enough to perk up the entire story; as I’d hoped on seeing Satoshi Mizukami was involved, the characters are unusual enough to seem complex. One thing that I am left wondering right now, though, is whether the adaptation will continue for a while longer; the end of the twelfth episode seemed a bit abrupt even for “please go on to the manga.”
The streaming announcement for Bang Brave Bravern showed up at a genuine last moment, and it took a week for two episodes to become available at once. I’d understood it was a “super robot” anime, directed by Masami Obari, who I understand to be a notable “mechanical animator.” At first glance, though, the show started off as a “real robot” series; it’s only when the international mecha pilots are at their last extremity facing shield-protected alien robots that have just shown up on Earth that Braven himself, a talking and transforming super robot, arrives to save the day as soon as a Japanese mecha pilot is invited to enter him. The second episode in particular just happened to make a certain homoerotic charge to things undeniable even to me along with a romantic triangle involving Bravern, the Japanese pilot Isami who’s nonplussed by this eruption of superness into his defined world, and an American pilot Smith who’d be altogether eager to pilot Bravern himself but simply can’t. I have to admit I was surprised to be just fine with all of this, although I know it’s nothing to boast about. Perhaps the other anime I watch throwing in far more “now these girls are an obvious item, aren’t they?” insinuations made this alternative refreshing. The rest of the series had enough energy, peculiarity, and outrageousness to stay very appealing; quibbles like wishing for some focus on “civilian survivors” and “real robots managing to defeat super robots” too were outweighed by the positive side of things. I was a little conscious of how my appreciation depended on an awareness of both super robots and mecha to know just what was being pushed to entertaining limits, but the series just might have transcended my usual moping, self-pitying thoughts about how “mecha series don’t get a fair shake these days.”
I’d mentioned three months before about how the little touches to Soaring Sky Pretty Cure were adding up to make it appeal to me that much more than the shows just preceding it in its franchise. I even got to the point of wondering about “putting it on a shelf” by not going straight on to its inevitable successor. Towards the very end of the series, though, it happened to suggest the motivation of the bad guy in charge of the already-introduced bad guys (and she hadn’t been visible beforehand, which was a change from the shows just previous) had to do with a shocking act by a past Pretty Cure. It then backed away from that to shift blame. For all that Pretty Cure first appealed to me just because it remained targeted at a young audience without the easy nihilism of “to want to help is to be played as a sucker,” I guess I might have thought this a sort of in-between equivocation and got to wondering how it could have been developed to my satisfaction. With the series over, I did manage to head on to a “fansub” of a special franchise-anniversary movie I’d taken note of before, Pretty Cure All Stars F. Where I’d seen jokes beforehand that there have been so many Pretty Cure magical girls that a movie could now be made up just of their transformation sequences, the movie included just one full transformation, with opening credits overlaid over it, then went to some lengths establishing the characters aren’t just “magical warriors in elaborate outfits” but also ordinary girls. It also managed to feature just a subset of the full role call, including all the main characters of Soaring Sky Pretty Cure but just two characters apiece from the three series just preceding it that I’ve seen. The remaining characters I wasn’t familiar with did leave me wondering if they’d been from shows just previous again or amounted to notable people whether or not they hadn’t quite got spotlights in special movies before. Along with all of this there was a development that might have been unsettling or challenging to a young audience (without the most obvious connotations that might be raised by that), before things worked out again and the spirit of the franchise was vindicated. I am still pondering going back to its very beginning.
As these three months came to an end I started finding the time to watch a few more movies. I’d received a Blu-Ray of The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes not that long ago, and thought that for once I could do something other than “let things sit forever.” The movie invoked a particular tale to set up a mysterious tunnel, carpeted with fallen Japanese maple leaves floating on shallow water, that hints at answering ultimate wishes, but establishes straight off that spending any time sloshing down it will mean emerging to find much, much more time has passed outside it. Just how much time will pass is hinted by the two teenaged protagonists starting off with 2005-vintage cell phones. They also have very different things to wish for, which sets up an interesting tension in the story even if it begins to approach “an anime character who’s interested in anime is somehow too much of a good thing.”
Blue Thermal had been waiting around for longer; I do have impressions I’d seen a dismissive blurb of the movie not that long after getting the Blu-Ray. It began with a female college student happening altogether by accident into flying sailplane gliders only to have a natural talent for it. I was ready to think of a generally realistic movie without obvious, overt conflict as interesting in itself, although once I’d thought about it more I realised it was pretty much a “sports story” that just happened to require very expensive equipment. There were perhaps more sudden complications to things on the ground than I can imagine some people thinking it needed; from the handful of translated credits I supposed the movie had been adapted from a manga, which just might have explained the need for developments to extend a serialization.
As I retrieved the “standard definition on Blu-Ray” disc of the third and final “J9” giant robot series from the early 1980s, I was wondering if I’d be left guessing once more at just how it was supposed to invoke something broad or whether I’d at least be able again to look up something specific. Then, I saw Around the World in Eighty Days mentioned on the back of Galactic Whirlwind Sasuraiger’s case. That did give me the motivation to get around to reading a new translation of the Jules Verne novel I’d bought some time before. (Complaints about the nineteenth-century and now public domain translations of Verne’s novels diminishing his rightful reputation in the English-speaking world might have some small bearing on the never-ending efforts of certain people to come up with new ways to take offense at “official” translations from Japanese.) In the case of Sasuraiger, its story begins a few centuries again after the previous J9 series, although its fashions might look that much more “1980s” than even in the first series. A man nicknamed IC Blues, a bit older than certain familiar complaints about “anime characters” dwell on, is about to break the bank at an outer space casino. When a criminal overlord with the even more peculiar name of Bloody God (who has an evil-looking cat and is always coloured blue to indicate lurking in the shadows) starts threatening Blues over this, the younger man manages to arrange a double-or-nothing bet where he’ll race to burn his name into fifty planets now counted in the solar system (he does eventually get as far out as Pluto, but mostly deals with “new Earths made from the explosion-scattered material of Jupiter” rather than “small but pleasingly spherical worlds in the outer distance”) inside of one Earth year. Blues manages to put together a crew of skilled yet casual people (quite recognizable as reprising roles from the original J9 series, although the familiar two younger people are no longer “brother and sister” but now eloping sweethearts), and they commandeer what looks like a nineteenth-century steam train but which can fly through space and transform into the giant robot Sasuraiger. (The train itself, which I eventually understood has its own name of J9-III, is enormous compared to actual locomotives, rather than enlarging as it transforms as the previous J9 series arranged things.) Sasuraiger seems to reflect changing styles in giant robot design through not having the same look as its predecessors; it’s equipped with a masked and visored head and carries a rifle rather than a sword. (Somewhere along the way, the contrast between the antique style of J9-III and the design of Sasuraiger and the characters alike had me wondering what this series might have looked like had it overlapped with “steampunk” being named, or even had it settled on the more contemporary “outer space Western.”) It also only battles robots its size or larger every once in a while, but for me there was still something pretty satisfying in seeing it lay waste to the more miscellaneous machinery of the criminal forces it keeps running into on the “planets of the week.” I suppose Sasuraiger was neither the worst-looking or the best-looking robot series of its era (it’s kind of tempting to say the original Macross fills both those categories for me); finishing it did leave me still with a certain number of Discotek releases in that genre to watch.
Along with pushing through that giant robot series in three months I was also devoting attention to an even earlier show in that genre, although there were times I amused myself with the thought I was “just” going back a mere fifty years to Getter Robo. I’d long understood it to be a foundational series, prominent in the Super Robot Wars games and inspiring following shows. It did feature “combination,” with three arrowhead-like flying machines that can link up in three different ways to make three altogether different robots, each with an intimidating and inhuman countenance. (The flying machines do “morph” enough combining to have me suppose they wouldn’t have worked as toys at the time and the robots were sold assembled and untransformable.) One has an enormous conical drill on one arm, which brought Gurren Lagann to mind at once; then, after beginning to watch Getter Robo I noticed a moment in Qualia the Purple where Yukari (who “sees all humans, aside from herself, as robots”) is asked just what looks especially appealing to her about what seems a rather ordinary high school boy to other eyes and she answers “his drills.” (She then just happens to mention certain girls have drills too.) The series does seem more a matter of “which robot will be deployed against the cyborg dinosaur monster of the week” than “how will the evolved dinosaurs from an underground empire try and stop Getter Robo from assembling?” I do sort of have the feeling at the midway point that the character I find the most interesting is the big dumb comedy relief pilot Musashi, although I can also suppose that a series involving narrow escapes and giant robot mayhem isn’t just a matter of “interesting characters.”
I did want to get back to watching anime I also had volumes of the manga it had been adapted from waiting until I’d got through the potentially watered-down adaptation, and started into Heavenly Delusion. People had complained about having to watch it on a streaming service that doesn’t offer a lot of other anime, and about how it had been titled there in the holier-than-thou yet perhaps easier-to-miss way of just using the romanji version of its original Japanese title. The series is set after an apocalypse left carefully unspecified; handfuls of people are left in worn-down cities and empty countrysides, still scavenging here and there although paper money is being used as a medium of exchange. (I could imagine it’s difficult to make, anyway.) The complication that might get in the way of “surely they’d have started rebuilding by now” and “surely even this sort of scavenging life can’t last” alike is that strange nightmare-chimera monsters roam the night and the shadows. Two young people are on a journey anyway chasing strange rumours; I supposed the one who’s a hired gun (with a battery-powered zap gun that can usually fire a few blasts) was a woman until the young man with the rumours to chase, assuming that too and trying for a kiss after a narrow escape, is told “I’m a guy inside.” In this case, it seems to have to do with a twisted transplantation involving a boy half-eaten by a monster and his older sister’s body. Every so often, the action cuts to a group of kids and youths in a closed-in but high-tech facility, which brought the beginning of The Promised Neverland to mind without invoking the same mood of fairy tale mixed with horror. The animation could look impressive, but after beginning to watch the series I guess I became that much more aware of complaints that something still unspecific to me in the last episodes inflicted a serious injury on the positive feelings of many. I decided not to watch the last two episodes “right away,” wondering if the manga I already have pushes past the point that bothered people and if I’d manage to get past it myself. The two halves of the story might have been at the point of converging then.
There’d been attempts years ago to translate and publish all of the Aria manga that had kept burning out midway through, raising gloomy grumbles from certain fans about the original source for the much-loved anime having been consigned to fates either illegitimate or untranslated. Then, years later, one more push resulted in deluxe volumes being released, but as I accumulated them I also had the Blu-Ray re-release of the anime to return to. I’d decided it was more than time to start watching some of the anime again, although I remained a little conscious I’d last turned to it in October of 2020, when it had been a little too easy to imagine it a last, desperate medicine against or just an escape from the world coming apart at the seams. That’s not to say I opened up Aria the Natural at the start of this year with the exact same feelings, of course, but I did wind up deciding to just watch half of that part of the anime and then leave the rest “for later.” That seemed easy enough due to the episodic nature of the small adventures of apprentice female gondoliers in a replica Venice (with enough Japanese cultural details mixed in to make it all too easy to start thinking in an amused way about “tailoring for a target audience”) on a terraformed world now almost unidentifiable as Mars; one of the most obvious developments was the characters changing from their long-sleeved winter uniforms to their lighter summer uniforms, although there were a few episodes that could be said to show the secondary character Alice lightening up. I was conscious of the upscaled Blu-Ray looking as if it was stuck in what seems to me to be a sort of visual valley for anime made around then, but maybe that feeling wasn’t so bad with the last few episodes I watched.
As for one other anime I had the original manga of waiting until I’d finished watching it, and which had managed to get in the way of beginning other series at the end of last year, I was becoming aware that some people were complaining about that manga for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End losing something ineffable as it ran on. The anime itself had Frieren and her latest travelling companions coming to a point where one of the magic users among them would have to be officially certified at the highest level before they could continue on their lengthy road. This meant quite a few other characters being introduced to also take magical tests, but in my case I found those characters interesting, which made the two lengthy trials they pushed through interesting as well. I have to admit that one thing I found interesting (but not the only or largest thing) was how, after taking calm note that Frieren and her apprentice Fern wear very sedate and respectable outfits, some (but only some) of the new female characters did show more skin. The anime wrapped up with Frieren and company on their way again and the new characters appearing to head in their own directions; for the moment, I am ready to go on to the manga.
At the start of the year I had some time open to watch some movies I’d had waiting for some time. The first one I settled on was influenced by also having managed to buy the novelization for Weathering With You. It’s possible that now that movie no longer has to be “an undeniable step up from anything Makoko Shinkai has made before given it’s his latest work,” and that seemed to help me in general. I did get to thinking I hadn’t really remembered some of its secondary characters, who now just might have seemed a slight antidote of sorts to those certain familiar complaints about anime being stuck focusing on “teenagers” regardless of the main characters themselves. At the end I might even have now been ready to see some reactions of one main character to the movie’s conclusion as being a bit more involved than “oh well, that happened.”
I’d added a movie called For Whom the Alchemist Exists, streaming on Crunchyroll, to my queue there on something of a lark, then had it visible there for quite some time. When I got around to it at last I noted it was fantasy just as I’d expected, with things like an alchemist speeding around on a brass motorcycle. When the alchemical weapon of summoning great figures from the past didn’t work out and the characters in desperate circumstances tried a different summoning that had a very ordinary Japanese schoolgirl fall off a bridge and wind up in the fantasy world, though, all of a sudden I was realising “good grief, it’s isekai!” This was a different sort of precipitation than my assumptions of the current decried works that amount to “all of a sudden a teenaged guy has overwhelming power and has to hold off potential girlfriends with a stick,” but there perhaps I was thinking “and girls aren’t allowed to just wield overwhelming power all of a sudden?” Still, within its limited bounds the movie did seem to wind up decently satisfying.
The new adaptation of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels started a week before many other series got under way. I’d already been thinking that if this anime would reach a more conclusive point in the story it would have to push through four novels where the first adaptation had only had to go through three, and I did notice the fourth novel was knocked off in just two episodes. My general reactions might have stayed “ah, it’s good enough,” thus leaving me considering a certain comment once seen that “you’re only allowed the opinions you can defend.” I can have the thought that this particular story isn’t one where “I like it because I’m represented in it,” but both its content and its initial presentation worked well enough to add together. One thing I did ponder about this adaptation was that, even as Tomozaki was being needled by his enigmatic mentor to “get a girlfriend,” the novels had left me altogether ready to suppose he was smitten with one particular character because of the way his internal monologue kept describing her. In the anime there’s not quite as much voiceover (despite thoughts voiceover is somehow more acceptable in animation and anime in particular than in live action), and there was an odd temptation to suppose other people, at least, would be readier to see some peculiar interactions with a different character and react with thoughts of her being the “obvious” choice. There were even a few moments where she was the single character on screen, even if this might have only amounted to “building up tragic-figure pathos.” With the adaptation running to thirteen episodes rather than just twelve, in the end the novel that brought things to the more conclusive point did get a bit more space for adaptation, and that did seem to offer sufficient satisfaction for me.
A series called Metallic Rouge started off with a fair bit of attention. I noted it was a genuine interplanetary science fiction story, but on realising its title character could turn into a warrior robot (thus making her more capable than an oppressed subclass of classically restrained and visually obvious robots) I had the immediate reaction that robot design just didn’t look very attractive. (The robot designs glimpsed in certain illustrations for Qualia the Purple did look different that way.) Had that in fact had me stop watching then and there, perhaps I’d been able to boast. Instead, I just kept watching only to become aware most other vocal opinions of the series had curdled over time amid complaints about so much stuff being jammed in that none of it seemed developed in a satisfying way. It might be summed up without proper explanation with the quote from Peanuts “there’s no heavier burden than a great potential!” Although not having been “blown away” by the first episode might have meant that for a while I wasn’t indignant the way so many others had become, I did wind up in that most unfortunate of places, skipping out on the last episodes just to have a bit more time for other things including starting to type up this summary.
Just enough of a hopeful first comment about Sengoku Youko showed up for me to take a chance on it. It being adapted from a manga (that I haven’t read yet) by Satoshi Mizukami, who’d contributed to Planet With, was enough to get my attention, but the comment that it looked better than the apparently quite diffident adaptation of Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer was what I needed to start watching this new series. (Instead of watching the Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime I’d gone back to the original manga, only to find myself trailing off partway through.) Sengoku Youko is set in an antique Japan (not altogether “timeless” when primitive firearms happen to show up), with a wandering swordsman of no particular talent falling in with an idealistic fox-girl supernatural being and a less pleasant young man who can get powered up for battle. That action animation was indeed good enough to perk up the entire story; as I’d hoped on seeing Satoshi Mizukami was involved, the characters are unusual enough to seem complex. One thing that I am left wondering right now, though, is whether the adaptation will continue for a while longer; the end of the twelfth episode seemed a bit abrupt even for “please go on to the manga.”
The streaming announcement for Bang Brave Bravern showed up at a genuine last moment, and it took a week for two episodes to become available at once. I’d understood it was a “super robot” anime, directed by Masami Obari, who I understand to be a notable “mechanical animator.” At first glance, though, the show started off as a “real robot” series; it’s only when the international mecha pilots are at their last extremity facing shield-protected alien robots that have just shown up on Earth that Braven himself, a talking and transforming super robot, arrives to save the day as soon as a Japanese mecha pilot is invited to enter him. The second episode in particular just happened to make a certain homoerotic charge to things undeniable even to me along with a romantic triangle involving Bravern, the Japanese pilot Isami who’s nonplussed by this eruption of superness into his defined world, and an American pilot Smith who’d be altogether eager to pilot Bravern himself but simply can’t. I have to admit I was surprised to be just fine with all of this, although I know it’s nothing to boast about. Perhaps the other anime I watch throwing in far more “now these girls are an obvious item, aren’t they?” insinuations made this alternative refreshing. The rest of the series had enough energy, peculiarity, and outrageousness to stay very appealing; quibbles like wishing for some focus on “civilian survivors” and “real robots managing to defeat super robots” too were outweighed by the positive side of things. I was a little conscious of how my appreciation depended on an awareness of both super robots and mecha to know just what was being pushed to entertaining limits, but the series just might have transcended my usual moping, self-pitying thoughts about how “mecha series don’t get a fair shake these days.”
I’d mentioned three months before about how the little touches to Soaring Sky Pretty Cure were adding up to make it appeal to me that much more than the shows just preceding it in its franchise. I even got to the point of wondering about “putting it on a shelf” by not going straight on to its inevitable successor. Towards the very end of the series, though, it happened to suggest the motivation of the bad guy in charge of the already-introduced bad guys (and she hadn’t been visible beforehand, which was a change from the shows just previous) had to do with a shocking act by a past Pretty Cure. It then backed away from that to shift blame. For all that Pretty Cure first appealed to me just because it remained targeted at a young audience without the easy nihilism of “to want to help is to be played as a sucker,” I guess I might have thought this a sort of in-between equivocation and got to wondering how it could have been developed to my satisfaction. With the series over, I did manage to head on to a “fansub” of a special franchise-anniversary movie I’d taken note of before, Pretty Cure All Stars F. Where I’d seen jokes beforehand that there have been so many Pretty Cure magical girls that a movie could now be made up just of their transformation sequences, the movie included just one full transformation, with opening credits overlaid over it, then went to some lengths establishing the characters aren’t just “magical warriors in elaborate outfits” but also ordinary girls. It also managed to feature just a subset of the full role call, including all the main characters of Soaring Sky Pretty Cure but just two characters apiece from the three series just preceding it that I’ve seen. The remaining characters I wasn’t familiar with did leave me wondering if they’d been from shows just previous again or amounted to notable people whether or not they hadn’t quite got spotlights in special movies before. Along with all of this there was a development that might have been unsettling or challenging to a young audience (without the most obvious connotations that might be raised by that), before things worked out again and the spirit of the franchise was vindicated. I am still pondering going back to its very beginning.
As these three months came to an end I started finding the time to watch a few more movies. I’d received a Blu-Ray of The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes not that long ago, and thought that for once I could do something other than “let things sit forever.” The movie invoked a particular tale to set up a mysterious tunnel, carpeted with fallen Japanese maple leaves floating on shallow water, that hints at answering ultimate wishes, but establishes straight off that spending any time sloshing down it will mean emerging to find much, much more time has passed outside it. Just how much time will pass is hinted by the two teenaged protagonists starting off with 2005-vintage cell phones. They also have very different things to wish for, which sets up an interesting tension in the story even if it begins to approach “an anime character who’s interested in anime is somehow too much of a good thing.”
Blue Thermal had been waiting around for longer; I do have impressions I’d seen a dismissive blurb of the movie not that long after getting the Blu-Ray. It began with a female college student happening altogether by accident into flying sailplane gliders only to have a natural talent for it. I was ready to think of a generally realistic movie without obvious, overt conflict as interesting in itself, although once I’d thought about it more I realised it was pretty much a “sports story” that just happened to require very expensive equipment. There were perhaps more sudden complications to things on the ground than I can imagine some people thinking it needed; from the handful of translated credits I supposed the movie had been adapted from a manga, which just might have explained the need for developments to extend a serialization.