2024: My Second Quarter in Anime
Jul. 1st, 2024 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs I posted my summary of the anime I’d seen in the first three months of this year, I knew I was days away from leaving on my second long vacation in less than a year’s time, getting away once more from Blu-Ray players and broadband connections. Having found a new video player program for my iPad, and contemplating six sea days in between Mexico and Hawaii and five sea days in between Hawaii and Vancouver Island, I didn’t intend for this to be altogether a “vacation from anime.” (I was also thinking a bit of reports that multicultural television in Hawaii had happened to show some anime in the 1970s and that that, more than memories of Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and some other “localized” cartoons in the 1960s, had got a first few fan-types thinking there were some interesting animated series in Japan... However, it wasn’t until my last day or so in Hawaii that I happened to think “now wasn’t ‘Kamehameha’ a term in Dragon Ball too?”) On coming back, though, I did decide at last I had to start turning in earlier to get to an early start-of-the-day meeting at work yet feel refreshed in the morning. I could still watch two episodes of anime in a weekday evening, but that began to feel a bit too extravagant with less time in general available in those evenings. I suppose having limited time to watch all the anime that’s caught your eye could be better in a certain way than having got to the point where you just can’t find anime that interests you, but there might be the eventual risk of feeling overwhelmed by what you can’t quite get around to.
About three-quarters of the way through Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, I got to thinking the small distinguishing features of that magical girl series, in appealing to me that much more than in the three Pretty Cure shows I’d seen preceding it, were adding up to the point where I was less interested in “taking a chance” on its inevitable franchise follow-up than in heading back towards earlier series. While a particular development very near the end of the show did leave me working through some ambiguity and its follow-up did attract some positive attention, I still wound up turning not just to the merely early series that had provided grown-up characters for a recent special show but to the very first Pretty Cure. I’d seen a certain number of comments the formula hadn’t altogether gelled the very first time around. That there were only two magical girls seemed less significant than that they had to transform together, and to top that I was a little surprised they had a “naked transformation sequence.” While they were silvery rather than flesh-toned for some measure of plausible deniability, the later Pretty Cure series I’d started with put their girls in very simple yet shimmery dresses as the stock footage began and had their elaborate costumes assemble over them. When not magical girls Nagisa and Honoka seem to spend more time in middle school uniforms than the girls of later series (the opening theme even mentions “school uniforms”), and that did seem to separate them a little more from my assumptions of the familiar target audience. For that matter, Nagisa starts off less enthusiastic at having been recruited to be a magical girl than my recollections of later Cures had it, and she and Honoka address each other by their family names for several episodes to begin with. (Nagisa has messy-short brownish hair and plays lacrosse while Honoka has long blue-black hair and is in a “science club”; I wondered for a little while if this sort of juxtaposition had existed before Dirty Pair, then happened on an article on Pretty Cure in an Otaku USA “anime special” issue that did bring up the “girls with guns” series.)
At the same time, this first Pretty Cure series did already feature a lot of role-play merchandise I can suppose was battery-operated and refugees from a magical land recruiting the magical girls. (Those small animals do look peculiar; I happened to think of the grotesque Maromi, the dog-thing title character of the anime-within-an-anime in Satoshi Kon’s TV production Paranoia Agent, and wondered if it had in fact been a bit more pointed a criticism than I’d thought after slight worries of “an anime so significant as to condemn all other anime” had faded from my mind.) The Cures, of course, are magical girls who spend a lot of time throwing punches and unleashing flying kicks, even if it surprised me they moved on from battling monsters made from everyday objects to going toe-to-toe with the minions creating those monsters, then went through those minions quite fast. By the end of twenty-six episodes they’d appeared to have defeated the dark overlord himself. I wondered just how the series would get its action going again, but have to admit to also thinking this might be a chance to move on to something new, or at least make my schedule a little less crowded going forward...
Pondering what “new” thing I might watch, all of a sudden I decided it was about time to get back to a baseball series I’d happened on years after it had been made and found interesting over its considerable length. Although I’d seen everything “made back then,” it has a relatively recent “sequel series.” Major 2nd, strictly speaking, begins with a “third” generation of baseball enthusiasts. As the veteran Goro Shigeno, son of a pro ball player, heads off to keep playing professionally in Taiwan, his own son Daigo is intent on joining the same little league team his father and his older sister played on in different decades. When Daigo has trouble throwing the ball very far and strikes out at a dramatic moment, though, he gives up in a sulk. (We do eventually learn his father isn’t altogether oblivious to what his son is going through.) As he’s getting close to leaving grade school, though, a boy named Hikaru shows up, who just happens to be the son of Toshiya Sato, Goro’s friend, rival, and teammate by turns over the length of the original series. Although Hikaru starts off insisting baseball isn’t interesting because the players spend most of their time standing and waiting, when he decides the pitcher does more and turns out to be the natural talent Daigo isn’t, the other boy does wind up becoming his catcher, swapping the roles of their fathers.
While “settling into” this newer series I did run into a rather off-model and unimpressive-looking episode early on. I’m afraid my thoughts jumped at once to how, while the beginning of Major itself had been made in the “digital production for standard definition” years and hadn’t looked altogether impressive to me, its sequel series had been made recently enough to line up with complaints and lamentations about overproduction for the sake of “content” that takes up space on streaming services and that’s it. At the same time, I was a little conscious of a rejoinder that “making less anime” might only mean somewhat more polish and a lot less variety. Anyway, the look of things did pick up again afterwards, and I found myself able to enjoy the training and game action of the series even as I wondered what someone who hadn’t seen the original (which still hasn’t been streamed the way the sequel has) would have made of it. I could only say that for me, adults returning from the original series (two of Goro’s fellow teammates from high school now manage and coach the little league team, and a teammate from even further back is in charge of a competitor) received decent enough introductions. The little league team remains minimally co-ed; a girl who knows Daigo at grade school joins the team along with him and Hikaru. I first noticed her called “Sakura” and thought with an amused mental smile that that seemed a bit obvious but I was all right with it; then, though, I realised she’d been addressed by her family name (where Daigo and Hikaru are already on a “first”-name basis) and her “first” name is Mutsuko. It was easy enough to imagine accusations of her role in the story being to get in the way of people getting too excited over the youthful friendship and on-field connection between Daigo and Hikaru (Daigo’s mother Kaoru, who casually mentions at one point she’s almost forty but whose eyes are still drawn as large as when she was in college, talks to Mutsuko about also having been on a little league team with Goro and even caught his pitches for a while), but she does turn out to be quite a competent ball player. In a way I appreciated that Major 2nd didn’t start with as much melodrama as the original Major; its conclusion did push towards that point, though, even with a bit of a “sorry I didn’t get around to telling you” resolution. There is a bit more left in this newer series to see.
Getter Robo stayed entertaining; its energetic opening theme always helped fire up my enthusiasm for each new episode of giant combining robot action. In its second half a grander power is revealed above even the emperor of an underground dinosaur empire (starting off I’d contemplated my understanding that Doctor Who brought in a similar idea at about the same time but developed it in its own, less violent way; I at least supposed each series was limited in its own fashion as to the number of invaders that could be shown on screen at once). New comedy-relief characters are introduced and there are dashes of “tragedy of the episode.” One thing I did bump into was who’d translated the “fansubs” I had queued up shifting and the subtitles becoming a lot more awkward; I did, though, just happen to have recourse to a different translation I hadn’t happened to queue, and it read much better. That, however, has me supposing there might not be any recourse available for the immediate followup to the series. Getter Robo ended, if not on a cliffhanger, then at least by introducing the next set of antagonists. I could at least watch a theatrical special crossing Getter Robo over with Great Mazinger (who got top billing), both giant robots having been animated by the same company (and both developed from manga by Go Nagai); it was very matter-of-fact about them sharing a world all of a sudden.
After returning to the original Love Live I’d been contemplating also going back to the next part of the franchise. On returning to my Blu-Ray player and streaming setup alike, I decided to push that off for a while longer. There was the thought I could watch at least something “as of its moment”; it wouldn’t be that much work to catch up to the brief episodes of another set of Nijiyon “four-panel gag manga” adaptations. Before starting that, I also watched a sort of long episode featuring the Nijigaski High School Idol Club members. I’d had impressions this was where the voice actress for the school idol Setsuna had had to change, but wound up thinking the replacement was a pretty good match. In any case I was a bit more inclined to think the special episode featured Shioriko, a proper Japanese girl with a rather plain character design (she’d been introduced in a mobile game as something of an antagonist) up until you notice there’s the small point of a “fang” at one side of her visible teeth. Although the special also involved providing motivation for a girl visiting from overseas to become a school idol herself, I suppose it could feel a bit lightweight, leading into the even more lightweight gags of Nijiyon. When you’re a bit more detached than many from the apparent invitations to pair off characters at least in your own mind, that seems to be what happens. I did notice that every so often its more or less “super-deformed” computer animation changed to a more conventional drawing of the characters.
The “fortieth anniversary of the Transformers” had been on my mind for a while, and so the very thing to do seemed to be to open an anime series not quite four decades old, based on a transforming-robots toy line from Japan that hadn’t been repackaged and renamed as the Transformers, but in competing with them under a different name only to not make it out of the original “transforming robots boom” had wound up sort of dismissed. Anyway, Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos was set on a distant planet named Cronos, quite Earthlike in appearance yet inhabited by a mixture of transforming robots recognizable as the “Machine Robo” toys that had become the GoBots, robots not recognizable as GoBots, and robots that are pretty much people in armour that doesn’t cover their flesh-coloured human faces. They’re attacked by evil robots from outer space, and so five heroes (just two of who are recognizable as GoBots, and who happened to have been repackaged there as bad guys) set out on a journey across their world. There’s a distinct martial arts flavour to the action, which I have to admit often doesn’t appeal to me as much as it seems to for other people, even without a “mechanical” feel to things. At the same time, the artwork had a certain flair, with lithe proportions and plenty of “modelling” in the paintwork of just the sort that could have meant “anime” to fans in the 1980s and early 1990s. All in all it at least looked more appealing to me than what little of the “GoBots fiction” I had noticed at the time; that had made the robots look rather homely. In more recent years I’ve at least noticed occasional comments to the effect of “if the Machine Robo anime had been brought over here, that would have been something!” However, there are enough “robot deaths” in the series that I can imagine the “localization” getting pretty awkward. (The alternative cover of the Discotek release features the girl-robot from the heroes and three other girl-robots, but two of those three don’t make it out of the episode they appeared in...) In any case, I did also start to wonder just how much “the look of Robotech” (or at least the look of the on-model episodes of Macross) had actually registered on me as compared to its story when I’d first seen it. With increased awareness of “the look of anime” I’m at least continuing to watch Revenge of Cronos, but I am conscious that so far as “peculiar Japanese developments from an American take on Japanese toys” go, Transformers Masterforce did seem to have appealed to me more, and I suppose that means the Transformers have won again...
Counting the weekends of the two months after my vacation, I realised I just might have the chance to push a bit further into a franchise I had my first exposure to back in my university’s anime club but still haven’t watched all the way through. Patlabor has accumulated such a good reputation over the years that I have grappled with the feeling it would be somehow better to keep it “to be watched” than to have watched it only to be faced with the thought “the high point’s been passed; it’s all downhill from here.” When I do manage to push that feeling back, my thoughts turn to the OVAs I’ve understood to be the first works of the franchise. There have been extra complications there, though. I bought up Patlabor on DVD in a rush after Central Park Media/US Manga Corp went out of business early in “the anime bust,” but as I opened the OVA case there were already reports of the franchise being “license rescued” by an underused sublabel of Sentai. After buying up those Blu-Rays and opening their OVA case despite having encountered complaints of their subtitles being oversized, there were reports of a complete collection with subtitles that weren’t quite as large. I did open up that collection to use the first OVA to “mark its year” on a peculiar personal tour through anime, but now as I said I was hoping to push a bit further.
I admit I got to wondering about the opening credits offering a “bait and switch” impression of the series being about the female pilot Noa, who has a certain thing for her police “Patrol Labor” mecha Alphonse, plunging into battle against hijacked work mecha. The OVAs are more of an ensemble piece and somewhat-to-rather more sedate, and I did have to face uncertain thoughts this would all amount to a chore the third time around. Even the episodes in the middle of the OVAs, though, did seem this time around to offer a few unexpected surprises or at least a sense of now knowing a little more about what outside ideas they were playing with. I was able to move on to the first Patlabor movie for my very first viewing of it. It alters the character designs a little (this seems to have the oddest effect on Noa, whose role is still somewhat limited even with a heroic turn near the end of the action) and spins out a science fiction story with a good bit of contemplative investigation in its middle. I’d imagined a certain science fiction surprise near the conclusion of a story involving a brilliant yet deceased programmer and “Labors” running amok without human hands on their controls; that surprise in fact wasn’t there. In any case I at least feel free to think further ahead to the remaining slices of the franchise I haven’t revisited in any capacity since university.
While I could offer a few excuses why I don’t have a subscription to Hidive, the most positive explanation I can provide is that Sentai still seems to get around to the limited number of new series they stream on their own service and release them on disc as well. With recollections that a series called Akiba Maid War had produced some positive comments and the sense its capsule description did amuse me, I went ahead and ordered it. Just a bit of extra effort did seem required to squeeze it into my viewing order starting off, but once I’d started watching it I was pretty much hooked.
The series happens to be set in 1999, which I have the impression was just a few years before “maids” started really showing up in anime. I have had a certain caution about most series said to feature them, if in part because I am aware of their fetish and fevered fantasy value. For this show, though, I knew somewhat in advance of its hapless main character Nagomi that the “maid cafes” of Akihabara (a region of Tokyo that also gained great significance to English-speaking anime fans somewhat after 1999) are here fronts for big criminal syndicates battling for total supremacy and the doting waitresses in outfits at once frilly and revealing are the foot soldiers in those battles outside of opening hours. Hired at a small and shabby upper-floor cafe with a more dubious animal theme than some, alongside a woman named Ranko who casually introduces herself as thirty-five years old (and whose thirty-sixth birthday happens in the series, although she transcends that single joke to become one of the most memorable characters of the show), Nagomi is plunged into the wars. This description, though, doesn’t begin to hint at the entertaining sense of straight-faced absurdity I found in the gunplay, general brawls, askew schemes, and deathtraps of the series, a sense I always have trouble describing to my own satisfaction but still one of the things I most enjoy happening on in anime. (It’s one of the things; were it the “only” thing I’d either watch much less anime or just have succumbed to lamentations about there never having been enough of it. If there’s perhaps a sincerity to this absurdity, series that are sincere without being absurd can appeal to me too.) It was fun and funny enough I was all but compelled to watch “extra” episodes of the show in my first weeks starting off to make up for having to finish it in the span of just two months. For that matter, the shocking conclusion of the penultimate episode had me watching the last episode the next day, where the humour got that much darker but things did stay satisfying. After saying all of that, I suppose I did discover myself thinking the series still made just a bit more of the idea of “maids” than its transgression of “female gangsters, from the lowest to the highest all in ridiculous outfits.” In finding myself just fine with that, I had to consider that, for all that I’m still not at all inclined to the thought of going to a maid cafe myself, perhaps I’m not as opposed to the mere idea of “maids” as my old caution might have been suggested to claim. There was also the more peculiar thought that while the character designs were at least somewhat varied and by no means unappealing to me, I did get to wondering what they might have looked like had they been “drawn in 1999.”
Announcements the Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction manga would be adapted into an anime got my attention, but on mentioning that I did get warned that the studio said to be doing the adaptation didn’t have enough of a track record to trust. I might have pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind until I heard the anime was in fact being released as movies and some reviews looked to be pretty positive. That still might not have meant all that much in the face of “but just how will I see those movies?” until the announcement they were being carved into television-sized episodes that would stream on Crunchyroll. All of a sudden, not having a schedule stuffed full of other streaming shows seemed to have paid off. One thing I had to confront straight off was there being an “episode zero” that adapts not the beginning of the manga, with an alien mothership hanging over Tokyo and high school students striving to live ordinary lives below, but the beginning of its final volume, which had managed to be set after the “end of the world” being counted down to in previous volumes. Other people seemed more incensed by this than I was; I suppose I got to thinking that, having started buying the manga late in its run after picking up at last on recommendations from unexpected directions, I’d read through a lot of it in a sustained burst and got a real sense of how it just might appeal to those with gloomy judgements of most of humanity, an impending sense of inescapable doom, and the thin consolation of at least supposing they’re aware of what most other people are in denial about. I was also wondering if, a bit older than some, I can at least remember the last days of being most worried about nuclear war and wondered if the opening episode was an effort to recontextualize the unpleasant anticipation and make sure the audience isn’t just imagining “the screen goes white and that’s it.” The episodes that followed at least looked impressive to me with ominous fate not yet having become palpable, even if I was now aware other people seemed more incensed by the subtitles in fact being the dreaded “dubtitles,” transcriptions of the dub script and therefore presumably constrained by “having to fit into the lip flaps.” I contemplated grasping the nettle and switching to the dubbed episodes; up to now, though, I do seem relaxed enough to just stick with what I defaulted to starting off.
About three-quarters of the way through Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, I got to thinking the small distinguishing features of that magical girl series, in appealing to me that much more than in the three Pretty Cure shows I’d seen preceding it, were adding up to the point where I was less interested in “taking a chance” on its inevitable franchise follow-up than in heading back towards earlier series. While a particular development very near the end of the show did leave me working through some ambiguity and its follow-up did attract some positive attention, I still wound up turning not just to the merely early series that had provided grown-up characters for a recent special show but to the very first Pretty Cure. I’d seen a certain number of comments the formula hadn’t altogether gelled the very first time around. That there were only two magical girls seemed less significant than that they had to transform together, and to top that I was a little surprised they had a “naked transformation sequence.” While they were silvery rather than flesh-toned for some measure of plausible deniability, the later Pretty Cure series I’d started with put their girls in very simple yet shimmery dresses as the stock footage began and had their elaborate costumes assemble over them. When not magical girls Nagisa and Honoka seem to spend more time in middle school uniforms than the girls of later series (the opening theme even mentions “school uniforms”), and that did seem to separate them a little more from my assumptions of the familiar target audience. For that matter, Nagisa starts off less enthusiastic at having been recruited to be a magical girl than my recollections of later Cures had it, and she and Honoka address each other by their family names for several episodes to begin with. (Nagisa has messy-short brownish hair and plays lacrosse while Honoka has long blue-black hair and is in a “science club”; I wondered for a little while if this sort of juxtaposition had existed before Dirty Pair, then happened on an article on Pretty Cure in an Otaku USA “anime special” issue that did bring up the “girls with guns” series.)
At the same time, this first Pretty Cure series did already feature a lot of role-play merchandise I can suppose was battery-operated and refugees from a magical land recruiting the magical girls. (Those small animals do look peculiar; I happened to think of the grotesque Maromi, the dog-thing title character of the anime-within-an-anime in Satoshi Kon’s TV production Paranoia Agent, and wondered if it had in fact been a bit more pointed a criticism than I’d thought after slight worries of “an anime so significant as to condemn all other anime” had faded from my mind.) The Cures, of course, are magical girls who spend a lot of time throwing punches and unleashing flying kicks, even if it surprised me they moved on from battling monsters made from everyday objects to going toe-to-toe with the minions creating those monsters, then went through those minions quite fast. By the end of twenty-six episodes they’d appeared to have defeated the dark overlord himself. I wondered just how the series would get its action going again, but have to admit to also thinking this might be a chance to move on to something new, or at least make my schedule a little less crowded going forward...
Pondering what “new” thing I might watch, all of a sudden I decided it was about time to get back to a baseball series I’d happened on years after it had been made and found interesting over its considerable length. Although I’d seen everything “made back then,” it has a relatively recent “sequel series.” Major 2nd, strictly speaking, begins with a “third” generation of baseball enthusiasts. As the veteran Goro Shigeno, son of a pro ball player, heads off to keep playing professionally in Taiwan, his own son Daigo is intent on joining the same little league team his father and his older sister played on in different decades. When Daigo has trouble throwing the ball very far and strikes out at a dramatic moment, though, he gives up in a sulk. (We do eventually learn his father isn’t altogether oblivious to what his son is going through.) As he’s getting close to leaving grade school, though, a boy named Hikaru shows up, who just happens to be the son of Toshiya Sato, Goro’s friend, rival, and teammate by turns over the length of the original series. Although Hikaru starts off insisting baseball isn’t interesting because the players spend most of their time standing and waiting, when he decides the pitcher does more and turns out to be the natural talent Daigo isn’t, the other boy does wind up becoming his catcher, swapping the roles of their fathers.
While “settling into” this newer series I did run into a rather off-model and unimpressive-looking episode early on. I’m afraid my thoughts jumped at once to how, while the beginning of Major itself had been made in the “digital production for standard definition” years and hadn’t looked altogether impressive to me, its sequel series had been made recently enough to line up with complaints and lamentations about overproduction for the sake of “content” that takes up space on streaming services and that’s it. At the same time, I was a little conscious of a rejoinder that “making less anime” might only mean somewhat more polish and a lot less variety. Anyway, the look of things did pick up again afterwards, and I found myself able to enjoy the training and game action of the series even as I wondered what someone who hadn’t seen the original (which still hasn’t been streamed the way the sequel has) would have made of it. I could only say that for me, adults returning from the original series (two of Goro’s fellow teammates from high school now manage and coach the little league team, and a teammate from even further back is in charge of a competitor) received decent enough introductions. The little league team remains minimally co-ed; a girl who knows Daigo at grade school joins the team along with him and Hikaru. I first noticed her called “Sakura” and thought with an amused mental smile that that seemed a bit obvious but I was all right with it; then, though, I realised she’d been addressed by her family name (where Daigo and Hikaru are already on a “first”-name basis) and her “first” name is Mutsuko. It was easy enough to imagine accusations of her role in the story being to get in the way of people getting too excited over the youthful friendship and on-field connection between Daigo and Hikaru (Daigo’s mother Kaoru, who casually mentions at one point she’s almost forty but whose eyes are still drawn as large as when she was in college, talks to Mutsuko about also having been on a little league team with Goro and even caught his pitches for a while), but she does turn out to be quite a competent ball player. In a way I appreciated that Major 2nd didn’t start with as much melodrama as the original Major; its conclusion did push towards that point, though, even with a bit of a “sorry I didn’t get around to telling you” resolution. There is a bit more left in this newer series to see.
Getter Robo stayed entertaining; its energetic opening theme always helped fire up my enthusiasm for each new episode of giant combining robot action. In its second half a grander power is revealed above even the emperor of an underground dinosaur empire (starting off I’d contemplated my understanding that Doctor Who brought in a similar idea at about the same time but developed it in its own, less violent way; I at least supposed each series was limited in its own fashion as to the number of invaders that could be shown on screen at once). New comedy-relief characters are introduced and there are dashes of “tragedy of the episode.” One thing I did bump into was who’d translated the “fansubs” I had queued up shifting and the subtitles becoming a lot more awkward; I did, though, just happen to have recourse to a different translation I hadn’t happened to queue, and it read much better. That, however, has me supposing there might not be any recourse available for the immediate followup to the series. Getter Robo ended, if not on a cliffhanger, then at least by introducing the next set of antagonists. I could at least watch a theatrical special crossing Getter Robo over with Great Mazinger (who got top billing), both giant robots having been animated by the same company (and both developed from manga by Go Nagai); it was very matter-of-fact about them sharing a world all of a sudden.
After returning to the original Love Live I’d been contemplating also going back to the next part of the franchise. On returning to my Blu-Ray player and streaming setup alike, I decided to push that off for a while longer. There was the thought I could watch at least something “as of its moment”; it wouldn’t be that much work to catch up to the brief episodes of another set of Nijiyon “four-panel gag manga” adaptations. Before starting that, I also watched a sort of long episode featuring the Nijigaski High School Idol Club members. I’d had impressions this was where the voice actress for the school idol Setsuna had had to change, but wound up thinking the replacement was a pretty good match. In any case I was a bit more inclined to think the special episode featured Shioriko, a proper Japanese girl with a rather plain character design (she’d been introduced in a mobile game as something of an antagonist) up until you notice there’s the small point of a “fang” at one side of her visible teeth. Although the special also involved providing motivation for a girl visiting from overseas to become a school idol herself, I suppose it could feel a bit lightweight, leading into the even more lightweight gags of Nijiyon. When you’re a bit more detached than many from the apparent invitations to pair off characters at least in your own mind, that seems to be what happens. I did notice that every so often its more or less “super-deformed” computer animation changed to a more conventional drawing of the characters.
The “fortieth anniversary of the Transformers” had been on my mind for a while, and so the very thing to do seemed to be to open an anime series not quite four decades old, based on a transforming-robots toy line from Japan that hadn’t been repackaged and renamed as the Transformers, but in competing with them under a different name only to not make it out of the original “transforming robots boom” had wound up sort of dismissed. Anyway, Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos was set on a distant planet named Cronos, quite Earthlike in appearance yet inhabited by a mixture of transforming robots recognizable as the “Machine Robo” toys that had become the GoBots, robots not recognizable as GoBots, and robots that are pretty much people in armour that doesn’t cover their flesh-coloured human faces. They’re attacked by evil robots from outer space, and so five heroes (just two of who are recognizable as GoBots, and who happened to have been repackaged there as bad guys) set out on a journey across their world. There’s a distinct martial arts flavour to the action, which I have to admit often doesn’t appeal to me as much as it seems to for other people, even without a “mechanical” feel to things. At the same time, the artwork had a certain flair, with lithe proportions and plenty of “modelling” in the paintwork of just the sort that could have meant “anime” to fans in the 1980s and early 1990s. All in all it at least looked more appealing to me than what little of the “GoBots fiction” I had noticed at the time; that had made the robots look rather homely. In more recent years I’ve at least noticed occasional comments to the effect of “if the Machine Robo anime had been brought over here, that would have been something!” However, there are enough “robot deaths” in the series that I can imagine the “localization” getting pretty awkward. (The alternative cover of the Discotek release features the girl-robot from the heroes and three other girl-robots, but two of those three don’t make it out of the episode they appeared in...) In any case, I did also start to wonder just how much “the look of Robotech” (or at least the look of the on-model episodes of Macross) had actually registered on me as compared to its story when I’d first seen it. With increased awareness of “the look of anime” I’m at least continuing to watch Revenge of Cronos, but I am conscious that so far as “peculiar Japanese developments from an American take on Japanese toys” go, Transformers Masterforce did seem to have appealed to me more, and I suppose that means the Transformers have won again...
Counting the weekends of the two months after my vacation, I realised I just might have the chance to push a bit further into a franchise I had my first exposure to back in my university’s anime club but still haven’t watched all the way through. Patlabor has accumulated such a good reputation over the years that I have grappled with the feeling it would be somehow better to keep it “to be watched” than to have watched it only to be faced with the thought “the high point’s been passed; it’s all downhill from here.” When I do manage to push that feeling back, my thoughts turn to the OVAs I’ve understood to be the first works of the franchise. There have been extra complications there, though. I bought up Patlabor on DVD in a rush after Central Park Media/US Manga Corp went out of business early in “the anime bust,” but as I opened the OVA case there were already reports of the franchise being “license rescued” by an underused sublabel of Sentai. After buying up those Blu-Rays and opening their OVA case despite having encountered complaints of their subtitles being oversized, there were reports of a complete collection with subtitles that weren’t quite as large. I did open up that collection to use the first OVA to “mark its year” on a peculiar personal tour through anime, but now as I said I was hoping to push a bit further.
I admit I got to wondering about the opening credits offering a “bait and switch” impression of the series being about the female pilot Noa, who has a certain thing for her police “Patrol Labor” mecha Alphonse, plunging into battle against hijacked work mecha. The OVAs are more of an ensemble piece and somewhat-to-rather more sedate, and I did have to face uncertain thoughts this would all amount to a chore the third time around. Even the episodes in the middle of the OVAs, though, did seem this time around to offer a few unexpected surprises or at least a sense of now knowing a little more about what outside ideas they were playing with. I was able to move on to the first Patlabor movie for my very first viewing of it. It alters the character designs a little (this seems to have the oddest effect on Noa, whose role is still somewhat limited even with a heroic turn near the end of the action) and spins out a science fiction story with a good bit of contemplative investigation in its middle. I’d imagined a certain science fiction surprise near the conclusion of a story involving a brilliant yet deceased programmer and “Labors” running amok without human hands on their controls; that surprise in fact wasn’t there. In any case I at least feel free to think further ahead to the remaining slices of the franchise I haven’t revisited in any capacity since university.
While I could offer a few excuses why I don’t have a subscription to Hidive, the most positive explanation I can provide is that Sentai still seems to get around to the limited number of new series they stream on their own service and release them on disc as well. With recollections that a series called Akiba Maid War had produced some positive comments and the sense its capsule description did amuse me, I went ahead and ordered it. Just a bit of extra effort did seem required to squeeze it into my viewing order starting off, but once I’d started watching it I was pretty much hooked.
The series happens to be set in 1999, which I have the impression was just a few years before “maids” started really showing up in anime. I have had a certain caution about most series said to feature them, if in part because I am aware of their fetish and fevered fantasy value. For this show, though, I knew somewhat in advance of its hapless main character Nagomi that the “maid cafes” of Akihabara (a region of Tokyo that also gained great significance to English-speaking anime fans somewhat after 1999) are here fronts for big criminal syndicates battling for total supremacy and the doting waitresses in outfits at once frilly and revealing are the foot soldiers in those battles outside of opening hours. Hired at a small and shabby upper-floor cafe with a more dubious animal theme than some, alongside a woman named Ranko who casually introduces herself as thirty-five years old (and whose thirty-sixth birthday happens in the series, although she transcends that single joke to become one of the most memorable characters of the show), Nagomi is plunged into the wars. This description, though, doesn’t begin to hint at the entertaining sense of straight-faced absurdity I found in the gunplay, general brawls, askew schemes, and deathtraps of the series, a sense I always have trouble describing to my own satisfaction but still one of the things I most enjoy happening on in anime. (It’s one of the things; were it the “only” thing I’d either watch much less anime or just have succumbed to lamentations about there never having been enough of it. If there’s perhaps a sincerity to this absurdity, series that are sincere without being absurd can appeal to me too.) It was fun and funny enough I was all but compelled to watch “extra” episodes of the show in my first weeks starting off to make up for having to finish it in the span of just two months. For that matter, the shocking conclusion of the penultimate episode had me watching the last episode the next day, where the humour got that much darker but things did stay satisfying. After saying all of that, I suppose I did discover myself thinking the series still made just a bit more of the idea of “maids” than its transgression of “female gangsters, from the lowest to the highest all in ridiculous outfits.” In finding myself just fine with that, I had to consider that, for all that I’m still not at all inclined to the thought of going to a maid cafe myself, perhaps I’m not as opposed to the mere idea of “maids” as my old caution might have been suggested to claim. There was also the more peculiar thought that while the character designs were at least somewhat varied and by no means unappealing to me, I did get to wondering what they might have looked like had they been “drawn in 1999.”
Announcements the Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction manga would be adapted into an anime got my attention, but on mentioning that I did get warned that the studio said to be doing the adaptation didn’t have enough of a track record to trust. I might have pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind until I heard the anime was in fact being released as movies and some reviews looked to be pretty positive. That still might not have meant all that much in the face of “but just how will I see those movies?” until the announcement they were being carved into television-sized episodes that would stream on Crunchyroll. All of a sudden, not having a schedule stuffed full of other streaming shows seemed to have paid off. One thing I had to confront straight off was there being an “episode zero” that adapts not the beginning of the manga, with an alien mothership hanging over Tokyo and high school students striving to live ordinary lives below, but the beginning of its final volume, which had managed to be set after the “end of the world” being counted down to in previous volumes. Other people seemed more incensed by this than I was; I suppose I got to thinking that, having started buying the manga late in its run after picking up at last on recommendations from unexpected directions, I’d read through a lot of it in a sustained burst and got a real sense of how it just might appeal to those with gloomy judgements of most of humanity, an impending sense of inescapable doom, and the thin consolation of at least supposing they’re aware of what most other people are in denial about. I was also wondering if, a bit older than some, I can at least remember the last days of being most worried about nuclear war and wondered if the opening episode was an effort to recontextualize the unpleasant anticipation and make sure the audience isn’t just imagining “the screen goes white and that’s it.” The episodes that followed at least looked impressive to me with ominous fate not yet having become palpable, even if I was now aware other people seemed more incensed by the subtitles in fact being the dreaded “dubtitles,” transcriptions of the dub script and therefore presumably constrained by “having to fit into the lip flaps.” I contemplated grasping the nettle and switching to the dubbed episodes; up to now, though, I do seem relaxed enough to just stick with what I defaulted to starting off.