2024: My Third Quarter in Anime
Oct. 1st, 2024 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThree months ago I remained conscious of having sliced a waking hour out of at least five days every week for the sake of getting more sleep before an early start at work, and how this had made me decide to halve the amount of anime I watched most weekday evenings, from two episodes to one. By most standards I was still taking in a lot of it, to the exclusion of just about anything else that might be watched, but I suppose a current habit of two episodes a week from a fair number of older and longer series added to the sense of constraints tightening. Still, in managing to maintain some variety of vintage and genre alike I kept finding certain rewards, organized here in the order I finished them in.
As I plodded further into Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos, I got to the point of taking another look at what scraps of information about the anime I’d noticed before linked to GoBots sites. (One of them now has to be pulled out of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) Among those scraps, one comment suggested the series did get better with time, a familiar enough encouragement of sorts from the days of anime series approaching fifty episodes in length. As things turned out, the journey of the handful of main characters in search of a vague McGuffin called “the Hyribead” did reach a fortified city-state (named “Emerald City,” but not that laden down with Wizard of Oz references so far as I could tell). From that point on, other Machine Robo characters recognizable as GoBot toys began to play a more significant role in the story. This did make the action feel a bit more varied than “martial arts” (so far as I understand that sort of thing to be). Still, I guess uncertain thoughts about “the sunk cost fallacy” did keep bouncing through my mind, even if they bounced against different thoughts that, maybe, there was indeed such a thing as being too quick to abandon series unfinished and that might even lead only to general burnout. There was also a perhaps-unfortunate temptation to proclaim, even if only to myself, “just because anime’s from ‘the Showa era,’ or even features ‘hand-drawn mechanical animation,’ doesn’t mean you’ll find it transcendent or something every time.” I did also happen to remember old convictions that watching GaoGaiGar (which is merely from the twentieth century) could invoke feelings of “being a preteen again and watching the best episode of Transformers ever.” Then, I realised the last episodes on the Discotek “standard definition Blu-Ray” appeared to be clip shows. That was a greater temptation to stop there at last, although I knew those clip shows were supposed to precede the beginning of another Machine Robo series. (Discotek licensed it as well, and I bought it, even if I’m aware of all the other series they released that seem more “giant robot” as I’d describe that, and the whole deal with “is it better to save what you suppose are the best for last, or to mix things up a bit?”)
So far as “Machine Robo was a somewhat peculiar substitute for marking the fortieth anniversary of that much more established property, the Transformers” went, the anime studio Trigger did happen to work on a brief music video for that anniversary. Watching it I was perhaps more conscious of all the quick details in it I didn’t feel familiar with (and so far as however many of them I was familiar with, having seen the late-1980s Japan-only Transformers series could have meant I recognized some characters other people wouldn’t), but in a way that could have been a certain strange reassurance the Transformers don’t altogether amount to recycling its initial characters, most notable and otherwise, over and over again.
More relaxed than some, I suppose, I kept watching Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction despite the complaints about its official subtitles (a few things about which did smooth out with the passage of time). While this was one case where I’d already read the manga the anime had been adapted from, I did get an impression a flashback sequence had been moved to earlier in the story, beginning to imply the main characters were in fact a bit more significant than altogether normal people trying to live normal lives as official incompetence and venality, or, indeed, just “the system,” seals their fate far above their awareness. I did wind up ready to suppose this had something to do with the anime having started as two movies and a particular moment not around the halfway mark of the manga being chosen for the dramatic ending of the first film, even if I didn’t go back to my manga to check. As the end-of-the-world moment anticipated through much of the manga passed with some characters left, I wondered if I’d remembered everything in the last volume of the manga, but was conscious there remained things about it that could leave people shrugging about “not committing to full and realistic darkness, no matter what science-beyond-science peculiarities had been set up after the beginning of the story.”
Having long been selective-to-picky about what new anime I watch streaming and having passed several recent years waiting for series to be finished in the slow-fading expectant anticipation of production problems, I did grapple with the thought of just “letting other people take the risk of seeing how things turn out.” As I was at least continuing a few streaming titles, though, I wound up deciding to take a chance on one series that had managed to catch my attention. Its name had been more or less translated as Narenare -Cheer For You!- A certain number of years had passed since I’d last seen an anime about cheerleading, and Anima Yell! had felt pretty lightweight. Narenare had more stunts in its cheerleading, and a moderately distinct look to its animation with backgrounds that shared the same outlined look as its characters and unusual colours to that linework. However, its first episode didn’t grab a number of other people (who were watching many streaming shows to start with and letting things shake out from there), and I saw a few more drop it partway through, which can weigh more on me than I suppose some would tell me it should. I did keep up with the small adventures of six girls of varying backgrounds who fall into putting on their own cheerleading performances for the encouragement of others, to wind up sometimes needing to encourage themselves. The question remained whether the series would have been helped by not being “a lone new pickup” or hindered in a fuller competition. It could be, anyway, that my uncertain thoughts about Machine Robo helped in this case.
Heading on to the second series of Major 2nd, I reached the point that had first caught my attention a few years ago now, when complaints about an apparently quite crummy-looking “girls playing baseball” series (in the quarter that had almost fallen apart in total amid serious production disruptions and rather bigger problems in the world) had been answered with a casual comment about a series that at one point happened to feature a fair number of girls on a co-ed team. Cross Game, some years before that, had established Japanese middle school (junior high) baseball teams could still be co-ed. The team Daigo and Mutsuko wound up in moving on from the series just previous happened to be two-thirds girls; over the course of this show, those players got to feeling much better developed than the roster-filler boys from that just-mentioned previous series. There didn’t seem much in the way of the most obvious forms of “fanservice,” beyond, perhaps, some shots fixing on the rears of girls winding up to pitch. It also took me quite a while to even happen to think there was no obvious trace of “girls competing over the boys that were to hand,” although I’d taken casual note of Mutsuko having a subtle crush on Daigo the boy (as ever) didn’t quite seem ready to pick up on. Things did move on to tournament play (still using all-white “rubber balls” and playing just seven innings) sooner than I’d expected. That tournament stretched out to where I wondered how much could happen in the remaining episodes, but there was a fair bit of development in them. This time, I also escaped worried thoughts about the series being one of “those” titles shortchanged on production values, even if one detail that most caught my eye was as simple as the sense of a certain delicacy to the linework. However, having been aware there hasn’t been any more anime telling the story of an unlicensed manga and supposing the emphasis on the female characters here would make them splitting off from whatever baseball career Daigo himself follows into high school and beyond kind of a letdown, it was a little unfortunate in a rare way for the very last episode to have the characters rally with apparent space left open for them to keep playing together in. “Use your own imagination!” is one thing, but at the moment that can get to seeming insubstantial.
Sengoku Youko picked up again after three months off with a new plot arc that managed to surprise me with some of the main characters disappeared and a young antagonist from the previous episode now on the side of the last main character from before. There was still a lot of superpowered action and some peculiar interludes between it, and a “time skip” added a little more interest, but I did start wondering if that action was starting to make things feel just a bit more conventional than the other series involving Satoshi Mizukami I’ve taken in. It then turned out the series would keep continuing into the new quarter. Weighing what I’d watch next, I at least contemplated taking my own break from the series. That, though, raised the obvious risk of just not picking it up again three months later.
There’d been a hole in my “Canlit” experience involving L.M. Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables. One of the things I did know about the book was that it was popular in Japan, popular enough to have been adapted into an anime in a long series of adaptations. Then, happening on a positive online post about the series and the simple thought it was now forty-five years old made me think I could get around to watching the “fansubs” I just happened to have had waiting for some time themselves.
The very first thought I had was “AVI files, huh? That takes me back.” When the encoding got pretty rough during the high-motion moments of the opening credits, I wondered about other screenshots I’d seen, and have to admit to seeking out and finding better-looking fansubs. (These ones, anyway, didn’t have “Green Gable” in their subtitles, something that seemed akin to spelling Anne without the E.) I was able to settle in to the series. The “proto-Ghibli” look was as strong as in Heidi or Future Boy Conan, although I did remind myself “‘Ghibli’ doesn’t mean just ‘Hayao Miyazaki.’” Things did seem kind of slow-paced, though; I wondered if this had something to do with the feeling that the Prince Edward Island scenery was pleasant but not as dramatic as the Swiss Alps in Heidi. There was some genuine variety to the character designs of the girls Anne’s age.
Partway through I did start wondering about Anne’s vocabulary in the subtitles being more varied than I associate with even professional work, and thinking there was a different source for the dialogue available. I sought out at last an ebook of Anne of Green Gables from Standard Ebooks and nodded in satisfaction at the obvious match; at the same time, I did get to thinking the anime showed things the novel just had Anne telling her adopters about. Both anime and novel, anyway, did have some dialogue between Anne and her “bosom friend” that didn’t feel all that distant from certain kinds of “girls’ love,” although in this case the original thought more have been more like the old-fashioned “Class S” stories and those certain complaints that “they’re going to grow out of it.”
Geting to the halfway point in the anime has brought me past the halfway point in the novel. I am getting conscious of old criticisms noticed that the animation quality slides in the second half of the series, which might have been a reason why I haven’t got to it until now. As I grappled with thoughts that I did have the novel to fall back to and there’s always more anime to get around to, then considered how I was sticking with Machine Robo, I took another look at the post that had shaped my thoughts and supposed there was still a bit of encouragement to continue there.
Even though I’d been watching the Urusei Yatsura anime from the 1980s at the time, I was tickled by the first announcements of a new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga. I took a break from the original anime three months before the scheduled premiere of the new version, supposing this might hold back unfortunate comparisons at least a little. Then, though, Sentai licensed the anime. Stuck with the established calculation that they don’t stream a lot of anime each season but they are quite likely to put those licenses out on disc, all of a sudden I was looking at a rather longer wait to get around to the new version. During that wait Discotek licensed the original TV series (which, of course, makes mentioning I’d already been watching it that much dodgier a topic to bring up), but as I collected those releases I did get to wondering what episodes had stuck in my mind to the point of wanting to see them again. My thoughts amounted to “there was that early half-episode where Sakura the shrine maiden-exorcist turned high school nurse consumes a gargantuan meal at the beach, the episode where the students try to grab lunch off campus while the teachers try to stop them, and... what else?”
At last, the new anime was available on disc, and I started into it. The new voices (an all-star cast, so I’d seen) seemed easy enough to accept at first, but with the very first lines from Lum, obnoxious alien and important step in the evolution of “drawn girlfriend candidates” herself, all of a sudden I was remembering seeing someone who’s pretty much just a “fan of old anime” having an instant “no sale” reaction. I still managed to reflect the second half of the first episode skipped ahead a little to a story where Lum is deep in her initial characterization as a delusional pest, but after that I did seem to get more comfortable with her new voice, too. One old comment that’s stuck in my mind is that the original anime had dropped Lum’s part-toddler, part-fire-breathing smartalec cousin Ten into early episodes well ahead of where he’d been introduced in the manga, apparently because he’d just been introduced in the manga as the anime had got under way. He didn’t show up right away in the new version, but I did have the impression it wasted no time in bringing in Mendou, the enormously rich twit nevertheless charming to the regular girls of the cast, and remembered another old comment his introduction could be interpreted as a sort of “soft reboot” of the manga, shifting from obnoxious aliens to high school mayhem.
By keeping up two storylines per episode the new anime seems to recall the energy that had appealed to me in the first episodes of the original series. I have to admit I don’t seem all that likely to laugh these days, but this new series can drag moments of laughter out of me. In pushing along to its second set of credit sequences I’ve happened to see both of the stories I just mentioned from the original (although Sakura’s enormous meal wound up a small moment included in a different story set at the beach). This is one case where I’ve been able to hold back uncertain feelings about how much entertainment these days amounts to safe-bet established properties being elaborated on to general exhaustion. On the other hand, I’m aware both that a new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2 is coming up (even as some lament Maison Ikkoku seems to have been neglected) and that I feel no particular compulsion to see it. (Still, maybe my general mixed reactions to Ranma 1/2 over the years added something to my pleasant surprise at having found so much enjoyment in Urusei Yatsura.)
I made a point of getting around to one just-completed series. A third set of Sound! Euphonium episodes had been greeted with positive thoughts of Kyoto Animation rebuilding after tragedy, making up for previous lamentations the story had an obvious path forward we might never get to see. I’d noticed that positivity staying high as the series had streamed. It moved the main characters into their third year of high school and positions of (student) importance in their wind ensemble band; that’s not the only thing building drama around performance, too. The impression of “gorgeous mundanity” remained strong. I suppose I might have felt downright relaxed about the continued moments I could imagine being jumped on to slash two of the main characters. That this didn’t seem to pervade all other girl-girl interactions (save, perhaps, for when characters who’d graduated in previous instalments showed up again in pairs) might have helped. At the same time, I guess I was still thinking there’s a difference between indulging in fantasy and expecting official confirmation. I was also conscious some things in the previous instalments of the series weren’t all that clear any more to me, perhaps most so the “second year” that had been presented through movies. Going back and watching everything again was a thought, if one always answered with “when would I ever manage it?” One thing that just might have helped there, though, was the recent unexpected announcement the first series was going to be released again on Blu-Ray in a more economically priced set, Pony Canyon USA’s own efforts at premium “neo-singles” not having worked out years before.
Even these days, occasional series some fans make a big deal of do slip through the cracks of being licensed for the ground level of streaming. More hard-bitten than some, I suppose, I have sought out the “fansubs” sometimes being turned out even in this day and age for certain of those shows. It could have been for that reason that I seemed more relaxed than some over a show called Girls Band Cry not being streamed. Before I could quite commit to seeking out its fansubs, though, news spread it would be streamed after the fact. When it turned out this would happen through a ragbag of obscure services, some reacted to this as another sign of something being bobbled within Toei Animation. I’ll admit I did contemplate again how the general indignation over Sony having been able or allowed to buy up most of the means for distributing anime over here doesn’t stop indignation whenever something is streamed through just about any of the remaining channels not under that company’s control. However, I also noticed one scrap of the ragbag was Hoopla, which I can access through my municipal library even if I most often seem to use it to read e-comics. In any case, as with when Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction showed up in the middle of the three months before, not watching quite as much anime as I once did made it easier to fit something new into even my abbreviated evenings.
I did wonder in advance about the subtitles, having to admit that the official subtitles for the Pretty Cure series Toei Animation is now making available over here had come to seem kind of stilted to me. (Another thing I have to admit is wondering if Soaring Sky Pretty Cure appealed to me that extra little bit over the three series just preceding it in the franchise I’d seen because I’d resorted to unofficial subtitles, even if I would start the official stream on another device while I was playing one of the saved videos...) The subtitles, though, did seem to read all right, even if they also gave me an impression the video on Hoopla was at a lower resolution. What might have compensated for that was Girls Band Cry using computer animation. Reactions to this had been more positive than with the last few computer-animated anime series I’ve watched (which by no means is “all of it”); a comment the animation was “like RWBY’s, but better” at least got my attention. The story that animation was in service of was also impressive. I did have to face how my personal standard of comparison for “teenaged girls and young women playing rock music” remains K-ON! after all these years with a more recent slice of Bocchi the Rock! when supposing Girls Band Cry had more rude rock-and-roll energy than “aren’t these high school girls just so precious when they play at being rockers?”, although that of course might be starting from a very low level. If the traditional formula is “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” then “sex” (as ever) amounts to reading a great deal into occasional moments between some of the girls in the band coming together over the course of the series (and, as ever, resorting to private fantasy about something only kind of like a “workplace relationship” because there’s no other alternative for what some insist is essential isn’t that exciting to me) and “drugs” amounts to the two somewhat older girls in the band drinking beer. I did think starting off that the opening theme didn’t impress me as much as at least one opening theme for K-ON! or indeed for Bocchi the Rock, but it did grow on me with time (along with noticing there were little bits of what did look like traditional hand-drawn animation mixed in every so often).
As I plodded further into Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos, I got to the point of taking another look at what scraps of information about the anime I’d noticed before linked to GoBots sites. (One of them now has to be pulled out of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) Among those scraps, one comment suggested the series did get better with time, a familiar enough encouragement of sorts from the days of anime series approaching fifty episodes in length. As things turned out, the journey of the handful of main characters in search of a vague McGuffin called “the Hyribead” did reach a fortified city-state (named “Emerald City,” but not that laden down with Wizard of Oz references so far as I could tell). From that point on, other Machine Robo characters recognizable as GoBot toys began to play a more significant role in the story. This did make the action feel a bit more varied than “martial arts” (so far as I understand that sort of thing to be). Still, I guess uncertain thoughts about “the sunk cost fallacy” did keep bouncing through my mind, even if they bounced against different thoughts that, maybe, there was indeed such a thing as being too quick to abandon series unfinished and that might even lead only to general burnout. There was also a perhaps-unfortunate temptation to proclaim, even if only to myself, “just because anime’s from ‘the Showa era,’ or even features ‘hand-drawn mechanical animation,’ doesn’t mean you’ll find it transcendent or something every time.” I did also happen to remember old convictions that watching GaoGaiGar (which is merely from the twentieth century) could invoke feelings of “being a preteen again and watching the best episode of Transformers ever.” Then, I realised the last episodes on the Discotek “standard definition Blu-Ray” appeared to be clip shows. That was a greater temptation to stop there at last, although I knew those clip shows were supposed to precede the beginning of another Machine Robo series. (Discotek licensed it as well, and I bought it, even if I’m aware of all the other series they released that seem more “giant robot” as I’d describe that, and the whole deal with “is it better to save what you suppose are the best for last, or to mix things up a bit?”)
So far as “Machine Robo was a somewhat peculiar substitute for marking the fortieth anniversary of that much more established property, the Transformers” went, the anime studio Trigger did happen to work on a brief music video for that anniversary. Watching it I was perhaps more conscious of all the quick details in it I didn’t feel familiar with (and so far as however many of them I was familiar with, having seen the late-1980s Japan-only Transformers series could have meant I recognized some characters other people wouldn’t), but in a way that could have been a certain strange reassurance the Transformers don’t altogether amount to recycling its initial characters, most notable and otherwise, over and over again.
More relaxed than some, I suppose, I kept watching Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction despite the complaints about its official subtitles (a few things about which did smooth out with the passage of time). While this was one case where I’d already read the manga the anime had been adapted from, I did get an impression a flashback sequence had been moved to earlier in the story, beginning to imply the main characters were in fact a bit more significant than altogether normal people trying to live normal lives as official incompetence and venality, or, indeed, just “the system,” seals their fate far above their awareness. I did wind up ready to suppose this had something to do with the anime having started as two movies and a particular moment not around the halfway mark of the manga being chosen for the dramatic ending of the first film, even if I didn’t go back to my manga to check. As the end-of-the-world moment anticipated through much of the manga passed with some characters left, I wondered if I’d remembered everything in the last volume of the manga, but was conscious there remained things about it that could leave people shrugging about “not committing to full and realistic darkness, no matter what science-beyond-science peculiarities had been set up after the beginning of the story.”
Having long been selective-to-picky about what new anime I watch streaming and having passed several recent years waiting for series to be finished in the slow-fading expectant anticipation of production problems, I did grapple with the thought of just “letting other people take the risk of seeing how things turn out.” As I was at least continuing a few streaming titles, though, I wound up deciding to take a chance on one series that had managed to catch my attention. Its name had been more or less translated as Narenare -Cheer For You!- A certain number of years had passed since I’d last seen an anime about cheerleading, and Anima Yell! had felt pretty lightweight. Narenare had more stunts in its cheerleading, and a moderately distinct look to its animation with backgrounds that shared the same outlined look as its characters and unusual colours to that linework. However, its first episode didn’t grab a number of other people (who were watching many streaming shows to start with and letting things shake out from there), and I saw a few more drop it partway through, which can weigh more on me than I suppose some would tell me it should. I did keep up with the small adventures of six girls of varying backgrounds who fall into putting on their own cheerleading performances for the encouragement of others, to wind up sometimes needing to encourage themselves. The question remained whether the series would have been helped by not being “a lone new pickup” or hindered in a fuller competition. It could be, anyway, that my uncertain thoughts about Machine Robo helped in this case.
Heading on to the second series of Major 2nd, I reached the point that had first caught my attention a few years ago now, when complaints about an apparently quite crummy-looking “girls playing baseball” series (in the quarter that had almost fallen apart in total amid serious production disruptions and rather bigger problems in the world) had been answered with a casual comment about a series that at one point happened to feature a fair number of girls on a co-ed team. Cross Game, some years before that, had established Japanese middle school (junior high) baseball teams could still be co-ed. The team Daigo and Mutsuko wound up in moving on from the series just previous happened to be two-thirds girls; over the course of this show, those players got to feeling much better developed than the roster-filler boys from that just-mentioned previous series. There didn’t seem much in the way of the most obvious forms of “fanservice,” beyond, perhaps, some shots fixing on the rears of girls winding up to pitch. It also took me quite a while to even happen to think there was no obvious trace of “girls competing over the boys that were to hand,” although I’d taken casual note of Mutsuko having a subtle crush on Daigo the boy (as ever) didn’t quite seem ready to pick up on. Things did move on to tournament play (still using all-white “rubber balls” and playing just seven innings) sooner than I’d expected. That tournament stretched out to where I wondered how much could happen in the remaining episodes, but there was a fair bit of development in them. This time, I also escaped worried thoughts about the series being one of “those” titles shortchanged on production values, even if one detail that most caught my eye was as simple as the sense of a certain delicacy to the linework. However, having been aware there hasn’t been any more anime telling the story of an unlicensed manga and supposing the emphasis on the female characters here would make them splitting off from whatever baseball career Daigo himself follows into high school and beyond kind of a letdown, it was a little unfortunate in a rare way for the very last episode to have the characters rally with apparent space left open for them to keep playing together in. “Use your own imagination!” is one thing, but at the moment that can get to seeming insubstantial.
Sengoku Youko picked up again after three months off with a new plot arc that managed to surprise me with some of the main characters disappeared and a young antagonist from the previous episode now on the side of the last main character from before. There was still a lot of superpowered action and some peculiar interludes between it, and a “time skip” added a little more interest, but I did start wondering if that action was starting to make things feel just a bit more conventional than the other series involving Satoshi Mizukami I’ve taken in. It then turned out the series would keep continuing into the new quarter. Weighing what I’d watch next, I at least contemplated taking my own break from the series. That, though, raised the obvious risk of just not picking it up again three months later.
There’d been a hole in my “Canlit” experience involving L.M. Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables. One of the things I did know about the book was that it was popular in Japan, popular enough to have been adapted into an anime in a long series of adaptations. Then, happening on a positive online post about the series and the simple thought it was now forty-five years old made me think I could get around to watching the “fansubs” I just happened to have had waiting for some time themselves.
The very first thought I had was “AVI files, huh? That takes me back.” When the encoding got pretty rough during the high-motion moments of the opening credits, I wondered about other screenshots I’d seen, and have to admit to seeking out and finding better-looking fansubs. (These ones, anyway, didn’t have “Green Gable” in their subtitles, something that seemed akin to spelling Anne without the E.) I was able to settle in to the series. The “proto-Ghibli” look was as strong as in Heidi or Future Boy Conan, although I did remind myself “‘Ghibli’ doesn’t mean just ‘Hayao Miyazaki.’” Things did seem kind of slow-paced, though; I wondered if this had something to do with the feeling that the Prince Edward Island scenery was pleasant but not as dramatic as the Swiss Alps in Heidi. There was some genuine variety to the character designs of the girls Anne’s age.
Partway through I did start wondering about Anne’s vocabulary in the subtitles being more varied than I associate with even professional work, and thinking there was a different source for the dialogue available. I sought out at last an ebook of Anne of Green Gables from Standard Ebooks and nodded in satisfaction at the obvious match; at the same time, I did get to thinking the anime showed things the novel just had Anne telling her adopters about. Both anime and novel, anyway, did have some dialogue between Anne and her “bosom friend” that didn’t feel all that distant from certain kinds of “girls’ love,” although in this case the original thought more have been more like the old-fashioned “Class S” stories and those certain complaints that “they’re going to grow out of it.”
Geting to the halfway point in the anime has brought me past the halfway point in the novel. I am getting conscious of old criticisms noticed that the animation quality slides in the second half of the series, which might have been a reason why I haven’t got to it until now. As I grappled with thoughts that I did have the novel to fall back to and there’s always more anime to get around to, then considered how I was sticking with Machine Robo, I took another look at the post that had shaped my thoughts and supposed there was still a bit of encouragement to continue there.
Even though I’d been watching the Urusei Yatsura anime from the 1980s at the time, I was tickled by the first announcements of a new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga. I took a break from the original anime three months before the scheduled premiere of the new version, supposing this might hold back unfortunate comparisons at least a little. Then, though, Sentai licensed the anime. Stuck with the established calculation that they don’t stream a lot of anime each season but they are quite likely to put those licenses out on disc, all of a sudden I was looking at a rather longer wait to get around to the new version. During that wait Discotek licensed the original TV series (which, of course, makes mentioning I’d already been watching it that much dodgier a topic to bring up), but as I collected those releases I did get to wondering what episodes had stuck in my mind to the point of wanting to see them again. My thoughts amounted to “there was that early half-episode where Sakura the shrine maiden-exorcist turned high school nurse consumes a gargantuan meal at the beach, the episode where the students try to grab lunch off campus while the teachers try to stop them, and... what else?”
At last, the new anime was available on disc, and I started into it. The new voices (an all-star cast, so I’d seen) seemed easy enough to accept at first, but with the very first lines from Lum, obnoxious alien and important step in the evolution of “drawn girlfriend candidates” herself, all of a sudden I was remembering seeing someone who’s pretty much just a “fan of old anime” having an instant “no sale” reaction. I still managed to reflect the second half of the first episode skipped ahead a little to a story where Lum is deep in her initial characterization as a delusional pest, but after that I did seem to get more comfortable with her new voice, too. One old comment that’s stuck in my mind is that the original anime had dropped Lum’s part-toddler, part-fire-breathing smartalec cousin Ten into early episodes well ahead of where he’d been introduced in the manga, apparently because he’d just been introduced in the manga as the anime had got under way. He didn’t show up right away in the new version, but I did have the impression it wasted no time in bringing in Mendou, the enormously rich twit nevertheless charming to the regular girls of the cast, and remembered another old comment his introduction could be interpreted as a sort of “soft reboot” of the manga, shifting from obnoxious aliens to high school mayhem.
By keeping up two storylines per episode the new anime seems to recall the energy that had appealed to me in the first episodes of the original series. I have to admit I don’t seem all that likely to laugh these days, but this new series can drag moments of laughter out of me. In pushing along to its second set of credit sequences I’ve happened to see both of the stories I just mentioned from the original (although Sakura’s enormous meal wound up a small moment included in a different story set at the beach). This is one case where I’ve been able to hold back uncertain feelings about how much entertainment these days amounts to safe-bet established properties being elaborated on to general exhaustion. On the other hand, I’m aware both that a new adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2 is coming up (even as some lament Maison Ikkoku seems to have been neglected) and that I feel no particular compulsion to see it. (Still, maybe my general mixed reactions to Ranma 1/2 over the years added something to my pleasant surprise at having found so much enjoyment in Urusei Yatsura.)
I made a point of getting around to one just-completed series. A third set of Sound! Euphonium episodes had been greeted with positive thoughts of Kyoto Animation rebuilding after tragedy, making up for previous lamentations the story had an obvious path forward we might never get to see. I’d noticed that positivity staying high as the series had streamed. It moved the main characters into their third year of high school and positions of (student) importance in their wind ensemble band; that’s not the only thing building drama around performance, too. The impression of “gorgeous mundanity” remained strong. I suppose I might have felt downright relaxed about the continued moments I could imagine being jumped on to slash two of the main characters. That this didn’t seem to pervade all other girl-girl interactions (save, perhaps, for when characters who’d graduated in previous instalments showed up again in pairs) might have helped. At the same time, I guess I was still thinking there’s a difference between indulging in fantasy and expecting official confirmation. I was also conscious some things in the previous instalments of the series weren’t all that clear any more to me, perhaps most so the “second year” that had been presented through movies. Going back and watching everything again was a thought, if one always answered with “when would I ever manage it?” One thing that just might have helped there, though, was the recent unexpected announcement the first series was going to be released again on Blu-Ray in a more economically priced set, Pony Canyon USA’s own efforts at premium “neo-singles” not having worked out years before.
Even these days, occasional series some fans make a big deal of do slip through the cracks of being licensed for the ground level of streaming. More hard-bitten than some, I suppose, I have sought out the “fansubs” sometimes being turned out even in this day and age for certain of those shows. It could have been for that reason that I seemed more relaxed than some over a show called Girls Band Cry not being streamed. Before I could quite commit to seeking out its fansubs, though, news spread it would be streamed after the fact. When it turned out this would happen through a ragbag of obscure services, some reacted to this as another sign of something being bobbled within Toei Animation. I’ll admit I did contemplate again how the general indignation over Sony having been able or allowed to buy up most of the means for distributing anime over here doesn’t stop indignation whenever something is streamed through just about any of the remaining channels not under that company’s control. However, I also noticed one scrap of the ragbag was Hoopla, which I can access through my municipal library even if I most often seem to use it to read e-comics. In any case, as with when Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction showed up in the middle of the three months before, not watching quite as much anime as I once did made it easier to fit something new into even my abbreviated evenings.
I did wonder in advance about the subtitles, having to admit that the official subtitles for the Pretty Cure series Toei Animation is now making available over here had come to seem kind of stilted to me. (Another thing I have to admit is wondering if Soaring Sky Pretty Cure appealed to me that extra little bit over the three series just preceding it in the franchise I’d seen because I’d resorted to unofficial subtitles, even if I would start the official stream on another device while I was playing one of the saved videos...) The subtitles, though, did seem to read all right, even if they also gave me an impression the video on Hoopla was at a lower resolution. What might have compensated for that was Girls Band Cry using computer animation. Reactions to this had been more positive than with the last few computer-animated anime series I’ve watched (which by no means is “all of it”); a comment the animation was “like RWBY’s, but better” at least got my attention. The story that animation was in service of was also impressive. I did have to face how my personal standard of comparison for “teenaged girls and young women playing rock music” remains K-ON! after all these years with a more recent slice of Bocchi the Rock! when supposing Girls Band Cry had more rude rock-and-roll energy than “aren’t these high school girls just so precious when they play at being rockers?”, although that of course might be starting from a very low level. If the traditional formula is “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” then “sex” (as ever) amounts to reading a great deal into occasional moments between some of the girls in the band coming together over the course of the series (and, as ever, resorting to private fantasy about something only kind of like a “workplace relationship” because there’s no other alternative for what some insist is essential isn’t that exciting to me) and “drugs” amounts to the two somewhat older girls in the band drinking beer. I did think starting off that the opening theme didn’t impress me as much as at least one opening theme for K-ON! or indeed for Bocchi the Rock, but it did grow on me with time (along with noticing there were little bits of what did look like traditional hand-drawn animation mixed in every so often).