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2024: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
At the beginning of October I’d worked out an anime viewing schedule fitted to what I was still thinking of as increased constraints on my time. It would mix some antique series seen via “fansubs,” some not quite as old shows on Blu-Ray discs, and just a few brand-new streaming titles. I’d only seen one episode apiece of the “Blu-Ray shows,” though, before winding up in the hospital with a broken hip. While I have to acknowledge the personal good fortune of having family who could head to where I live and take care of things for the first weeks of recovery, the additional people in my place did make watching Blu-Rays on my big TV feel a little awkward. I dropped back to what I could watch on my iPad, which amounted to the fansubs and streaming titles. The “Blu-Ray shows” were replaced with a few more newly streaming titles that had at least got my attention before but for which I’d tried to come up with reasons why they had to fall by the wayside. It wasn’t until I’d recovered to the point of going back to work and faced turning in earlier again that I happened to wonder if I could have worked back up to “two episodes a day every day” in my time off and raced through an extra catalog title or two. Still, in that time I had read through a manga series I’d already finished, perhaps even rarer for me than returning to an anime series, and got a good way through an old multi-part documentary. Even that small variety might well been more satisfying than uninterrupted anime.
As I crossed the halfway mark in Anne of Green Gables I was conscious of certain comments run into over the years that animation quality slipped later in the series. It’s possible things got to looking a little less impressive in general; that I’m using the word “possible” does seem to mean things weren’t like certain infamous examples of inconsistent-to-exhausted animation in anime. I do sort of want to bring up impressions of moments with subtle “acting without words” early in the series that couldn’t be matched later, but then I can’t quite say what those specific moments were. If one thing did distract from fixating on hypothetical moments of production weakness, it was the much more obvious change of the series bringing in new character designs as Anne grew from an orphan girl to a teenager (to use an anachronism; L.M. Montgomery’s original novel once made a point of the change from “child” to “girl.”) This was something I was happy to think of as a potential strength of animation as compared to live action. It just might, though, have also been a distraction from that ever-returning uneasy awareness of the combination of “you started off with blithe unconsciousness of the original identities of certain cartoon characters rebadged with Western names” and “you just haven’t got all that much into live action from Japan, be it ‘special effects shows,’ ‘adaptations of certain kinds of manga,’ or ‘critically favoured original productions’” now becoming a dark temptation to wonder if in this case the drawings would have been more casually accepted by their intended audience than an imported live-action series.
In any case, the series spent enough time with Anne as a studious teenager that her younger days getting into assorted scrapes faded back in my mind. There’d always been the thought that, for all that the anime “showed” what the novel often just had Anne “tell” her foster parents about after the fact, it could feel as if it was stretching its source material out some distance to fill fifty episodes; it was just that I kept imagining being told admitting that thought only revealed my utter philistinism and decayed attention span, unable to appreciate the deliberate establishment of setting (Green Gables and its surroundings got to feeling quite well-established) and mood. An announcement there’d be a new anime adaptation of the novel got my attention just for showing up as I was watching through this older one; I did notice immediate comments this new adaptation just wouldn’t be able to compare to the older series, so I can suppose a lot of people haven’t worried very much about the question of animation quality.
“Netflix-exclusive anime” no longer seems under quite the same general cloud as I, at least, was tempted to suppose “everyone else” applied to it a few years ago. When a series called Blue Box attracted a bit of positive anticipation and attention starting off, I decided to watch it. It is sort of tempting to joke about what “recycling: the anime” would be like, but the actual show is a high school romance, with the brief opening description “a badminton-playing boy meets a basketball-playing girl.” (They go to a sports-focused school with a gymnasium of considerable size.) I was just settling in to how Taiki was taking particular notice of the slightly older Chinatsu (he politely calls and thinks of her as “Chinatsu Senpai”) when the first episode’s end set up a convenient situation I have to admit I associate with sleazier, “guy-targeted” romance anime and manga. Afterwards, though, things stayed more or less restrained for all that I soon recognised the series was, indeed, “guy-focused,” spending very little time presenting just what Chinatsu is thinking. For that matter, we don’t see very much girls’ basketball being played for all that the opening credits themselves seem to establish that imbalance of emphasis. (The badminton action, as Taiki tries to improve to the point where he’ll feel worthy of declaring his feelings to Chinatsu, isn’t quite as grandiose as I remember the animation in Hanebado! being, but then this series doesn’t go to the overripe lengths of the earlier show’s melodrama either.) As a certain amount of grumbling about this developed I did try telling myself people are not privy to the interior monologues of their interests. However, the familiar complication of “he could wind up with this girl,” involving a girl called Hina in rhythmic gymnastics who was “just friends” with Taiki at the start of the show only to realise her true feelings just a little too late, produced its own unfortunate complications given we were shown what she was thinking. My usual casual thought “you’re young; you can always find true love in college” might have been a bit harder to apply this time.
A number of years ago, I contributed to a Kickstarter for a “pilot episode” called Mecha-Ude, thinking there seemed something at least a little unusual about even an action series given it involved “extra mechanical arms popping out from under the clothing of the characters.” That sample product turned out more satisfying than the previous “anime pilot” Kickstarter I’d paid into, even if it was in media res action rather than “here’s where everything starts.” There haven’t been many comparable Kickstarter projects since (at least that I’ve noticed), but it did get my attention when it was announced the concept was being expanded into a full series. I made a point of it being one of the limited number of streaming series I was going to watch straight off.
There remained something interesting about the concept and the designs had a distinctive and even appealing “cartooniness” to them, to say nothing of at least some of the mechanical arms (who were “characters” themselves) looking as if they were being drawn by hand. At the same time, the story soon gave me a sense of a lot of material being crammed into a limited number of episodes, getting much more complicated than “scrappy renegades bonding with their mechanical-arm partners versus the minions of an evil corporation technologically controlling their mechanical-arm weapons.” I’m afraid that at a certain point I got to remembering how calls for “original anime to stand out against diffident adaptations” crash into complaints that “the writing’s the problem with most original anime,” and supposing just about any comment from anyone else would be discouraging and depressing, for all that I wanted to keep liking this series. (For a while I was waiting to see if the Kickstarter product got recycled as a midway-through episode, but that didn’t seem to happen.)
It’s been a while since the second series of Love Life Superstar left off with a cliffhanger and the promise of a third series. Since then I’ve seen two series of short gag episodes and an OVA featuring the characters of the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, said goodbye to a mobile game that didn’t involve the Superstar characters, returned to the anime featuring the original Love Live characters, and sampled a mobile game introduced with its end-of-service date already set that at least included the Superstar characters. Despite all the time that took, I didn’t have too much trouble settling back into this particular story. Although it covered the third year of high school for the original five Superstar characters, their designs didn’t look to have changed to show them a little older. I’d also known in advance just two new characters would be joining the group of “school idols,” one of them already established and the other linked to another established character. They were both a bit “difficult” at first, but the show did find a different and interesting way to complicate things on the way to the final state made clear in the opening credits. There was also one of the “trips overseas” I know have featured in the movies concluding previous franchises, with everyone going to Shanghai, home city of the aspiring school idol Keke. (Her name does sound more like “kuku” to me, although one way or another she did seem mature enough in this latest series that I wound up not quite as swift as I once was to tell myself she is, indeed, “koo-koo.”) All in all things did build and wrap up quite nicely in the final episodes (which included a different, quicker trip overseas to boot).
I hadn’t quite found the time to continue watching Sengoku Youko at the beginning of October. The intimation it wasn’t quite impressive enough to follow through on no matter what was a bit discouraging; telling myself I could catch up on it later led to the question of whether this “later” would turn into “never.” With “watching Blu-Rays on my big TV” feeling awkward with my family at my place, though, that did open the time to pick up this series again. The action built into a multi-episode battle bringing back the characters who’d fallen by the wayside in the course of its first block of episodes, and then things wrapped up with a sort of “there are no real villains, just misunderstandings” resolution that had me thinking once more of other stories from Satoshi Mizukami. At the end of the thirty-fourth episode I started wondering if that was it; it was a somehow unusual number of episodes for an anime series even with two clip shows thrown in. Then, a thirty-fifth episode offered an extended coda; I supposed that number of episodes was a little more familiar.
A series with the all-caps title DAN DA DAN had been talked up as this season got under way, but I have to admit thoughts of a “hype machine” picking one thing to push had me thinking “why should I watch something just because everyone else is?” Noticing at least one first reaction be uneasy over an apparent nasty edge to an opening threat might have been a peculiar reinforcement of that personal effort at detached disdain. With the “Blu-Ray titles” bumped out of my viewing, though, I settled on being one more person viewing DAN DA DAN too.
The brief opening description of the series might be “a stylish high school girl who believes in spirits but not aliens meets an awkward high school boy who believes in aliens but not spirits”; each trying to convince the other to widen their beliefs gets them in trouble they emerge from with strange powers, which turn out handy when still more spirits and aliens show up. This turned out quite impressive with animation from Science SARU. I have to admit that a certain, perhaps even “limited,” amount of raunchiness in the series, almost surely the source of that initial uneasiness (and that before we got to “the world’s hottest grandma”), worked for me and even had me thinking of “the olden times of anime” (so far as what was released “over here” for most of the 1990s, anyway). Doses of pathos applied to some of the supernatural threats managed to help in their own fashion too. For all of that I wasn’t quite watching the series the day it streamed, which meant I noticed the announcement it would soon continue before seeing the last episode; when that last episode ended on a cliffhanger I supposed I could see the point of the announcement being made when it had been.
Towards the end of these three months I did manage to get around to a few Blu-Rays, even if they contained self-contained OVAs released by the under-new-ownership AnimEigo. I was watching Riding Bean for the first time, although I’d known about it for a long time just because its characters had wound up in the “bot fodder” for one of my favourite MSTings (which had also involved Gunsmith Cats, which I’d seen at my university’s anime club before reading the MSTing itself, and Here is Greenwood, which I hadn’t taken anywhere near as long getting around to). I’d been ready to suppose whatever had been presented in the MSTing hadn’t been quite “accurate” compared to the original material, but it still surprised me a bit that the main character Bean was a getaway driver for hire quite willing to work for crooks. He had just enough ethics even so to wind up caught between those crooks and the law, emerging via “anime violence” and some impressive driving animation. For some reason I was a bit struck by how “sunny” the Chicago setting looked for much of the OVA.
I had seen Otaku no Video before, if long enough ago that I was now a little curious as to how my reactions to this “anime about anime fans” would have changed. It’s possible I’m more familiar with the references of what was already something of a “nostalgia piece” when it was made at the beginning of the 1990s (although I haven’t quite seen everything I recognised), and I was conscious of how it gets to the point of implying “becoming an otaku” amounted to becoming disreputable. At the same time, I could also remember my old thoughts that the OVA’s first half, where an “ordinary” tennis-playing guy runs into an old friend who’s still a “fan” and is enticed into the otaku lifestyle, was more interesting to me than its second half, where a comedic take on the prehistory of the animation studio Gainax started to feel an awful lot like “wish fulfilment” to me. I did try telling myself this time that the sheer speed and scale of the rise might be absurd enough to defuse that feeling. The live-action segments spaced throughout might have seemed a bit of a unifying element now.
As for one other anime I’d seen before, I was interested in going back to the very first Space Battleship Yamato series in some part just because it had reached its fiftieth anniversary. In fact, I started into my “fansubs” of it (with just a thought or two of whether someone would be able to track them down this long after I’d got my own hands on them) the first Saturday morning in October, noticed the original broadcast date on the opening title card, and told myself “if I wait just one day, I’ll be able to watch the first episode on the very date matching that card.” However, that specific day happened to be the one I was in the hospital being operated on to put screws into my leg bone, my accident having happened the previous afternoon. I at least managed to begin the series once I was out of the hospital; I’d always intended to “get out of synch” by watching two episodes a week to head through it in a mere three months.
I remembered the space opera voyage of the series well enough to look forward to seeing it again, but I have to admit to some grappling with a certain personal complication that first stuck with me years before even that initial viewing. I hadn’t quite been aware of the “localized” version of Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers, until getting online in the mid-1990s. It can seem that from that moment, though, I’ve kept suspecting at least some Star Blazers fans are among the quickest to condemn Robotech. When, just past the turn of the millennium, a very early effort at “official online streaming” (it involved RealVideo) happened to offer Star Blazers, I took a chance on it. For the first five episodes I was interested enough; I can remember being impressed the show acknowledged the World War II battleship at the bottom of an ocean dried up by alien attacks, being converted into a starship to travel to a distant planet and bring back a mechanism to cleanse the deadly radiation left by those attacks, remained the Japanese warship Yamato before the rebuilt ship was renamed something more neutral. The sixth episode, though, had just enough obvious editing and redubbing to soft-pedal some killing that I’m afraid I started thinking of the endless voiceover declarations “robot supply ships” were being blown up in “the other Voltron,” and I stopped watching Star Blazers at that point regardless of potential insistences things still weren’t anywhere near as egregious in it. Of course, before some undeniable examples of Harmony Gold getting in the way of merchandising led to the general consensus later Macross titles weren’t being brought over here just because anime-releasing companies couldn’t afford expected legal expenses (despite the general certainty the courts would find in their favour if they only had a little more money) and even before a man whose name was prominent in Robotech’s credits had brought more anime over here but hadn’t released subtitled versions, there’s the question of whether “Star Blazers didn’t have these obviously reprehensible changes made in Robotech” outweighs the more general and self-excusing shrug that we’re all more forgiving towards our own “gateway titles,” given I didn’t watch much of the mid-1990s wave of dubbed anime on TV having joined my university’s anime club at the same time.
This time around, though, I was at least able to tell myself that while I’d thought Robotech “like Transformers” or “like Voltron” (or even like a much more obscure series that just happened to have got on my local TV station and just happened to have been made by some of the people who’d made Space Battleship Yamato, if not the people most linked by fandom with the excellence of the more famous series) but “more interesting,” Star Blazers would surely have stood out far more among other cartoons at the end of the 1970s. (Over the years I’ve seen two people I don’t associate with “anime fandom” mention watching the show themselves back then.) I also happened to think of Space Battleship Yamato itself in a new context as well. Where I’d once been presented with comments about it leading to Mobile Suit Gundam and then to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, then amused myself with thoughts that animated series like Heidi had done much better in the ratings (which did link Yamato with a few other series spanning a decade of time I’ve seen comments about involving “struggling just for trying to push the envelope”), I was now considering the early “super robot” series. Some of them, at least, ran for twice as long or longer than Yamato, but they could feel much more “the same thing over and over.” The voyage of the Yamato offered a greater sense of progression to the story, but in some ways the simple variety of things that happened during that voyage appealed in itself. An action-light episode where the crew called home just before passing beyond communications range impressed me when I saw it, and then I saw impressed comments from other people too. Too, the scientific fortresses “super robots” deployed from were more eccentric settings than the Yamato itself seemed to become; whether having invoked an actual ship helped there is something I haven’t quite decided on yet. (I am aware the actual ship was sunk before completing a one-way voyage to counterattack the American invasion of Okinawa months before the end of World War II, with some element of “it can’t just be bombed in the harbour” leading to the death of its crew. Whatever the risks of commenting on the anime from across a language barrier, I did get to thinking the starship wasn’t just “an ever-victorious warship” now.) I can also admit that I’d first commented on the “remake” (which I’ve seen twice since watching the original, even if I haven’t opened the Blu-Rays eventually released in full and trailed off on the remake’s follow-ups) as diverging from the original, but a good number of things about the original had now faded from my memory over the years.
As I crossed the halfway mark in Anne of Green Gables I was conscious of certain comments run into over the years that animation quality slipped later in the series. It’s possible things got to looking a little less impressive in general; that I’m using the word “possible” does seem to mean things weren’t like certain infamous examples of inconsistent-to-exhausted animation in anime. I do sort of want to bring up impressions of moments with subtle “acting without words” early in the series that couldn’t be matched later, but then I can’t quite say what those specific moments were. If one thing did distract from fixating on hypothetical moments of production weakness, it was the much more obvious change of the series bringing in new character designs as Anne grew from an orphan girl to a teenager (to use an anachronism; L.M. Montgomery’s original novel once made a point of the change from “child” to “girl.”) This was something I was happy to think of as a potential strength of animation as compared to live action. It just might, though, have also been a distraction from that ever-returning uneasy awareness of the combination of “you started off with blithe unconsciousness of the original identities of certain cartoon characters rebadged with Western names” and “you just haven’t got all that much into live action from Japan, be it ‘special effects shows,’ ‘adaptations of certain kinds of manga,’ or ‘critically favoured original productions’” now becoming a dark temptation to wonder if in this case the drawings would have been more casually accepted by their intended audience than an imported live-action series.
In any case, the series spent enough time with Anne as a studious teenager that her younger days getting into assorted scrapes faded back in my mind. There’d always been the thought that, for all that the anime “showed” what the novel often just had Anne “tell” her foster parents about after the fact, it could feel as if it was stretching its source material out some distance to fill fifty episodes; it was just that I kept imagining being told admitting that thought only revealed my utter philistinism and decayed attention span, unable to appreciate the deliberate establishment of setting (Green Gables and its surroundings got to feeling quite well-established) and mood. An announcement there’d be a new anime adaptation of the novel got my attention just for showing up as I was watching through this older one; I did notice immediate comments this new adaptation just wouldn’t be able to compare to the older series, so I can suppose a lot of people haven’t worried very much about the question of animation quality.
“Netflix-exclusive anime” no longer seems under quite the same general cloud as I, at least, was tempted to suppose “everyone else” applied to it a few years ago. When a series called Blue Box attracted a bit of positive anticipation and attention starting off, I decided to watch it. It is sort of tempting to joke about what “recycling: the anime” would be like, but the actual show is a high school romance, with the brief opening description “a badminton-playing boy meets a basketball-playing girl.” (They go to a sports-focused school with a gymnasium of considerable size.) I was just settling in to how Taiki was taking particular notice of the slightly older Chinatsu (he politely calls and thinks of her as “Chinatsu Senpai”) when the first episode’s end set up a convenient situation I have to admit I associate with sleazier, “guy-targeted” romance anime and manga. Afterwards, though, things stayed more or less restrained for all that I soon recognised the series was, indeed, “guy-focused,” spending very little time presenting just what Chinatsu is thinking. For that matter, we don’t see very much girls’ basketball being played for all that the opening credits themselves seem to establish that imbalance of emphasis. (The badminton action, as Taiki tries to improve to the point where he’ll feel worthy of declaring his feelings to Chinatsu, isn’t quite as grandiose as I remember the animation in Hanebado! being, but then this series doesn’t go to the overripe lengths of the earlier show’s melodrama either.) As a certain amount of grumbling about this developed I did try telling myself people are not privy to the interior monologues of their interests. However, the familiar complication of “he could wind up with this girl,” involving a girl called Hina in rhythmic gymnastics who was “just friends” with Taiki at the start of the show only to realise her true feelings just a little too late, produced its own unfortunate complications given we were shown what she was thinking. My usual casual thought “you’re young; you can always find true love in college” might have been a bit harder to apply this time.
A number of years ago, I contributed to a Kickstarter for a “pilot episode” called Mecha-Ude, thinking there seemed something at least a little unusual about even an action series given it involved “extra mechanical arms popping out from under the clothing of the characters.” That sample product turned out more satisfying than the previous “anime pilot” Kickstarter I’d paid into, even if it was in media res action rather than “here’s where everything starts.” There haven’t been many comparable Kickstarter projects since (at least that I’ve noticed), but it did get my attention when it was announced the concept was being expanded into a full series. I made a point of it being one of the limited number of streaming series I was going to watch straight off.
There remained something interesting about the concept and the designs had a distinctive and even appealing “cartooniness” to them, to say nothing of at least some of the mechanical arms (who were “characters” themselves) looking as if they were being drawn by hand. At the same time, the story soon gave me a sense of a lot of material being crammed into a limited number of episodes, getting much more complicated than “scrappy renegades bonding with their mechanical-arm partners versus the minions of an evil corporation technologically controlling their mechanical-arm weapons.” I’m afraid that at a certain point I got to remembering how calls for “original anime to stand out against diffident adaptations” crash into complaints that “the writing’s the problem with most original anime,” and supposing just about any comment from anyone else would be discouraging and depressing, for all that I wanted to keep liking this series. (For a while I was waiting to see if the Kickstarter product got recycled as a midway-through episode, but that didn’t seem to happen.)
It’s been a while since the second series of Love Life Superstar left off with a cliffhanger and the promise of a third series. Since then I’ve seen two series of short gag episodes and an OVA featuring the characters of the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, said goodbye to a mobile game that didn’t involve the Superstar characters, returned to the anime featuring the original Love Live characters, and sampled a mobile game introduced with its end-of-service date already set that at least included the Superstar characters. Despite all the time that took, I didn’t have too much trouble settling back into this particular story. Although it covered the third year of high school for the original five Superstar characters, their designs didn’t look to have changed to show them a little older. I’d also known in advance just two new characters would be joining the group of “school idols,” one of them already established and the other linked to another established character. They were both a bit “difficult” at first, but the show did find a different and interesting way to complicate things on the way to the final state made clear in the opening credits. There was also one of the “trips overseas” I know have featured in the movies concluding previous franchises, with everyone going to Shanghai, home city of the aspiring school idol Keke. (Her name does sound more like “kuku” to me, although one way or another she did seem mature enough in this latest series that I wound up not quite as swift as I once was to tell myself she is, indeed, “koo-koo.”) All in all things did build and wrap up quite nicely in the final episodes (which included a different, quicker trip overseas to boot).
I hadn’t quite found the time to continue watching Sengoku Youko at the beginning of October. The intimation it wasn’t quite impressive enough to follow through on no matter what was a bit discouraging; telling myself I could catch up on it later led to the question of whether this “later” would turn into “never.” With “watching Blu-Rays on my big TV” feeling awkward with my family at my place, though, that did open the time to pick up this series again. The action built into a multi-episode battle bringing back the characters who’d fallen by the wayside in the course of its first block of episodes, and then things wrapped up with a sort of “there are no real villains, just misunderstandings” resolution that had me thinking once more of other stories from Satoshi Mizukami. At the end of the thirty-fourth episode I started wondering if that was it; it was a somehow unusual number of episodes for an anime series even with two clip shows thrown in. Then, a thirty-fifth episode offered an extended coda; I supposed that number of episodes was a little more familiar.
A series with the all-caps title DAN DA DAN had been talked up as this season got under way, but I have to admit thoughts of a “hype machine” picking one thing to push had me thinking “why should I watch something just because everyone else is?” Noticing at least one first reaction be uneasy over an apparent nasty edge to an opening threat might have been a peculiar reinforcement of that personal effort at detached disdain. With the “Blu-Ray titles” bumped out of my viewing, though, I settled on being one more person viewing DAN DA DAN too.
The brief opening description of the series might be “a stylish high school girl who believes in spirits but not aliens meets an awkward high school boy who believes in aliens but not spirits”; each trying to convince the other to widen their beliefs gets them in trouble they emerge from with strange powers, which turn out handy when still more spirits and aliens show up. This turned out quite impressive with animation from Science SARU. I have to admit that a certain, perhaps even “limited,” amount of raunchiness in the series, almost surely the source of that initial uneasiness (and that before we got to “the world’s hottest grandma”), worked for me and even had me thinking of “the olden times of anime” (so far as what was released “over here” for most of the 1990s, anyway). Doses of pathos applied to some of the supernatural threats managed to help in their own fashion too. For all of that I wasn’t quite watching the series the day it streamed, which meant I noticed the announcement it would soon continue before seeing the last episode; when that last episode ended on a cliffhanger I supposed I could see the point of the announcement being made when it had been.
Towards the end of these three months I did manage to get around to a few Blu-Rays, even if they contained self-contained OVAs released by the under-new-ownership AnimEigo. I was watching Riding Bean for the first time, although I’d known about it for a long time just because its characters had wound up in the “bot fodder” for one of my favourite MSTings (which had also involved Gunsmith Cats, which I’d seen at my university’s anime club before reading the MSTing itself, and Here is Greenwood, which I hadn’t taken anywhere near as long getting around to). I’d been ready to suppose whatever had been presented in the MSTing hadn’t been quite “accurate” compared to the original material, but it still surprised me a bit that the main character Bean was a getaway driver for hire quite willing to work for crooks. He had just enough ethics even so to wind up caught between those crooks and the law, emerging via “anime violence” and some impressive driving animation. For some reason I was a bit struck by how “sunny” the Chicago setting looked for much of the OVA.
I had seen Otaku no Video before, if long enough ago that I was now a little curious as to how my reactions to this “anime about anime fans” would have changed. It’s possible I’m more familiar with the references of what was already something of a “nostalgia piece” when it was made at the beginning of the 1990s (although I haven’t quite seen everything I recognised), and I was conscious of how it gets to the point of implying “becoming an otaku” amounted to becoming disreputable. At the same time, I could also remember my old thoughts that the OVA’s first half, where an “ordinary” tennis-playing guy runs into an old friend who’s still a “fan” and is enticed into the otaku lifestyle, was more interesting to me than its second half, where a comedic take on the prehistory of the animation studio Gainax started to feel an awful lot like “wish fulfilment” to me. I did try telling myself this time that the sheer speed and scale of the rise might be absurd enough to defuse that feeling. The live-action segments spaced throughout might have seemed a bit of a unifying element now.
As for one other anime I’d seen before, I was interested in going back to the very first Space Battleship Yamato series in some part just because it had reached its fiftieth anniversary. In fact, I started into my “fansubs” of it (with just a thought or two of whether someone would be able to track them down this long after I’d got my own hands on them) the first Saturday morning in October, noticed the original broadcast date on the opening title card, and told myself “if I wait just one day, I’ll be able to watch the first episode on the very date matching that card.” However, that specific day happened to be the one I was in the hospital being operated on to put screws into my leg bone, my accident having happened the previous afternoon. I at least managed to begin the series once I was out of the hospital; I’d always intended to “get out of synch” by watching two episodes a week to head through it in a mere three months.
I remembered the space opera voyage of the series well enough to look forward to seeing it again, but I have to admit to some grappling with a certain personal complication that first stuck with me years before even that initial viewing. I hadn’t quite been aware of the “localized” version of Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers, until getting online in the mid-1990s. It can seem that from that moment, though, I’ve kept suspecting at least some Star Blazers fans are among the quickest to condemn Robotech. When, just past the turn of the millennium, a very early effort at “official online streaming” (it involved RealVideo) happened to offer Star Blazers, I took a chance on it. For the first five episodes I was interested enough; I can remember being impressed the show acknowledged the World War II battleship at the bottom of an ocean dried up by alien attacks, being converted into a starship to travel to a distant planet and bring back a mechanism to cleanse the deadly radiation left by those attacks, remained the Japanese warship Yamato before the rebuilt ship was renamed something more neutral. The sixth episode, though, had just enough obvious editing and redubbing to soft-pedal some killing that I’m afraid I started thinking of the endless voiceover declarations “robot supply ships” were being blown up in “the other Voltron,” and I stopped watching Star Blazers at that point regardless of potential insistences things still weren’t anywhere near as egregious in it. Of course, before some undeniable examples of Harmony Gold getting in the way of merchandising led to the general consensus later Macross titles weren’t being brought over here just because anime-releasing companies couldn’t afford expected legal expenses (despite the general certainty the courts would find in their favour if they only had a little more money) and even before a man whose name was prominent in Robotech’s credits had brought more anime over here but hadn’t released subtitled versions, there’s the question of whether “Star Blazers didn’t have these obviously reprehensible changes made in Robotech” outweighs the more general and self-excusing shrug that we’re all more forgiving towards our own “gateway titles,” given I didn’t watch much of the mid-1990s wave of dubbed anime on TV having joined my university’s anime club at the same time.
This time around, though, I was at least able to tell myself that while I’d thought Robotech “like Transformers” or “like Voltron” (or even like a much more obscure series that just happened to have got on my local TV station and just happened to have been made by some of the people who’d made Space Battleship Yamato, if not the people most linked by fandom with the excellence of the more famous series) but “more interesting,” Star Blazers would surely have stood out far more among other cartoons at the end of the 1970s. (Over the years I’ve seen two people I don’t associate with “anime fandom” mention watching the show themselves back then.) I also happened to think of Space Battleship Yamato itself in a new context as well. Where I’d once been presented with comments about it leading to Mobile Suit Gundam and then to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, then amused myself with thoughts that animated series like Heidi had done much better in the ratings (which did link Yamato with a few other series spanning a decade of time I’ve seen comments about involving “struggling just for trying to push the envelope”), I was now considering the early “super robot” series. Some of them, at least, ran for twice as long or longer than Yamato, but they could feel much more “the same thing over and over.” The voyage of the Yamato offered a greater sense of progression to the story, but in some ways the simple variety of things that happened during that voyage appealed in itself. An action-light episode where the crew called home just before passing beyond communications range impressed me when I saw it, and then I saw impressed comments from other people too. Too, the scientific fortresses “super robots” deployed from were more eccentric settings than the Yamato itself seemed to become; whether having invoked an actual ship helped there is something I haven’t quite decided on yet. (I am aware the actual ship was sunk before completing a one-way voyage to counterattack the American invasion of Okinawa months before the end of World War II, with some element of “it can’t just be bombed in the harbour” leading to the death of its crew. Whatever the risks of commenting on the anime from across a language barrier, I did get to thinking the starship wasn’t just “an ever-victorious warship” now.) I can also admit that I’d first commented on the “remake” (which I’ve seen twice since watching the original, even if I haven’t opened the Blu-Rays eventually released in full and trailed off on the remake’s follow-ups) as diverging from the original, but a good number of things about the original had now faded from my memory over the years.