2008: My First Quarter in Anime
Apr. 2nd, 2008 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLast year, I made up three reviews of all the anime that I watched then, but wound up dividing things into those three chunks more or less because I couldn't quite manage to put anything together at the start of April. Now, I'm trying that much harder... and when I had a simple list of the episodes I've watched in just three months drawn up, I was a little impressed by how much was on it. As if to prove that hubris must always be clobbered by nemesis, though, I started wondering about how I can never seem to find the additional time in an evening to watch an hour-long episode of something in live action from this side of the Pacific on DVD... but then did recall that I had managed to watch all of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" this winter. Perhaps it's easier for me to find the time when that time's already been blocked out by a scheduling department.
With that thought, it does seem that fears that I'm somehow "driving myself too hard" are now back in just about the same remission as fears that I'll "burn out" just because. Of course, that doesn't hold back the angst of others about titles vanishing from the upcoming release lists of North American anime companies, and as much as I was relieved to see many of them be solicited again, some I was interested in buying didn't show up... although in another case of much the same thing, I was more or less indifferent. In the face of those fears about DVD-releasing companies going out of business, though, I have heard about plans to test a few new series in simultaneous subtitled streaming... it may help usher in the millennium at last, or it may not.
Still, with a "backlog" of unwatched DVDs, I seem to have something of an additional buffer against feeling troubled... and, once again, even spared the time to rewatch something I've seen before. The Vision of Escaflowne caught my attention at my university's anime club, and I got the DVD collection some years ago. It's tempting enough to say that it's got something for everyone, romance and melodrama and giant robots in a fantasy rather than science fiction setting, and for me a slight but stimulating dose of resemblance to Star Wars, what with a familial connection between the young male lead and a brooding villian with an artificial arm... although it's not a perfect resemblance, of course.
Escaflowne is a bit over a decade old now, but that's still a good decade newer than what seems a good amount of what I've been watching and rewatching of late... and I did manage to see several other short series from this very decade in the past three months and enjoy them, too, in pleasant contradiction to certain faint impressions remaining about how others may have kept telling me to think. I started off with the anime adaptation of a manga I particularly enjoyed, Genshiken, and found it agreeable enough in a sort of "complement-to-the-manga" sort of way. I then took cares to watch the heavily promoted The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in a particular way, and while I did wind up wondering if the series really did indeed "just had" to be viewed in that order, it was still an interesting experience. I also got around to opening up another fairly new series called Starship Operators, one I'd actually watched a "fansub" of the first episode of back when it first showed up on Japanese TV, but decided not to follow... I suppose I was a little surprised when it got licensed for North American release by Geneon, but at that time I was pretty much convinced that watching only one episode of a series didn't mean an obligation to buy all of it. Somewhat later on, though, I had a chance to buy the DVDs of the series for a considerable discount from one online store, and took that chance for what I believe were a variety of motivations... and not that long afterwards, Geneon went out of business in North America. I can wonder if the series was somehow another illustration of how Geneon would constantly gain the approval of anime fans on one particular message board, but this didn't translate into success in a larger world more inclined to just mutter about how their DVDs were too expensive... but heading back into the series again, having paid money for it seems to have focused my attention on watching and even appreciating it, as has happened in other cases. The series itself might seem conventional enough as science fiction, involving a group of cadets who, when their planet is conquered, take their starship and set off to fight on their own, but it does include the additional note that, to finance themselves, they've reached an arrangement with an interstellar news channel to provide content. While this idea doesn't overwhelm the entire storyline, it does provide regular twists to it.
Of course, I am still plugging away at several older series. I'm working my way through the DVDs of Cat's Eye, which remains entertaining, and Orguss, which does prompt both an awareness of how its action scenes seem to manage to repeat every piece of animation at least twice and wistful wishes that Macross, produced by some of the same creative team just before it back in the early 1980s, could have looked as consistent at least when it came to its character designs. When it comes to "fansubs" of older series, I finished off the quaint yet somehow compelling giant-robot odyssey Space Runaway Ideon, which was wrapped up with a movie that kept delivering escalating shock value and yet didn't seem quite so bleak or universally apocalyptic in the end as I'd been expecting. Of course, I'm able to accept a certain amount of mysticism every so often. I also made it past the halfway mark to the two-thirds milestone in the baseball anime Touch, which remains interesting to me. It may, though, be tempting me to armchair socio-cultural generalizations: its main characters seem to be involved in athletics not just because they're good at it, but because it's somehow an obligation for them to help their peer groups and community...
I'm also continuing to watch "fansubs" of a new anime, Gundam 00. The thought had begun to creep up on me that, perhaps, it wasn't so aware as I'd perhaps just hoped of the unintended consequences of trying to end all war with a small force of near-invincible giant robots... but where that might have bothered me, introducing still more characters to its cast did help strike a great many sparks, including but not limited to melodrama. I don't know if I ever actually saw anyone proclaim, or even hope, that this series was to cast all the other merely recent Gundam worlds and their passel-of-incompetents creative crews into obscurity through the effortless presentation of some definitive vision, but not having to chew on that that seems in some ways pleasant for me. (I suppose, too, that where some other recent Gundam series are criticised by others for their character designs seeming to hew too close to that old sneer against anime, that "everyone looks the same except for their hair and clothing," I can wonder myself about Gundam 00 seeming to have a certain number of chiseled male and top-heavy female torsos...) One remaining flaw in the situation, though, may be of my own making. I had suspected that a number of groups would try to "fansub" the series, and decided that I would watch the releases of a group other than the first to charge out of the gate, convinced that this would make for better translations... except that the group I picked has fallen several episodes behind what's been aired (in something of a new development for an anime series, it's been broken into two "seasons" and is now on hiatus). That seems to defeat the whole purpose of following, however vicariously, the experiences of others also watching the series for the first time (I'd even found a group on my regular anime message board who were positive about the series and didn't indulge in too many jabs at other series in the process), and then buying the official North American releases however many long months afterwards... although, of course, I'm still planning to do that.
With that thought, it does seem that fears that I'm somehow "driving myself too hard" are now back in just about the same remission as fears that I'll "burn out" just because. Of course, that doesn't hold back the angst of others about titles vanishing from the upcoming release lists of North American anime companies, and as much as I was relieved to see many of them be solicited again, some I was interested in buying didn't show up... although in another case of much the same thing, I was more or less indifferent. In the face of those fears about DVD-releasing companies going out of business, though, I have heard about plans to test a few new series in simultaneous subtitled streaming... it may help usher in the millennium at last, or it may not.
Still, with a "backlog" of unwatched DVDs, I seem to have something of an additional buffer against feeling troubled... and, once again, even spared the time to rewatch something I've seen before. The Vision of Escaflowne caught my attention at my university's anime club, and I got the DVD collection some years ago. It's tempting enough to say that it's got something for everyone, romance and melodrama and giant robots in a fantasy rather than science fiction setting, and for me a slight but stimulating dose of resemblance to Star Wars, what with a familial connection between the young male lead and a brooding villian with an artificial arm... although it's not a perfect resemblance, of course.
Escaflowne is a bit over a decade old now, but that's still a good decade newer than what seems a good amount of what I've been watching and rewatching of late... and I did manage to see several other short series from this very decade in the past three months and enjoy them, too, in pleasant contradiction to certain faint impressions remaining about how others may have kept telling me to think. I started off with the anime adaptation of a manga I particularly enjoyed, Genshiken, and found it agreeable enough in a sort of "complement-to-the-manga" sort of way. I then took cares to watch the heavily promoted The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in a particular way, and while I did wind up wondering if the series really did indeed "just had" to be viewed in that order, it was still an interesting experience. I also got around to opening up another fairly new series called Starship Operators, one I'd actually watched a "fansub" of the first episode of back when it first showed up on Japanese TV, but decided not to follow... I suppose I was a little surprised when it got licensed for North American release by Geneon, but at that time I was pretty much convinced that watching only one episode of a series didn't mean an obligation to buy all of it. Somewhat later on, though, I had a chance to buy the DVDs of the series for a considerable discount from one online store, and took that chance for what I believe were a variety of motivations... and not that long afterwards, Geneon went out of business in North America. I can wonder if the series was somehow another illustration of how Geneon would constantly gain the approval of anime fans on one particular message board, but this didn't translate into success in a larger world more inclined to just mutter about how their DVDs were too expensive... but heading back into the series again, having paid money for it seems to have focused my attention on watching and even appreciating it, as has happened in other cases. The series itself might seem conventional enough as science fiction, involving a group of cadets who, when their planet is conquered, take their starship and set off to fight on their own, but it does include the additional note that, to finance themselves, they've reached an arrangement with an interstellar news channel to provide content. While this idea doesn't overwhelm the entire storyline, it does provide regular twists to it.
Of course, I am still plugging away at several older series. I'm working my way through the DVDs of Cat's Eye, which remains entertaining, and Orguss, which does prompt both an awareness of how its action scenes seem to manage to repeat every piece of animation at least twice and wistful wishes that Macross, produced by some of the same creative team just before it back in the early 1980s, could have looked as consistent at least when it came to its character designs. When it comes to "fansubs" of older series, I finished off the quaint yet somehow compelling giant-robot odyssey Space Runaway Ideon, which was wrapped up with a movie that kept delivering escalating shock value and yet didn't seem quite so bleak or universally apocalyptic in the end as I'd been expecting. Of course, I'm able to accept a certain amount of mysticism every so often. I also made it past the halfway mark to the two-thirds milestone in the baseball anime Touch, which remains interesting to me. It may, though, be tempting me to armchair socio-cultural generalizations: its main characters seem to be involved in athletics not just because they're good at it, but because it's somehow an obligation for them to help their peer groups and community...
I'm also continuing to watch "fansubs" of a new anime, Gundam 00. The thought had begun to creep up on me that, perhaps, it wasn't so aware as I'd perhaps just hoped of the unintended consequences of trying to end all war with a small force of near-invincible giant robots... but where that might have bothered me, introducing still more characters to its cast did help strike a great many sparks, including but not limited to melodrama. I don't know if I ever actually saw anyone proclaim, or even hope, that this series was to cast all the other merely recent Gundam worlds and their passel-of-incompetents creative crews into obscurity through the effortless presentation of some definitive vision, but not having to chew on that that seems in some ways pleasant for me. (I suppose, too, that where some other recent Gundam series are criticised by others for their character designs seeming to hew too close to that old sneer against anime, that "everyone looks the same except for their hair and clothing," I can wonder myself about Gundam 00 seeming to have a certain number of chiseled male and top-heavy female torsos...) One remaining flaw in the situation, though, may be of my own making. I had suspected that a number of groups would try to "fansub" the series, and decided that I would watch the releases of a group other than the first to charge out of the gate, convinced that this would make for better translations... except that the group I picked has fallen several episodes behind what's been aired (in something of a new development for an anime series, it's been broken into two "seasons" and is now on hiatus). That seems to defeat the whole purpose of following, however vicariously, the experiences of others also watching the series for the first time (I'd even found a group on my regular anime message board who were positive about the series and didn't indulge in too many jabs at other series in the process), and then buying the official North American releases however many long months afterwards... although, of course, I'm still planning to do that.