2009: My Second Quarter in Anime
Jul. 1st, 2009 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith another three months passed, I'm once more looking back at all the anime I watched during them. My vacation cut into the amount of stuff I was able to get through, but at least I wasn't worried about that while away. Even so, I suppose I can indeed respond to overtones of elegiac apocalyptism on the message board that I do read in response to delayed releases and general cheese-paring with "even if all new anime was to cease tomorrow, I've got stuff piled up on my shelves to open"... Nevertheless, watching still doesn't seem a chore to me.
At the start of this period, I finished something that might have been either a very long time coming or just a casual and not that necessary indulgence. Back in the early 1990s, I hung around the local comic shop but seemed most devoted to the preview catalogue, and that more to gawk than to dream. One day, though, I saw a note about something called "Macross II: The Role-Playing Game," and the description made me think in an amused way of how I had daydreamed up a continuation to Robotech itself... A while later, aware of how I used the Robotech role-playing games as "sourcebooks" (if due in part to being so horribly isolated that I didn't know anyone well enough to ask to play a campaign with me), I started picking up the Macross II role-playing game books and learned that they were based on a new short animated series from Japan, that I might not just have to cling to personal memories of the "giant robot" boom of the mid-1980s after all... although I didn't actually get around to watching any anime until I got to university and joined the anime club there, and by that point Macross II had been dismissed on both sides of the Pacific, reduced to a mere "alternative world." Many years after that, though, I had the chance to throw a sale-priced DVD of it into an online order, and a while after that I got around to watching the OVA itself, with little more than a "why not?" motivation. I suppose that the criticisms that the characters don't seem that well-defined seem valid enough to me, and the animation quality takes an unfortunate dip in the last episode, right when it might seem it ought to be the most "epic"... and yet, I did find myself wondering a little about how Robotech might have influenced what I had once imagined the villains to be, and about how they might be different in a way that allows for some interesting thoughts about the heroes... all of it, of course, one hundred percent personal speculation.
I did, of course, watch other anime series that didn't require so much after-the-fact pondering. One "boutique" release from a company that specializes in them, subsidized perhaps by its online store, that I ordered a while back was Victorian Romance Emma, motivated in part by the promise that those who preordered would get their names on screen pages on the DVDs. The one problem was that the DVDs I received were incorrectly authored with mono sound, which meant I had to send them back for free replacements, delaying my getting around to the series... in any case, I did get around to it. A few years back, a certain subset of anime fans were freaking out about series that had "maids" in fetishistic uniforms (nowadays, they just freak out about the nebulous term "moe," which can seem to mean to them anything they don't agree with), but Emma was a very distinct exception, set in a late-Victorian England presented in careful detail. (I did find myself thinking that, while the colours weren't garish, things still seemed more varied than I'd always imagined the Victorian period to be.) A thought that did come to me partway through the series was that a romance across class lines, no matter how subtly developed, isn't that unusual in fiction, and then the series seemed to acknowledge that. Things left off with another season still to come, which I have on my shelf but which I'll have to find the time to get around to.
I finished off the last third of the first half of Code Geass, which drove to moments of tragedy at times "unfair" to me yet affecting and a really big cliffhanger... again, I'm wondering if I'll be able to take however the second part of the series seems to shift, guessing that it goes in a sort of "don't take this so seriously" direction. I also finished off the TV episodes of Lucky Star, thinking again that it's better to take them in smaller chunks than I did once. With all of that wrapped up, I did try and fill the time remaining before I left on vacation by going through a shorter series of OVAs. I had seen Giant Robo back at my university's anime club, and knew it's had a certain cult following for a long time. At times when watching it this time, I found myself contemplating it as an intriguingly skewed take on "superheroes" as we understand them in North America, even if there could be a sense there was a lot more to the story than what got animated.
As I didn't know how much spare time I would have on my cruise, I loaded up my portable's hard drives with "fansub" episodes... and, in the end, wound up watching just four episodes of Macross 7 over four weeks, one fewer than I had got through the first time I had dared sampling the series. Of course, I can imagine there being those who recommend not seeing any of Macross 7 at all... although I did find myself thinking that the series seems to be presenting its controversial fusion of the familiar Macross themes of "music" and "mecha pilots" as not instantly successful. At the same time, I'm not sure if even the one or two characters I think I can empathize with are really sympathetic, and even before seeing someone else complain about what's happened to the characters returning from the original Macross I was a bit troubled by how they were being presented, if occasionally wondering as well about the ways they had been developed later on in Robotech.
That wasn't the only anime series I saw on a computer screen in the last three months, anyway. Whether it's "at long last and perhaps not too late" or not, there are efforts now being made to provide official online streaming of new anime series. If this begins to reshape how some people, at least, first see anime and keeps them from concluding that they like the stylistic peculiarities of "fansubs" and hence will never bother with DVDs, that ought to be a good thing in my view. However, just as with many fansubs, I just don't seem to have the time to get around to watching a whole bunch of new series first thing... but I was willing to make an exception for the new Fullmetal Alchemist series. The original anime was based on the manga that had been completed to that date, but wound up, from what I've heard, going in its own direction for its latter half. Unfortunately, I have to go with what I've heard because, after a few panels of one volume of the manga got drawn over, I dropped that series in a fit of pique, and perhaps with that abandoned any chance of letting manga "take over" from anime in my general interests... After trying to convince myself that I was perfectly fine with the Fullmetal Alchemist anime alone, though, I heard that a new series was being made with more manga to adapt. In the episodes that I've seen, stuff that was adapted before is being adapted again, but at what seems a brisker pace now. While I was away, there was some sort of fiasco involving the anime company's online streaming service being tapped into to leak an episode early, thus resulting in a shuddering halt to the streaming series, but things seem to be recovering now.
I did find myself picking up on one new "fansub," though. Cross Game is a baseball anime based on a manga by the artist of Touch, which got turned into an anime in the mid-1980s that I've seen the anime of and found quite interesting across a hundred episodes. There's a similarity to the character designs even after two decades, of course, and at the risk of giving things away a development right at the start of Cross Game seems similar to a development a quarter of the way through Touch... the new series seems to be becoming interesting in its own right for me, though. I did note that other thoughts of "time passing" were sparked by where, with Touch, female characters just got to be managers of high school baseball teams, here a female character can pitch for the junior high team... how far she'll be permitted to go with that could still be a definite issue, though.
On getting back from vacation, I decided to pick up on some series that have been on personal hiatuses for a little too long. I had heard interesting things about the "giant robot" anime series GaoGaiGar well before it got licensed. At the same time, one thing that was said was the familiar "it gets a lot better in the second half"... and yet, in watching the DVDs of the first half, I was entertained enough for all that it was a little hard to quantify my reaction, given thoughts that the characters didn't seem much more complex than variations on "determined and resolute" and a good part of the action always seemed to be stock transformation sequences, stock combination sequences, and stock finishing attacks... but very well-done stock sequences, somehow. Somehow, I was always able to imagine myself nine years old again and watching the best episode of Transformers ever... (The anime did air in a time slot that Transformers series used to air in over in Japan, and some of the robots in it have a very "familiar" style to them.) However, the series didn't seem to sell well enough to continue non-stop (leading to complaints from the fans about how it had to be the fault of the company releasing it), and when the second half did show up in a subtitled-only box set I was a little too busy to pick right up with it... when I did, though, I found myself thinking early on "so where do they go from here?" before they did, in fact, go well enough. A second series I picked up on again was the second series of Black Lagoon, the DVDs of which arrived in slightly jumbled order because of the way larger orders fell together. It presents a dark and violent world, and yet with undertones of entertaining absurdity and style. Once again, I'm indulging in its dubbed version, laden with foul language but that adding to the effect.
At the start of this period, I finished something that might have been either a very long time coming or just a casual and not that necessary indulgence. Back in the early 1990s, I hung around the local comic shop but seemed most devoted to the preview catalogue, and that more to gawk than to dream. One day, though, I saw a note about something called "Macross II: The Role-Playing Game," and the description made me think in an amused way of how I had daydreamed up a continuation to Robotech itself... A while later, aware of how I used the Robotech role-playing games as "sourcebooks" (if due in part to being so horribly isolated that I didn't know anyone well enough to ask to play a campaign with me), I started picking up the Macross II role-playing game books and learned that they were based on a new short animated series from Japan, that I might not just have to cling to personal memories of the "giant robot" boom of the mid-1980s after all... although I didn't actually get around to watching any anime until I got to university and joined the anime club there, and by that point Macross II had been dismissed on both sides of the Pacific, reduced to a mere "alternative world." Many years after that, though, I had the chance to throw a sale-priced DVD of it into an online order, and a while after that I got around to watching the OVA itself, with little more than a "why not?" motivation. I suppose that the criticisms that the characters don't seem that well-defined seem valid enough to me, and the animation quality takes an unfortunate dip in the last episode, right when it might seem it ought to be the most "epic"... and yet, I did find myself wondering a little about how Robotech might have influenced what I had once imagined the villains to be, and about how they might be different in a way that allows for some interesting thoughts about the heroes... all of it, of course, one hundred percent personal speculation.
I did, of course, watch other anime series that didn't require so much after-the-fact pondering. One "boutique" release from a company that specializes in them, subsidized perhaps by its online store, that I ordered a while back was Victorian Romance Emma, motivated in part by the promise that those who preordered would get their names on screen pages on the DVDs. The one problem was that the DVDs I received were incorrectly authored with mono sound, which meant I had to send them back for free replacements, delaying my getting around to the series... in any case, I did get around to it. A few years back, a certain subset of anime fans were freaking out about series that had "maids" in fetishistic uniforms (nowadays, they just freak out about the nebulous term "moe," which can seem to mean to them anything they don't agree with), but Emma was a very distinct exception, set in a late-Victorian England presented in careful detail. (I did find myself thinking that, while the colours weren't garish, things still seemed more varied than I'd always imagined the Victorian period to be.) A thought that did come to me partway through the series was that a romance across class lines, no matter how subtly developed, isn't that unusual in fiction, and then the series seemed to acknowledge that. Things left off with another season still to come, which I have on my shelf but which I'll have to find the time to get around to.
I finished off the last third of the first half of Code Geass, which drove to moments of tragedy at times "unfair" to me yet affecting and a really big cliffhanger... again, I'm wondering if I'll be able to take however the second part of the series seems to shift, guessing that it goes in a sort of "don't take this so seriously" direction. I also finished off the TV episodes of Lucky Star, thinking again that it's better to take them in smaller chunks than I did once. With all of that wrapped up, I did try and fill the time remaining before I left on vacation by going through a shorter series of OVAs. I had seen Giant Robo back at my university's anime club, and knew it's had a certain cult following for a long time. At times when watching it this time, I found myself contemplating it as an intriguingly skewed take on "superheroes" as we understand them in North America, even if there could be a sense there was a lot more to the story than what got animated.
As I didn't know how much spare time I would have on my cruise, I loaded up my portable's hard drives with "fansub" episodes... and, in the end, wound up watching just four episodes of Macross 7 over four weeks, one fewer than I had got through the first time I had dared sampling the series. Of course, I can imagine there being those who recommend not seeing any of Macross 7 at all... although I did find myself thinking that the series seems to be presenting its controversial fusion of the familiar Macross themes of "music" and "mecha pilots" as not instantly successful. At the same time, I'm not sure if even the one or two characters I think I can empathize with are really sympathetic, and even before seeing someone else complain about what's happened to the characters returning from the original Macross I was a bit troubled by how they were being presented, if occasionally wondering as well about the ways they had been developed later on in Robotech.
That wasn't the only anime series I saw on a computer screen in the last three months, anyway. Whether it's "at long last and perhaps not too late" or not, there are efforts now being made to provide official online streaming of new anime series. If this begins to reshape how some people, at least, first see anime and keeps them from concluding that they like the stylistic peculiarities of "fansubs" and hence will never bother with DVDs, that ought to be a good thing in my view. However, just as with many fansubs, I just don't seem to have the time to get around to watching a whole bunch of new series first thing... but I was willing to make an exception for the new Fullmetal Alchemist series. The original anime was based on the manga that had been completed to that date, but wound up, from what I've heard, going in its own direction for its latter half. Unfortunately, I have to go with what I've heard because, after a few panels of one volume of the manga got drawn over, I dropped that series in a fit of pique, and perhaps with that abandoned any chance of letting manga "take over" from anime in my general interests... After trying to convince myself that I was perfectly fine with the Fullmetal Alchemist anime alone, though, I heard that a new series was being made with more manga to adapt. In the episodes that I've seen, stuff that was adapted before is being adapted again, but at what seems a brisker pace now. While I was away, there was some sort of fiasco involving the anime company's online streaming service being tapped into to leak an episode early, thus resulting in a shuddering halt to the streaming series, but things seem to be recovering now.
I did find myself picking up on one new "fansub," though. Cross Game is a baseball anime based on a manga by the artist of Touch, which got turned into an anime in the mid-1980s that I've seen the anime of and found quite interesting across a hundred episodes. There's a similarity to the character designs even after two decades, of course, and at the risk of giving things away a development right at the start of Cross Game seems similar to a development a quarter of the way through Touch... the new series seems to be becoming interesting in its own right for me, though. I did note that other thoughts of "time passing" were sparked by where, with Touch, female characters just got to be managers of high school baseball teams, here a female character can pitch for the junior high team... how far she'll be permitted to go with that could still be a definite issue, though.
On getting back from vacation, I decided to pick up on some series that have been on personal hiatuses for a little too long. I had heard interesting things about the "giant robot" anime series GaoGaiGar well before it got licensed. At the same time, one thing that was said was the familiar "it gets a lot better in the second half"... and yet, in watching the DVDs of the first half, I was entertained enough for all that it was a little hard to quantify my reaction, given thoughts that the characters didn't seem much more complex than variations on "determined and resolute" and a good part of the action always seemed to be stock transformation sequences, stock combination sequences, and stock finishing attacks... but very well-done stock sequences, somehow. Somehow, I was always able to imagine myself nine years old again and watching the best episode of Transformers ever... (The anime did air in a time slot that Transformers series used to air in over in Japan, and some of the robots in it have a very "familiar" style to them.) However, the series didn't seem to sell well enough to continue non-stop (leading to complaints from the fans about how it had to be the fault of the company releasing it), and when the second half did show up in a subtitled-only box set I was a little too busy to pick right up with it... when I did, though, I found myself thinking early on "so where do they go from here?" before they did, in fact, go well enough. A second series I picked up on again was the second series of Black Lagoon, the DVDs of which arrived in slightly jumbled order because of the way larger orders fell together. It presents a dark and violent world, and yet with undertones of entertaining absurdity and style. Once again, I'm indulging in its dubbed version, laden with foul language but that adding to the effect.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-02 01:37 am (UTC)Some things I liked about Mac II, some things I didn't: I had an old dub VHS that I'd picked up years and years ago, and got around to watching it. I didn't find it review-worthy, though I tacked on my thoughts onto a general essay about my early reactions to the Macross universe.
The rest of these series I've mostly not seen. Code Geass is on my to-see list.
You know me and my vendetta against Macross 7. To some extent, my dislike of the series on a deeper level was something that crept up on me gradually, but I remember a superficial feeling of dislike from the get-go, including the portrayal of the "old guard".
I'm going to avoid the new FMA: the only thing that really interested me in the first anime was the concept of the Homunculi and in engaging in some noise-making about how the narrative dealt with them. The manga portrayed the Homunculi differently, and though I usually prefer the manga version of a Japanese work, there was nothing else that made me want to pursue the FMA manga or the series in any great depth.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-02 09:51 pm (UTC)I had wondered a bit about Macross II not really presenting a "Zentradi perspective," although the "sudden insight" that I alluded to was thinking that the "Marduk" might not be an equivalent of the Robotech Masters, "the group that was always really in charge," but instead just the descendents of a world that had also survived a random encounter with the Zentradi through the use of music, and then started using music to shove their way into the universe... then, I wondered if Earth's "Minmay Defence" somehow meant they were beginning to "lose the point" of music as well. As I admitted before, though, it does seem all frothy speculation imposed on what we actually got...
I managed to stop reading the Fullmetal Alchemist manga right where it really started diverging from the anime, so simple "curiosity" may well be enough to drive me on. Whenever you do get around to seeing Code Geass, I'll just have to wait for what your own reactions are and see how I react to them.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-04 02:52 am (UTC)I like your suggestion of the Marduk's control methods being a darker version of what Minmay did for the Zentraedi in the original series, if that's what you're getting at...but as I've mentioned before, I dislike the idea of music as a literal weapon, and of Minmay's music having its own special power.
I also felt trying to retread the "discovery of culture" thing through Ishtar was a bit of a shallow imitation.
Hibiki, though, a reporter as a protagonist instead of a mecha pilot, was a pretty cool idea, and I wished more was done with it.
(And yes, I'm aware Macross II was meant as a sequel of sorts to DYRL before being relegated to a second continuity. I don't know if that taints the experience or not)