Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Right after admitting to an arid patch of anime still able to perk up my interest, I’m getting to a year where a solid crop of titles can do just that. It wasn’t altogether difficult to decide on just one series from among them to sample. I was quite ready to head back to the anime adaptation of Azumanga Daioh.
( Raspberry heaven, I’m coming back to you )

When I started roughing out a personal list of “anime I certainly wouldn’t mind going back to again, sorted by year,” I did get to thinking the list thinned out every time two digits turned over in the year. When I started sampling series from that list, I had just one title available to look at from 1970, and a certain uncertainty about how I’d react to it. For 1980 and 1990 I went back to the shows I’d sampled back in 2010, although I was able to give reasons for doing that other than “they’re all I’ve got.” As all four digits turned over in the year there were a few titles on my list, but most of them were series I still haven’t started after more than twenty years, and after all the other shows I’ve seen the first episodes of I wasn’t quite willing to take the chance on any of them winding up really impressive. Still, even if I was going to go back to FLCL as well, it offered its own compensations.
( Ride on shooting star )

Some years are a little trickier than others when it comes to picking one single series to watch one single episode from to try to “represent the anime of its time.” As I settled on returning to one episode I’d sampled back in 2010, I was aware of two other quite notable shows from its year, and of the perhaps-convoluted reasons stuck in my mind for stepping past them again. On a somewhat more positive note, going back to Cardcaptor Sakura would let me point out Sailor Moon reconfiguring “magical girls” into “teenaged superheroines drawing on team patterns from live-action shows” wasn’t a “from now on” change to the whole genre.
( Magic released )

After watching the first episode of an anime series probably not the most overwhelming and impressive of its year (although to be fair the TV animation of Slayers followed two OVAs and could have suffered just by comparison, and Naomi Miyata’s character designs for it just might set one definition for the way “1990s anime” looks) in part to not go back to the series I sampled in 2010, I’ve moved on to another series I chose to represent its year that first time around. All in all, though, I think I might have been a bit more interested in going back to The Vision of Escaflowne.
( The first vision )

With a new month came another year’s worth of anime to select an episode from, just as with each day of the month past. By now, though, I’m getting to the point of anime that had been relatively fresh when I joined the club at university (in that still-antique time when a title could be a year or two old and still be percolating through the (North) American fandom...) Having skipped the opening episodes of the original Macross itself this time around, I was still ready and willing to acknowledge that “Macross matters to me in particular” with one choice among sixty by watching the first episode of Macross Plus.
( “Dedicated to all pioneers” )

Closing in on the midpoint of this lightweight personal tour of anime, I’ve also got to a title I first saw mere years after it had premiered in Japan. Sailor Moon showed up on TV over here just when I was leaving for university (I have an impression I might have caught a glimpse of it in the last days before leaving, even if I’m a little concerned about the possibility of “reconstructing memory for the sake of making a point.”) After joining the anime club at university and trying to follow online discussions about anime (overwhelmed by everything everyone else already knew and had experienced, I kept retreating to the safer haven of a “Robotech Mailing List”), though, it was easy enough to run into complaints about the multifold compromises of adaptation. There were digs at Sailor Moon on a club poster that fall and in a show video segment (“I think we’ve been punished enough”), but by the end of my time at university things had got to the point of a special “short adventure” being tossed into another show. Years after that, I did manage to get past “I am not in the target demographic for this” and watch the original series, although I’ve never managed to move on from there to the “Sailor Moon R” episodes I recall having seen other glimpses of back on TV.
( The new development in magical girls )

In observing “fandoms” of long-running things it can get all too tempting to suppose that with the passage of time some might do better to detach not just from what annoys them now but also from what’s still to come to see if they can stick with what they have liked. I suppose I’ve pulled a ripcord or two myself, and in at least one case I do seem to have stuck with a subset of the past for all that it’s not the subset a lot of other people had long made a big deal of holding up as the reproach to everything else. In other cases I’ve been more tolerant, or adaptable, or just plain “undiscerning,” but for all that I began this year with hopes of flitting past a full sixty years of anime and coming out unscathed I was conscious one dividing line has been drawn right between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, with the death of a monarch closing the “Showa era” (although Yawara! was already a “Heisei era series”) and the crash of the Nikkei stock exchange noted too. For that matter, over here anime was shifting from “something you had to have the right contacts to really know about” to “something you could put money down in exchange for.” As if to mark this moment, I watched the first episode of a series I’ve seen more than one notable figure be indignant towards...
( The secret of Blue Water )

Not that long ago I happened to get pointed to a challenge of “finding anime that came out when you were twelve,” which does happen to date me just like it would date anyone else listing their own titles. Almost everything I can say I’ve seen from then was OVAs and movies. Having included a “feature-length OVA” among the movies I watched in the closing weeks of last year, though, could be seen as cover for including a few “TV episode-length OVAs” in the first days of this year. It would be easy enough to watch the first episode of Gunbuster once again, but having done that as part of my previous “one anime per year” tour back in 2010 I decided I could get around to opening up my latest Patlabor collection.
( SV2 moves out )

As this whirlwind tour of anime pushes further into the 1980s it’s reaching an era of notable OVAs. Keeping the length of some of those OVAs in mind, though, for the moment I’m sticking with TV shows. I wound up deciding to watch the first episode of another magical girl series I haven’t seen before. After Minky Momo had turned out a bit differently than I’d imagined its “formula” would amount to (but closer to a much earlier series with a magic girl in it), I did do a bit of double-checking and confirmed Pastel Yumi had been produced by Studio Pierrot, the same as Creamy Mami. In this case, the series did involve a girl who’s granted magic by small animals, but it wasn’t quite “just the same as Creamy Mami.”
( Flower magic and drawing magic deployed )

When considering how “watching one episode from one anime series to stand in for a whole year’s production” might only amount to puffery, I do get to thinking back to a weblog set up a decade ago, with each “golden anniversary” post from a different person. While the posts included much more summarizing than I’m managing here, I suppose I did keep remembering how the one for 1984 proclaimed it was going to focus on Fist of the North Star. Not having begun that post-apocalyptic martial arts epic yet (with the impression that brief summary isn’t doing it justice at least so far as someone who’d make it their sole choice for a year might react) and having already had a first taste alone of several shows in these past three weeks, I was resolved to just revisit a different series I’ve already seen. Then, as it turned out, I glanced back at the old post again and saw it did rather briefly acknowledge the existence of Giant Gorg and a few other series from the year.
( Gorgless to begin with, but still interesting )