krpalmer | Entries tagged with anime

Watching Patlabor 2: The Movie again, about twenty-nine years and eleven months after I’d first seen it, marked the latest “it’s been that long, huh?” moment in time since I attended my introductory anime club showing at university (one month before they screened that movie). I had been thinking, however, of further iterations on that idea to make a bigger deal of my personal anniversary. Other titles were coming to mind that I’ve seen once yet never quite got back to despite taking some interest in them (and, quite often, having DVDs or Blu-Rays sitting around, many of them unopened...) Those sole viewings weren’t separated from now by quite as much time as the movie, but I was still ready to think that, again, “it’s been long enough.” For the next title in mind, though, I’d still be dropping back in on a different part of my university years.

( Enter the Knight Sabers )

Aware I’d slid back into “let someone else take the chance on being horribly disappointed by new anime series” and conscious even that just might be a step towards “making a great show of disdain for all ‘recent’ anime,” I resolved to watch a few streaming series “with everyone else.” As soon as I’d started them, I was feeling kind of bad about “only watching the safest bets from among the most popular titles and very much depending on established names.” It took me a little while to think about the varied older titles I was also watching, a while longer to remember some unfortunate examples of “sequels much fault was found with for not matching the brilliance of the original production,” and some more time again to consider the examples I’ve piled up over a certain number of years of when I just didn’t seem as offended by certain series “everyone else” kept, or keep, singling out for condemnation, to say nothing of some perhaps more unfortunate instances when I wasn’t as impressed with some shows as insistences would have it. After all of that, in the end I suppose I was in general contented with all the anime I watched in the past three months, and conscious those months brought me up to another big anniversary of when I joined the anime club at university.

( Streaming sequels: DAN DA DAN and My Dress-Up Darling )

( Streaming absurdity: CITY the Animation )

( Getting around to work: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. )

( On a new track: Shinkalion Change the World )

( Into dangerous territory?: Attack on Titan )

( A magical conclusion: Minky Momo )

( Back on a long road: Urusei Yatsura )

( Looking back, glancing ahead: Patlabor 2 the Movie and Nijiyon 2 )

Five years ago, I was able to go back to all of the anime OVAs I saw at the first anime club show I attended at university (and a movie that was mentioned on that first show’s poster but apparently not screened that night, according to the page of “previous shows” I found in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine). Five years before that, I made a point of watching through some long series from past decades. Five years before that, I watched one sample episode from each year stretching back into the 1970s (although there were gaps in the series I then had available from that decade, something I strove to redress in 2023, a general rather than personal anniversary year...) Five years before that (before I began posting here), I’d accumulated enough anime to schedule a series of “personal showings” revisiting bits of what I’d seen at the club, dropping in on the titles I’d seen someone call “the four revolutions of anime,” and striving to look ahead by returning to bits of some pretty new series that had impressed me. Five years before that, I was still managing to get back to university and stay with younger acquaintances from residence while going to the club shows (even if I’d made it through some “gap months” far from the university on a work contract I’d supposed didn’t pay well enough to seek out VHS tapes, much less those new-fangled DVDs, to start a personal collection with...) Five years before that, I was at that first show.

( Added up, that amounts to... )

One weekend before I left on my vacation I took a shorter trip, going back to my old university for homecoming. I must not have paid close enough attention to the schedule, because in arriving around noon after a lengthy trip by train and bus I found the homecoming events had closed down and displays for visitors were being packed away. Managing to shrug that off, I wandered around campus by myself and dropped in on the arts library, my thoughts turning to a particular article I’d read a certain number of years ago.

( Past mechanics )

One more three-month block defined by new anime series showing up opened with me aware something would be different in my case. My latest long vacation was scheduled for the block’s last weeks. For the moment still lingering behind many other people and awaiting their judgments on shows, this might not have been an overwhelming difference. Still, I did work through a bit of scheduling to make sure I could finish everything I’d been thinking about seeing before leaving. I also happened in the opening weeks of the quarter to view Princess Mononoke at the movies. Perhaps this could be seen as a more genteel version of “no wonder movies are the way they are with people only willing to spend money on ‘expected quantities,’” but I did seem able to find something added by “the theatrical presentation.”

( From days of yore: Albegas and Minky Momo )

( Into half-remembered territory: Attack on Titan )

( On with the show: Oshi no Ko )

( Recent streaming: The Apothecary Diaries and Zenshu )

( Taking my own chance: Gundam GQuuuuuuX )

( Travelling samples: Lycoris Recoil and Himitsu no Akko-chan )

That I scraped together the resolve to step outside weekend routine and head to my area’s big anime convention in 2019 could feel in the immediate years afterwards like “at last yet almost too late; at least I can say I once saw what they were like.” Even after starting to get on cruise ships again I was at least noticing warnings that conventions had never been healthy places. In the leadup to this year’s “Anime North,” though, noticing

davemerrill’s panel announcements might have tipped a balance that had already been shifting. (That had something to do with being invited to describe a university anime club experience at the time of the very first Anime North.) A few daydreams about taking the chance bounced through my mind, and then I bought a Saturday pass, perhaps a few more days before the convention than I’d managed back in 2019.

( Preparations and panels )

In keeping up with the “Cartoon Brew” web site, I noticed reports of two “Looney Tunes movies” that had been made only to become entangled in the run-down state of their studio. Coyote vs. Acme became a cause celebre, or at least one recent example of “people want what they cannot have.” Amid rumours of other companies trying to acquire the rights to it, though, the other movie did get to the point of being picked up. With the impression it was connected to “new Looney Tunes” shorts I’d heard about but never quite got around to tracking down, I did start thinking it might be interesting to see The Day the Earth Blew Up.

( More than a few surprises )

As the new year started I was intent on getting back to the anime Blu-Rays I’d only just begun in the first days of October before breaking my hip. With family staying at my place afterwards to provide considerable and welcome assistance, watching anime on any screen larger and less private than an iPad had got to feeling awkward right away. Once I’d started making trips to and from their home so that they could keep meeting appointments of their own, that didn’t help either. Returning to those shows, my thoughts also turned to some Blu-Rays that had just come in, if in some certain way just to “get them out of the way now rather than leave them lurking in the pile.” Around that point, with schemes in mind to watch two episodes a week of some longer series, what wound up giving was any intention of seeing new titles streaming. The problem there was that I started thinking how sometimes not very many sour dismissals tossed into reaction threads to end-of-the-season reviews will nudge me away from trying to form my own opinions or just dampen my own best efforts at that. There does seem a threat of “always expecting the worst when it comes to recent anime.” It wasn’t until months later that I happened to wonder whether there’s that much difference between “a three-month-old series you gather you’ve been granted an all-clear for,” “a three-year-old series that’s still being mentioned but you haven’t quite found time for yet,” and “a three-decade-old series you suppose is worth watching because Discotek just licensed it, and they know what they’re doing...”

( More than a footnote: Albegas )

( A risky return?: Attack on Titan )

( Also getting around to it: Demon Slayer )

( Newer and older: Urusei Yatsura and Minky Momo )

( Streaming efforts: Blue Box and The Apothecary Diaries )

( Mecha movies: Macross DYRL and Gundam GQuuuuuuX )

Advance reports of a new Gundam series did get my attention. It hadn’t been all that long since The Witch From Mercury; for all of the complaints from other fans feeding into my self-pitying thoughts that “mecha series don’t get a fair shake these days,” perhaps the temptation was to now think the franchise was actually doing all right. (In reflecting on the years between that series and Iron-Blooded Orphans, though, I did wind up reminding myself the “Build Divers” shows had appeared in between them.) The peculiar subtitle of the upcoming series “GQuuuuuuX” at least got my attention too, for all that I felt very tempted to anticipate knocking out the “u”s in private record-keeping of episodes watched. (While it’s not the exact same thing, I’ll admit to forever being tempted to think of “The 08th MS Team” as “Gundam MST08,” even if this didn’t extend to trying to cast that OVA’s characters in yet another “non-standard MSTing...”)

( At the very least, hints at a surprise given away )

Advance reports the latest release over in Japan of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? would have English subtitles got my attention. That particular piece of the Macross franchise hadn’t been included in the recent rollout to streaming services outside Japan I don’t have a subscription to. While I am quite aware a good number of other fans assign all the blame for that continued absence to Harmony Gold, I have to admit to being willing to wonder if there might be something to the occasional counterarguments the number of entities involved in the production of the movie four decades ago could have something to do with particular problems with its overseas rights. (I also understand that when the English dub of uncertain provenance was released on videotape years and years ago, Harmony Gold didn’t appear to have been involved...) In any case, I did start contemplating taking a rare step indeed for me.

( Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence )

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.

( Back from the past: Anne of Green Gables )

( Scheduled streaming: Blue Box, Mecha-Ude, and Love Live Superstar )

( Streaming additions: Sengoku Youko and DAN DA DAN )

( Blu-Rays eventually: Riding Bean and Otaku no Video )

( Back to one future: Space Battleship Yamato )

Just as I’d happened to do during the first months of this year, I came upon on certain notices there’d be another altogether unofficial streaming of Do You Remember Love? This time, the promise was of the original Japanese language dialogue with subtitles. That would be more familiar to me than the perhaps-infamous English dub streamed earlier, but I still thought I could make a late evening of the movie.

( Found in translation )

To be brief, I’ve pared time spent with a web browser open well back. To fill that gap, I decided to return to some manga and read it again. Picking up The Promised Neverland, I pushed through twenty volumes and a special follow-up of one-shots also from author Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu in four days. This was a considerable acceleration from my usual pace of courteous chapter-sized nibbles.

( The reason for my choice )

Three 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.

( Plugging along: Machine Robo Revenge of Cronos )

( Streaming dark and light: Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction and Narenare Cheer For You! )

( Streaming old and new: Major 2nd and Sengoku Youko )

( Back to long ago: Anne of Green Gables )

( A new adaptation: Urusei Yatsura )

( The concluding movement: Sound! Euphonium )

( The unexpected number: Girls Band Cry )

In keeping up with what shows up on Anime News Network, I did feel a bit surprised to see Big X, an anime series from 1964, appear on the front page. The article explained the studio that had made it would be streaming (via the uncomplicated means of YouTube) various sample episodes from its productions over the years, and while they weren’t starting with their very first series they would get around to an episode of it.

Having taken in some television anime from the 1960s out of some mixture of simple curiosity and feeble grandstanding, I’m at least intrigued by the thought of more people having the chance to do that (for all that for me Big X more “represented its year” than stood out on merit from its decade...) I’m also conscious that, lacking any fluency in Japanese, I pretty much depended on a single “fansubber” to see what sample episodes from then I’ve seen. Things were a bit better there when it came to movies.

As I posted my summary of the anime I’d seen in the first three months of this year, I knew I was days away from leaving on my second long vacation in less than a year’s time, getting away once more from Blu-Ray players and broadband connections. Having found a new video player program for my iPad, and contemplating six sea days in between Mexico and Hawaii and five sea days in between Hawaii and Vancouver Island, I didn’t intend for this to be altogether a “vacation from anime.” (I was also thinking a bit of reports that multicultural television in Hawaii had happened to show some anime in the 1970s and that that, more than memories of Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and some other “localized” cartoons in the 1960s, had got a first few fan-types thinking there were some interesting animated series in Japan... However, it wasn’t until my last day or so in Hawaii that I happened to think “now wasn’t ‘Kamehameha’ a term in Dragon Ball too?”) On coming back, though, I did decide at last I had to start turning in earlier to get to an early start-of-the-day meeting at work yet feel refreshed in the morning. I could still watch two episodes of anime in a weekday evening, but that began to feel a bit too extravagant with less time in general available in those evenings. I suppose having limited time to watch all the anime that’s caught your eye could be better in a certain way than having got to the point where you just can’t find anime that interests you, but there might be the eventual risk of feeling overwhelmed by what you can’t quite get around to.

( Back to one beginning: Pretty Cure )

( Forward to a follow-up: Major 2nd )

( A super robot wrap-up: Getter Robo )

( Return to streaming: Love Live Nijigasaki Next Sky and Nijiyon 2 )

( Return to Blu-Rays: Machine Robo Revenge of Cronos )

( Beginning once more: Patlabor OVAs and Movie )

( Extra unusual service: Akiba Maid War )

( One concluding surprise: Dead Dead Demon's DeDeDeDe Destruction )

At the start of this year I’d picked up on a few upcoming anime series that seemed interesting to me from their first descriptions and the comments of a few other people. More than that, I could find the time to properly begin watching all of them. Having only managed both those things during one quarter of last year, I did feel as if things were coming back together at last. Even so, I suppose a few familiar risks were returning too. The benefit of “watching anime as it streams” would seem to be augmenting the experience by joining discussions about it and picking up on the interest of others. That can skew into “my good taste is demonstrated by picking shows everyone else likes,” though, and then the problem becomes that if-and-when smirking shrugs about “Sturgeon’s Law” apply, watching everyone else sour on things, or even bumping into casual brushoff postmortems, can get pretty dispiriting. Even so, the wrinkle of not being as exposed to the comments of others as I once was aside, I did seek a certain solace in still getting around to a good number of “older” titles from previous seasons or decades.

( Once upon a time: Galactic Whirlwind Sasuraiger and Getter Robo )

( Manga preparation: Heavenly Delusion, Aria the Natural, and Frieren )

( Movies part one: Weathering With You and For Whom the Alchemist Exists )

( Streaming part one: Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki and Metallic Rouge )

( Streaming part two: Sengoku Youko and Bang Brave Bravern )

( Wrapping up and moving along: Soaring Sky Pretty Cure and Pretty Cure All Stars F )

( Movies part two: The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes and Blue Thermal )

Having marked the last time I revamped my home page with a post here just might have wound up a nagging reminder of how much time has passed since then. Beyond the problems of “linkrot,” the home page did just happen to contain a comment about “new promises of even newer Star Wars movies.” After a long time, I did start to wonder about whether I could reshape the home page into “narratives of how I became interested in some of the things I post the most about on this journal”; some time later, I had the body text written and the HTML formatted. Even if I’d led off with a casual comment about “Web 1.0,” I had picked up a further trick or two with CSS.

My old comments about Marathon slipped out altogether from my “old computers” section; wondering if I could mention one more thing on the page, I decided to say something about Peanuts for all that I don’t go to very many links on that subject. I also went to the point of reformatting my old Saga Journal essays, trying to make up for how I don’t go to very many Star Wars links now either. As for the links to other subjects, I decided to cut out editorializing, even managing to think this might make it a bit easier to revamp them in passing.

Having kept watching anime for as long as I have sometimes still provokes trying to explain that, if only to myself. I’ve supposed not watching as many “new” series as I could might help evade becoming jaded and annoyed by “sameness,” although I’m not anywhere as selective and discerning as some people. As for also watching titles years or decades old, there are at least a few names out there I’ve let remain gaps in my knowledge.

As a result of that, one reaction following the first jolt at the news of the death of the manga artist Akira Toriyama was the awareness I’ve never taken more than the briefest of glances at his Dragon Ball manga or anime. I can’t be so grandiose as to claim I’m the only fan with that blind spot, but I was conscious of all of the people who’ve commented about Dragon Ball being a gateway title for them, and of comments the series is something more than just that, too. There’s at least the impression the anime showed up over here on the final borderline of “localizations becoming acceptable to many established fans,” but just perhaps that meant it not quite registering on me right away. I’m at least conscious that “lengthy shonen action series” are something I don’t dip into very often, but again some of the things I take in instead aren’t a sign of refined tastes. Aware Toriyama’s career encompassed more than Dragon Ball, I do wonder if other things he worked on have caught my attention a little more; at the same time, I’m aware they haven’t got to the point of trying to seek them out.

Certain notices there’d just happen to be a one-time and altogether unofficial streaming screening of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? managed to reach my eyes. In the midst of another “quarter,” working my way through multiple anime series according to a self-imposed weekly schedule (although I did manage to watch a few movies in the first weeks of this year before my schedule filled in altogether), and last having seen Do You Remember Love almost five years ago, as a somewhat impulsive addition to returning to the original Macross anime and a great number of other titles I could link to it in tenuous ways, the thought of just happening to drop in on the stream grew on me. One comment that showed up early on was that the movie would be streamed with its old English dub of uncertain provenance, linked with the more peculiar name “Clash of the Bionoids.” Having dared just short clips of that dub before might only have been an odd encouragement this time, although there was a thought or two about “leaving early” should the late night get to me. For that matter, I was uncertain about promises of a double bill that didn’t name the second title.

( As it turned out... )

Profile

krpalmer

Multi-Purpose Home Page

Navigation

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Night Sea for Tranquility III by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

Page generated Dec. 4th, 2025 05:40 pm

Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Entries tagged with anime

It's Been Long Enough: Bubblegum Crisis

2025: My Third Quarter in Anime

It's Been Long Enough: Patlabor 2 the Movie

What Was, What Might Have Been

2025: My Second Quarter in Anime

See Anime North Again and Live

Two Animated Weekends

2025: My First Quarter in Anime

At the Movies: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-

Legitimately Remembered Love at last

2024: My Fourth Quarter in Anime

More Remembered (Streaming) Love

Unrealized Cross-Media Fortunes

2024: My Third Quarter in Anime

A Big (X) Surprise

2024: My Second Quarter in Anime

2024: My First Quarter in Anime

A Once-in-a-Decade Rebuild

Farewell to an Unseen Master

I Do Remember (Streaming) Love