Varying Degrees of Whut

I find Sora Kake Girl or Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo or The Girl Who Leapt Through Space quite enjoyable, for reasons which escape me. The staff are poking heaps of fun at other anime, past and present, from the same studio, and I suppose I’m in a position to appreciate at least some of that poking process. Plus my lack of anything approaching good taste in music helps me tap my foot to the Ali Project opening. But there are also odd hints in the show that it might turn out to be, like Code Geass, a fertile ground for the parlour game of crackpot theories.

Here’s my first contribution.

Notes on Ballet Bodies

When, in Ride Back‘s first scene, Rin dances, she looks to me like she has weight. I don’t mean that she looks like she’s heavy, I mean that she doesn’t look ethereal. It helps that the first few shots we see of her show her testing and adjusting her ballet shoes.

‘My Father is a Pirate’

It should be no surprise that I’m watching Space Pirate Captain Harlock: it’s about a chap who captains pirates, in space! The presence of pirates – of fictional pirates, not the depressingly prosaic Somali kind, or petty internet pirates like me and (if you use fansubs) you – is almost a guarantee of excitement, and so a story about pirates in space could only really be improved by adding a Gundam. Harlock (recently reviewed by psgels) almost manages to make even that deficiency up by being full of incident and infused with some kind of distilled Spirit of Adventure.

(Since we’re on the subject, I’ve heard rumours that this anime might appear legally on that streaming site – what was its name? ‘Brittlebun’, or something. Since it has had a longstanding presence across the Atlantic (probably despite, rather than because, of Toei’s own efforts), it’s somehow fitting that Harlock might still be at the cutting – or bleeding – edge of anime distribution, whatever one thinks of Brittlebun. Not that it’s available to viewers over here, of course, but it’s still really fitting – and that’s some comfort, isn’t it?)

I’ve only watched roughly the first fifth of the series so far, but I felt the need to try to crystalise a few of my thoughts – stimulated by one or two posts from other bloggers – by writing them down.

In Which I Write an Episode Summary

These days it feels like writing an episode summary is a political act, and writing about old anime is always a slightly charged business, so when the Mighty Benefactor  who is subtitling Dougram took the time to do a first-draft set of subtitles for the first episode of Panzer World Galient, I thought I might as well combine the two activities.

Condensed Review: GaoGaiGar

Pros and Cons

+ refuge in audacity
- formulaic first half . . .
+ . . . but it’s a damn good formula
- made for children . . .
+ . . . but not unremittingly childish
+ Kouhei Tanaka, god-tier super robot music composer

Supplementary Remarks

+ hotbloodedness and screaming
++ a love-letter to its own genre
+++ THE MOONS OF JUPITER

Verdict

Mediocre-to-good. Acquired taste, unless you’re in touch with your inner child.

Did I Like It?

Absolutely.

‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me . . .’

I’m Not A Blogger, by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid, who kindly distributes under a Creative Commons license

Look familiar? If it does, you’ve probably been reading The Animanachronism (since ‘anima’ beats ‘anime’, I’d appear so high on alphabetical blogrolls if I had only forgone the article!) since last Christmas, in which case you’ll also feel a sense of familiarity when I tell you that ‘I can only remember eleven things about my anime year in 200[8], and so have to scratch up a subject for my twelfth day.’ That wasn’t entirely true then, of course, and it’s definitely not true now: those to whom this entry is dedicated deserve it on merit.

Macross Frontier: Hands in the Air

The first episode of Macross Frontier – the Deculture Edition of the first episode – was my first contact with Macross, excepting a dimly-remembered trailer for (I think) Plus, which I saw on a rented DVD ages ago. I’m not counting that trailer because I didn’t pay much attention to it, on the grounds that ‘you promised me giant robots, and these are definitely planes, not giant robots’.

How little I knew!

Clannad: Unscene

You may or may not have noticed that I missed yesterday’s post. This is because my laptop’s screen died last night. I’m typing this on my new desktop computer, poorer but irreverently thankful for Sunday trading. I’ve an essay due in shortly and needed something fast, although I had been wondering about buying a desktop in any case. This isn’t what I’d choose if I had time and money, but I’m reasonably content.

I’ll get back to these posts once I’ve finished migrating from one machine to the other, but since I have a broken screen on my mind it seems fitting to give a passing nod to the impact of a scene that I never saw, from an anime I didn’t watch. I’m referring to two Clannad characters’ brief sojourn in a P.E. equipment shed, ‘the moment that froze the otakusphere.‘

I don’t have much to say about the scene itself, partly because it’s been well-covered already and partly because I haven’t seen it – although if you collected every screencap of the scene that I’ve seen, printed them all out in sequence and stapled one edge to make a flick book, you would, I think, have an accurate, if low-quality, reconstruction.

It’s pleasing that the whole incident is brought about not by a wish on Tomoya’s part, but by a book of charms, as though Clannad itself is a more cynically self-aware member of the Key-adaption family. Is a storage room lock-in a staple of the genre, or something that a normal schoolboy might wish for? One wonders what else Yukine’s book can do – if, that is, it was responsible in the first place. Not knowing any details, I can’t help imagining that it might actually be a book chock-full of charms to bring about hackneyed anime situations. I’m sure it’s much more mundane, but that’s an amusing thought, and as I go through the rigmarole of transferring my existence from one computer to another, I have to savour whatever amusement I can get.

True Tears: ‘No connection! No connection!’

I watched True Tears in the space of a few days at the end of August. I was reasonably impressed. People who actually  know things about quality seemed to agree: if I had to list the better anime of 2008 by skimming opinions from the creamy top of the ‘sphere, True Tears would probably feature.

Tytania: Who Delegates, Wins

Part of the fun in watching Tytania is in picking apart the choices taken by Tytania’s Dukes, and my favourite example of this is the chain of decisions surrounding Lydia, ‘the Moe Princess‘. Tytania doesn’t fit Lydia, though I imagine she would say it’s the other way round. Her sense of honour-driven politics is naïve, but increasingly attractive when juxtaposed with, say, Idris’s serpentine plotting, or even Zalisch’s more honest belligerence.