VII: Highway Code

As Dai-Guard nears its conclusion, Tokyo is evacuated. The streets are completely empty.

But of course we must still stop at red lights.

VI: Losers With Nukes

By chance it was December the first time I watched 0080, and in the years since I’ve made rewatching it part of Advent’s furniture. Moderate lateral spoilers follow.

V: The Five-Part Collapse

In the second part of Break Blade, a running golem has its leg shot out. So great is its momentum that after initially sliding face-first into the ground, it enters a catastrophic bouncing roll making, by my count, five distinct contacts with the ground. (I found the ground itself unconvincing when I looked hard at it, but I suppose savings had to be made somewhere. Or else my amateurish sense for animation’s off, as usual.) Quite a departure for a robot which had performed so efficiently up to that point, but then we have a foot in the shot reminding us whose mecha is the really cool one.

Break (or Broken, maybe) Blade as a whole is a strange thing. Outside of the finely-detailed robot-on-robot violence, and the elegant super-real reversal built into the manga’s premise, it all feels a bit plodding to me. So it’s good that these guys can make a golem falling over look impressively nasty.

IV: Recklessly Helmetless

In a quick read of the Mazinger Z manga this summer, I recognised the attitude that lies behind some of the good stuff which fills out Mazinkaiser and Shin Mazinger Z. How will SKL turn out, I wonder?

(I shamefully cropped and resized the image above from an eye-popping three-page sequence.)

The Burnt Remains

On Boxing Day I finished watching Dougram, a longish old anime about a small band of rebels and a prototype war machine. A fairly standard recipe for its time, distinguished in this case by understated mecha and heightened attention to politics. This is the first thing Takahashi directed (Anglophone fan-rumour has it that Takeyuki Kanda rode shotgun), and it began airing in 1981. It feels a little like an attempt to do a toned-down Mobile Suit Gundam — with which it shares a scriptwriter — though, being an anime history dilettante, I don’t know whether in 1981 Gundam was regarded as something influential, interesting or successful enough to be worth imitating.

I liked it rather a lot. I’ll say why I liked it in a bit, but first I think it’s worth pausing to note the significance of my being able to finish watching it at all.

III: Three Times Faster

‘Technology takes precedence over characterization, and thematically, the material is retrograde.’

II: It Has Missiles and a Stealth Mode, Too

Bowsprit laser? Yes! You are the most heavily-armed flying phantom ship ever!

(Competitor moments: all the parts where I was mentally bouncing the film’s plot off of its circumstances of  funding and production. Read more about The Flying Phantom Ship here.)

I: Boom

You want moments?

Nanoha levels a city in the movie adaption of her first season. And it is good.

(Happy God-Fleshification Day, by the way.)