Escape Mechanism

There’s no real reason behind my selection of this picture, beyond the fact that I’m talking about Turn-A Gundam in this post. It’s nice to see a Gundam lead piloting something low-tech now and then, though, isn’t it? (Given what I could have chosen, be thankful.) Anyway, this is a follow-up to ‘War Sucks!‘, and while it contains no spoilers for Turn-A, it does contain one moderate spoiler for the final episode of Gundam 00.

‘War Sucks!’

I was idle, and I thought idly about war and anime. ‘Anime says that war sucks,’ is what I thought first. This seems to be the standard opinion. If it’s deployed, it’s frequently followed by mention of pacifism and the atomic bomb.

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.

‘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!

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.

Gundam 00: Space Battlewagon

We can come away from a good action sequence saying more than ‘wow’ or alternatively ‘it left me cold’. So, for example, in one of Legend of the Galactic Heroes’s side-stories it’s extremely fitting that a certain character dies with the loss of his right arm just before the revelation that he was less of a dangerous Machiavel than he had seemed. That revelation would have felt different if he had lost his left arm instead, or for that matter if he had died with all his limbs attached.

Zettai Karen Children: Suprised by Hilarity

For those who have had better things to watch this year, Zettai Karen Children is – how to put this? – a cocktail of comedy and action in a magical girl-shaped glass, with an olive in it that tastes like X-Men’s theme of prejudice against the superpowered. Judging from its timeslot, children are its main audience, though there are moments when one must suppress qualms about precisely who is enjoying what.

Kaiji: ‘He fell! He fell!’

People have written about Kamina, and rightly so, but I don’t want to talk about him today. Today I want to talk about Mitsuzi Ishida.