anime

[WickedCestus]

Based on the recommendation of several people who I think are cool, I fell down a Gundam hole for the last few months. I've finished 0079, Zeta Gundam, Char's Counterattack, 08th MS Team, War In The Pocket, The Origin, and Unicorn. I also dipped my feet into Stardust Memory and Thunderbolt before deciding they definitely weren't my thing. I'm currently watching Victory Gundam and honestly, it feels like I'm literally never going to stop watching Gundam. I don't read the synopsis for any of the series, so I go into each one completely blind and spend the first few episodes just getting my bearings on where and when it takes place. I'm always thinking, "The next one can't be quite as good", but other than the aforementioned two, I've been absolutely in love with all of them, and I think I've now reached the point that literally just seeing a Gundam will make me love the show, just because of the association in my mind.

 

I keep trying to start other shows I really want to watch, but I always immediately find myself wanting to watch Gundam again. I'm hoping that once I finish all of the shows in the Universal Century, I will be able to take a break and slow down, but who knows. I don't even recognize myself when I look in the mirror anymore.

[Gormongous]

Finished Little Witch Academia. I'm probably being too hard on it, but I thought the shift from "episodic Saturday Morning Cartoon format" to "light seinen drama" in the second cour of the show was clumsy enough to make me watch the final few episodes with some real side-eye. I appreciated the increasing character development that was a byproduct of the shift a lot: Diana, Constanze, Lotte, and even Ursula get some quality time with Akko, whose bumbling earnestness forces them all to either step up or reveal some vulnerability. Lotte's episode especially is excellent, possibly the best in the series, but they're all good. Unfortunately, the nebulous threat to magic, the mustache-twirling villain, and the rather arbitrary resolution are not. Honestly, my best guess is that Yoshinari You, while a talented short-form director, doesn't really have the juice for or the interest in going for an old-school two-cour anime series, and Shimada Michiru, while an old hand at the scenario business, didn't really have the material to force him to it. I don't know, it's whatever. 7/10.

 

On 6/26/2017 at 1:53 AM, WickedCestus said:

Based on the recommendation of several people who I think are cool, I fell down a Gundam hole for the last few months. I've finished 0079, Zeta Gundam, Char's Counterattack, 08th MS Team, War In The Pocket, The Origin, and Unicorn. I also dipped my feet into Stardust Memory and Thunderbolt before deciding they definitely weren't my thing. I'm currently watching Victory Gundam and honestly, it feels like I'm literally never going to stop watching Gundam. I don't read the synopsis for any of the series, so I go into each one completely blind and spend the first few episodes just getting my bearings on where and when it takes place. I'm always thinking, "The next one can't be quite as good", but other than the aforementioned two, I've been absolutely in love with all of them, and I think I've now reached the point that literally just seeing a Gundam will make me love the show, just because of the association in my mind.

 

I keep trying to start other shows I really want to watch, but I always immediately find myself wanting to watch Gundam again. I'm hoping that once I finish all of the shows in the Universal Century, I will be able to take a break and slow down, but who knows. I don't even recognize myself when I look in the mirror anymore.

 

Like I said earlier, I'm watching Turn A Gundam on a whim right now, having only ever watched War in the Pocket and parts of the movie versions of the original series, and I've actually been blown away by how inventive, daring, and weird it is. Granted, Turn A is notoriously the dark horse of the franchise, being set in a WW1-era Earth that's getting invaded by moon people, but it's still such a good time and so sure of itself that it's hard not to get swept along. I'm beginning to wonder if all Gundam is like this?

[WickedCestus]

I have not seen Turn A, so it's possibly weirder than what I've seen before, but I too have been surprised by the tone of the series. There is a ton of interesting concepts going on, with each series seeming to fall on a different place on the spectrum between the major political factions. There are series that are skewed toward one side or the other, and then there are others that seem totally caught in the middle, which means the viewer has to constantly re-contextualize how they feel about these conflicts. It just feels like the show, while fun, is absolutely serious in its treatment of war. It's never far outside of your mind that real people are dying during these events.

 

Also, I don't know how much Turn A gets into this, but 0079 and Zeta get into strange psychological territory that introduces some cool dream-like imagery which I absolutely did not expect. I always thought of Gundam as just a bunch of mechs, but it treads a weird balance between mech battles (that are totally cool) and political/interpersonal drama that, while sometimes hokey, often hits me harder than I expect.

[Gormongous]

1 hour ago, WickedCestus said:

Also, I don't know how much Turn A gets into this, but 0079 and Zeta get into strange psychological territory that introduces some cool dream-like imagery which I absolutely did not expect. I always thought of Gundam as just a bunch of mechs, but it treads a weird balance between mech battles (that are totally cool) and political/interpersonal drama that, while sometimes hokey, often hits me harder than I expect.

 

I guess I'll spoil a little of Turn A Gundam in the hopes of advancing this conversation? It's only a mid-level plot twist in the first dozen episodes or so.

 

 

There are two characters in Turn A Gundam who are perfectly identical to each other. One is Dianna Soreil, leader of the Dianna Counter, the nation/ideological faction/expeditionary force of the Moon Race, and the other is Kihel Heim, the daughter of a local Earth grandee who happened to take in a Moon Race infiltrator who turns coat when he sees the brutality of the Moon Race invasion. At one point, they encounter each other, because the leader of the country being invaded by the Moon Race took Kihel under his wing immediately before opening negotiations with the Dianna Counter. Long story short, they decide to trade clothes as a lark, then their airship comes under attack and they get separated... so the sheltered rich girl has to learn how to be an autocratic leader and the autocratic leader gets a firsthand perspective on what her invasion is doing to the countryside. It's typical Prince and the Pauper fare, but it's done really deftly and it's much more emotionally detailed than I'd expect from a Gundam show. I'm more engaged by the whole feel of "naive person being horrified by the ravages of war" than I have been in years.

 

Also, as I mentioned in our podcast that's going up on Monday, I like the gentle alternation between visceral-feeling robot combat and fairly intricate political drama. Apparently that's a hallmark of the Gundam franchise? It makes me want to watch more. I feel like War in the Pocket was a bad intro to the whole thing because it's really restricted to a child's point of view.

 

EDIT: Oh, also, the other Moon Race factions, besides Dianna Counter, are Agrippa Maintainer and Ghingham Fleet. They're all great, it's that really charming way that Japanese shows use English "names."

[WickedCestus]

@Gormongous Yes! The idea of members of opposing factions meeting in non-battle situations is a concept that is explored in almost every Gundam series* to an extent, and is often handled much more complexly than the typical "reluctantly teaming up with my enemy to survive" or "two kids who don't understand why there's a war" tropes, although there are usually elements of those too. This is one of the things I love most about the show, and is tied to the moral ambiguity I referred to earlier. Both sides do bad things and good things, and have good and bad characters, without it feeling like the show is artificially creating a false equivalency. It's packed with grey areas that allow you as a viewer to decide who is worse, because at some point, it does feel like you have to pick a side, because the state of the world is clearly not right in a way that, perhaps, and this is a core theme of the show, can only be solved by these conflicts.

 

I think War In The Pocket hits the nail maybe too closely on the head. *Spoiler for War In The Pocket*

The idea of star-crossed lovers accidentally being involved in combat comes up

a lot in the series preceding WITP.

It works well as a stand-alone story, but it loses something if divorced from the grander Gundam narrative, I think, and is less subtle in its treatment. I still think it's a great OVA, but does misrepresent, maybe, what makes the series truly special. A lot of the stories within Gundam are reinforced by the meta-narrative, and also by the fact that concepts are repeated over and over in a way that, at least to me, feels like more of an intentional choice than trope-y laziness (although it might sometimes be that too (as evidenced by the myriad clones of Char Aznable in the alternate universe shows (most of which I haven't seen though and can't comment on))).

 

Also, Gundam names are always ridiculous and hilarious in a way I can truly get behind. The main character in Victory is called "Usso" (similar to the Japanese word for "lie"), which makes me constantly think the characters are yelling "no way!" when they refer to him.

 

*I'm not really sure how to differentiate between referring to individual TV series or OVAs and the Gundam series as a whole, so I use "series" to refer to individual series, and "the show" to refer to the grander story. I don't like the word "franchise" because I think it doesn't convey the idea that this is a meta-narrative, and not just a bunch of things thrown together by a brand.

[Gormongous]

To the surprise of everyone, myself included, I'd never watched Patlabor: the Movie 2 until last night, but now I can join the chorus of voices say that it is absolutely excellent. It's an Oshii film in all of the right ways (beautiful animation and direction, meditative pacing and tone, deep interest in the role of violence in civil society and in the modern blurring between peacetime and wartime, alienated characters clinging to or placing themselves in opposition to institutional power structures as a means of preserving their damaged selves, military thriller in which lethal force is the consequence and not the catalyst) without being an Oshii film in the bad ways (needlessly obscure or muted plot beats, multiple soliloquies on tangential philosophical concepts, cheesecake filler, casting the villain as a social and political cipher).

 

Watching it in 2017, it's easy to see and feel the bones there of what would become the first Ghost in the Shell movie, two years before Oshii had even made it, but I also think Patlabor 2 is more grounded and more interested in depicting a society in which the foundational institutions are fundamentally in conflict with each other. The bureaucracy pushes the military around, the military pushes the police around, the police push the bureaucracy around... and, if any of them ever gets a chance to push in the other direction, they'll do it in a second and damn the consequences. The choice to make the viewpoint characters the seasoned SV2 captains Goto Kiichi and Nagumo Shinobu, rather than their goofily semi-competent crew like Noa Izumi and Shinohara Asuma, reinforces that depiction of society. These are fiercely intelligent individuals, with long histories of public service, who know how politics, violence, and order interpenetrate and who can navigate that inward-tending geography of ideology and humanity in order to achieve whatever small victory they might hope to win against a society at war, albeit a quiet and undeclared war, with its constituent parts.

 

I'd watched the original OVA, the spinoff TV series, the sequel OVA for the TV series, and the first movie before this, so I'm not entirely sure how much of the sense of deep characterization that I intuited in Patlabor 2 comes from having consumed over two dozen hours of Mobile Police Patlabor beforehand, but a lot of those two dozen hours were pretty damn bad (the TV series, especially, swung between near-Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex quality and early-nineties direct-to-video garbage practically every other episode) so it's probably more of a wash than anything one way or another.

 

Also, this doesn't really fit anywhere, but I really enjoyed how this is the most traditionally modern and military of Oshii's sci-fi works. No super-soldiers with Nazi-evoking armor, no thermo-optic camouflage, no semi-immortal fighter pilots, and barely any robots, for that matter. Just lots of uniformed soldiers and guns and tanks and helicopters, controlled (and, almost, haunted) by bespectacled government spooks like Arakawa.

[Gormongous]

I love double-posting!

I'm actually in a bit of an anime slump, not because I'm not watching shows, but because I'm watching three older ones (Turn A Gundam, Space Runaway Ideon, and Urusei Yatsura) that are all both long (fifty, thirty-nine, and a hundred ninety-five episodes respectively) and indifferently paced, so I don't really have the feeling of making progress. I guess I'm also watching the second cour of Sakura Quest, but I've found that show to be a disappointment and I'm just counting out my time there now.

 

Anyway! All of that is to say that the best anime that I've been watching lately is Aggressive Retsuko, starring a red panda who's the new character from Sanrio. Like the last Sanrio anime for which I stumped, Show by Rock!!, Aggretsuko is way, way better than it should be. The episodes are under two minutes long and follow a very similar pattern: Aggretsuko is going about her life and minding her own business, something frustrates or demeans her, and she fantasizes about telling the offending party off with death metal lyrics. It should get stale really fast, but it doesn't, partly because of the craft of each episode but mostly because the situations that bedevil Aggretsuko are so real, both in their setup and in her response. She's plagued by the indifference of her bosses to her talent, the demands of sacrificing her social life for illusory professional success, the shallowness of modern friendships, the difficulty of enjoying simple pleasures in life, and more! And she gets pissed about all of it in a really satisfying way. I'm not the first to point out that Sanrio's making something of an anti-capitalist paean here, but that's not going to stop me from promoting it. Unfortunately, it's not available in English except through fansubs, but that shouldn't stop you.

 

Also, I parlayed my thoughts on Patlabor: the Movie 2 into a podcast with the rest of the Key Frames team! Listen to it here (and to all the rest of our episodes, after you do).

[Twig]

guys i know concrete revolutio is a hard sell, it's fuckin "superheroes are everywhere", but it's good!! it deals a lot with discrimination and societal acceptance of that which is different. it also has a lot of parallels with real history events, like shitty ones, like human experiments, etc. and also it looks fucking good, and it's bones, so you KNOW it's got some great goddamn animation.

 

it's biggest flaw is perhaps the way it jumps around in a very complicated timeline. it gives you dates, but if you're just watching the show passively it's real hard to keep up with the flow all the specific events. the broad strokes aren't hard to pick up, though.

 

also a gay relationship was just revealed and it was not a big deal? that is, the show did not think it was a big deal. the manager/producer/whatever of the band she was in did. it was of a minor side character, though.

it may be one of the most underrated series i've seen

that said i'm not finished and maybe it turns to shit by the end

i don't think that will happen though

[Twig]

FINISHED IT!

 

it did not turn out shit! i'm not a huge fan of the ending, though. not SHIT but could've been better. still, i don't believe a subpar ending can retroactively make the previous stuff bad (at least not always). i still recommend it if anything i've said sounds good to you.

 

something worth calling out that i didn't mention above: the show features "superhumans". what that means in this specific case is... EVERYTHING. demons, people who can turn giant, mechs, ghosts, robot satellites that respond to and are powered by cries for help, cyborg cops, magical girls, etc, etc, etc. these are disparate concepts and wildly varying art styles that bones somehow successfully made work. nothing seems out of place. everything melts together into a sublime soup of superpowers. hell if i know how they managed it.

 

another thing: because the show takes place over a long period of time, jumping back and forth through time, there are many many times when people shift allegiances. alliances form and dissipate in what seems like minutes but is actually literally years within the show's timeline. it's cool!!! i think.

 

it's also worth repeating what i said above about that being its biggest flaw. but also i think it's one of its biggest strengths. it makes it interesting. not to say it's for everyone, but i... kinda liked it, even while i hated it.

 

it's a complex show. it's very hard to follow. it requires serious work to fully understand the flow of events. if i were a less lazy man i honestly would've written down the timing of events to help me understand better. i'm not, though. i might some day. or i suppose i could find where someone else has done that on the internet. 

also in the process of writing this post i think i might dislike the ending less. i think it was kind of a copout in that it... makes a lot of events throughout the show feel kind of... it brings them to a head that ends before the face. (what.) on the other hand, it absolutely jives with many of the themes presented throughout the show. so... there's that!

 

anyway i like it please watch it so i have someone to talk to thanks.

[Twig]

grumble grumble no one watching concrete revolutio grumble grumble

grumble grumble gorm always pestering me to write more in this thread grumble grumble

i just finished space battleship yamato 2199, here's some random thoughts i wrote down in evernote just now (bolded stuff is the most important - one being my biggest complaint (sort of), and the other being my biggest anti-complaint (not sort of, absolutely, 100%, best thing ever)):

 

my fav episode is the one with the gamilan robot and analyzer becoming friends and then the newly named "alter" being killed by analyzer at the very end because he's gone what amounts to dangerously insane and since he's a robot it's okay to kill him. ): i'm a HUGE sucker for ai being people and this was executed very strongly i think. and then they never did anything with it again! why! hell, even analyzer barely shows up from that point on, except as a drinking buddy for drunk doctor. i wonder if it was like this in the original series. like maybe it was more throwaway, and they made it better here, and then because they were trying to stay faithful to the original material, they never touched on it again.

 

i don't understand norran's motivations by the end. he kidnaps mori because they think she's the iscandarian. okay, fine. he's loyal to gamilas. okay, fine. he takes her to gamilas and then is assigned as her protection and whatever. then she's nice to him so he... saves her? i guess? it's weird, i don't buy it all.

yamato ship damage should've/could've been permanent. like battle scars i mean. how they gonna repaint the ship even if they repair. they used a 3d model so it should've been easy to just keep adding scars. bit of a bummer, but oh well.

 

the female uniforms are awful. truly awful.

 

the iscandarian robots are goofy as hell! that walk cycle!!

 

there is a literal goddamn space submarine that dives into subspace and has a periscope that pokes out of subspace and fires torpedoes out of subspace. INCREDIBLE.

 

series should've been one or two episodes shorter... like why did we need to see goer's rebel fleet wiped out? why did we need to see desler survive yet another obvious and unavoidable death? is he dead for real this time?! just feels like they stretched it out for some reason. which, i am told, this is an ova so they had however any episodes they wanted and didn't need to do 26. i dunno weirdddddddd. and then we got ghost older kodai, whose soul is i guess in the cosmo reverser.

 

thinking about it more, the last episode was real good so i'll accept what happened.

 

overall, though i fucking loved it. to be honest, i'd even say it fits comfortably alongside a lot of my favorite western sci-fi series. much of the same tropes and plot patterns. i mean that very positively, too. but i'm a unique butterfly when it comes to sci-fi tastes, maybe, probably not actually, but whatever.

[Gormongous]

12 hours ago, Twig said:

grumble grumble gorm always pestering me to write more in this thread grumble grumble

 

It's for the good of the podcast for you to take notes in a public space!

 

Looking back in this thread, I talk about Space Battleship Yamato 2199 at least four times, having started to watch it at the instigation of Rodi, but I said very little substantive about it — mostly just that it played like nationalist propaganda from the future and that the plot was surprisingly enjoyable for how repetitive and predictable it is. I remember very little, except for impressionistic takes of various characters, so I'm looking forward to getting reminded of the good parts when we next record!

 

Also, if you're into space submarines, there are multi-episode arcs in Crest/Banner of the Stars and Starship Operators with your name on them...

[Gormongous]

I can't believe that FUNimation licensed boobs-and-butt-wrestling anime Keijo!!!!!!!!. Regardless of its actual quality, deep down, it's the kind of anime that should be totally toxic for an American company to pick up and sell, but here we are.

 

I was also pleased (and, tragically, almost as surprised) to find out that FUNimation has the rights to my favorite anime space opera, Crest/Banner of the Stars, speaking of that anime in the above post... and they've had them since 2013. Why? Who can say. Honestly, if those series get a remastered box set of Blu-rays at a reasonable price, they'd be a day-one purchase for me. I wouldn't even wait for a sale!

[Gormongous]

Triple post, because I like talking about anime on the forums as much as the slack! This past week, I finished Show by Rock!! #, which I'd picked up as a pick-me-up from the doldrums of watching too many old and long-running series. It was a really good time! The first season, minus the sharp sign, was a lighthearted Sanrio joint that mostly focused on gags about the music industry, gags about music genres, and heartfelt teamwork between band members. It was cute and fun but not essential, you know? Like most anime out there.

 

As I said on a recent Key Frames episode, the second season is radically different, almost as if it's the result of a blank check or open-ended mandate from corporate leadership. A universe-destroying threat is set up and executed in the first five minutes of the first episode, then rolled back through time travel so that the protagonists can try to prevent it... by growing together as a band. On the way, they participate in a bake sale, a water sports tournament, a sentai show, an interplanetary voyage, a trip to Hawaii-but-not-Hawaii, and of course multiple battles of the bands. The best gags from the first season are still in use: the ludicrous pretensions of the visual kei band, the cod wisdom and grandeur of the traditional Japanese band, the sickly-sweet infighting of the idol group... I don't know. It's really interesting that Sanrio is doing all these anime like Aggretsuko and Show by Rock!! that have these hard, self-undermining edges to them, but unfortunately I don't think that those edges make them any more recommendable to people who already aren't into cute animals and/or rock band shenanigans. I enjoyed myself immensely, even as the end of Show by Rock!! # leveled out into a fairly predictable "play music and support your friends to defeat the bad thing, which isn't actually bad so much as misunderstood" finale. Who knows what's next? Maybe Gudetama? Maybe not.

 

Anyway, we'll always have dumb jokes like this:

[gavku]

I've started watching Made In Abyss ( 3 eps in )....digging it so far, feel like its about to really kick off.

 

 

 

[Twig]

Made in the Abyss starts or as one thing and becomes another and that change was shocking at first but I loved it in the end.

 

Bad but actually good lady sucks so much, though.

 

Unrelated:

 

I really like this interview with the director for Land of the Lustrous.

https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/10/31/land-of-the-lustrous-director-takahiko-kyougoku-interview/

It's confirmed a lot of things I'm feeling about the show, and also put a lot of things in a new light. I'm very excited to continue watching it.

Side note: anyone more familiar with Japanese than I know how they emphasis nonbinary gender in Japanese?

[Gormongous]

After letting my viewing of it lapse for months, I've been back into Turn A Gundam in a big way. Something that you don't get when you only watch one- and two-cour anime is how many different themes a longer-running series can tackle over the course of its running time. Turn A spends twenty episodes on the fog of war and the inherent factionalism of human beings in times of conflict, then another fifteen on the absurdity of mutually assured destruction and who should have the power to make that call anyway, and now the final fifteen are returning to what I think of as more traditional concerns of Gundam: whether certain people, objects, and ideas are inherently violent or not, and whether you risk repeating history more by educating people about past atrocities or keeping them ignorant of them. Except for the last phase, these themes have been remarkably subtle and underplayed, mostly coming through the well-realized characters and the intricate politics of the show.

 

I have to admit, I always suspected that I might enjoy a full-length Gundam series, but Turn A has really knocked my socks off. Except for a tedious interlude about an adventurer who was searching for a way to travel to the moon, it succeeds with almost all of the many ideas that it tries: invasion of a relatively primitive society by technologically advanced colonists; the process of discovering and using lost technology; fighting a guerrilla war against technologically and numerically superior forces; nuclear disarmament; an ancient civilization built around an abandoned space elevator; moon colonies and their society; and, perhaps the greatest achievement, a fascinating prince-and-pauper dynamic between the two main female characters, Dianna Soriel and Kihel Heim. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Japan has a different (and largely superior) take on doppelgangers, when Kokoro Connect was such a good story about body-swapping and Golden Time's amnesia plot wasn't terrible, but still. The queen of the moon and the daughter of a mine owner switch places on a lark, during one of the filler episodes, and then are forced to maintain their new roles for most of the ensuing episodes, and they both learn and grow so much from the expectations and relationships that hitherto surrounded the other that they've both become my favorite characters in the show by a long shot.

 

Even if Turn A Gundam continues its apparent trajectory in the final six episodes towards typical anime "gee whiz wouldn't it be great" pacifism and falls back on platitudes about compromise, communication, and humility, the sequence of events that led a queen to learn about the kind of life of her own choosing she could lead and for a young woman to learn how to wield authority even when it's not given to her has made this one of my favorite sci-fi anime of all time... You could say that I'm over the moon, even.

[syntheticgerbil]

Can someone here help me with the 1993 OVA series of Jojo? I've finally bit the bullet and decided to try to collect everything I can by Satoshi Kon and there's surprisingly not a whole lot, but his involvement in 1993 Jojo is really confusing.

 

So I asked a friend who likes the series and he said they reordered the episodes from 1993 to come after the 2001 OVAs which means all of these things have conflicting episode numbers, but from what I can tell when it comes to DVD releases, now the episode I'm at least looking for, that I am sure Satoshi Kon directed is Episode 12 (or what used to be 5). Of course the DVD for that is very expensive but whatever.

 

So now my real problem is beyond just the episode he directed there's a lot of conflicting information on his involvement with many episodes of that series. I know he did some key animation here and there as well as storyboards, but I'm looking for any episode he either had a hand in writing or directing.

Anime News Network, Wikipedia, and Imdb seem at odds. He seems to get credited for 11-13 (or originally 4-6) but then sometimes fans get overzealous and write whatever the fuck they want to inflate their involvement, like people who still say Hideo Kojima is somehow the creator and director of Zone of the Enders. But this doesn't mean they are wrong in this case, and I also don't know anything about Jojo.

 

Is there anyone who has access to substantial episode credits (maybe even the Japanese release and not translated credits)? Did Satoshi Kon writer or direct episodes 11-13 (or 4-6)? Also Imdb lists Katsuhiro Otomo as codirecting 11-13 which seems fucking bonkers and extremely wrong. I'm pretty sure I would have known about that already. I can't seem to find any information anywhere else on Otomo's involvement in this series which means it's probably another overzealous fan. But... maybe is it possible Otomo had involvement as well?

[Gormongous]

19 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:

Is there anyone who has access to substantial episode credits (maybe even the Japanese release and not translated credits)? Did Satoshi Kon writer or direct episodes 11-13 (or 4-6)? Also Imdb lists Katsuhiro Otomo as codirecting 11-13 which seems fucking bonkers and extremely wrong. I'm pretty sure I would have known about that already. I can't seem to find any information anywhere else on Otomo's involvement in this series which means it's probably another overzealous fan. But... maybe is it possible Otomo had involvement as well?

 

IMDB is the worst source for anime production credits, sadly. It's usually, as you said, overzealous fans working off of the back of a DVD or pausing the translated credits, both of which can be incomplete or over-generalizing. If I need to double-check production credits for specific episodes in an anime, I tend to use AniDB, which is better-curated than MyAnimeList and AnimeNewsNetwork and has more granularity in how it credits people per episode. According to the AniDB listing, Satoshi Kon is credited with script, storyboards, and direction for episode 5; "composition assistance" (which I haven't really seen before, but I assume means helping on script and/or storyboards) for episode 6; and key frame animation on episode 2. Hopefully you're not collecting everything that Kon did key frame animation on, I imagine that's a pretty long list! I can find no evidence of Otomo's involvement in the 1993 Jojo and I think that that's someone conflating Kon and Otomo, honestly.

 

Anyway, over the last month of anime viewing, I finished Turn A Gundam, which had a predictably Instrumentality-like ending but then had an extremely powerful and emotional epilogue that completely resold me on the series. After that, I finished my watch of Space Runaway Ideon and its two movies. I liked those a lot less: there were intermittently some very clever ideas about humanity's predisposition towards violence and how peace can be achieved in spite of that, but they were hampered by a highly episodic "mecha of the week" format and one-dimensional characters who, by the second movie, openly admitted that there was no rational motivation for their self-destructive escalation. It's actually kind of uncanny how much the second movie, Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked, is a prototype for End of Evangelion, and that's probably where I got most of my enjoyment. Finally, I watched all of Hyouka, KyoAni's 2012 take on the series of mystery novels. Being more serious than most other offerings from that studio, it feels like Hyouka is often overlooked, but I thought it did a great job of using high school slice-of-life trappings to tell a series of extremely low-stakes mystery stories. The initial mystery, an investigation into the meaning of the titular hyouka or "ice cream," is probably the best, although I'm fond of the one about the horror movie because it was one that I was able to solve in advance of the characters, and the second cour of the anime slowly de-emphasizes the mysteries in favor of character moments, finishing with a somewhat abrupt (but not unexpected or precipitous) ending. I enjoyed it immensely, and it was a great palate-cleanser after Ideon.

 

The question, now, is what to watch next? I have a friend pushing me to watch Rozen Maiden, but I was also thinking about Bubblegum Crisis 2040. Those are pretty different anime, but that's just how worldly I am!

[Roderick]

I was surprised to find a mention of Jojo in recent posts, as I came here to briefly blurt about exactly that just now. After seeing a few key people in my environment absolutely obsessed with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and especially one of its characters, Dio, I saw the first episode of - I gather - the latest version. I thought it was a miserable experience. What an un-fun story, and weirdly, badly told too. The characters are heinous and unlikeable, the story made me cringe and I had to wash the whole thing down with a binge of anime short Senyu just to cleanse my palate.

 

I'm sure it gets better after this - it must! Otherwise I don't see how this would garner any attention at all! - but I'm certainly not watching it further.

[Twig]

Phantom Blood is rough, but short. Battle Tendency is great. Stardust Crusaders is mostly good. Diamond is Unbreakable is fucking fantastic.

 

It's a macho man show about macho men doing more and more ridiculous things. (Sometimes women partake, but usually they don't. At least so far. I hear Araki gets better and better at not treating his lady characters like shit. Part 4 has a good... if weird one. Sorta. I like her, anyway.) They introduce something called Stands in part 3, which change up the show a lot. At first I was against it, but man they get creative with how they work. ESPECIALLY in part 4, where the main dude's power is that he can repair anything by punching it with his stand. Leads to a lot of creative solutions to problems. And he has probably one of the LEAST interesting powers. My main man Koichi has the power of words. Quite literally.

 

Does it get better? That entirely depends on your perspective. Part 1 is, as I said, rough. But it doesn't stop being about ridiculous dramatic poses and ridiculously over the top situations. It does stop being so gross (mostly), even with Dio, who becomes one of the better villains in a show like this. He comes back in part 3 and is pretty incredible, in no small part thanks to a very specific single moment, which is executed PERFECTLY in the anime..

 

Each part introduces a brand new cast of main characters. So if it's the characters that bother you, that might change. They do recycle some, but none from the first part, besides Dio, who, as I said above, is great after part 1.

 

Watch more. :smug:

[Gormongous]

7 hours ago, Roderick said:

I was surprised to find a mention of Jojo in recent posts, as I came here to briefly blurt about exactly that just now. After seeing a few key people in my environment absolutely obsessed with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and especially one of its characters, Dio, I saw the first episode of - I gather - the latest version. I thought it was a miserable experience. What an un-fun story, and weirdly, badly told too. The characters are heinous and unlikeable, the story made me cringe and I had to wash the whole thing down with a binge of anime short Senyu just to cleanse my palate.

 

I'm sure it gets better after this - it must! Otherwise I don't see how this would garner any attention at all! - but I'm certainly not watching it further.

 

As a counterpoint to Twig, I've watched all of the latest JoJo's Bizarre Adventure through Stardust Crusaders and I don't think it's worth your time if it doesn't immediately grab you as something great. There are some fun and interesting twists to the formula, but deep down it's still an extremely rote shounen battles-and-friendship anime, just one that doesn't take itself terribly seriously (while still being perfectly happy to be taken seriously by the viewer) while showing off a lot of sub-Fist of the North Star beefcake. There's a lot of pressure online to watch and enjoy JoJo, and I know from experience that it's hard to ignore, so I'm always willing to raise my voice to say that there are dozens of anime that are better to watch, no matter what your tastes are.

[Reyturner]

I recommend maybe listening to the JoJo Bizarre Explainer podcast along with watching show. They do a great job making jokes and critiquing it from a queer perspective. 

 

That said, Phantom Blood sucks, Battle Tendency owns, Stardust Crusaders is in bad need of a skip list and Diamond is Unbreakable is peak JoJo.

[Twig]

deep down it's still an extremely rote shounen battles-and-friendship anime

This is only true on the most reductive sense in Diamond is Unbreakable.

[Gormongous]

1 hour ago, Twig said:

This is only true on the most reductive sense in Diamond is Unbreakable.

 

I distinctly remember Jotaro starting alone, in jail, in Stardust Crusaders and ultimately gathering a party of a half-dozen others, some of them former enemies of his, in his quest to do the whatever. Like, if you don't enjoy bromance and a lot of fights where one person thinks they've won but then it turns out that they haven't because the other person is cleverer or gutsier, JoJo doesn't transcend that. It's not bad at all, and I've never argued that, but it's definitely solid in its genre roots, and if you don't enjoy that genre it's not going to win you over with style alone.

[Roderick]

Thank you all for your perspective - that was nice to read. I don't think I'll give it more of my attention, though. I'll save that for my first-ever viewing of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is odd in all the best ways and a wonderful time capsule to 2006 anime. I was there when the thing exploded in Dutch convention fandom spaces, and now it's fun to watch and understand what made it special.

 

Currently well into Endless Eight, which I was taught to fear, but turns out to be 100% enjoyable, not boring and a great time loop story. Did people not have the stomach for that back then? I remember so many folks quitting or getting exasperated by it.