Anime

[therewillbeblus]

I just placed a giant order, so if there are more cheap deal sets people recommend that pushes me back over the free shipping threshold, I may just have to place another

[feihong]

That was a good deal on The Big O at $15.96, though OOS now. I wonder if anyone else shares my love for this show. It was easy to dismiss when it came out during the Toonami days since it so prominently wore its influences (Batman, James Bond, Giant Robo). But it legitimately came into its own, especially when you looked beyond the robot fights— which while great, seemed almost at odds with the sensitivity of the rest of it. Like the peculiar interactions between Roger and his android assistant Dorothy, or the way all the people in the city are just trying to move along with their lives despite having no memory beyond the past 40 years. The art style is also fascinating in its 60s Japan animation meets 90s Batman: TAS look, that I don’t think has been replicated.

Unfortunately the second season lacks all of the class of the nearly perfect first season. Though Cartoon Network ordered the new season themselves, they creatively interfered, apparently telling the director to wrap it up and “reveal the mystery”. The result is a bizarre, Evangelion inspired deconstruction of itself that I’ve never been able to comprehend on any satisfying level.

Well, I love the show as well––easily one of my favorite anime––but I don't share your dislike of the second season. I thought the second season unpacked all of the interesting ideas teased in the first season and made them wonderfully clear and worthwhile. The pace changes abruptly to fit the new remit of ending the show, sure, but if anything, that made the 2nd season more exciting to watch on a week-by-week basis on Toonami back in the day. My buddy and I made a date of it every week, and each episode of the second season was like a mind-blowing new high. By the end, when Roger is

Spoiler

negotiating with a god-robot––that is unmaking the world as it walks through it––in order to preserve the illusion of his reality,

it seemed to me like the apex of something that the first episode of the first season started laying out like disparate pieces of a puzzle.

It sounds to me as though you view the second season as a compromise, in which the psychotronic philosophical elements are a reaction to creative interference (a la End of Evangelion), but I see it as a direct development of the themes and ideas set down in the first season––and the full-throated explication of those ideas in the second season is something I find richly satisfying. The first season sets up so many mysteries––and I found the solution to those mysteries pleasingly thoughtful and profound, as opposed to those mysteries in which "the butler did it," et al. interestingly, when the show was not approved for a second season in Japan, the creators had a conference in which they tried to decide what sort of ending to give the final episode of season 1. The choice was between an episode that concluded the series without tugging at any of the thematic threads they had laid down in the first season, or one in which they tugged at all of them, with the hope that people were intrigued enough to mount a letter-writing campaign or some other form of rescue for the show. They went with the second choice, and honestly, that final episode is my favorite of the first season, simply because of that choice. Put it this way: I don't think if the first season had existed by itself, that the show would be remembered at all nowadays, or rereleased on blu ray, for instance. And I think there's a big difference between the playful ouroboros of Big O's central conceit––that we are, in fact, the playthings of the robots which we believe we're at play inside of, that we use them as a fantasy extension of ourselves, not realizing we are a fantasy extension of them––and the digression of the various later ends of Evangelion (to me the original Evangelion ending works the best, I think––though I'm always interested in the later ones, and what they try to say), which don't always spring from any original purpose of the show (and which, in the case of the movies, are the result of a total renovation of what the show might have originally been about). When I watch Evangelion, I get the sense that the creator's ideas about the show are changing as it continues to be made. When I watch Big O, I get the sense that the world presented in the first season was always made to reach the discoveries we make in the second season. Either way, though, I share your enthusiasm. The Big O is so worth seeing!

For those interested, "The Big O," incredibly, doesn't refer to an orgasm, but to a giant robot the show's negotiator hero uses as an extension of his own impact on the world around him. When negotiations get rough, he brings in Big O to solve his problems. While the robot doesn't move on its own, without a pilot, it does judge its pilot worthy or not before allowing itself to be manipulated by the pilot. This is presented as a sort of rote formality in the first season, but in the second season the idea of what it means to be worthy to pilot the robot gets queried in a lot of productive ways. But I can understand the immediate reaction to lump the show in with shows with teasing titles, like Californication.

[Michael Kerpan]

One problem with Rightstuf potentially. If you order in-stock items and pre-orders/back orders -- one can never know whether they will send a partial order or not. It's sort of based on chance/whim. So unless I am in no hurry at all, I tend to separate out in-stock from other items (and put them in two orders). (Maybe you can pay extra for split shipments -- I forget).

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I figured it was worth splitting them. I was thinking of getting Parasyte the Maxim, which is discounted and also out of stock. Any other recs at decent discounts, in or out of stock, doesn't matter?

Also, I paid the extra $5-6 for the 'package protection' or whatever, because my order was so large, but this feels kinda silly. Like, does Rightstuf just say Too Bad if they lose your package or it comes damage if you don't throw them a couple extra bucks?

[Michael Kerpan]

Not sure what that extra charge does. It seems to be a rather new thing.

[Boosmahn]

Yeah, I figured it was worth splitting them. I was thinking of getting Parasyte the Maxim, which is discounted and also out of stock. Any other recs at decent discounts, in or out of stock, doesn't matter?

Barakamon is sweet and contains one of the cutest child characters of all time, Naru. (Voiced by an actual child in the Japanese version!)

Death Parade has its issues but a really novel concept. Definitely worth a try!

I enjoyed Den-Noh Coil as well -- just not as much as others. It's very well-liked. And for $12, it's a steal.

Juni Taisen: Zodiac War is a battle royale series with a unique twist: after a couple of episodes, the viewer will be able to, and is seemingly supposed to, figure out in which order the 12 contestants die. Here is where I should say where the focus truly lies (one, for sure, is the cast of characters), but I need to rewatch this to get a stronger grip on what it's trying to say.

[Michael Kerpan]

If you like school girls playing rock music and loafing around eating tea and treats more than practicing -- the iconic K-on! is discounted at least 60 percent.

[RIP Film]

@feihong That’s quite interesting, I’ve never seen a defense of season 2 let alone an elaboration of its ideas.

It sounds to me as though you view the second season as a compromise, in which the psychotronic philosophical elements are a reaction to creative interference (a la End of Evangelion), but I see it as a direct development of the themes and ideas set down in the first season––and the full-throated explication of those ideas in the second season is something I find richly satisfying.

Spoiler

Yeah. Part of that stems from just my initial disappointment with it after the first airing: the tonal shift, literally in the palette from an overcast, black-heavy traditional cel animation to pastel digital animation; and the move from western TV inspired self-contained stories to a more serialized anime format, with a down the rabbit hole, inward trajectory. To me the former was what made it stand out as something unique, and the latter made it just another anime.

There’s also an interview with Katayama on YouTube where he says he never intended an ending, and that had CN not told him to reveal the mystery he would have kept it going in that episodic format (rewatching the interview, I find it funny that CN also requested “more action”). And there’s quirks like Alex Rosewater’s demeanor change between seasons, into a more regressive tyrant than the cool, detached overseer he was, that gave me the impression the course was altered to reach a conclusion.

But these days I feel more ready to accept and even appreciate the show’s dual nature, and what you say is certainly intriguing. I’ll need to engage with it again and see if I can find the through line.

[colinr0380]

It’s just on Netflix- it was an original series they produced. The good news is that it’s incredibly short, so low stakes even if it doesn’t grab you

That's a shame. I see that Devilman Crybaby did get a release on Blu-ray but only in Japan (with unsubtitled commentary tracks). It would be great if All the Anime could simply just port that edition across at some point, subtitling the extras and translating the artbook. It is probably unlikely, but then again All the Anime has released the first two seasons of the Netflix produced Castlevania anime series, so fingers crossed!

[therewillbeblus]

FYI Giant Robo and the first two Revolutionary Girl Utena volumes went back down in price on Rightstuf

[therewillbeblus]

I've already placed three orders this sale, but today there are a ton of Mega Deals- curious if anyone has any die-hard recs from that list before sale ends. Robot Carnival in 4K sounds interesting, and I know Wolf's Rain was recommended. A few sets I already bought at higher but fair prices are even more reduced (i.e. Mob Psycho 100 set 1, Vision of Escaflowne) and I don't see anything I bought has increased at all, so a good time to buy for those who haven't yet

[Boosmahn]

Crunchyroll has purchased Right Stuf. I don't know what the repercussions will be (if any, but... come on), but I really don't like the consolidation of everything anime-related under Sony and Crunchyroll.

The only change so far is that erotica has been removed from Right Stuf's catalog. Other 18+ content, such as Violence Jack, is still there.

[therewillbeblus]

With Funimation also getting usurped, and Crunchyroll primarily working with streaming (I believe?) it doesn't look like a move that will exact 'prioritize' physical media, at best

[Boosmahn]

They once partnered with FUNimation to bring their titles to home video, so while they're definitely streaming-focused, they at least have an interest in the physical media market. The main motivation for this purchase is probably to further move the non-Japanese anime market under the Crunchyroll brand.

Or maybe this will deprioritize anime physical media... I really don't know. We'll just have to wait and see.

[DandyDancing]

Hasn't Discotek been licensing titles from Crunchyroll for some time? Maybe that was before the Sony buyout I'm not sure.

[J Wilson]

This would not have been the outcome I'd have predicted years ago when Crunchyroll was a basically a pirate operation making money by using other people's fansubs to solicit donations.

[therewillbeblus]

I recently watched Bubblegum Crisis and liked it a lot, though I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. What initially seemed to be alienating became an aspect I appreciated about the series: That it didn't spend careful time acclimating us to the characters, plot, or action. That's not to say that the series doesn't introduce elements to build its world, but we're essentially dropped into this dystopian future milieu with half-developed characters on a collective one-note existential mission with shades of distinct personalities kept on a simplified plane. It's a show about taking action, not intention or individualized catharsis that a backstory may fill in and inspire in its audience. We aren't allotted detailed surrogates to empathize with, because in this world all that counts is what you do, and how you feel or who you are fails to matter beyond the basic traits that you can weaponize as utility to the team's advantage (be they technical skills, or a sassy persona that can manipulate police into revealing information, etc.). I had to stop the series halfway through and restart it from the beginning because I hardly had any bearings on what was occurring. However, the second time through those first four episodes didn't reveal too much more information than the first go-round. Rather, I was able to accept and lean into the exposition and experiential momentum and forgo my expected or desired explanation for hand-holding. This is their world, I'm just dropping in for a piece of it on vacation. While Blade Runner is the clearest influence, I feel like Michael Mann would love this show since he concocts a lot of his characterizations -and positions vantage point of their relationships to, and informed by, industrial environments- similarly to this anime.

[colinr0380]

Crunchyroll has purchased Right Stuf. I don't know what the repercussions will be (if any, but... come on), but I really don't like the consolidation of everything anime-related under Sony and Crunchyroll.

The only change so far is that erotica has been removed from Right Stuf's catalog. Other 18+ content, such as Violence Jack, is still there.

I just got to the ever reliable Glass Reflection's video about this situation, which notes in more detail how that the Right Stuff buyout has affected a number of its subsidiary companies such as Nozomi (who licence Gundam and the mentioned last page Emma: A Victorian Romance. They did a Kickstarter to produce the Emma release and I have been recently aware of them because I contributed to that new Kickstarter to produce an English language dub of the 1980s Dirty Pair series - which incidentally got me signed up to the Right Stuff e-mail newsletter by default - and have been getting various update messages since this buy out about how this will not affect that project) and the adult animation label Critical Mass (which has knocked the notoriously dropped by Funimation Interspecies Reviewers series back into OOP status).

Hopefully it was not a buy out just to kill the physical media competitor, but even if not it is still a bit concerning to have one single avenue (and its choices about what to promote/drop) rather than a number of separate companies licencing products.

[Michael Kerpan]

TWBB -- 2 other Androids Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner-adjacent shows -- Vivy:Fluorite's Eye Song and Time of Eve (a choice of short series or movie for the latter -- but the movie has a little epilogue not included in the series). I can recommend both, but Time of Eve is lower-key (and lower budget) than Vivy.

[jojo]

I recently watched Bubblegum Crisis and liked it a lot, though I wasn't sure what to make of it at first. What initially seemed to be alienating became an aspect I appreciated about the series: That it didn't spend careful time acclimating us to the characters, plot, or action. That's not to say that the series doesn't introduce elements to build its world, but we're essentially dropped into this dystopian future milieu with half-developed characters on a collective one-note existential mission with shades of distinct personalities kept on a simplified plane. It's a show about taking action, not intention or individualized catharsis that a backstory may fill in and inspire in its audience. We aren't allotted detailed surrogates to empathize with, because in this world all that counts is what you do, and how you feel or who you are fails to matter beyond the basic traits that you can weaponize as utility to the team's advantage (be they technical skills, or a sassy persona that can manipulate police into revealing information, etc.). I had to stop the series halfway through and restart it from the beginning because I hardly had any bearings on what was occurring. However, the second time through those first four episodes didn't reveal too much more information than the first go-round. Rather, I was able to accept and lean into the exposition and experiential momentum and forgo my expected or desired explanation for hand-holding. This is their world, I'm just dropping in for a piece of it on vacation. While Blade Runner is the clearest influence, I feel like Michael Mann would love this show since he concocts a lot of his characterizations -and positions vantage point of their relationships to, and informed by, industrial environments- similarly to this anime.

Walter Hill's Streets of Fire is a big influence too--Priss' entire look is based on Diane Lane's character, and I believe certain scenes were wholesale lifted straight out of the film. It can't be overstated how popular Streets of Fire was in Japan.

I do feel like Bubblegum Crisis stopped just as it was hitting its stride in episodes 7-8, though it's hard to be critical of the series' overall impact since it's such a seminal anime. The longer episode format in episodes 5-8 (all around 40-50 minutes each) also helped the episodes breathe a bit more.

[feihong]

It is interesting seeing what different creative personnel had in mind for how to develop the series' story, had Bubblegum Crisis been able to continue. I mean, none of the story developments are really satisfactory, but they are interesting. Bubblegum Crash offers a story that trades action for more character development––a story that produces a central villain whose motives intertwine with Sylia Stingray's backstory. Defeating the bad guy resolves Sylia's neuroses and dispels the reason for forming the Knight Sabers in the first place, and everybody retires at the end of three miserable episodes. That series lacks the hard-edged action and the music that made its' predecessor so notable––and it suggests that the style of Bubblegum Crisis is more important than anything traditional scriptwriting can provide for the show. There is also a set of punk values the original show projects that are absolutely absent in Bubblegum Crash, and once they're gone, you end up realizing how much more important that stuff is to making Bubblegum Crisis what it is than anything more specific in the script.

The Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 show follows years later, with other personnel from the original show and with years of more artful television anime as an example––so it's hard to imagine this would have been one of the intended directions for the series, at least, not exactly the intended direction. That show pushes that material into a trippier space, with sort of post–Evangelion psychedelic action set–pieces, and a "welcome to the Knight Sabers" introductory character arc where Linna goes from failed OL to vigilante robot fighter, giving us the introduction to the series we never got and never needed in its original incarnation. This show has some weird twists, with Sylia's brother turning out to be an artificial intelligence hologram of her dead sibling, a boomer revolt that topples civilization, and Priss merging with a hardsuit in deep space for a hallucinatory finale. The show is exhausting, and incredibly crude and over-obvious in its characterization, illuminating a sort of admirable restraint in the original series which none of the creative team seems to have been able to recreate once they split up. Most disappointing of all is the music––you would think by the late 90s someone would have realized that the fresh music was a huge part of the success of the original series, but Tokyo 2040 features some of the most egregious examples of what the We Hate Movies podcast refers to as "90s-era fart rock"––marked by the "Seinfeld"–style slap-basslines and post-grunge chonky guitars. The result is dispiriting and clumsy–feeling, and it feels like no one involved has a clue what made the original series memorable.

There's also a series of shows that deal with the world of Bubblegum Crisis in salvo after salvo of diminishing returns: there is a 3-episode A.D. Police OVA (From the Files of the A.D. Police) which, in it's nihilism and it's cyberpunk "how-do-I-know-if-I'm-human-or-a-robot-anymore?"–kind of philosophizing gets closest of all of these follow-up series to the feel of Bubblegum Crisis. But the show's lack of any even remotely sympathetic characters proves that the alchemy that made the original Bubblegum Crisis just isn't going to get repeated. There's a second A.D. Police series (A.D. Police: To Protect and Serve) which gets a 12-episode run of absolutely predictable cornball B.S. There's a swift lone wolf on the force––Kenji––and he works alone, dammit! But he gets this partner, Hans, who works hard behind the scenes and is really just about the best cop partner in all of film for a while there. But does Kenji appreciate it? No, of course not. There's an incident in his past, you see, and he just hates robots, and of course...that's what Hans is! Here I am spoiling all these terrible shows for you. You're all welcome. They are all of them too wretched to watch.

Anyway, the second A.D. Police series gets much more cartoony character designs, and does the stupidest thing it can; it boosts the profile of the A.D. Police so that they are capable of this all–out war with the boomers––I mean, the whole point of Bubblegum Crisis in the first place was that the A.D. Police couldn't handle the boomer assaults, and the Knight Sabers could. But, whatever! Here the A.D. Police kick *ss again and again, blowing away boomers with single headshots, and pretty much undermining the premise of the whole original project. This show is really just a string of cop show cliches, with only the slimmest connection to the premise of the source material.

Lastly, there's Parasite Dolls, which is also about a police detective with a boomer partner taking out boomer criminals. This one tries more than any of the others to ape the seediness of Blade Runner, and it kind of succeeds. The art is that grody Ninja-Scroll-inspired stuff from the 90s, it rains all the time in the 3 episodes, and the writers seem to have never met an original story idea they liked. It is endless cliches, bland characters, and the boomers are all personal-sized, for the most part. This series seems unforgivably small compared to the original.

And at the end of the day, only Bubblegum Crisis works. None of the material that follows it is worthy of the name––and most of the production teams involved seem to be shy of even trying to equate their follow-up shows directly to Bubblegum Crisis––though that may have been for legal reasons rather than artistic ones. Still, it's tempting to think they all recognized that none of this follow-up material was any good. What watching it all did for me was really position every virtue of the original Bubblegum Crisis series––including a lot of things that weren't obvious to me when I used to just like the OVA. It has to be said also that not a one of these follow-ups has art and animation that looks anywhere near as good as Bubblegum Crisis, and none of them sound at all interesting. True, Bubblegum Crisis had problems there that weren't anticipated––like Kinuko Ohmori's management not letting her sing on the later episodes (which is why we stop seeing Priss performing in the later part of the series), and the breakup of the production team––which ended the OVA prematurely (who's to say if they hadn't ended like they did what the average number of episodes for an OVA might come to? Patlabor's 2nd OVA runs 16 episodes long––but most of these projects seemed to follow the lead of either Crisis (8 episodes) or Crash (3 episodes)). But what seeing the follow-ups really cemented for me was the special frisson of the original production team (which apparently was not harmonious at all), that made all these shrewd decisions about tone over content, and then seemed to consciously strip down the melodrama, the character beats, everything like that. What it did was foreground the setting itself in a very cyberpunk way, so that even though we're focused on the only truly interesting people in this world they've created, what comes through most clearly is the way the world around them is constructed, and their basic reactions to that. That's the real subject matter of Bubblegum Crisis, and it's what keeps the show interesting. Sylia's speech in the final episode about what the Knight Sabers are doing is really interesting in this regard; they aren't trying to revolutionize the system, but rather just to balance the scales in their own way. The dramas of individual episodes are about whether the individual Knight Sabers' values and their reactions to specific triggers in their world can be made to align with the Knight Sabers' somewhat abstract mission (this is especially underlined in the 2nd episode, where Priss goes rogue, and in the Mad Machine episode, where their mechanic asks them to do a job as a favor to him). Any attempt in these later spin-offs to complicate that drama with more character development (Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 is full of this) robs the show of its special elan. Likewise, centering the characters at the expense of the setting (a la Bubblegum Crash) takes away the punk edge and the grit of the show. And without those things, you really have surprisingly little of any value in the world of Bubblegum Crisis. It is, in more ways than one, one of the main inflection points where anime begins to feel like the result of deliberate authorship––where the individual vibe of the production overrides the generic cliches of television animation (of course, Studio Ghibli is there before them, but it wasn't a guarantee that Miyazaki's brand of auteurship woud cross over from the silver screen to the television set). It looks forward to the television productions of the 90s, from Evangelion to Cowboy Bebop to Escaflowne to Utena. I guess at the end of the day, after making the journey through the detritus Bubblegum Crisis left in its wake (following the splitting of its studio), I've grown to respect it as a sort of object d'art––similar to my feelings on Blade Runner, actually. Though I think I like Bubblegum Crisis a bit more than I really "like" Blade Runner.

[therewillbeblus]

Speaking of, I'm onto the second saga of Revolutionary Girl Utena, and it's pretty terrific. I haven't read up on it enough to know how its trajectory coincides with quality as measured by its fanbase, but I felt the show really came into its own towards the end of the first saga and is downright fascinating as we transition into the Black Rose chapter. The silly surface-level stuff and deceptively-rote formula of dueling from the first chunk of episodes is infected by not only a vast narrative arc, but minute details of pathos and audacious vulnerability. These meditations are often initiated by norm-destruction to signify the elasticity omnipresent in our souls but that society does not support, drawing up barriers that keep us isolated and scared and lonely when we could be freed towards collective intimacy. The fury and selfishness that drive the villains of the narrative is fear-based, sourced in a self-preservation that assumes these individuals are segregated from their peers and need to fight to get their needs met. And then there are passive observations like Touga listening to his own voice on a tape recorded post-defeat that destroys his sister and earn our empathy on a purely humanist level, without deserving it in any cathartic narrative sense.

Oh, and while it's a bit 'much' to review each episode in depth, I'm finding Lilian Min's recaps on 'themarysue' website to be surprisingly infectious. She totally matches the tone of the anime subgenre in her intentional gushing of its symbolism in her writing and it's a delight

[therewillbeblus]

Okay, so Revolutionary Girl Utena has overall been terrific, with a few inconsistent episodes, but my god.. there is scene in "The Prince Who Runs Through the Night" (ep 33) where Utena is distraughtly having a crisis about lunch (that's not about lunch at all) in a rambling monologue precipitated by of off-screen trauma, and is captured with such unflinching suffocation and urgent compassion that it ranks up with the best cinematic expressions of raw emotion I've ever seen. I want to praise the performance itself- the way Utena is drawn, how she quivers, trembles, composes herself, only to be destroyed again.. her eyes oscillating between dissociation and sobriety to what's happened and its impact on her existential and emotional wellbeing... The artistry becomes performance, the animator is the thespian. I've never seen anything like it. And I don't know if I'll ever eat Salmon and Asparagus the same way again, at least not for lunch

[Michael Kerpan]

Sadly the Japanese VA who voiced Utena (Tomoko Kawakami) died quite young (at 41). She also played a much lower-key character in the Aria series (set on a terraformed Mars -- in a city that recreates the now-submerged-on-Earth Venice).

[knives]

Can’t wait till when you have the time to see/ write about Welcome to the NHK.