January marks two years for me in this blogging game. It’s by no means a super long time when you look at some blogs, but an eternity considering the average length of an anime blog. Let’s call it “long enough.”
I would like to let a few more famous and/or eloquent folks speak for me for a minute, on a variety of relevant topics that I have encountered and dealt with over the past two years. Here come the waterworks
Well, it’s over. Thirty-nine disorienting episodes later, Revolutionary Girl Utena has ended for me. There’s a lot to digest, and sometimes the pace at which bizarreness is thrown at you can be a little much. So not only am I confident that I’ll watch Utena again, I think right now I can only manage a pretty surface-level post.
So, here are the 10 (surface level) reasons to love Revolutionary Girl Utena. Be warned a thousand times, if you haven’t seen the full series, there will be spoilers. Most are vague, but they’re there.
Read the list.
The final installment of the 12 Moments in Anime 2009, the gift that will finally stop giving today.
There are a few things to which you can attribute my fandom. Chalk it up most notably to Evangelion, the “show that made a million fanboys.” Before that, my interest was spurred on by ultraviolent Kawajiri’s OVAs like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City. Before that, the dark atmosphere of Vampire Hunter D fascinated me.
But before all of that, before I was even old enough to have the slightest idea what “anime” was, I watched cartoons on TV. Now, in the days before “japanimation” became something that companies could sell, the name of the game was adaptation, usually of 10-20 year old shows. And the adapters got everything wrong. They renamed the shows to some stupid nonsense (involving the word “Star” and a verb, usually). They threw Macross in a pot with some Mospeada and Southern Cross and stirred until it curdled into Robotech. And they replaced any lines that they didn’t feel like translating with random yelling and screaming. After all, who cares what them Japs wrote in the first place — it’s just some dumb kid’s show from the country where they make our radios (Contrast this with the aforementioned 90s, when “AUTHENTIC ANIME FROM JAPAN” is here and it’s NOT FOR KIDSSSSSS).
But occasionally, they were right. Yes, “Tranzor Z” is a dumb name. As is Deviline. And Dr. Demon is far less threatening than Dr. Hell. But what’s really important? The giant fucking robot that comes out of a waterfall and tears the shit out of bad guys, occasionally getting upgrades along the way. That’s what’s important. And on Saturday mornings, I sat transfixed as Tranzor Z did just that. I didn’t know or care how old the series was by that point, or what the names of the characters should have been. I was glued to the TV regardless.
So Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-Hen’s first rocket punch, circa episode 3, wasn’t just an amazing moment. It was a moment of time travel. Time travel that Imagawa himself was obviously partaking in (and milking). Shin Mazinger is full of these moments. After all, it’s specifically built using all the parts you remember and love (some of them upgraded), without all the parts you didn’t like, and then constructed at 20 times the size of the original just so the impact isn’t lost on your cynical adult mind. It’s the Gurren Lagann principle: Its Gainax creators wanted to transport viewers to their childhood by increasing the scale to match your own widened picture of the world. And they did a great job, but they lacked the specificity of Imagawa’s angle. This is childhood, and this is hands down the greatest moment in anime 2009.
What am I watching?
