As I let my thumbs recover from being abused by the backs of pushpins, something hits me. The irony of going to an anime con these days is that you end up watching less anime than if you hadn’t gone. Back home, I must now catch up at a time when finales are coming in left and right not unlike a fierce Dempsey Roll.
Anime is dead. Long live anime.
I normally don’t like to make Youtube-only posts but look at this! Look!
The animations in SRWZ are the best the series has ever seen. What I particularly like is that they’re going away from using too many shots where they just traced over a screenshot from the series.
And Keiko has seriously never looked better.
Making fun of the Cosplay Summit Competition via Pictochat.
Apparently 4kids dropped the license for Pretty Cure after years of holding onto it and doing nothing with it. I don’t know why 4kids let such an obscenely successful franchise out of its grasp, but I have my suspicions.
1) Pretty Cure’s primary audience is girls, young girls.
2) Pretty Cure is a fairly VIOLENT show aimed towards young girls that would have probably aired on a non-cable network like Fox or the CW, which cringes at too much violence in shows.
3) Anime licensing costs being what they were back when Pretty Cure was licensed, Toei probably cost them enough arms and legs to cripple the Hecatonchires.
Knowing what they did with Doremi, I’m not that sad to see it go, but Pretty Cure is the type of show that needs to be on a normal network to succeed. Here’s hoping someone else picks up the ball.
Recently, I’ve been watching episodes of the original Speed Racer. Not Mach Go Go Go, and even if presented with the option, I would try to watch episodes of both. Speed Racer is one of those shows that attracted a lot of fans for a multitude of reasons, primarily the car, and having never really watched entire episodes of Speed Racer, I wanted to see what was, as the kids say, “up.”
In addition to the show aging surprisingly well, I noticed something somewhat peculiar about Speed Racer: its voice-acting is actually very good. These days, when the subject of older voice acting comes to mind, it’s usually the ridiculous dubs of 80s and 90s, or the transition away from Saban for the dub of Dragon Ball Z. Older dubs are associated with being poorly acted and often stilted, while newer dubs have a frequent problem of being too wooden or “sounding like anime dubs.” This isn’t the case with Speed Racer at all, and after seeing Peter Fernandez get congratulated so many times for his voice work as Speed, I can finally see that he gets the credit he deserves, not to mention the rest of the cast including minor characters. It has the right amount of radio-show-style acting without going overboard like the old Symphony of the Night dub. Batman: The Animated Series’ voice actors were told to act out their roles as if they were in a radio show. Maybe there’s something to that after all, something that more dubs could learn to use.
I’ve seen a significantly older show receive a curiously impressive dub before in the form of Gigantor. Not a surprise to see that Fernandez had a role in the Gigantor dub as well. Is it just that he’s got talent and it bled through to everything else in recording? Perhaps, but there’s one factor which I think contributes to the quality of these old dubs, and it’s actually the result of a limitation.
In these old shows, especially with Gigantor which had a low budget even for its time. When Jimmy Sparks says a few lines, his mouth moves maybe 5 or 10 times. The voice actors did not try to match the lip flaps because that would have been impossible, and I think it’s this non-adherence to mouth movements which freed up the dubs to have more natural and vibrant-sounding characters, even if the dialogue itself was still kind of awkward in that stereotypical way everyone makes fun of Speed Racer for.
You can hear Peter Fernandez as a grown-up Spritle in that new Speed Racer cartoon, but I wouldn’t recommend watching it.
This past Saturday was the final Toonami. I didn’t catch it. I didn’t even know Toonami was ending. My first response was, “Why is it ending in the first place?” Having a specific “block” of shows is, underneath all the layers, simply a marketing scheme, and this marketing scheme was 11 years old and had gone through multiple transformations. Still, I realized that anime fandom in America owes a lot to Toonami.
The effect Toonami had on kids and budding fans was unmistakable. It was on Toonami that kids too young to remember the 80s well got their first exposure to Robotech and Battle of the Planets. It was on Toonami that legions of girls saw Heero Yuy and Duo Maxwell and thought that they would be an excellent couple. It was on Toonami that Dragon Ball Z truly began to take off and cemented itself as one of the most successful anime franchises in the US (not to mention the entire world).
The two biggest changes to Toonami are probably the two extra blocks that resulted from it. The old Toonami timeslot was taken by the new “Miguzi,” which was meant for younger kids. Older kids could still watch their Toonami, with more anime than ever before. Adult Swim is partly the result of those midnight uncut showings of Gundam W, where Cartoon Network began to realize that people were willing to stay up that late to keep up with their favorite show. For better or worse, Toonami defined Cartoon Network just as much if not more than the Cartoon Cartoons which followed and preceded it.
Still, 11 years is a very long time to be around in TV land, and in the end it was a good run.
For almost as long as I’ve been playing video games, I have held the Megaman franchise on a pedestal atop a pillar atop a tower with seemingly never-ending steps winding towards the top. Even when it was clear the series had begun to lose steam and ideas were being rehashed, I was still all for it because it meant more Robot Masters. As a kid and even today I love the concept of bosses in video games, these greater menaces that the player needs to overcome in order to gain safe passage to the next part of the game, and Megaman was king of this. Hearing news that Megaman 9 would be out this Monday, the 22nd of September, I took it upon myself to celebrate in a number of ways. I downloaded Megaman 2 on the virtual console today and beat it within a few hours. I also began to make sprites out of the many, many robot master designs I had thought up as a child, one of the first being the one you saw above, the creatively named “Garbageman.”
The hideousness of the Western Megaman art boxes has become relatively common knowledge by this point. Capcom even decided to parody it by making Megaman 9 box art resemble these fiascos. As a kid, I always thought something wasn’t quite right with the Megaman 2 cover, where a macho-looking guy in blue holding a futuristic pistol stands prominently. I knew this wasn’t what we were expected to see when we saw Megaman’s wide-eyed sprite blink and run and die over and over. Years later, I obtained Megaman 8 for the Sega Saturn, and watched the intro sequence involving Megaman fighting select robots from each of the seven previous Megaman games in full animation. It was at that moment that the intended “style” of the Megaman series hit me: “Megaman is anime!” The big eyes, the round faces, the colors, this all came from an anime style. I had gotten into anime in a big way around the time I first started playing Megaman 8, and I was fascinated by the designs, especially of the Robot Masters. Megaman looked like Megaman, but sleek and streamlined without having those features be too prominent a la Battle Network franchise (though I have nothing against that series or its designs). I even started to look for the existence of an actual Megaman anime, thinking the intro couldn’t possibly be the only thing.
Being wowed by fully animated introductions was not new to me even at that point, as years earlier I told my friend to play the intro to Sonic CD on his Sega CD over and over, but Megaman 8 came out at just the right time. Technology in games was steadily improving, allowing games to look more like anime than ever (Guardian Heroes to name one). I was in high school at the time, and thus was big into anime, though definitely not as much as now, and actively sought out things related to anime. And of course it was Megaman, a character whose games I grew up loving. So it was with Megaman that I began to realize just how much companies tried to cover their Japanese origins.
I’m pretty sure that I knew the fact that video game companies in the 80s and 90s didn’t want Americans to know of their Japanese origins, but it was with Megaman though that I investigated this anew. I took a lookat the NES Bionic Commando, and the full body image of (MUTEKI NO) Spencer they’d use at the end of levels, and realized that it definitely had some anime influence to it. I opened up an old issue of Nintendo Power and saw a title, Clash at Demonhead. At the beginning of the section was a large, colored image displaying a blond guy in armor and weapons done in a very cartoony style. Near it however was screenshots from the game’s intro, with character designs reminiscent of late-80s, early 90s anime such as Mikimoto or Takahashi’s stuff. And there were not one, but two Golgo 13 games, though I don’t think the steps taken to cover up Golgo’s origins were too extensive.
I find it amazing how much FULLY ANIMATED INTRO SEQUENCE FOR VIDEO GAMES were able to influence me and many others. Seeing the intro for the Sega Saturn Magic Knights Rayearth game in a store, I cared little for what the actual game was like. It was these intros that gave an air of legitimacy to games, and also provide plenty of fodder for fanfiction, which they most definitely did. These intros, prior to having games simply look that good all the time, provided enough of an inspiration to construct and elaborate everything necessary for creative endeavors.
If you look at the Megaman 9 official art though, the designs in even the official art have gone all the way back to 2, with a chubbier Megaman at the helm. So maybe Megaman 8 was a bit of a lie after all. Perhaps Megaman was anime all along, just not to that extent.
(Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily! Dr. Wily Dr. Wily, ohhhh Dr. Wily!)
When listing the tropes of the magical girl genre, certain traits come to mind. Shows are generally targeted towards mainly a female audience. Romance is usually a focus. Magic is used in some manner of wish fulfillment, either by the characters or the viewers or even both. Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san, a 2001 anime about an extraterrestrial princess with the power of the stars, can easily fit these descriptions and more, but none of them quite do justice to young Princess Comet and her story. Comet-san defies its own categorizations without betraying any of them in the process.
All stars have their own radiance, their own personalities, their own lives. And in the vast sea of the universe there are those who understand and communicate with these stars. One of them is Comet, a young princess of Harmonica Star Country, who is set to marry the prince of the neighboring Tambourine Star Country and unite their lands for the sake of their peoples. When the prince runs away to Earth, Comet is tasked to follow him and ask for his hand in marriage personally. Comet is quick to accept her mission, though what no one other than her mother knows is that she doesn’t care one way or another about chasing princes or fostering peace between nations. Comet is a girl full of curiosity and enthusiasm, eager to see what life is like on a new planet far away from her home.
Comet-san has a certain magnetism to it. While many magical girl anime are very episodic, or have a focus on the daily lives of normal girls (albeit with magical powers), very few of them can match the (ironically) down-to-earth nature of Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san. Rather than Cardcaptor Sakura or Shugo Chara, the pacing of Comet-san is closer to that of shows such as Kino’s Journey or Aria. The show pulls you into its own deliberately slow pace, and you may find yourself being dragged along willingly. Each episode finds Comet-san learning more and more about life on Earth. People, plants, animals, customs, weather, art, love, anything and everything is a joy for Comet to experience, and every day is a new opportunity for discovery.
Comet-san is a show that is blessed with strong characters all around. The primary rival, a short-tempered princess from Castanet Star Country named Meteo who is far more interested in finding the prince, provides a nice foil for Comet, though it is Comet’s even-handedness that frustrates Meteo more than the other way around. A young life guard reminiscent of Li Shaoran named Keisuke provides one of many potential romances for Comet. Comet has her requisite animal mascot in a bear-like creature named Rababou (a take on “rubber ball” due to his elastic body), who is there to remind Comet of her true goal, but is also a valuable friend and at first her only companion from home. Comet’s host family’s children are fraternal twins named Tsuyoshi and Nene. Their nickname for Comet is “Komatta-san,” with komatta meaning “troubled.” They are two of the most endearing and non-irritating child characters in anime all the while while having the maturity one expects of children.
Comet herself is an inspiring main character whose personality could probably be best described as “subdued enthusiasm.” Comet shows a wide range of emotions, some of them completely new and unfamiliar to her, and expresses them in a way that can be very cathartic to watch, especially because of her pleasant voice, courtesy of Maeda Aki. In the end, nothing contributes to the slow pacing of the series more than Comet.
This is not to say, however, that the show is without progress or continuity. The feeling of the show is such that often times I found myself thinking that all it would take is one big twist to turn it all upside down, and most likely this twist somehow involves the fact that no one knows what the Tambourine Star Country’s prince actually looks like.
Sadly, that is all speculation from me, as less than half Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san is available subtitled, and the fansubbing group that has been slowly plugging has been doing so since 2002. If there is an end, it is way off in the distance. I hear that this show was actually dubbed into English as “Princess Comet” though, and broadcast around the world, so it may be possible to obtain it in that form more easily. That said, even with completion nowhere in sight, I urge anyone and everyone to watch a few episodes and see if life doesn’t start looking a little brighter.
There are a number of aspects of the Japanese language that you can use to supplement your Japanese studies, but one of the most difficult areas in my opinion is that of politeness. More often than not, anime characters care little for using the appropriate verb forms in specific situations. Probably the most you’ll ever see in terms of levels of politeness and familiarity is characters who originally called each other by their last names transitioning to a first-name-basis kind of relationship. And the most formal vocabulary is known as “keigo.”
Keigo is the kind of vocabulary you use when you want to be ultra formal, ultra polite, and probably talking to your boss. I can’t give any specific lessons as my keigo is shaky at this point in time, but to give you an idea of keigo and some of the difficulty that learning it entails, I’ll provide a few examples. The verb “suru,” to do, in keigo is “nasaru.” That “itadakimasu” you hear so often before meals is actually a keigo form of “moraimasu,” or to receive.
Again, this is not something you can develop or improve significantly while watching anime or reading manga, so in this case it is best to go through more orthodox channels.
OGIUE MANIAX 