Over at Wasteland and Sky, the "100 best anime" series has come to an end.
There are a lot of items new to me on the list. Of the ones I'm familiar with though, I generally agree.
First - please, God, no for Attack on Titan. Yes, the quality of the animation is excellent, and it's a big deal, but it's such a dark, depressing mess embodying the worst of the zombie genre - though the monsters in question have more in common with the nightlands than traditional zombies. Maybe it picks up later, but five episodes of death, chaos, destruction, and angst in... I quit.
And Psycho-pass. Yes, I just complained about a dark series, and Psycho-pass, which deals with free will, good, and evil, is dark. That said, it's amazing. Despite my love for Gurren Lagann and Full Metal Alchemist, if there's a show on that list I'd recommend to someone who thought the Matrix or Blade Runner were deep, that would be it. They'll get something with kick ass action that's also more thoughtful.
What do you get when you cross Gregory Benford's Great Sky River with a spaghetti western?
Blame.
A brief voiceover gives us the setting. In the far, far future where humanity lost the ability to communicate with the city it constructed, that they lived in, and so the city deemed them illegal residents, and began to exterminate humanity. Our story starts generations later.
An aside. Yes. Given the word choice, I'm sure some people would love to make it about the current immigration kerfluffle, but keep in mind this is a Japanese comic from 20-30 years ago, and Japan isn't exactly an immigration capital even now. Also, it's not the first to posit total war between man and machine - Saberhagen's Berzerker stories come to mind, as well as the future of the Terminator movies, of course.
The action starts right away - you see a small team of people scurrying through giant metal caverns and claustrophobic spaces, in search of a new food source for their village - these details being picked up over several minutes from hints dropped in conversation. The team is composed of kids, teens, and if that fact itself didn't show their desperation, it's later reinforced.
They get in trouble...
...and are rescued by a quiet, almost speechless man calling himself "Killy" - who is searching for humans with the net terminal gene.
Already, the similarities with Great Sky River show up - the desperate straights of the dwindling human population that found a sanctuary of sorts, but must still forage in the world of the machines to get by, living like rats in the walls in constant fear of being found, of their sanctuary broken.
And the westerns - a lone stranger shows up, rescuing the hunting party from the "safeguard". Back at the village, he brings with him the chance to survive, to secure a source of food, and perhaps return the city to human control. And so a team of villagers set out.
And so - through numerous twists I won't spoil - the village is brought to the brink of disaster, yet saved, and the lone stranger wanders off on his quest, never to be seen again.
The action sequences are amazing. The 3d-rendered shading style has vastly improved over efforts I'd seen in the past. The characters are memorable, with the competent and wise village leader, "pops" and his dutiful, competent son, are both noteworthy. Despite a few infodumps, they are short, added only as needed, and the personalities are drawn out with economy and clarity.
Bradford Walker has suggested we fork Star Wars, and then proceeded to suggest some other sources to look at - and said sources immediately tugged at some truly nostalgic memories.
First - Yamato. While I'd had some exposure while visiting the grandparents via Boston channels to the giant-robot cartoons out of Japan, "Star Blazers", as it was released in the states, was truly something else. Sure, the Battleship was awesome, but instead of a giant, and even then, sortof cheesy robot (despite also fondly remembering "Shogun Warriors", you had a spaceship that looked like a battleship, interesting characters, nail-biting action, beauty, fighters that still look freaking cool, and a story that dragged you in kicking and screaming and would not let you go.
Given it was before the day of practical VCR's for most families, I cursed the days the bus was late, or my mom made me finish my homework first, because it came on minutes after I usually got home. When I later started collecting anime via tape-trading groups, I made it a point to get my hands on a few of the Yamato movies, which I enjoyed.
Looking back, the animation is definitely of its time from a quality standpoint, but the style and storytelling still hold up. It has a lasting audience as well, as repeated movies, the live movie, and the newer TV remake mentioned at Walkers indicate.
Next, Macross - which I first saw as the opening third of the Robotech TV series. I'd been looking forward to it a bit since I already had a couple of the "Robotech Defenders" models and the Valkyrie-based "changer" model which of course I'd recognized as sharing the same source as a number of the early Battletech mechs. Fortunately - because I had to leave for the bus before the episode would finish, we had a VCR in the house, and I was able to record - though I later lost - the entire series all the way through the last of the "Invid" ( Genesis Climber Mospeada ) episodes.
I was hooked, and that started my hunt for any and all other anime I could track down, and from there the various mail-based swap clubs, and some truly weird stuff. Among other odds and ends I got my hands on the Monogram model for "Cy-Kill" from Gobots which was actually a rebranded Cyclone from Genesis Climber. I also could do a pretty decent rendition of the transforming bike/suit armor in ink - not my illustration included.
But Macross - along with Crusher Joe and a handful of other titles - has stuck with me over the years where most of the other stuff I saw was forgotten to time and mediocrity.
It's a pleasure when you go back to revisit something you loved in your childhood, and discover that it holds up, rather than being an artifact of Childhood Nostalgia Disorder
Walker has recently had some excellent posts on SF in Anime, including looking at the influences that Votoms, Dougram, Macross, and Crusher Joe have had on, among other things, Battletech. So it's fair to say that there's a lot of evidence that they've not been as susceptible to Social Justice Convergence. They certainly inspired one of my favorite movies, which Jeffro would find refreshingly short on excessive backstory.
As with Star Wars, Japan's long-running pop-culture SF/F franchises are built on pulpy and superversive foundations- despite significant differences in mood, theme, tone, and subject matter. Mobile Suit Gundam, as much as it gets the billing for making "Real Robot" a viable subgenre, has protagonists and antagonists motivated by passion and desire beyond all material drives- something that persists across the franchise. Space Battleship Yamato is a Space Opera that E.E. Smith would approve of, as is Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross. The Dragon Ball franchise is full of this stuff; for all the jokes about a five-minute move taking 30 episodes to execute, the heroes hero because it's right and the villains (for the most part) are evil and don't apologize for it.
There is, and always has been, some great stuff. There is also of course, and always has been, a lot of dreck. Given that my start in anime was a combination of some morning cartoons available in the Boston area and Star Blazers, followed by the release of the Robotech series, I'm not the otaku some are, but I do have a fair bit of perspective. Shortly after Robotech started, I dug in and discovered a wealth of movies, starting - for better or for worse - with Megazone 23, and quickly jumping to more titles than I can remember. Gundam, the Lensman movie, the Iczer series, Bubblegum Crisis, the Macross movie, Golgo 13, the Arion movie, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, Area88, Project A-Ko, more damn esper movies than I can count, etc.
A lot of it was trading videotaped copies. Having a second or third gen copy off of a laser disk original was worth something.
Once out in the world things took a slump as deployments and obligations cut down on time for cons and getting a hold of material - and we were in that weird limbo before massive bandwidth where some good stuff was starting to show up on the cartoon network like Cowboy Bebop, and the Ghost in the Shell movie, but not a lot, yet. Then netflix and streaming services came along, and while I don't watch much TV, a good chunk of what I do watch is anime.
Positives? Given I haven't watched too many "slice of life" movies - action. Some fantastic art. A lot of genre bending. Off the wall ideas pushed to their limits. Negatives? Well, it's pretty easy to find some very dark and nihilistic stuff - I'm not a huge fan of DeathNote - a lot of "loser is inexplicably attractive to girls" harem series, a number of very angsty and mopy boys, and Dragon Ball is hardly the only series to stretch out five minutes of story.
Take Bleach. Well enough done I ended up watching a lot of it, but the entire "Soul Society" sequence was almost nothing but backstory of every major character and how they got there, with a minute or two of plot continuation, before - finally - wrapping everything up in the last minute or two of the sequence.
