And I know full well that is not an ideal first impression of the genre.
I've also still only watched what has been Dubbed of it, so two seasons and zero movies, and I'm slowly losing hope any more will ever get dubbed.
As it's own stand alone show I quite enjoy Wixoss, it's dark yet still optimistic and very Gay. What bugs me on a Meta Level however is that it is essentially trying to be the Madoka Magica of a sub-genre that doesn't exist yet.
"But there's a lot of Card Game Anime, Mother's Basement did a whole rant video on them" you may say in response. Well yes there are but they are all Shonen. I am NOT a supporter of the narrative many AnimeFeminist.com contributors spread that the Dark Magical Girl genre is some inherently misogynist message about "punishing girls for wanting things" when the same "be careful what you wish for" moral is in a lot of male oriented media and is always what "Deconstructions" are based on saying. However in this case it does unsettle me a bit that the only entry in this Genre where Girls take center stage is the Dark "this Wish Fulfillment is actually a Nightmare" take.
What Wixoss is at first kind of pretending to be (but the Madoka vibes were always there so don't pretend you were ever fooled) is a premise I'd like to see simply played straight. The idea of there being this really popular Card Game, that everyone keeps saying is mostly played by boys, but the magical real secret game is one only girls are invited to. That could be a cool fun premise that could also provide some subtle nerd culture social commentary.
And as far as the issue Mother's Basement has with Card Game Anime, imagine if this Girl centric one was the first to give him what he wanted, that'd be awesome. I would have advised him to add to the video a comparison to how the Pokemon Anime eventually gets better at depicting fun interesting strategic battles.
And yes, the fact that I'm much more likely to watch an Anime where the main characters are mostly or entirely girls is the main reason Wixoss is still the only Card Game Anime I've watched. Though back in the day my radical brand loyalty to Nintendo kept me from trying anything perceived as competing with Pokemon so Yugioh like Digimon were more ruled out by that.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Monday, June 24, 2019
Sailor Moon in Japanese
Of the major pillars of the 90s American Anime Fandom, of the Anime that American Millennials are Nostalgic for, Sailor Moon is the only one I've watched a significant percentage of in Japanese. I've heard clips of what Japanese voices sound like in DBZ and Pokémon and other stuff in YoutTube videos. In some cases all I've seen of a franchise in Japanese is stuff the localizations skipped. But generally stuff I've watched Subbed is stuff more recent or never got an official if any English Language localization till recently if at all. And is all stuff I watched pretty much within the last 4 years.
Most of it happened because of the Hulu Revival, I watched the first few episodes on there as well as most of Crystal, then the Sailor Jupiter introduction for the sake of the research for that old Sailor Jupiter post I made. And other random examples till I eventually just flat out watched Sailor Stars and season 3 of Crystal as they went up on Hulu. But some I'd seen even before that, I remember looking for the R movie online because it was the only movie not at my video rental store and the Sub was all I could find (I have now also seen both Dubs for that movie though). But I later much more intentionally chose to seek out some Subs for Sailor Moon S.
Looking at the reasons why, I feel like I'm probably not alone in that.
With DBZ the Dubs were viewed as very good, so while there was a niche of people watching bootlegged VHS fan subs even before the rise of Internet streaming, those of my generation mostly weren't interested. Some people I've heard turned to bootlegging more out of impatience then any issues with the Dub. But for me even when I did start learning these shows came from Japan it never occurred to me that Japan would be that far ahead of us. I only in the last few years realized the earliest DBZ episodes were already nearly a decade old when they first aired on Toonami.
With Pokémon when I did first start learning that a lot of stuff was changed I didn't really care much. I already knew certain Mario stuff was different in Japan so I accepted it as part of how Nintendo does things. I'm certainly not gonna play Pokémon in Japanese so why bother watching it in Japanese? And I'm pretty sure 90% of Pokémon fans trying to look smart by telling you about the differences are just repeating what they read on Dogasu's Backpack and Bulbapedia, if they're not spouting long debunked rumors about Butterfree.
There are two things that made me more interested in seeking out Sailor Moon in Japanese then many other Anime that I was often generally more into.
Even though I have nostalgia for the DiC voice actors I always knew on some level they weren't really good the way DBZ and Pokémon's Dub voices were. And for the Cloverway stuff I found some of them outright bad. And no it's not just because they were Canadian (something I didn't know at the time) the Futari Wa Pretty Cure Dub holds up and I always knew that one was Canadian.
And then there is the fact that I knew even very early on some Sailor Moon censorship changes were specifically about erasing LGBTQ representation. The 4Kids Dub of Pokémon if anything did the opposite however unintentionally. Even with Hun oddly enough, if that character simply had a male voice I may not have thought of them as Androgynous, but the Dub voice hardly sounds blatantly female, they actually sound pretty ambiguous.
So because I've always been interested in LGBT subjects even though I wasn't always the full vocal supporter I am now, I had an interest in wanting to experience the Japanese Audio of Sailor Moon that I still don't have for any other classic show. And lots of people were obviously far more invested in that aspect then I was.
Now my most recent earlier this year experience with Sailor Moon has been pretty exclusively the new Viz Dub since most of it is out now and I love all of the VAs they're using. But I remain a fan of what I've heard of the show in Japanese. And when I can finally find a way to watch the first Sailor Moon Memorial I will, I'm quite curious about that.
So I'm partly making this post because I want to learn if there are indeed others for whom this is the case, or had a similar yet different experience?
But also if it is true that this is the case, what could that information be useful for?
Well if you're someone trying to convince people you know to watch more stuff in Japanese. My first advice is don't be a judgmental Jerk about it, respect that they enjoy stuff you don't and try to convince them to watch more Subs in addition to not instead of the Dubs they like. Don't accuse them of disrespecting the original intent or make ablest comments about being unable to read, you will only make them mad at you. For me it's often easier to follow a Sub when I've already seen it dubbed and know the gist of the dialogue already.
After that figure out what stuff they are already a fan of the Japanese audio for (every Anime fan has probably watched something Subbed by this point) and try to recommend them stuff that has the same Seiyu they like in different roles. And in this case Sailor Moon may be the place to start. Of course even the most purely 4Kids Pokémon fans are fans of Ikue Ootani's voice, but guess what, she was also on Sailor Moon as Nyanko Suzu/Sailor Tin Cat during Sailor Stars. I wonder if she'll reprise the role if Crystal ever gets that far?
Some people might be surprised to learn how much other work the voice of Usagi Tsukino herself did considering how in the West we're used to Iconic TV Superhero actors getting too type cast to have much success doing anything else. But Kotono Mitsuishi has actually done quite a few other roles and not just obscure random throw away stuff. She's three different human Pokémon characters including Domino one of my favorites, I still haven't watched Mewtwo Returns in Japanese but I might someday just to see if she can be as memorable as Kerry Williams. She was also Excel in Excel Saga. And she's mother fraking Mireille Bouquet a lead character in my absolute favorite Anime Noir, I did watch Noir in Japanese once in late 2016 but didn't know this at the time, it must show her range cause I never once went "she sure sounds like Sailor Moon". She was also Misato Katsuragi on some little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion. And she was one of the more fun villains on Wedding Peach. She was the title character of Maze, and she was Juri on Utena (I suggested earlier this month Juri's dub VA was the main reason that Dub is looked on poorly, how ironic to now learn she was filling in for possibly the biggest Seiyu of them all). Back to her Pokémon contributions, MAL doesn't list this one but she was also Ditto (Metamon in Japanese) in at least two episodes including it's Anime debut. Oh and she provided narration for Eromanga-Sensei.
Apparently more Noir voices were Sailor Moon alumni. My favorite character Chloe was Ami Mizuno. I'm starting to wonder if it'd be easier to list shows that don't share a Seiyu with Sailor Moon?
Since Dogasu cares so much about convincing more people to watch Pokémon in Japanese, he should perhaps write something specifically on how much Seiyu overlap it has with Sailor Moon. Jessie/Musashi was Himeko in the S movie for another example.
Most of it happened because of the Hulu Revival, I watched the first few episodes on there as well as most of Crystal, then the Sailor Jupiter introduction for the sake of the research for that old Sailor Jupiter post I made. And other random examples till I eventually just flat out watched Sailor Stars and season 3 of Crystal as they went up on Hulu. But some I'd seen even before that, I remember looking for the R movie online because it was the only movie not at my video rental store and the Sub was all I could find (I have now also seen both Dubs for that movie though). But I later much more intentionally chose to seek out some Subs for Sailor Moon S.
Looking at the reasons why, I feel like I'm probably not alone in that.
With DBZ the Dubs were viewed as very good, so while there was a niche of people watching bootlegged VHS fan subs even before the rise of Internet streaming, those of my generation mostly weren't interested. Some people I've heard turned to bootlegging more out of impatience then any issues with the Dub. But for me even when I did start learning these shows came from Japan it never occurred to me that Japan would be that far ahead of us. I only in the last few years realized the earliest DBZ episodes were already nearly a decade old when they first aired on Toonami.
With Pokémon when I did first start learning that a lot of stuff was changed I didn't really care much. I already knew certain Mario stuff was different in Japan so I accepted it as part of how Nintendo does things. I'm certainly not gonna play Pokémon in Japanese so why bother watching it in Japanese? And I'm pretty sure 90% of Pokémon fans trying to look smart by telling you about the differences are just repeating what they read on Dogasu's Backpack and Bulbapedia, if they're not spouting long debunked rumors about Butterfree.
There are two things that made me more interested in seeking out Sailor Moon in Japanese then many other Anime that I was often generally more into.
Even though I have nostalgia for the DiC voice actors I always knew on some level they weren't really good the way DBZ and Pokémon's Dub voices were. And for the Cloverway stuff I found some of them outright bad. And no it's not just because they were Canadian (something I didn't know at the time) the Futari Wa Pretty Cure Dub holds up and I always knew that one was Canadian.
And then there is the fact that I knew even very early on some Sailor Moon censorship changes were specifically about erasing LGBTQ representation. The 4Kids Dub of Pokémon if anything did the opposite however unintentionally. Even with Hun oddly enough, if that character simply had a male voice I may not have thought of them as Androgynous, but the Dub voice hardly sounds blatantly female, they actually sound pretty ambiguous.
So because I've always been interested in LGBT subjects even though I wasn't always the full vocal supporter I am now, I had an interest in wanting to experience the Japanese Audio of Sailor Moon that I still don't have for any other classic show. And lots of people were obviously far more invested in that aspect then I was.
Now my most recent earlier this year experience with Sailor Moon has been pretty exclusively the new Viz Dub since most of it is out now and I love all of the VAs they're using. But I remain a fan of what I've heard of the show in Japanese. And when I can finally find a way to watch the first Sailor Moon Memorial I will, I'm quite curious about that.
So I'm partly making this post because I want to learn if there are indeed others for whom this is the case, or had a similar yet different experience?
But also if it is true that this is the case, what could that information be useful for?
Well if you're someone trying to convince people you know to watch more stuff in Japanese. My first advice is don't be a judgmental Jerk about it, respect that they enjoy stuff you don't and try to convince them to watch more Subs in addition to not instead of the Dubs they like. Don't accuse them of disrespecting the original intent or make ablest comments about being unable to read, you will only make them mad at you. For me it's often easier to follow a Sub when I've already seen it dubbed and know the gist of the dialogue already.
After that figure out what stuff they are already a fan of the Japanese audio for (every Anime fan has probably watched something Subbed by this point) and try to recommend them stuff that has the same Seiyu they like in different roles. And in this case Sailor Moon may be the place to start. Of course even the most purely 4Kids Pokémon fans are fans of Ikue Ootani's voice, but guess what, she was also on Sailor Moon as Nyanko Suzu/Sailor Tin Cat during Sailor Stars. I wonder if she'll reprise the role if Crystal ever gets that far?
Some people might be surprised to learn how much other work the voice of Usagi Tsukino herself did considering how in the West we're used to Iconic TV Superhero actors getting too type cast to have much success doing anything else. But Kotono Mitsuishi has actually done quite a few other roles and not just obscure random throw away stuff. She's three different human Pokémon characters including Domino one of my favorites, I still haven't watched Mewtwo Returns in Japanese but I might someday just to see if she can be as memorable as Kerry Williams. She was also Excel in Excel Saga. And she's mother fraking Mireille Bouquet a lead character in my absolute favorite Anime Noir, I did watch Noir in Japanese once in late 2016 but didn't know this at the time, it must show her range cause I never once went "she sure sounds like Sailor Moon". She was also Misato Katsuragi on some little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion. And she was one of the more fun villains on Wedding Peach. She was the title character of Maze, and she was Juri on Utena (I suggested earlier this month Juri's dub VA was the main reason that Dub is looked on poorly, how ironic to now learn she was filling in for possibly the biggest Seiyu of them all). Back to her Pokémon contributions, MAL doesn't list this one but she was also Ditto (Metamon in Japanese) in at least two episodes including it's Anime debut. Oh and she provided narration for Eromanga-Sensei.
Apparently more Noir voices were Sailor Moon alumni. My favorite character Chloe was Ami Mizuno. I'm starting to wonder if it'd be easier to list shows that don't share a Seiyu with Sailor Moon?
Since Dogasu cares so much about convincing more people to watch Pokémon in Japanese, he should perhaps write something specifically on how much Seiyu overlap it has with Sailor Moon. Jessie/Musashi was Himeko in the S movie for another example.
Update December 2nd 2023: Case Closed???
I've got big into Detective Conan a few years after writing this, I've watched everything Dubbed that exists but also countless hours of Subbed content. I'm not sure how much that make my opening statement less true since I don't know how much traction it's old Dub got or even if it aired soon enough to really part part of Millennial Nostalgia.
But it's what I talked about near the end that is really relevant. Kotono Mitsuishi voiced the character of Kir aka Mizunashi Rena who is introduced in episode 425 an episode that still doesn't even have a fan Dub, then is in a Coma for over 2 real world years till the Clash of Red and Black. And finally got to do something significant again earlier this year in episodes 1077-1079 and Movie 26 a Sub of which finally surfaced online at the end of November 2023.
However the Japanese Seiyu Detective Conan has made me a fan of it Minami Takayama the voice of the title character. I like both of Conan's official English VAs and the two FanDubs I've heard are fine as well. But Minami's talent at giving Childlike Conan and true Conan distinct voices while still also sounding plausibly like a little boy is amazing, I'm will to designate her the Bud Collyer of Anime. I was hoping to find out she was also someone on Sailor Moon but so far no luck, unless someone hasn't been properly added to MAL yet.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
I Love Captain Marvel and I Hate The Last Jedi
I really didn't want to talk about TLJ again, but I've observed something that has forced me to. It seems most of the people hating on Captain Marvel are also people who dislike TLJ and are defining both films as being the same problem.
What I hate about TLJ has nothing to do with anything it has in common with Captain Marvel. Quite the contrary Captain Marvel is in a way like Return of The Jedi, where the Hero of the Story becomes the true Hero they are meant to be when they go against what their traditional Mentor Figures wanted them to do. I realize that comparison is stretching it a bit, but the point is my rage at TLJ is strongly tied to how it did the opposite, how Rey is punished for trying the same thing Luke did in ROTJ, how the film is a fundamental rejection of what I believe the message of the Meta-Narrative of George Lucas's Six Episode Saga was.
I would also have found it interesting for a post ROTJ Star Wars film to have a twist like Captain Marvel's where who we thought was the Evil Empire turns out to have been the true Rebels all along. Captain Marvel is not the most nuanced version of something like that but by Hollywood standards I found it damn refreshing.
There are in fact four female lead Superhero movies of the last two years this post is about. Wonder Woman, The Last Jedi, Battle Angel Alita and Captain Marvel. They are in fact the only female lead Hollywood Blockbuster Genre films we've gotten in that time frame (and only one of those leads is even close to qualifying as non white). When you consider how we've had in that same time-frame as many male lead equivalents for each of those you'll perhaps understand why people who crave more Superheroine films will frequently take whatever they can get. I don't need to as much because I get quite a bit from Anime, but I'm not a Woman myself so my investment in the subject is not as directly personal.
Of those four movies, TLJ is the only one I don't like at all. But if I have to pick a least among the other three it would be Wonder Woman which I've liked less the more I think about it, like how all the Disney Star Wars films have gone for me actually. And if I had to pick one I definitely liked the most it would be Captain Marvel.
So one YouTube channel I was just looking at was saying how they think Wonder Woman and Battle Angel Alita are good so that proves they don't simply hate women, they just think those films are how a "Strong Female Character" should be written. They dislike Captain Marvel and TLJ because they're bad not because they're about women.
I'm not making this post to suggest they do hate women, I don't know what's in their minds. But Sexism is a tricky thing, very few misogynists literally do in fact hate every single woman. You see men dictating what women should and should not be like has always been a part of how Patriarchy works, though in different cultures and different eras what those standards are change. And even the most Patriarchal cultures that have ever existed have allowed "Strong Women" on special occasions. So a man dictating how a female Superheroine should be written sure can look like it's just the modern Nerd Culture version of that. That's why my goal in a post like this is never to say what I prefer is how they should always be, people liking the stuff I don't like doesn't bother me.
I'm not gonna say my dislike of TLJ has nothing to do with how Rey was handled, but I feel if anything the opposite. I don't see how you can call her an unstoppable Mary Sue when she failed to do the main thing she set out to do. But mostly Rey herself isn't my problem at all, I relatively liked The Force Awakens. Even Holdo as a character was fine it was only the resolution of that plot-line I didn't like, and I liked Rose.
The mentality these fans express is that there is nothing engaging about a story where the Hero starts out already strong and competent and powerful and only becomes even more so as the story progresses. Where nothing is ever truly a threat to that hero. They say this as if it would apply to a male hero equally and I believe them, because the pieces of popular culture I know of with a male hero like that do have varying degrees of critical push back even when they are in fact highly popular and successful.
But it's an attitude I fundamentally reject regardless of Gender as someone who made a post on this blog about how Wish Fulfillment Escapism is Art. I have issues with Sword Art Online but they aren't in anyway about how overpowered Kirito is, he's really no more overpowered then Lina Inverse was on Slayers.
The first season of A Certain Scientific Railgun is a lot like Captain Marvel. The story begins with Misaka already a Level 5, the challenges she faces are to her worldview not from anyone who can actually overpower her. And the moment she does something bigger then we'd seen before it's because she stopped holding herself back. That's a show that became more popular then the one it spun off from then got an even better second season and now a third is coming.
I like lots of different kinds of Superhero stories, for both men and women. I can and do also enjoy ones where they barely succeed, or don't entirely. But I see great value in just enjoying letting one wreak havoc on the bad guys unimpeded.
What I hate about TLJ has nothing to do with anything it has in common with Captain Marvel. Quite the contrary Captain Marvel is in a way like Return of The Jedi, where the Hero of the Story becomes the true Hero they are meant to be when they go against what their traditional Mentor Figures wanted them to do. I realize that comparison is stretching it a bit, but the point is my rage at TLJ is strongly tied to how it did the opposite, how Rey is punished for trying the same thing Luke did in ROTJ, how the film is a fundamental rejection of what I believe the message of the Meta-Narrative of George Lucas's Six Episode Saga was.
I would also have found it interesting for a post ROTJ Star Wars film to have a twist like Captain Marvel's where who we thought was the Evil Empire turns out to have been the true Rebels all along. Captain Marvel is not the most nuanced version of something like that but by Hollywood standards I found it damn refreshing.
There are in fact four female lead Superhero movies of the last two years this post is about. Wonder Woman, The Last Jedi, Battle Angel Alita and Captain Marvel. They are in fact the only female lead Hollywood Blockbuster Genre films we've gotten in that time frame (and only one of those leads is even close to qualifying as non white). When you consider how we've had in that same time-frame as many male lead equivalents for each of those you'll perhaps understand why people who crave more Superheroine films will frequently take whatever they can get. I don't need to as much because I get quite a bit from Anime, but I'm not a Woman myself so my investment in the subject is not as directly personal.
Of those four movies, TLJ is the only one I don't like at all. But if I have to pick a least among the other three it would be Wonder Woman which I've liked less the more I think about it, like how all the Disney Star Wars films have gone for me actually. And if I had to pick one I definitely liked the most it would be Captain Marvel.
So one YouTube channel I was just looking at was saying how they think Wonder Woman and Battle Angel Alita are good so that proves they don't simply hate women, they just think those films are how a "Strong Female Character" should be written. They dislike Captain Marvel and TLJ because they're bad not because they're about women.
I'm not making this post to suggest they do hate women, I don't know what's in their minds. But Sexism is a tricky thing, very few misogynists literally do in fact hate every single woman. You see men dictating what women should and should not be like has always been a part of how Patriarchy works, though in different cultures and different eras what those standards are change. And even the most Patriarchal cultures that have ever existed have allowed "Strong Women" on special occasions. So a man dictating how a female Superheroine should be written sure can look like it's just the modern Nerd Culture version of that. That's why my goal in a post like this is never to say what I prefer is how they should always be, people liking the stuff I don't like doesn't bother me.
I'm not gonna say my dislike of TLJ has nothing to do with how Rey was handled, but I feel if anything the opposite. I don't see how you can call her an unstoppable Mary Sue when she failed to do the main thing she set out to do. But mostly Rey herself isn't my problem at all, I relatively liked The Force Awakens. Even Holdo as a character was fine it was only the resolution of that plot-line I didn't like, and I liked Rose.
The mentality these fans express is that there is nothing engaging about a story where the Hero starts out already strong and competent and powerful and only becomes even more so as the story progresses. Where nothing is ever truly a threat to that hero. They say this as if it would apply to a male hero equally and I believe them, because the pieces of popular culture I know of with a male hero like that do have varying degrees of critical push back even when they are in fact highly popular and successful.
But it's an attitude I fundamentally reject regardless of Gender as someone who made a post on this blog about how Wish Fulfillment Escapism is Art. I have issues with Sword Art Online but they aren't in anyway about how overpowered Kirito is, he's really no more overpowered then Lina Inverse was on Slayers.
The first season of A Certain Scientific Railgun is a lot like Captain Marvel. The story begins with Misaka already a Level 5, the challenges she faces are to her worldview not from anyone who can actually overpower her. And the moment she does something bigger then we'd seen before it's because she stopped holding herself back. That's a show that became more popular then the one it spun off from then got an even better second season and now a third is coming.
I like lots of different kinds of Superhero stories, for both men and women. I can and do also enjoy ones where they barely succeed, or don't entirely. But I see great value in just enjoying letting one wreak havoc on the bad guys unimpeded.
Friday, June 21, 2019
Magical Girl Anime as the Cure to Toxic Masculinity.
I’m not gonna claim to be a Cis-Het Male who is or has become completely immune to Toxic Masculinity. I do have a temper that I sometimes lose control of. But to a typical dude bro who’s offended by the phrase itself, I’m definitely a Beta Cuck.
I have had an attraction to certain media that is presumed in the mainstream standards of American Society to be “for girls” almost my entire life. Also in the more traditionally male oriented stuff I like I frequently find many of the female characters the most relatable and/or likeable.
The thing is Sailor Moon may very well be the first. I have memories of watching the show early Sunday mornings on the UPN, meaning before it’s Toonami run and before Buffy was ever on TV. And I never watched any Buffy till 2000, likewise Xena I didn’t get into until it was already airing its last season in 2000/2001. And the chick shows I got into that are considered even weirder for a guy to like mostly came much later, besides maybe Party of Five but even that I didn’t catch till Scream 2 was already on home video.
My relationship with Sailor Moon was rather complex. There was a time when I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, for some reason more hesitant to admit to liking it then Buffy and One Tree Hill which I talked about on my main IMDB account but used a sock puppet for posting on the Sailor Moon board. That went away over time of course.
Also for a long time being into Sailor Moon didn't much lead to me watching other Magical Girl Warrior shows. I caught some Wedding Peach during the same era I got into Noir partly because it's Dub was being made and promoted at the same time by some of the same people. But I didn’t complete that show till last year or maybe the year before. For some reason I heard of Saint Tail on some website and was interested but never really tried to watch any of it.
It was in 2014 that began to change, my interest in the Sailor Moon revival is what brought me to Hulu and then the recommendations Hulu had on the Sailor Moon pages lead to me checking out both Madoka Magica and Utena, and then other Anime not so closely related to the Magical Girl genre like Rose of Versailles. And from there I dove down even further and have now seen countless hours of Pretty Cure and then most recently the stuff I talked about at the start of this month.
The fact that I cared about Sailor Moon enough in 2014 to be that interested in the revival had a lot to do with how into Pretty Little Liars I was, I knew there was overlap between those fandoms because of my Facebook friends. What I’m not so sure on is to what extent having that past history with Sailor Moon was a factor in my being open to PLL in the first place.
I really feel like I became the true Feminsit and LGBTQ ally I am now from watching PLL and engaging in it’s Fandom for seven years. My thinking on those topics used to be more “centrist” for lack of a better word. But now I feel I’ve become as radically Lefitst as a Cis-Het Male can be on those topics. And reading everything Heather Hogan said while talking about PLL was a factor in moving me on that path. However, the fact that I watched Utena and then read VraiKaiser’s analysis of Utena in the midst of that period also sped things along. And Utena I probably wouldn’t have watched without knowing it’s connection to Sailor Moon.
I’m sure there are many with experiences similar to mine. The thing about the Magical Girl Warrior is that even the most properly Shoujo incarnations have the ability to appeal to guys, girls, and others who wouldn't usually watch girly stuff because they’re essentially Superhero shows. And then the versions presumably marketed at men do not lose the feminine heart of the genre. If there are a lot of people watching only the late night Anime Magical Girls and not the Shoujo ones, I think it’s more the massive number of episodes you have to plow through then being turned off by them being even more girly. In fact that issue is why completing Wedding Peach took me so long and why I still haven't finished most not Dubbed Pretty Cure seasons or the two Magical Girl Thief shows I'm interested in.
There is also of course the cynical assumption that many guys only watch these shows because they like looking at girls in short skirts. Ironically my personal tastes tend to find them Sexier in the Shoujo shows. The characters in Nanoha, Madoka and Yuki Yuna are cute but not sexy. If you wanted to ask me which Magical Girls are even sexier then the Sailor Scouts I’d point you to Wedding Peach.
The thing is Magical Girls aren’t the only girly media where the girls are Sexy. Every actress on OTH and PLL is a pretty damn attractive and some friggin Lifetime movies are among the Sexiest films I’ve watched. But your typical dude insecure in his masculinity isn’t gonna actually watch those shows or read those books to Fap to them, there’s no need when a simple Google Image search will provide more than enough pics of the actress in question. No, anyone actually watching a Magical Girl show likes the product they’re seeing beyond that. At first it may be just for the Superhero stuff, and for some it may stay that way. But there are many for whom watching this stuff has opened their minds to a more feminine perspective.
There are plenty of times when these shows address masculinity in an interesting way. Like the Pretty Sammy episode with the hyper masculine delinquents. They make an effort to help normalize guys being feminine and girls being masculine which undermine certain more cynical assumptions about the genre. Many Feminist love that Be A Man song from Mulan as an unironic celebration of the positive traits society codes as Masculine, in a way the Magical Girl Genre has plenty of moments that can be just like that.
I have had an attraction to certain media that is presumed in the mainstream standards of American Society to be “for girls” almost my entire life. Also in the more traditionally male oriented stuff I like I frequently find many of the female characters the most relatable and/or likeable.
The thing is Sailor Moon may very well be the first. I have memories of watching the show early Sunday mornings on the UPN, meaning before it’s Toonami run and before Buffy was ever on TV. And I never watched any Buffy till 2000, likewise Xena I didn’t get into until it was already airing its last season in 2000/2001. And the chick shows I got into that are considered even weirder for a guy to like mostly came much later, besides maybe Party of Five but even that I didn’t catch till Scream 2 was already on home video.
My relationship with Sailor Moon was rather complex. There was a time when I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, for some reason more hesitant to admit to liking it then Buffy and One Tree Hill which I talked about on my main IMDB account but used a sock puppet for posting on the Sailor Moon board. That went away over time of course.
Also for a long time being into Sailor Moon didn't much lead to me watching other Magical Girl Warrior shows. I caught some Wedding Peach during the same era I got into Noir partly because it's Dub was being made and promoted at the same time by some of the same people. But I didn’t complete that show till last year or maybe the year before. For some reason I heard of Saint Tail on some website and was interested but never really tried to watch any of it.
It was in 2014 that began to change, my interest in the Sailor Moon revival is what brought me to Hulu and then the recommendations Hulu had on the Sailor Moon pages lead to me checking out both Madoka Magica and Utena, and then other Anime not so closely related to the Magical Girl genre like Rose of Versailles. And from there I dove down even further and have now seen countless hours of Pretty Cure and then most recently the stuff I talked about at the start of this month.
The fact that I cared about Sailor Moon enough in 2014 to be that interested in the revival had a lot to do with how into Pretty Little Liars I was, I knew there was overlap between those fandoms because of my Facebook friends. What I’m not so sure on is to what extent having that past history with Sailor Moon was a factor in my being open to PLL in the first place.
I really feel like I became the true Feminsit and LGBTQ ally I am now from watching PLL and engaging in it’s Fandom for seven years. My thinking on those topics used to be more “centrist” for lack of a better word. But now I feel I’ve become as radically Lefitst as a Cis-Het Male can be on those topics. And reading everything Heather Hogan said while talking about PLL was a factor in moving me on that path. However, the fact that I watched Utena and then read VraiKaiser’s analysis of Utena in the midst of that period also sped things along. And Utena I probably wouldn’t have watched without knowing it’s connection to Sailor Moon.
I’m sure there are many with experiences similar to mine. The thing about the Magical Girl Warrior is that even the most properly Shoujo incarnations have the ability to appeal to guys, girls, and others who wouldn't usually watch girly stuff because they’re essentially Superhero shows. And then the versions presumably marketed at men do not lose the feminine heart of the genre. If there are a lot of people watching only the late night Anime Magical Girls and not the Shoujo ones, I think it’s more the massive number of episodes you have to plow through then being turned off by them being even more girly. In fact that issue is why completing Wedding Peach took me so long and why I still haven't finished most not Dubbed Pretty Cure seasons or the two Magical Girl Thief shows I'm interested in.
There is also of course the cynical assumption that many guys only watch these shows because they like looking at girls in short skirts. Ironically my personal tastes tend to find them Sexier in the Shoujo shows. The characters in Nanoha, Madoka and Yuki Yuna are cute but not sexy. If you wanted to ask me which Magical Girls are even sexier then the Sailor Scouts I’d point you to Wedding Peach.
The thing is Magical Girls aren’t the only girly media where the girls are Sexy. Every actress on OTH and PLL is a pretty damn attractive and some friggin Lifetime movies are among the Sexiest films I’ve watched. But your typical dude insecure in his masculinity isn’t gonna actually watch those shows or read those books to Fap to them, there’s no need when a simple Google Image search will provide more than enough pics of the actress in question. No, anyone actually watching a Magical Girl show likes the product they’re seeing beyond that. At first it may be just for the Superhero stuff, and for some it may stay that way. But there are many for whom watching this stuff has opened their minds to a more feminine perspective.
There are plenty of times when these shows address masculinity in an interesting way. Like the Pretty Sammy episode with the hyper masculine delinquents. They make an effort to help normalize guys being feminine and girls being masculine which undermine certain more cynical assumptions about the genre. Many Feminist love that Be A Man song from Mulan as an unironic celebration of the positive traits society codes as Masculine, in a way the Magical Girl Genre has plenty of moments that can be just like that.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
The Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach Anime are connected.
Kazuko Tadano is a Character Designer I'm a fan of.
I still prefer the basic character designs of the Sailor Senshi in the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal, and she was the Character Designer for the first two seasons and the R Movie. I was relived to learn this Character Designer was a woman, I would feel quite uncomfortable with preferring how men changed the designs of a female Mangaka. You could still argue she was designing them to fit the tastes of Sato and Ikuhara, which is an interesting issue to think about given how one of the episodes she also helped animate was Episode 21 - Protect the Dreams of Children! The Friendship Bound in Anime.
None of her replacements as the Sailor Moon character designer had the job as long as she did. They were probably all hired to mainly follow the lead she set, which is a job I'm sure no artist wanted to do long term. But they were good at it so I give them all props.
I have a long history of saying the only Magical Girl Warriors who look even better then the Sailor Scouts (I still call them that sometimes, fight me) are the Love Angels of Wedding Peach. And guess what, the Character Designer for that Anime was also Kazuko Tadano (Sayuri Ichishi shares that credit for the OVAs but not the main series). Now I currently have no idea what the Wedding Peach Manga looked like and so can't express an opinion on if these Anime designs are also better then the Manga. But the point remains that she's made all of my favorite Magical Girl Warrior Character Designs.
This wasn't the only staff the Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach Anime had in common. Hisashi Kagawa for example worked on both of them and Pokemon. Does knowing about this common staff help or hurt the desire to argue that Wedding Peach can stand on it's own and isn't just a knock off? I don't know, but it certainly should help in convincing people who like Sailor Moon to give Wedding Peach a chance.
Digibro likes to argue that you should care more about common creative staff then who has the official branding. Does that mean Wedding Peach is better Sailor Moon then the actual Sailor Moon airing at the same time? It mainly aired concurrent with SuperS the often least highly regarded season of Sailor Moon. Ikuhara was still series director but he had less actual control then he did for S and the R Movie and his frustration with that is why he quickly left to go get started on Utena.
I sometimes wonder if for both Hollywood Movies and Anime we often give too much credit to the Director and not enough to the Writer of the Script/Screenplay. I mention this here because the main Director of Wedding Peach wasn't a Sailor Moon alumni (instead he'd go on to do Pokemon) but at least one of the head writers was, Sukehiro Tomita.
Sukehiro wrote the Scripts for 15 episodes of season one, 13 episodes of R, 7 episodes of S and the Screenplays for both the R and S movies. The generally least liked movie is the only one he didn't write, I have some fondness for Black Dream Hole but it is the weakest. The R movie was the best under Ikuhara, but it seems the Director changing didn't cause as much of a quality drop as the writer changing.
I don't currently know if anyone else can be said to have written more episodes of season one. But I made a Semi-Filler Free guide to Season 1 of Sailor Moon and only two of his episodes didn't make it and only one is among those that barely qualified. He wrote 12 episodes that are almost impossible to justify skipping including the first and last episodes. So if you're someone who outright prefers the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal (I used to at least for season one but I've become more balanced on the issue) he may deserve just as much credit for that adaptation work as Sato and Ikuhara. Still he didn't write all of the non filler, you will miss stuff watching only what he wrote.
He also wrote plenty of stuff that at least follows the formula of a Sailor Moon filler episode, including some of what set that formula. So if you like the 90s Sailor Moon Anime mainly for the filler with no counterpart to anything in the Manga (like me) then he also likely wrote something you enjoyed. One of my personal all time favorite Sailor Moon episodes is Episode 26 - Bring a Smile to Naru's Face! Usagi's Friendship which is also one Ikuhara directed. In fact I want the Viz Dub of that episode played at my funeral instead of any religious sermon, just play this and read 1 Corinthians 15.
During the Doom Tree Saga he wrote three episodes, the best of which is the Snow White one, the one who's localization would create one of my favorite Memes. He wrote 10 episodes for the Black Moon saga, which seem to include most of the most watchable ones (I'm not big on that arc in any version). He wrote only 7 for S but they include some major stand outs, like the one where Minako goes nuts donating blood.
He scripted 16 episodes of Wedding Peach including the first two and the last two. But he's also credited with the "original story" which I'm not sure what that means in a Manga adaptation. Did he also help write the Manga? Or come up with the basic outline of how it was changed for the Anime? I don't know enough about how this stuff works.
Most major Wedding Peach creative minds not connected to Sailor Moon would go on to be heavily involved in Pokemon, so if you're nostalgic for 90s and early 2000s kid's Anime they all probably made something more well known you like.
I have a fondness for Wedding Peach that long predates my knowing about any of these connections it has to Sailor Moon and Pokémon. Even if it is a rare occasion of an Anime I like where I can't recommend or even much defend the Dub. And also in-spite of it having less Yuri then any other Magical Girl show I've watched which I'd expect to bother me more then it does.
As far as comparing it to Sailor Moon goes it's only really fair to compare it to single "seasons" not the whole show since Wedding Peach didn't get equivalent sequels, not in Anime form at least, just a fun 4 episode OVA epilogue which is if anything most like the Doom Tree Saga as filler material.
I would easily pick Wedding Peach over R and SuperS and maybe even Stars. But S is definitely a better product, while comparing it to season 1 is the really tough comparison. Sailor Moon's greatest strength is that it has some single episodes that by far top anything else I've seen in Pre-Pokémon TV Anime. However Sailor Moon does have some hard to defend episodes that are arguably worse then Wedding Peach's worst episodes. And I say that as someone hesitant to call any episode of Sailor Moon completely irredeemable.
I wonder if Wedding Peach had an overlooked influence on the future of the genre? It predates PreCure in having Pink be the main color of the MC. I could maybe think of other things that make it proto-PreCure.
Tomita would go on to return to Toei for Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, where he did Series Composition and Scripted 13 episodes.
I still prefer the basic character designs of the Sailor Senshi in the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal, and she was the Character Designer for the first two seasons and the R Movie. I was relived to learn this Character Designer was a woman, I would feel quite uncomfortable with preferring how men changed the designs of a female Mangaka. You could still argue she was designing them to fit the tastes of Sato and Ikuhara, which is an interesting issue to think about given how one of the episodes she also helped animate was Episode 21 - Protect the Dreams of Children! The Friendship Bound in Anime.
None of her replacements as the Sailor Moon character designer had the job as long as she did. They were probably all hired to mainly follow the lead she set, which is a job I'm sure no artist wanted to do long term. But they were good at it so I give them all props.
I have a long history of saying the only Magical Girl Warriors who look even better then the Sailor Scouts (I still call them that sometimes, fight me) are the Love Angels of Wedding Peach. And guess what, the Character Designer for that Anime was also Kazuko Tadano (Sayuri Ichishi shares that credit for the OVAs but not the main series). Now I currently have no idea what the Wedding Peach Manga looked like and so can't express an opinion on if these Anime designs are also better then the Manga. But the point remains that she's made all of my favorite Magical Girl Warrior Character Designs.
This wasn't the only staff the Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach Anime had in common. Hisashi Kagawa for example worked on both of them and Pokemon. Does knowing about this common staff help or hurt the desire to argue that Wedding Peach can stand on it's own and isn't just a knock off? I don't know, but it certainly should help in convincing people who like Sailor Moon to give Wedding Peach a chance.
Digibro likes to argue that you should care more about common creative staff then who has the official branding. Does that mean Wedding Peach is better Sailor Moon then the actual Sailor Moon airing at the same time? It mainly aired concurrent with SuperS the often least highly regarded season of Sailor Moon. Ikuhara was still series director but he had less actual control then he did for S and the R Movie and his frustration with that is why he quickly left to go get started on Utena.
I sometimes wonder if for both Hollywood Movies and Anime we often give too much credit to the Director and not enough to the Writer of the Script/Screenplay. I mention this here because the main Director of Wedding Peach wasn't a Sailor Moon alumni (instead he'd go on to do Pokemon) but at least one of the head writers was, Sukehiro Tomita.
Sukehiro wrote the Scripts for 15 episodes of season one, 13 episodes of R, 7 episodes of S and the Screenplays for both the R and S movies. The generally least liked movie is the only one he didn't write, I have some fondness for Black Dream Hole but it is the weakest. The R movie was the best under Ikuhara, but it seems the Director changing didn't cause as much of a quality drop as the writer changing.
I don't currently know if anyone else can be said to have written more episodes of season one. But I made a Semi-Filler Free guide to Season 1 of Sailor Moon and only two of his episodes didn't make it and only one is among those that barely qualified. He wrote 12 episodes that are almost impossible to justify skipping including the first and last episodes. So if you're someone who outright prefers the 90s Anime over the Manga and Crystal (I used to at least for season one but I've become more balanced on the issue) he may deserve just as much credit for that adaptation work as Sato and Ikuhara. Still he didn't write all of the non filler, you will miss stuff watching only what he wrote.
He also wrote plenty of stuff that at least follows the formula of a Sailor Moon filler episode, including some of what set that formula. So if you like the 90s Sailor Moon Anime mainly for the filler with no counterpart to anything in the Manga (like me) then he also likely wrote something you enjoyed. One of my personal all time favorite Sailor Moon episodes is Episode 26 - Bring a Smile to Naru's Face! Usagi's Friendship which is also one Ikuhara directed. In fact I want the Viz Dub of that episode played at my funeral instead of any religious sermon, just play this and read 1 Corinthians 15.
During the Doom Tree Saga he wrote three episodes, the best of which is the Snow White one, the one who's localization would create one of my favorite Memes. He wrote 10 episodes for the Black Moon saga, which seem to include most of the most watchable ones (I'm not big on that arc in any version). He wrote only 7 for S but they include some major stand outs, like the one where Minako goes nuts donating blood.
He scripted 16 episodes of Wedding Peach including the first two and the last two. But he's also credited with the "original story" which I'm not sure what that means in a Manga adaptation. Did he also help write the Manga? Or come up with the basic outline of how it was changed for the Anime? I don't know enough about how this stuff works.
Most major Wedding Peach creative minds not connected to Sailor Moon would go on to be heavily involved in Pokemon, so if you're nostalgic for 90s and early 2000s kid's Anime they all probably made something more well known you like.
I have a fondness for Wedding Peach that long predates my knowing about any of these connections it has to Sailor Moon and Pokémon. Even if it is a rare occasion of an Anime I like where I can't recommend or even much defend the Dub. And also in-spite of it having less Yuri then any other Magical Girl show I've watched which I'd expect to bother me more then it does.
As far as comparing it to Sailor Moon goes it's only really fair to compare it to single "seasons" not the whole show since Wedding Peach didn't get equivalent sequels, not in Anime form at least, just a fun 4 episode OVA epilogue which is if anything most like the Doom Tree Saga as filler material.
I would easily pick Wedding Peach over R and SuperS and maybe even Stars. But S is definitely a better product, while comparing it to season 1 is the really tough comparison. Sailor Moon's greatest strength is that it has some single episodes that by far top anything else I've seen in Pre-Pokémon TV Anime. However Sailor Moon does have some hard to defend episodes that are arguably worse then Wedding Peach's worst episodes. And I say that as someone hesitant to call any episode of Sailor Moon completely irredeemable.
I wonder if Wedding Peach had an overlooked influence on the future of the genre? It predates PreCure in having Pink be the main color of the MC. I could maybe think of other things that make it proto-PreCure.
Tomita would go on to return to Toei for Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, where he did Series Composition and Scripted 13 episodes.
It's not that Japan can't do CG Animation well, Anime studios just don't.
They do do it well in Video Games. I've already said on this blog that I do not comprehend film critics saying "looks like a video game" as a criticism when I watch the Cut Scenes in Final Fantasy XII and XIII and go "why can't Hollywood movies look this awesome". Even on the Wii over a decade ago the cut scenes in Mario Galaxy look better then what Disney and Pixar are putting on the big screen now much less at the time.
But these are the top tier AAA Video Games, they have massive budgets and are typically in production for years. Most Anime is made on a limited budget and schedule that doesn't allow the same amount of work to be put into it. To many nit picky Anime critics this even hurts how good their 2D Animation looks, in TV Anime at least. But 2D Animation is still inherently cheaper to do well and Japan's been ahead of the west at that art-form since the 70s so it's easy for even the cheapest shows to impress a casual viewer when it's 2D.
With Pokemon we can see this contrast demonstrated in the same franchise. Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution is going to be the first fully CG Pokemon Anime and it isn't looking good at all. But in the games Let's Go Pikachu, Let's Go Eevee, Sword and Shield are providing some fraking gorgeous purely CG Animation.
Frankly I think if they really wanted to do this now they should have used Detective Pikachu as an excuse to take this year off from the annual Pokemon Anime Film schedule and spend twice as much time on this one. And done it with an original story, everyone comparing this to the movie we're all nostalgic for is not gonna help it.
There are also video games that have a more explicitly Anime style. And plenty of Dark Fantasy Video Games with an aesthetic that could have worked for something like Berserk.
Final Fantasy VII Advent Children was a Japanese CG Animated Movie made by a Video Game company with the same effort they'd put into a Video Game. And it looks awesome, whatever your lame opinions on it's story are.
But these are the top tier AAA Video Games, they have massive budgets and are typically in production for years. Most Anime is made on a limited budget and schedule that doesn't allow the same amount of work to be put into it. To many nit picky Anime critics this even hurts how good their 2D Animation looks, in TV Anime at least. But 2D Animation is still inherently cheaper to do well and Japan's been ahead of the west at that art-form since the 70s so it's easy for even the cheapest shows to impress a casual viewer when it's 2D.
With Pokemon we can see this contrast demonstrated in the same franchise. Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution is going to be the first fully CG Pokemon Anime and it isn't looking good at all. But in the games Let's Go Pikachu, Let's Go Eevee, Sword and Shield are providing some fraking gorgeous purely CG Animation.
Frankly I think if they really wanted to do this now they should have used Detective Pikachu as an excuse to take this year off from the annual Pokemon Anime Film schedule and spend twice as much time on this one. And done it with an original story, everyone comparing this to the movie we're all nostalgic for is not gonna help it.
There are also video games that have a more explicitly Anime style. And plenty of Dark Fantasy Video Games with an aesthetic that could have worked for something like Berserk.
Final Fantasy VII Advent Children was a Japanese CG Animated Movie made by a Video Game company with the same effort they'd put into a Video Game. And it looks awesome, whatever your lame opinions on it's story are.
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
It's fine if the Villain isn't one of the best characters.
I myself in the past on this very blog have repeated the common notion that having a great villain is a requirement for a great Superhero story. But a lot has happened to change my mind on that.
It would be pointless to go on about great Genre stories that have no villain at all like the third Pokemon movie or Star Trek IV or the book of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Because that's irrelevant to the argument that if there is a villain the villain needs to be a very engaging and/or entertaining character.
Now I do love great villains, from cartoon villains played by a charismatic actor having a great time hamming it up to complex nuanced psychological profiles. SSSS.Gridman provided one of each of those making it perhaps the best Anime of 2018 in the villain department.
But there is no story where every character is going to be a super engaging stand out character. I need some to be fun and/or interesting for me to get into a show or movie, but it's okay if not all of them are. Even some characters who have a lot of screen time and narrative importance in a given movie are basically just talking plot devices.
This post is about the fact that we tend to see the role of antagonist as one that's uniquely not allowed to be of lower priority. No one is confused when a Superhero film is well received in-spite of the love interest character not being all that highly regarded. But I'd argue the person we're supposed to believe the Hero is In Love With should be more important to get right then the person the Hero is trying to beat up. The old Batman movies got away with relegating Pat Hingle's Jim Gordon to just an exposition device, but when they get one of the villains wrong everyone loses their minds.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe was for awhile perceived as being pretty weak in the villain department besides Loki and maybe a few others. But those movies were massively successful in-spite of that and certain internet critics were pretty confused, lamenting that society has lost something in allowing villains to get stale.
Now over the course of phase three there is a perception that the MCU has been getting better in the villain department. I personally like some of the older MCU villains particularly Ultron, and am not as impressed with some of these highly praised recent ones, especially Killmonger and Hella. But that's not the point today.
I would argue that in the early years of the MCU general audiences and even some Comic readers didn't consider the lack of scene stealing villains a bug and maybe even saw it as a feature.
The 90s Batman movies were largely treated like episodes of the 60s TV Show just now on the big screen and separated by years instead of weeks, and so the fact that each movie had a different villain was treated as the main thing setting them apart from each other. And to a large extent the 2000s pre-MCU Marvel Superhero movies followed their example. When Batman Begins came along and the marketing largely underplayed the villains for the sake of selling it as Batman's Origin Story a lot of us thought things would be different. But low and behold for the sequels it was once again The Joker and Bane who were really selling them.
I think it's possible when the MCU got going many found it darn right refreshing that these Superhero films were not so villain driven, even if often the marketing was seemingly trying to be business as usual in this area. Even the MCU films that critics weren't so kind to still did well at the Box Office.
Thor: The Dark World is constantly treated by YT Video Essayists as among the worst of the MCU films, but for me it's the best Thor movie by far. And criticisms of the movie largely come down to finding Malekith a bland boring uninteresting villain with unexplained motives. I can't even remotely understand criticizing anything else about the film.
The movie isn't actually about Malekith, it's about Thor and his relationships with Loki and Jane and Odin. And in my opinion all of that is handled beautifully whether or not it was predictable. Malekith being just an external threat to advance that narrative is perfectly fine and I would possibly even have disliked screen time being wasted on trying to make him more sympathetic or understandable.
Ronin in the first Guardians of The Galaxy is viewed as being the exact same "problem" as Malekith yet it doesn't seem to have hurt the overall critical reception of the film nearly as much. In that film I think Ronin being a bland character was recognized as being actually thematically relevant, it contrasts him to the fun cast of quirky heroes being established, it even plays into how he's defeated at the end. And maybe the same idea was at play in using him in a minor role in Captain Marvel.
Malekith's blandness may not be so thematically justified but I'd certainly argue it's narrativly justified. He's someone who wants to destroy the Universe as we know it because he wants to eliminate all light and return existence to perpetual darkness. Would it really make sense for that to be a fun one liner dropping character? And knowing why he is like that or wants that would add nothing to what the film is actually about, it would only be a distraction.
Going outside of Comic Book Superhero movies I feel similarly about the aliens in Darling in The Franxx, and many of the villains of the Pokemon movies, and Count Dooku. Some Pokemon movies have great villains, like anyone connected to Team Rocket (even if that connection only exists in the Dub). But it's totally fine that the villain in Pokemon 2000 is just there to start the conflict and then become irrelevant, and that plenty of later ones were just basically that formula being recycled, because the villains are never what I watch a Pokemon movie for.
And maybe it's a problem that for so many Comic Book fans the villains are what they watch Superhero movies for?
Update July 3rd 2019: I have stumbled upon on old YouTube video that perhaps overlaps with the ideas of this discussion. Though I suspect they're critical of more Plot Device Characters then I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGtKCATsUuA
It would be pointless to go on about great Genre stories that have no villain at all like the third Pokemon movie or Star Trek IV or the book of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Because that's irrelevant to the argument that if there is a villain the villain needs to be a very engaging and/or entertaining character.
Now I do love great villains, from cartoon villains played by a charismatic actor having a great time hamming it up to complex nuanced psychological profiles. SSSS.Gridman provided one of each of those making it perhaps the best Anime of 2018 in the villain department.
But there is no story where every character is going to be a super engaging stand out character. I need some to be fun and/or interesting for me to get into a show or movie, but it's okay if not all of them are. Even some characters who have a lot of screen time and narrative importance in a given movie are basically just talking plot devices.
This post is about the fact that we tend to see the role of antagonist as one that's uniquely not allowed to be of lower priority. No one is confused when a Superhero film is well received in-spite of the love interest character not being all that highly regarded. But I'd argue the person we're supposed to believe the Hero is In Love With should be more important to get right then the person the Hero is trying to beat up. The old Batman movies got away with relegating Pat Hingle's Jim Gordon to just an exposition device, but when they get one of the villains wrong everyone loses their minds.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe was for awhile perceived as being pretty weak in the villain department besides Loki and maybe a few others. But those movies were massively successful in-spite of that and certain internet critics were pretty confused, lamenting that society has lost something in allowing villains to get stale.
Now over the course of phase three there is a perception that the MCU has been getting better in the villain department. I personally like some of the older MCU villains particularly Ultron, and am not as impressed with some of these highly praised recent ones, especially Killmonger and Hella. But that's not the point today.
I would argue that in the early years of the MCU general audiences and even some Comic readers didn't consider the lack of scene stealing villains a bug and maybe even saw it as a feature.
The 90s Batman movies were largely treated like episodes of the 60s TV Show just now on the big screen and separated by years instead of weeks, and so the fact that each movie had a different villain was treated as the main thing setting them apart from each other. And to a large extent the 2000s pre-MCU Marvel Superhero movies followed their example. When Batman Begins came along and the marketing largely underplayed the villains for the sake of selling it as Batman's Origin Story a lot of us thought things would be different. But low and behold for the sequels it was once again The Joker and Bane who were really selling them.
I think it's possible when the MCU got going many found it darn right refreshing that these Superhero films were not so villain driven, even if often the marketing was seemingly trying to be business as usual in this area. Even the MCU films that critics weren't so kind to still did well at the Box Office.
Thor: The Dark World is constantly treated by YT Video Essayists as among the worst of the MCU films, but for me it's the best Thor movie by far. And criticisms of the movie largely come down to finding Malekith a bland boring uninteresting villain with unexplained motives. I can't even remotely understand criticizing anything else about the film.
The movie isn't actually about Malekith, it's about Thor and his relationships with Loki and Jane and Odin. And in my opinion all of that is handled beautifully whether or not it was predictable. Malekith being just an external threat to advance that narrative is perfectly fine and I would possibly even have disliked screen time being wasted on trying to make him more sympathetic or understandable.
Ronin in the first Guardians of The Galaxy is viewed as being the exact same "problem" as Malekith yet it doesn't seem to have hurt the overall critical reception of the film nearly as much. In that film I think Ronin being a bland character was recognized as being actually thematically relevant, it contrasts him to the fun cast of quirky heroes being established, it even plays into how he's defeated at the end. And maybe the same idea was at play in using him in a minor role in Captain Marvel.
Malekith's blandness may not be so thematically justified but I'd certainly argue it's narrativly justified. He's someone who wants to destroy the Universe as we know it because he wants to eliminate all light and return existence to perpetual darkness. Would it really make sense for that to be a fun one liner dropping character? And knowing why he is like that or wants that would add nothing to what the film is actually about, it would only be a distraction.
Going outside of Comic Book Superhero movies I feel similarly about the aliens in Darling in The Franxx, and many of the villains of the Pokemon movies, and Count Dooku. Some Pokemon movies have great villains, like anyone connected to Team Rocket (even if that connection only exists in the Dub). But it's totally fine that the villain in Pokemon 2000 is just there to start the conflict and then become irrelevant, and that plenty of later ones were just basically that formula being recycled, because the villains are never what I watch a Pokemon movie for.
And maybe it's a problem that for so many Comic Book fans the villains are what they watch Superhero movies for?
Update July 3rd 2019: I have stumbled upon on old YouTube video that perhaps overlaps with the ideas of this discussion. Though I suspect they're critical of more Plot Device Characters then I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGtKCATsUuA
Monday, June 17, 2019
The Shockingly Shoujo Roots of The Pokemon Anime.
In my post about 1992 I mentioned that Wedding Peach homage in the Erika episode of Pokemon as indirect evidence Pokemon might have been influenced by Sailor Moon and linked to Suede's corresponding Pokemon Journey episode as that's where I first learned of this piece of trivia. At the time I made that I didn't recall exactly what Suede had said about it so I've since re-watched it and done some more research. Suede was actually quite understating the connection, it goes beyond just one common staff member.
Nintendo didn't just create their own animation studio out of thin air when they decided to make an Anime for Pokemon. But they did interestingly choose a then young and up and coming one called OLM (Oriental Light and Magic). Wedding Peach was OLM's first TV Anime having previously only done a couple of obscure OVAs. And this is technically still the Studio in charge of the Pokemon Anime to this day. The creative staff of the two Anime by no means completely overlap, but quite a bit of overlap does exist, from series director Kunihiko Yuyama to Yuji Asada (Suede's favorite Storyboarder), Hideki Sonoda (who previously worked on Shoujo projects like Attacker You! and Hikari no Densetsu), Sayuri Ichishi, Norihiko Sudo and even the Sound Director and Photography Director as well as the two OLM producers.
Wedding Peach was a successful show at the time, regardless of how many critics may see it as the most egregious Sailor Moon copycat, and it seems the success of Wedding Peach was a major factor in how they got the Pokemon gig, it seems to have been the biggest thing they'd done prior to Pokemon.
As far as using this as evidence of Sailor Moon possibly directly influencing the Pokemon Speak trope. While as a fan of Wedding Peach I sometimes get defensive of the idea that it's just a Sailor Moon knock off, there is no doubt in my mind the people who made Wedding Peach must have been watching Sailor Moon. And I've found there is indeed some staff who worked on both Wedding Peach and Sailor Moon, but I've yet to find a single person who worked on all three (besides Voice Actors but they aren't the creative staff), like Sukehiro Tomita who was a key writer for Wedding Peach and had previously worked on the first three seasons of Sailor Moon and the first two movies, also Wedding Peach's character designer had previously worked on Sailor Moon including the R movie. That means past Sailor Moon staff and future Pokemon staff were working together, sharing ideas and talking about stuff.
Knowing about this interesting connection between Wedding Peach and Pokemon makes me oddly want to see Wedding Peach characters added to Super Smash Bros. Maybe one of those people who make Smash Mods can do a Wedding Peach one?
OLM has recently started doing Live Actions stuff, including it seems one of the few Live Action incarnations of the Magical Girl Warrior Sub-Genre, the Girls x Heroine! Series. I hope there's a legal way for me to try watching that. I actually don't know if they were involved in making Detective Pikachu at all.
The fact that some of Pokemon's original Japanese voice cast had previously done Wedding Peach and/or Sailor Moon is also interesting. Though perhaps not that surprising, Japanese Seiyu get around just as quickly as Dub Actors, more so even since in Japan this industry isn't divided between two different States, it's pretty much all recorded in Tokyo.
Let's start with the one Japanese Pokemon voice everyone can recognize, Pikachu. Ootani Ikue had previously been Sailor Tin Cat in Sailor Stars the last season of Sailor Moon which ended a few weeks before Pokemon went on the air. The voice of Chibi-Usa was the Japanese voice of Sabrina the Saffron Gym Leader. And Usagi herself has been three different Pokemon characters including Domino in Mewtwo Returns, and she was Potamos one of the more entertaining Wedding Peach antagonists. While the main female leads of Wedding Peach only did occasional if any Pokemon voice work, the two male leads of Wedding Peach became the Japanese voices of Brock and James.
But perhaps most relevant to how I started this is that Momoko the main protagonist of Wedding Peach was also the Japanese voice of Erika on both the series and in the recent reboot movie. Why is Erika the only Gym Leader featured in that movie? I enjoyed it cause Erika was kind of the most misrepresented in the original series and her scene in that movie felt much more like who she is in the Games. But the staff may have simply wanted to work with their original star Seiyu again (and yes some of the staff was still the same, particularly the main director). She was also Aitwo (Amber Two) in the origin of Mewtwo add on to the first movie, so maybe she'll be in the upcoming remake as well?
Takeshi Shudou was never involved in Wedding Peach or Sailor Moon it seems but did create Magical Princess Minky Momo which also had Junki Takegami as a writer and Kunihiko Yuyama as the director.
Update: I found someone who worked on all three of Sailor Moon, Wedding Peach and Pokemon. Hisashi Kagawa who's mostly credited as an animation director or "key animation" and occasionally Character Design. He's worked on a lot of other stuff too, he really gets around.
And another person Wedding Peach and Pokemon have in common is Art Director Katsuyoshi Kanemura.
Satoru Iriyoshi had previously worked on Goldfish Warning! the predecessor to Sailor Moon's time-slot, and then Ghost Sweeper Mikami and Marmalade Boy which were in the future Pretty Cure Timeslot.
Yukiyoshi Ohashi was a Pokemon writer who'd previously worked on Cutey Honey Flash, Mahou No Angel Sweet Mint and some Akko-Chan reboots. And it as turns out they also wrote a lot of Wedding Peach, Shikichi Ohashi is the same person, AnimeNewsNetwork is just confused.
Massaki Iwane made his debut as an Anime Director doing Pokemon where he's become a fan favorite. But he had previously done Key Animation for 7 episodes of Wedding Peach starting with the third. Often ones that were also Yuji Asada episodes.
Nintendo didn't just create their own animation studio out of thin air when they decided to make an Anime for Pokemon. But they did interestingly choose a then young and up and coming one called OLM (Oriental Light and Magic). Wedding Peach was OLM's first TV Anime having previously only done a couple of obscure OVAs. And this is technically still the Studio in charge of the Pokemon Anime to this day. The creative staff of the two Anime by no means completely overlap, but quite a bit of overlap does exist, from series director Kunihiko Yuyama to Yuji Asada (Suede's favorite Storyboarder), Hideki Sonoda (who previously worked on Shoujo projects like Attacker You! and Hikari no Densetsu), Sayuri Ichishi, Norihiko Sudo and even the Sound Director and Photography Director as well as the two OLM producers.
Wedding Peach was a successful show at the time, regardless of how many critics may see it as the most egregious Sailor Moon copycat, and it seems the success of Wedding Peach was a major factor in how they got the Pokemon gig, it seems to have been the biggest thing they'd done prior to Pokemon.
As far as using this as evidence of Sailor Moon possibly directly influencing the Pokemon Speak trope. While as a fan of Wedding Peach I sometimes get defensive of the idea that it's just a Sailor Moon knock off, there is no doubt in my mind the people who made Wedding Peach must have been watching Sailor Moon. And I've found there is indeed some staff who worked on both Wedding Peach and Sailor Moon, but I've yet to find a single person who worked on all three (besides Voice Actors but they aren't the creative staff), like Sukehiro Tomita who was a key writer for Wedding Peach and had previously worked on the first three seasons of Sailor Moon and the first two movies, also Wedding Peach's character designer had previously worked on Sailor Moon including the R movie. That means past Sailor Moon staff and future Pokemon staff were working together, sharing ideas and talking about stuff.
Knowing about this interesting connection between Wedding Peach and Pokemon makes me oddly want to see Wedding Peach characters added to Super Smash Bros. Maybe one of those people who make Smash Mods can do a Wedding Peach one?
OLM has recently started doing Live Actions stuff, including it seems one of the few Live Action incarnations of the Magical Girl Warrior Sub-Genre, the Girls x Heroine! Series. I hope there's a legal way for me to try watching that. I actually don't know if they were involved in making Detective Pikachu at all.
The fact that some of Pokemon's original Japanese voice cast had previously done Wedding Peach and/or Sailor Moon is also interesting. Though perhaps not that surprising, Japanese Seiyu get around just as quickly as Dub Actors, more so even since in Japan this industry isn't divided between two different States, it's pretty much all recorded in Tokyo.
Let's start with the one Japanese Pokemon voice everyone can recognize, Pikachu. Ootani Ikue had previously been Sailor Tin Cat in Sailor Stars the last season of Sailor Moon which ended a few weeks before Pokemon went on the air. The voice of Chibi-Usa was the Japanese voice of Sabrina the Saffron Gym Leader. And Usagi herself has been three different Pokemon characters including Domino in Mewtwo Returns, and she was Potamos one of the more entertaining Wedding Peach antagonists. While the main female leads of Wedding Peach only did occasional if any Pokemon voice work, the two male leads of Wedding Peach became the Japanese voices of Brock and James.
But perhaps most relevant to how I started this is that Momoko the main protagonist of Wedding Peach was also the Japanese voice of Erika on both the series and in the recent reboot movie. Why is Erika the only Gym Leader featured in that movie? I enjoyed it cause Erika was kind of the most misrepresented in the original series and her scene in that movie felt much more like who she is in the Games. But the staff may have simply wanted to work with their original star Seiyu again (and yes some of the staff was still the same, particularly the main director). She was also Aitwo (Amber Two) in the origin of Mewtwo add on to the first movie, so maybe she'll be in the upcoming remake as well?
Takeshi Shudou was never involved in Wedding Peach or Sailor Moon it seems but did create Magical Princess Minky Momo which also had Junki Takegami as a writer and Kunihiko Yuyama as the director.
Update: I found someone who worked on all three of Sailor Moon, Wedding Peach and Pokemon. Hisashi Kagawa who's mostly credited as an animation director or "key animation" and occasionally Character Design. He's worked on a lot of other stuff too, he really gets around.
And another person Wedding Peach and Pokemon have in common is Art Director Katsuyoshi Kanemura.
Satoru Iriyoshi had previously worked on Goldfish Warning! the predecessor to Sailor Moon's time-slot, and then Ghost Sweeper Mikami and Marmalade Boy which were in the future Pretty Cure Timeslot.
Yukiyoshi Ohashi was a Pokemon writer who'd previously worked on Cutey Honey Flash, Mahou No Angel Sweet Mint and some Akko-Chan reboots. And it as turns out they also wrote a lot of Wedding Peach, Shikichi Ohashi is the same person, AnimeNewsNetwork is just confused.
Massaki Iwane made his debut as an Anime Director doing Pokemon where he's become a fan favorite. But he had previously done Key Animation for 7 episodes of Wedding Peach starting with the third. Often ones that were also Yuji Asada episodes.
Saturday, June 15, 2019
The Lineage of The Magical Girl Warrior
In 1991 the Magical Girl Warrior Sub-Genre was born in Manga with Codename Sailor V and Devil Hunter Yoko which technically qualifies but came out too close to Sailor V for one to have influenced the other. Of the two it is mainly Sailor V that is the literary ancestor of the Magical Girl Warriors who've come since, chiefly via it's more well known spin off Sailor Moon.
However I'd have to say the main literary ancestors of the Magical Girl Warrior were not earlier Magical Girls but other types of Superhero stories.
The original Magical Girl genre was mainly a Sit-Com premise, basically inspired by Bewitched but focusing on younger characters rather then a house wife, it's western equivalent would be stuff like Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Wizards of Waverly Place. Next came the Magical Girl Idol sub-genre which is basically Jem and the Holograms but more like how the Japanese Idol Industry works, and it's most in the case of that Magical Girl sub-genre where I can definitely say the Japanese version predates the western equivalent, Creamy Mammy was popular for a few years before Jem came along. Harmony Gold started work on a Creamy Mammy dub that never saw the light of day, so Americans in the Animation industry were aware of it.
I don't want to over emphasize the extent to which certain western works were an influence, directly or indirectly, on the genre. But I have to talk about it somewhat since Naoko Takeuchi has publicly admitted to Wonder Woman being an influence.
Mechanically speaking it is mainly the Lynda Carter TV Show Wonder Woman who seems like a proto Magical Girl Warrior (Or Magical Woman if you prefer since she's an adult), since in that version she doesn't have her powers when in civilian form and has the spinning transformation. And I'm unsure to what extent any other version of Wonder Woman would have been available in Japanese in the 80s and early 90s. But I feel the spirit of the Magical Girl genre is more anticipated by Marston's original vision in the Golden Age comics which were often distinct from the Male Superheros of the Golden Age in how they were about at least trying to solve things non violently and reforming the villains. And the Magical Girl genre has similarly been associated with sexual kinks being thrown in.
Wedding Peach might have been drawing even more on Wonder Woman, they got similar looking Bracelets and a general ancient Greek soldier aesthetic to the Magical Warrior costumes and using Aphrodite in a similar way.
The lineage of Superheros with Magical Transformations probably begins with Fawcett's Captain Marvel aka Shazam, I watched Linkara's review of the first Shazam comic and if only Billy were a girl and Shazam a cute animal it would sure seem like a Magical Girl pilot. A little later the character of Mary Marvel was added to the Shazam mythos and since she doesn't age up when she transforms she is perhaps the first true Magical Girl Warrior. Mary Marvel unfortunately wasn't included in the 70s TV version of the Shazam mythos, instead they created Isis another Magical Woman Warrior. Then there are the many Western Superheros viewed as knock offs of Captain Marvel in some way, from Thor having a similar kind of transformation to Miracleman and Miracle Woman to Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel.
But leaving the transformation element aside, I feel Supergirl may likely have been a visual influence on the genre, in her early to mid 80s look (which is still her most iconic look) she anticipates the basic look of the Sailor Scouts and Love Angels in a lot of ways, especially Mina and Usagi being inexplicably Blond. And it was largely Bronze Age Supergirl comics that first explored balancing the Superhero life with School Life using a female character. Another interesting DC Proto Magical Girl Warrior was Amethyst Princess of Gemworld, but I'm unsure to what extent that character could have been known across the Pacific that early. And maybe She-Ra could be considered a factor as well.
But as I said the Magical Girl Warrior is a Japanese innovation. In many ways the concept was arguably just a Hyper Girlification of the Tokusatsu Transforming Superhero formula most popularly exemplified by Ultraman, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, but arguably the first was a character known as Gekko Kamen or the Moonlight Mask, the Moonlight Knight from the Doom Tree Saga of Sailor Moon was a direct homage to that character. When I was watching SSSS.Gridman it really felt at times to me like the MC was a male Magical Girl.
And this Genre of Japanese entertainment had even already had Female Superheroes before the Magical Girl Warrior, but they were all more Science Based then Magick which is why they seem related to the Magical Girl genre only in retrospect. The first of them, or at least first to be the main character was Go Nagai's Cutey Honey, Cutey Honey's perceived relationship to this genre is why after the 90s Sailor Moon anime went off the air Toei put a more Shoujo oriented reboot of Cutey Honey in it's time-slot, Cutey Honey Flash.
Once again however I don't think transforming characters were the only influence. I can't help but wonder if La Seine No Hoshi was an aesthetic influence in some fashion. But adding further weight to the possible DC Comics influence mentioned above, I have come to think Project A-Ko must have been a factor. That movie used the same kind of Sailor Fuku that Sailor V and Sailor Moon would later wear, and it anticipated running late for school as a common recurring gag. And all three of it's lead Seiyu wound up being on Sailor Moon, two of them as major characters.
However I'd have to say the main literary ancestors of the Magical Girl Warrior were not earlier Magical Girls but other types of Superhero stories.
The original Magical Girl genre was mainly a Sit-Com premise, basically inspired by Bewitched but focusing on younger characters rather then a house wife, it's western equivalent would be stuff like Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Wizards of Waverly Place. Next came the Magical Girl Idol sub-genre which is basically Jem and the Holograms but more like how the Japanese Idol Industry works, and it's most in the case of that Magical Girl sub-genre where I can definitely say the Japanese version predates the western equivalent, Creamy Mammy was popular for a few years before Jem came along. Harmony Gold started work on a Creamy Mammy dub that never saw the light of day, so Americans in the Animation industry were aware of it.
I don't want to over emphasize the extent to which certain western works were an influence, directly or indirectly, on the genre. But I have to talk about it somewhat since Naoko Takeuchi has publicly admitted to Wonder Woman being an influence.
Mechanically speaking it is mainly the Lynda Carter TV Show Wonder Woman who seems like a proto Magical Girl Warrior (Or Magical Woman if you prefer since she's an adult), since in that version she doesn't have her powers when in civilian form and has the spinning transformation. And I'm unsure to what extent any other version of Wonder Woman would have been available in Japanese in the 80s and early 90s. But I feel the spirit of the Magical Girl genre is more anticipated by Marston's original vision in the Golden Age comics which were often distinct from the Male Superheros of the Golden Age in how they were about at least trying to solve things non violently and reforming the villains. And the Magical Girl genre has similarly been associated with sexual kinks being thrown in.
Wedding Peach might have been drawing even more on Wonder Woman, they got similar looking Bracelets and a general ancient Greek soldier aesthetic to the Magical Warrior costumes and using Aphrodite in a similar way.
The lineage of Superheros with Magical Transformations probably begins with Fawcett's Captain Marvel aka Shazam, I watched Linkara's review of the first Shazam comic and if only Billy were a girl and Shazam a cute animal it would sure seem like a Magical Girl pilot. A little later the character of Mary Marvel was added to the Shazam mythos and since she doesn't age up when she transforms she is perhaps the first true Magical Girl Warrior. Mary Marvel unfortunately wasn't included in the 70s TV version of the Shazam mythos, instead they created Isis another Magical Woman Warrior. Then there are the many Western Superheros viewed as knock offs of Captain Marvel in some way, from Thor having a similar kind of transformation to Miracleman and Miracle Woman to Marvel Comics' Captain Marvel.
But leaving the transformation element aside, I feel Supergirl may likely have been a visual influence on the genre, in her early to mid 80s look (which is still her most iconic look) she anticipates the basic look of the Sailor Scouts and Love Angels in a lot of ways, especially Mina and Usagi being inexplicably Blond. And it was largely Bronze Age Supergirl comics that first explored balancing the Superhero life with School Life using a female character. Another interesting DC Proto Magical Girl Warrior was Amethyst Princess of Gemworld, but I'm unsure to what extent that character could have been known across the Pacific that early. And maybe She-Ra could be considered a factor as well.
But as I said the Magical Girl Warrior is a Japanese innovation. In many ways the concept was arguably just a Hyper Girlification of the Tokusatsu Transforming Superhero formula most popularly exemplified by Ultraman, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, but arguably the first was a character known as Gekko Kamen or the Moonlight Mask, the Moonlight Knight from the Doom Tree Saga of Sailor Moon was a direct homage to that character. When I was watching SSSS.Gridman it really felt at times to me like the MC was a male Magical Girl.
And this Genre of Japanese entertainment had even already had Female Superheroes before the Magical Girl Warrior, but they were all more Science Based then Magick which is why they seem related to the Magical Girl genre only in retrospect. The first of them, or at least first to be the main character was Go Nagai's Cutey Honey, Cutey Honey's perceived relationship to this genre is why after the 90s Sailor Moon anime went off the air Toei put a more Shoujo oriented reboot of Cutey Honey in it's time-slot, Cutey Honey Flash.
Once again however I don't think transforming characters were the only influence. I can't help but wonder if La Seine No Hoshi was an aesthetic influence in some fashion. But adding further weight to the possible DC Comics influence mentioned above, I have come to think Project A-Ko must have been a factor. That movie used the same kind of Sailor Fuku that Sailor V and Sailor Moon would later wear, and it anticipated running late for school as a common recurring gag. And all three of it's lead Seiyu wound up being on Sailor Moon, two of them as major characters.
Update: I have now learned that there were a few Toei Toku shows that were basically live action Magical Girl shows in the late 80s and early 90s as part of the Fushigi Comedy Series. The most important being The Masked Belle Poitrine.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
It's #BATTINSON time
A week ago Robert Pattinson was officially announced as the new Batman, I didn't even know he was rumored till today. A new Batman actor was announced and it was a WEEK before I heard about it. This would never have happened five years ago. But during that period when I hadn't come to terms with BvS I stopped following most Superhero news at all and dove deeper and deeper into Anime trying to make it so I was pretty much only following Anime stuff on Twitter.
I have not seen him in anything that isn't a Twilight movie. I will give him a fair shake
He's in his 30s which on the one hand should alleviate my fears we'll be getting another young still learning Batman. But he's not that much older then Bale was in 2004.
Apparently back in August it was announced this film isn't an Origin Story, but I don't even want him having been doing it for only a year or so either. I want a Batman who's young enough that we're no where near DKR territory but who is already a veteran at what he's doing. That's the Batman we still haven't gotten in a proper Live Action movie besides the Shumackers.
The film currently in production is apparently defined as a "Noir driven story". That can mean a lot of things, in my view The Dark Knight is the best modern Film Noir Hollywood has given us. But if it focuses on Batman as a detective more then any prior Live Action Batman movie has I'll be happy, that is definitely the main aspect of the character we haven't seen properly on the Silver Screen yet.
We got two years to wait for that. Right now I'm getting annoyed we still lack a proper trailer for the Birds Of Prey movie that comes out in less then a year. To what extent is that and the Suicide Squad sequel even still in the same universe?
I have not seen him in anything that isn't a Twilight movie. I will give him a fair shake
He's in his 30s which on the one hand should alleviate my fears we'll be getting another young still learning Batman. But he's not that much older then Bale was in 2004.
Apparently back in August it was announced this film isn't an Origin Story, but I don't even want him having been doing it for only a year or so either. I want a Batman who's young enough that we're no where near DKR territory but who is already a veteran at what he's doing. That's the Batman we still haven't gotten in a proper Live Action movie besides the Shumackers.
The film currently in production is apparently defined as a "Noir driven story". That can mean a lot of things, in my view The Dark Knight is the best modern Film Noir Hollywood has given us. But if it focuses on Batman as a detective more then any prior Live Action Batman movie has I'll be happy, that is definitely the main aspect of the character we haven't seen properly on the Silver Screen yet.
We got two years to wait for that. Right now I'm getting annoyed we still lack a proper trailer for the Birds Of Prey movie that comes out in less then a year. To what extent is that and the Suicide Squad sequel even still in the same universe?
Saturday, June 8, 2019
2004-2005 was a transitional phase for the Magical Girl Genre.
The end of Ojamajo Doremi closed one chapter in Toei Animation’s role in the genre’s history.
Meanwhile with Sailor Moon, the ending of the Live Action series PGSM as well as the original run of Sera Myu musicals and the discontinuing of the Pioneer/Cloverway localizations marked the end of official Sailor Moon material anyone is currently nostalgic for. In a decade people will be nostalgic for Crystal and the Viz Dub and the new musicals but for now classic Sailor Moon ends in 2005.
Meanwhile the first two seasons of both Futari Wa Pretty Cure and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha mark the beginning of what the Magical Girl genre has been ever since, for both Shoujo and Seinen respectively. The OG PreCures interestingly got their blonde adopted daughter before Nanoha and Fate did.
Pretty Cure literally took over Doremi’s timeslot. Here is a Twitter Thread I made inquiring about Anime Time Slots.
https://twitter.com/KuudereKun888/status/1137272052031938565
And these two years also had their own little isolated projects not particularly connected to what came before or after, like Uta Kata and Tweeny Witches.
This wouldn’t be the last time there would be a game changer year in the genre’s history. I already talked about 2011 which included some of its Magical Girl relevance. But also the end of that year and going into 2012 was the 20th Anniversary of Sailor Moon which sparked the Sailor Moon revival we’re still experiencing.
But these two years were more revolutionary over all with Nanoha clearly being an influence on both Madoka and plenty of the alleged Madoka imitators. Both Madoka and Day Break Illusion shared some key creative staff with Nanoha.
And this was an important time period elsewhere as well, Pokemon was changing via the Advance Generation and Bee Train was changing via Madlax. In Hollywood the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was ending and The Chronicles of Narnia and the Nolan Batman saga were beginning. Meanwhile DC Comics was building toward Infinite Crisis and Marvel towards Civil War. In WWE the Ruthless Aggression era was starting. And the currently last great Vampire craze was sparked by the publications of Twilight and the books True Blood was based on.
For now this will probably be my last post looking at specific time periods or seasons of Anime's past. But I may return to the idea later with less specific focus on the Magical Girl Genre. For the rest of June I have other Magical Girl topics I want to cover.
Meanwhile with Sailor Moon, the ending of the Live Action series PGSM as well as the original run of Sera Myu musicals and the discontinuing of the Pioneer/Cloverway localizations marked the end of official Sailor Moon material anyone is currently nostalgic for. In a decade people will be nostalgic for Crystal and the Viz Dub and the new musicals but for now classic Sailor Moon ends in 2005.
Meanwhile the first two seasons of both Futari Wa Pretty Cure and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha mark the beginning of what the Magical Girl genre has been ever since, for both Shoujo and Seinen respectively. The OG PreCures interestingly got their blonde adopted daughter before Nanoha and Fate did.
Pretty Cure literally took over Doremi’s timeslot. Here is a Twitter Thread I made inquiring about Anime Time Slots.
https://twitter.com/KuudereKun888/status/1137272052031938565
And these two years also had their own little isolated projects not particularly connected to what came before or after, like Uta Kata and Tweeny Witches.
This wouldn’t be the last time there would be a game changer year in the genre’s history. I already talked about 2011 which included some of its Magical Girl relevance. But also the end of that year and going into 2012 was the 20th Anniversary of Sailor Moon which sparked the Sailor Moon revival we’re still experiencing.
But these two years were more revolutionary over all with Nanoha clearly being an influence on both Madoka and plenty of the alleged Madoka imitators. Both Madoka and Day Break Illusion shared some key creative staff with Nanoha.
And this was an important time period elsewhere as well, Pokemon was changing via the Advance Generation and Bee Train was changing via Madlax. In Hollywood the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was ending and The Chronicles of Narnia and the Nolan Batman saga were beginning. Meanwhile DC Comics was building toward Infinite Crisis and Marvel towards Civil War. In WWE the Ruthless Aggression era was starting. And the currently last great Vampire craze was sparked by the publications of Twilight and the books True Blood was based on.
For now this will probably be my last post looking at specific time periods or seasons of Anime's past. But I may return to the idea later with less specific focus on the Magical Girl Genre. For the rest of June I have other Magical Girl topics I want to cover.
Friday, June 7, 2019
1992, the year that retroactively gave birth to Millennial Otakudom
Most of 1992 and into early 1993 was when Japanese Television was airing both the first season of Sailor Moon and Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger.
Both of these shows in addition to being very influential within their Genres in their home nation of Japan would also within a few years receive creative English Language localizations that would became two of the major Otaku Gateway Drugs for a generation of North American Millennial Weebs, predating even Dragon Ball getting any widely viewed American version. Akira had aired in American cinemas already, but I think that's mainly part of the nostalgia of an older generation.
I mentioned them being influential within Japan as well. For Sailor Moon that claim isn't controversial, it outright invented a new sub-genre. But I know many Americans might assume Zyuranger is important within Sentai only for spawning Power Rangers, however that would be wrong. There were a couple previous Sixth Rangers, but it as the popularity of the Dragon Ranger that made this an almost required aspect of the Sentai formula going forward. It's also considered a turning point in the Sentai franchise incorporating more fantasy and mystical aspects alongside it's Sci-Fi.
Meanwhile on Dragon Ball Z, when these shows were beginning to air is also about when the Cell saga was starting.
One thing about Pokemon I want to remind people of is how the whole Pokemon Speak trope (them saying their names to communicate) was originally only in the Anime, it's popped up in some Games since, often just for Pikachu and Jigglypuff, but the main Games didn't and still don't do it. And it is in the context of that aspect of the importance of the Pokemon Anime that I want to mention how that trope now named after Pokemon had already been a thing in Anime.
Utena which I just observed started airing about the same time as Pokemon did it with Chu Chu, coincidentally voiced by Rachel Lillis in the Dub who also voiced Jigglypuff and sometimes Pikachu when technical problems hindered the usual policy of keeping Ikue Ootani's voice.
But before that it had been done with many of Sailor Moon's Youma and MOTWs all the way back to season 1, suggesting it was something Ikuhara and Sato had a thing for, as well as Chibi Chibi during Stars. And it had been included in the DiC Dub in 1995. I don't remember whether or not this ever happened on Wedding Peach, I do know Wedding Peach provides us with evidence someone involved in making the Pokemon Anime was into Magical Girl shows because of the shout out that show gets in the Erika episode.
So is it possible one of the most Iconic aspects of Pokemon was a product of Sailor Moon's influence?
Both of these shows in addition to being very influential within their Genres in their home nation of Japan would also within a few years receive creative English Language localizations that would became two of the major Otaku Gateway Drugs for a generation of North American Millennial Weebs, predating even Dragon Ball getting any widely viewed American version. Akira had aired in American cinemas already, but I think that's mainly part of the nostalgia of an older generation.
I mentioned them being influential within Japan as well. For Sailor Moon that claim isn't controversial, it outright invented a new sub-genre. But I know many Americans might assume Zyuranger is important within Sentai only for spawning Power Rangers, however that would be wrong. There were a couple previous Sixth Rangers, but it as the popularity of the Dragon Ranger that made this an almost required aspect of the Sentai formula going forward. It's also considered a turning point in the Sentai franchise incorporating more fantasy and mystical aspects alongside it's Sci-Fi.
Meanwhile on Dragon Ball Z, when these shows were beginning to air is also about when the Cell saga was starting.
One thing about Pokemon I want to remind people of is how the whole Pokemon Speak trope (them saying their names to communicate) was originally only in the Anime, it's popped up in some Games since, often just for Pikachu and Jigglypuff, but the main Games didn't and still don't do it. And it is in the context of that aspect of the importance of the Pokemon Anime that I want to mention how that trope now named after Pokemon had already been a thing in Anime.
Utena which I just observed started airing about the same time as Pokemon did it with Chu Chu, coincidentally voiced by Rachel Lillis in the Dub who also voiced Jigglypuff and sometimes Pikachu when technical problems hindered the usual policy of keeping Ikue Ootani's voice.
But before that it had been done with many of Sailor Moon's Youma and MOTWs all the way back to season 1, suggesting it was something Ikuhara and Sato had a thing for, as well as Chibi Chibi during Stars. And it had been included in the DiC Dub in 1995. I don't remember whether or not this ever happened on Wedding Peach, I do know Wedding Peach provides us with evidence someone involved in making the Pokemon Anime was into Magical Girl shows because of the shout out that show gets in the Erika episode.
So is it possible one of the most Iconic aspects of Pokemon was a product of Sailor Moon's influence?
1992 was also the birth year of the Tenchi Muyo franchise.
This is my second post in a row pointing out something like this. It seems game changers never come in isolation, we get a couple at least just when new innovations are needed.
This is my second post in a row pointing out something like this. It seems game changers never come in isolation, we get a couple at least just when new innovations are needed.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Spring 1997 Anime Season, and I ramble off topic about Dub voice actors
April 1st 1997 was the day the Pokemon Anime premiered on Japanese TV. The following day, April 2nd, was the premier of Revolutionary Girl Utena. April 3rd was the premiere of Maze, a show not nearly as influential or culturally important as those two shows but when I first learned of it I was indeed surprised to learn that stuff like that already existed in the 90s.
Another Anime to debut on April 1st was Shin Tenchi Muyo aka Tenchi in Tokyo, the 3rd TV Anime of the Tenchi Franchise, but it seems it's not one of it's more well regarded installments. Another Anime to debut on April 3rd was Hyper Police, which shows Monster Girls in Anime are nothing new either.
April 4th saw the premier of the third season of Slayers. Another Anime to debut in April of 97 was a Space Opera re-imagining of Moby Dick called Hakugei Densetu. And that's less then half of what debuted that Spring.
I suppose to some people this justifies their complaints about the state of modern Anime, today we don't even always get one game changer a season, while this season had two back to back. The thing is not every season of the late 90s looked like this one, Summer of 97 premiered nothing we still care about, and the Winter of 97 is most notable for two installments of much older franchises, neither of which is at the forefront of that franchise's legacy today. A Speed Racer Reboot and Cutey Honey F which Toei had put in Sailor Moon's old time-slot after it ended.
What was going on in Western Entertainment media at this time? Well on the WB the premier of Buffy The Vampire Slayer about three weeks earlier. The fact that Buffy's feminist credentials have been called into question so much lately is not helped by the fact Utena had finished airing before Buffy was half way through it's second season. Wrestlemania 13 was on March 23rd, arguably the beginning of the Attitude Era. The Star Wars Special Editions were playing in American movie Theaters. And sadly also Biggie Smalls passed away, Pac and Big never lived to see Pokemon, that is truly tragic.
So on both sides of the Pacific times were changing.
I'd made a post earlier this year about The Dark Age of Anime, this season can be argued to be the beginning of that age, or you could say it began when Sailor Moon ended a few weeks before, but I'm now willing to consider Pretty Sammy equally a part of the Golden Age of the Magical Girl Warrior.
I do not consider Utena properly a part of the Magical Girl Warrior genre, it definitely makes itself a relative of the genre, Ikuhara' Sailor Moon work was very much his training ground for Utena. But the Magical Girl Genre is most certainly NOT what the show is deconstructing.
I suspect a ReDub of Utena may be inevitable. There are many reasons for Netflix to consider Utena the logical follow up to ReDubbing Neon Genesis Evangelion, even though I personally would prefer they focus on making Dubs for stuff that got passed over originally. Like Rose of Versailles which it would benefit people to see alongside Utena, or Gunbuster which should be a necessary companion to Eva. But in the context of my drawing attention to Magical Girl stuff this month I'd say please finally Dub the Pretty Sammy TV Anime, even though it is sad we can no longer do it with the Classic Tenchi Dub Cast.
I am perfectly fine with the Utena Dub and can't understand why it's so often trashed even by other Dub defenders, nothing seems to have been censored out of it? You certainly can't improve on Crispin Freeman as Touga, Lisa Ortiz as Shiori is one of the best vocal performances in the history of mankind, and the way Saionji's voice sounds to me like a Vincent Price impression yet I'm unsure it was intentional is endlessly captivating. I get that on a Meta level some people might have trouble with Utena sounding so obviously like Misty, but I love it. I'm very much not a fan of Misty but it was never the Actress's fault, so I enjoy hearing Rachael Lillis as a character I can respect. The only voice in the existing Utena Dub I can kind of understand not liking is Juri, and I guess sometimes one being weak is enough to drag the whole thing down, but Juri is only important in like four episodes, the same episodes where Lisa is killing it as Shiori.
Still I can accept a New Dub, but please at least try to keep Freeman and Ortiz, they're still working and cannot be outdone.
If a ReDub happens, I feel the need to recommend Cherami Leigh for Utena Tenjou. In Digibro's recent Utena Video he talked about how Light Novel Heroines are often very powerful but always second to the male lead, and how Touga views Utena as that but she isn't. So that creates a pretty strong Meta Value to Utena sharing a voice with Asuna Yuki of SAO. And then Leigh has also done Magical Girl stuff including the OG Minako Aino.
If I had to cast someone new for Saionji it'd have to be the current Aniplex voice of Shinji Matou from their Dubs of UFOtable's Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel, Nasu has admitted in interviews that character was partly based on Saionji. And speaking of Fate/ Voices maybe Kari Walgren could be the one to finally do Juri justice?
Wasn't this post supposed to also be about Pokemon? Speaking of Dub voices, how come Crispin Freeman was never in Pokemon? He was clearly working in the same circles as some of the Pokemon voices in the late 90s, Utena being not even the only time he worked with Lillis, and he also worked with Ortiz in Record of Lodoss War. The first roles that pop into my mind as ones that could have been Freeman roles were the ones done pretty darn well by Dan Green, but it's still something I notice. [Update: Apparently he helped write some of the Pokemon Dub Scripts, that's interesting].
In completely different ways Utena and Pokemon both revolutionized Anime for decades to come. So it's fascinating how just the month of April 97 became so important. Now nearing the end of the Spring Season of 22 years later their impact is still being felt.
And the more obscure stuff that aired at the same time is also interesting, mostly stuff I haven't watched yet but I'm thinking of trying them out.
Update January 2020: The Eva ReDub was a trainwreck, but it's not the fault of Netflix or anyone else on our side of the Pond. It was Ano's own people micromanaging it obsessively like they did the 3.33 Dub.
Looking at how the 20tens Ikuhara shows were dubbed I think it's safe to say Ikuhara wouldn't be like that. Of course those 20tens Dubs seem to be Texas based which wouldn't make my proposed Utena ReDub cast likely, they're all in LA as far as I can tell.
Another Anime to debut on April 1st was Shin Tenchi Muyo aka Tenchi in Tokyo, the 3rd TV Anime of the Tenchi Franchise, but it seems it's not one of it's more well regarded installments. Another Anime to debut on April 3rd was Hyper Police, which shows Monster Girls in Anime are nothing new either.
April 4th saw the premier of the third season of Slayers. Another Anime to debut in April of 97 was a Space Opera re-imagining of Moby Dick called Hakugei Densetu. And that's less then half of what debuted that Spring.
I suppose to some people this justifies their complaints about the state of modern Anime, today we don't even always get one game changer a season, while this season had two back to back. The thing is not every season of the late 90s looked like this one, Summer of 97 premiered nothing we still care about, and the Winter of 97 is most notable for two installments of much older franchises, neither of which is at the forefront of that franchise's legacy today. A Speed Racer Reboot and Cutey Honey F which Toei had put in Sailor Moon's old time-slot after it ended.
What was going on in Western Entertainment media at this time? Well on the WB the premier of Buffy The Vampire Slayer about three weeks earlier. The fact that Buffy's feminist credentials have been called into question so much lately is not helped by the fact Utena had finished airing before Buffy was half way through it's second season. Wrestlemania 13 was on March 23rd, arguably the beginning of the Attitude Era. The Star Wars Special Editions were playing in American movie Theaters. And sadly also Biggie Smalls passed away, Pac and Big never lived to see Pokemon, that is truly tragic.
So on both sides of the Pacific times were changing.
I'd made a post earlier this year about The Dark Age of Anime, this season can be argued to be the beginning of that age, or you could say it began when Sailor Moon ended a few weeks before, but I'm now willing to consider Pretty Sammy equally a part of the Golden Age of the Magical Girl Warrior.
I do not consider Utena properly a part of the Magical Girl Warrior genre, it definitely makes itself a relative of the genre, Ikuhara' Sailor Moon work was very much his training ground for Utena. But the Magical Girl Genre is most certainly NOT what the show is deconstructing.
I suspect a ReDub of Utena may be inevitable. There are many reasons for Netflix to consider Utena the logical follow up to ReDubbing Neon Genesis Evangelion, even though I personally would prefer they focus on making Dubs for stuff that got passed over originally. Like Rose of Versailles which it would benefit people to see alongside Utena, or Gunbuster which should be a necessary companion to Eva. But in the context of my drawing attention to Magical Girl stuff this month I'd say please finally Dub the Pretty Sammy TV Anime, even though it is sad we can no longer do it with the Classic Tenchi Dub Cast.
I am perfectly fine with the Utena Dub and can't understand why it's so often trashed even by other Dub defenders, nothing seems to have been censored out of it? You certainly can't improve on Crispin Freeman as Touga, Lisa Ortiz as Shiori is one of the best vocal performances in the history of mankind, and the way Saionji's voice sounds to me like a Vincent Price impression yet I'm unsure it was intentional is endlessly captivating. I get that on a Meta level some people might have trouble with Utena sounding so obviously like Misty, but I love it. I'm very much not a fan of Misty but it was never the Actress's fault, so I enjoy hearing Rachael Lillis as a character I can respect. The only voice in the existing Utena Dub I can kind of understand not liking is Juri, and I guess sometimes one being weak is enough to drag the whole thing down, but Juri is only important in like four episodes, the same episodes where Lisa is killing it as Shiori.
Still I can accept a New Dub, but please at least try to keep Freeman and Ortiz, they're still working and cannot be outdone.
If a ReDub happens, I feel the need to recommend Cherami Leigh for Utena Tenjou. In Digibro's recent Utena Video he talked about how Light Novel Heroines are often very powerful but always second to the male lead, and how Touga views Utena as that but she isn't. So that creates a pretty strong Meta Value to Utena sharing a voice with Asuna Yuki of SAO. And then Leigh has also done Magical Girl stuff including the OG Minako Aino.
If I had to cast someone new for Saionji it'd have to be the current Aniplex voice of Shinji Matou from their Dubs of UFOtable's Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel, Nasu has admitted in interviews that character was partly based on Saionji. And speaking of Fate/ Voices maybe Kari Walgren could be the one to finally do Juri justice?
Wasn't this post supposed to also be about Pokemon? Speaking of Dub voices, how come Crispin Freeman was never in Pokemon? He was clearly working in the same circles as some of the Pokemon voices in the late 90s, Utena being not even the only time he worked with Lillis, and he also worked with Ortiz in Record of Lodoss War. The first roles that pop into my mind as ones that could have been Freeman roles were the ones done pretty darn well by Dan Green, but it's still something I notice. [Update: Apparently he helped write some of the Pokemon Dub Scripts, that's interesting].
In completely different ways Utena and Pokemon both revolutionized Anime for decades to come. So it's fascinating how just the month of April 97 became so important. Now nearing the end of the Spring Season of 22 years later their impact is still being felt.
And the more obscure stuff that aired at the same time is also interesting, mostly stuff I haven't watched yet but I'm thinking of trying them out.
Update January 2020: The Eva ReDub was a trainwreck, but it's not the fault of Netflix or anyone else on our side of the Pond. It was Ano's own people micromanaging it obsessively like they did the 3.33 Dub.
Looking at how the 20tens Ikuhara shows were dubbed I think it's safe to say Ikuhara wouldn't be like that. Of course those 20tens Dubs seem to be Texas based which wouldn't make my proposed Utena ReDub cast likely, they're all in LA as far as I can tell.
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
You Don't Tug on The Railgun's Skirt
Today I'm going to do something that "Respectable" Anime Anyalists do a lot more often and discus Character Arcs, well one in particular. I'm not against Character Arcs, I'm just against the common attitude that they are required for a story to be good, or that a story is required for fiction to be good art.
As much as I might like to I can't actually spend all of June watching and talking about only one Genre. But A Certain Scientific Railgun is an interesting companion to the Magical Girl Genre. It shows the variety in options Anime provides us by showing that Magical Girls are not the only kind of Superheroines Anime has. In addition to all the technical reasons that Railgun doesn't qualify as a Magical Girl show or even come close to following that formula. Mikoto Misaka is simply a very different kind of character from a typical Magical Girl protagonist, a personality type like her could be a supporting character in one but not likely the main character. But she's not the antithesis of a Magical Girl either, if you're looking for the Anime version of an Edgy 90s Anti-Heroine I'm afraid I'm not currently the one qualified to make that recommendation.
In one of RavorFists's more recent Noirchives he talks about how one of the Flanderizations of the Film Noir genre is that their protagonists were all cynical nihilist anti-heroes. He mentions that quote of Raymond Chandler "Down these means streets a man must go who is not himself mean". That quote was also used but changed slightly in the Pretty Little Liars episode Shadow Play "Down these means streets a girl must go who is not herself mean", that fits Mikoto Misaka in Academy City perfectly, she is a true traditional Film Noir protagonist in the form of an Japanese Middle School Girl who can do everything Pikachu and Magneto can do, but do it better.
The second season of Railgun, A Certain Scientific Railgun S, has spoiled me for all other Cyberpunk, nothing else in my mind could possibly do Cyberpunk as well. Railgun S was missing from my previous discussion of Film Noir in Anime for two reasons. 1, I hadn't watched any Raildex yet back then. 2, I chose to dodge the entire Cyberpunk sub section of that topic, I didn't think it was really possible for me to enjoy Cyberpunk before I watched Railgun S.
RazorFist also said, possibly in the same video, that he considers the number one non-negotiable requirement for qualifying as a Noir to be "setting as character". That may well make the Anime called Noir impossible to qualify, which I would want to fight him on. But it certainly helps Railgun, in fact the entire Raildex franchise is largely built around Academy City itself being the real ultimate main character, but it works better on Railgun since Index often leaves the city to get into the Magick and Religion based story-lines which Railgun has so far ignored sticking to being pure SciFi.
Misaka's main character Arc is also in Railgun S. But Railgun S needs the groundwork of season 1 in order to fully work. Season 1 is great television on it's own, though I recommend skipping the second episode. Still there will be some people to whom Railgun S is the story that they would be into, so I'm asking them to just trust me and take a 25 episode leap of faith. Misaka does learn some important lessons in season 1, but the main Character Arc there is Saten's. But I don't mind that, I actually wish more Batman stories would be about other characters and let Batman just be Batman.
From this point on I'm going to get into Spoiler territory as I talk about Misaka's Character Arc and some other subjects.
As much as I might like to I can't actually spend all of June watching and talking about only one Genre. But A Certain Scientific Railgun is an interesting companion to the Magical Girl Genre. It shows the variety in options Anime provides us by showing that Magical Girls are not the only kind of Superheroines Anime has. In addition to all the technical reasons that Railgun doesn't qualify as a Magical Girl show or even come close to following that formula. Mikoto Misaka is simply a very different kind of character from a typical Magical Girl protagonist, a personality type like her could be a supporting character in one but not likely the main character. But she's not the antithesis of a Magical Girl either, if you're looking for the Anime version of an Edgy 90s Anti-Heroine I'm afraid I'm not currently the one qualified to make that recommendation.
In one of RavorFists's more recent Noirchives he talks about how one of the Flanderizations of the Film Noir genre is that their protagonists were all cynical nihilist anti-heroes. He mentions that quote of Raymond Chandler "Down these means streets a man must go who is not himself mean". That quote was also used but changed slightly in the Pretty Little Liars episode Shadow Play "Down these means streets a girl must go who is not herself mean", that fits Mikoto Misaka in Academy City perfectly, she is a true traditional Film Noir protagonist in the form of an Japanese Middle School Girl who can do everything Pikachu and Magneto can do, but do it better.
The second season of Railgun, A Certain Scientific Railgun S, has spoiled me for all other Cyberpunk, nothing else in my mind could possibly do Cyberpunk as well. Railgun S was missing from my previous discussion of Film Noir in Anime for two reasons. 1, I hadn't watched any Raildex yet back then. 2, I chose to dodge the entire Cyberpunk sub section of that topic, I didn't think it was really possible for me to enjoy Cyberpunk before I watched Railgun S.
RazorFist also said, possibly in the same video, that he considers the number one non-negotiable requirement for qualifying as a Noir to be "setting as character". That may well make the Anime called Noir impossible to qualify, which I would want to fight him on. But it certainly helps Railgun, in fact the entire Raildex franchise is largely built around Academy City itself being the real ultimate main character, but it works better on Railgun since Index often leaves the city to get into the Magick and Religion based story-lines which Railgun has so far ignored sticking to being pure SciFi.
Misaka's main character Arc is also in Railgun S. But Railgun S needs the groundwork of season 1 in order to fully work. Season 1 is great television on it's own, though I recommend skipping the second episode. Still there will be some people to whom Railgun S is the story that they would be into, so I'm asking them to just trust me and take a 25 episode leap of faith. Misaka does learn some important lessons in season 1, but the main Character Arc there is Saten's. But I don't mind that, I actually wish more Batman stories would be about other characters and let Batman just be Batman.
From this point on I'm going to get into Spoiler territory as I talk about Misaka's Character Arc and some other subjects.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Pretty Sammy may be the Key to the Magical Girl Genre.
I watched the OVA incarnation of Pretty Sammy over a year ago I think, not long after Bennett The Sage had done his Anime Abandon episode on it. I observed on twitter how this is the first example of an Imouto character in a Harem getting an AU where they're a Magical Girl becoming it's own full sub franchise (and how the Dark Magical Girl Rival really only appears in that sub set of the genre). This happened to have been the first incarnation of Tenchi I'd watched at all, that's how much I'm into Magical Girls, but since then I've watched the Mihoshi Special, Tenchi Universe and the first 6 episode OVA series.
The OVA Pretty Sammy was a fun affectionate parody of the genre. Ben couldn't recognize it as a parody mainly because he doesn't get the genre in the first place and so probably can't count any affectionate one as a parody. It doesn't help that this genre has engaged in self parody from it's inception, there is no joke on the formula that Sailor Moon didn't already make in some form, particularly in episodes Ikuhara was involved in.
Now I have completed the 1996-97 TV Anime of Pretty Sammy, also known as Magical Project S. It's a separate continuity from the OVAs. Pretty Sammy is almost a microcosm of the Tenchi Franchise as a whole. Both start with a series of OVAs that lay out the formulae, then there is a 26 episode TV Anime that fleshed out and perfected it, then there is more post 2000 stuff few care about because the Waifu Warriors moved on to other Harems.
The Pretty Sammy TV Anime starts out seemingly like just as much of a pure Genre Parody as the OVAs were, more so perhaps, here is a clip I put on Youtube from episode 3 to show just how hilariously awesome it can be.
But in the latter part once we've gotten to know the characters it seamlessly becomes much more of a straight forward Magical Girl show, but still with that Otaku sense of humor Tenchi helped popularize. It doesn't follow exactly what I've defined before as the ideal 26 episode structure, but it does something similar. It gets really good, I've rated it a 10 out of 10.
It is influenced by the Magical Girl Anime that came before, with the MOTWs often feeling like they're particularly in the spirit of the Daimons from Sailor Moon S. And there are shout outs to other Anime/Manga and Toku media as well.
But I also feel it's an overlooked influence on what's come since, one particular scene has me convinced someone involved in making Nanoha season 1 must have seen it. The fact that it went off the air just before Utena, Pokemon and Buffy started is fascinating (paralleling my observation that Tenchi Universe finished right before Eva started), it also aired concurrent with much of the last season of Sailor Moon.
Pretty Sammy may not quite be the first Magical Girl show officially marketed as Senien rather then Shoujo, but unlike it's peers it captures the spirit of a proper Magical Girl show in a way that anticipates Nanoha and Madoka, but it also never gets as dark as they do or even as dark as Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns. It is a Fun time even when it does get intense.
I think even future writers of Shoujo Magical Girl Anime might have been influenced by this show, it anticipates Pretty Cure not just in the use of the English word "Pretty" but also in the Mascot Characters coming from a sort of parallel Fairy Queendom.
As far as what was on TV goes this is probably now definitively my favorite Magical Girl show of the 90s as I honestly feel it is no where near as flawed as every season of Sailor Moon can be at times. There might be individual episodes of Sailor Moon that no episode of Pretty Sammy can compete with, but that doesn't make the complete package better. It is indeed a perfect example of why two cour shows are the best, and it seems to be the only Magical Girl show to be two core which may be what's holding the genre back.
And it's also probably easily my favorite Tenchi project. If you are one of many Western Tenchi fans for whom Kiyone and Washu were your favorites then this gives you plenty to enjoy.
Sadly it's not easy to find now. It's never been Dubbed into English and is not currently on any of the legal Anime streaming sites or YouTube. There was an official Subtitled release once but that was a long time ago. And even many of the popular unofficial streaming sites don't have this one, even ones said to have pretty much everything. Whoever currently has the rights to it I highly recommend you get on it.
And if you even need to ask, obviously the Yuri is strong with this one if I gave it a 10.
I'm going to try Sasami Magical Girls Club next, It'll probably not get it's own blog post, if I feel like saying anything about it it'll probably be via an Update to this post.
The OVA Pretty Sammy was a fun affectionate parody of the genre. Ben couldn't recognize it as a parody mainly because he doesn't get the genre in the first place and so probably can't count any affectionate one as a parody. It doesn't help that this genre has engaged in self parody from it's inception, there is no joke on the formula that Sailor Moon didn't already make in some form, particularly in episodes Ikuhara was involved in.
Now I have completed the 1996-97 TV Anime of Pretty Sammy, also known as Magical Project S. It's a separate continuity from the OVAs. Pretty Sammy is almost a microcosm of the Tenchi Franchise as a whole. Both start with a series of OVAs that lay out the formulae, then there is a 26 episode TV Anime that fleshed out and perfected it, then there is more post 2000 stuff few care about because the Waifu Warriors moved on to other Harems.
The Pretty Sammy TV Anime starts out seemingly like just as much of a pure Genre Parody as the OVAs were, more so perhaps, here is a clip I put on Youtube from episode 3 to show just how hilariously awesome it can be.
It is influenced by the Magical Girl Anime that came before, with the MOTWs often feeling like they're particularly in the spirit of the Daimons from Sailor Moon S. And there are shout outs to other Anime/Manga and Toku media as well.
But I also feel it's an overlooked influence on what's come since, one particular scene has me convinced someone involved in making Nanoha season 1 must have seen it. The fact that it went off the air just before Utena, Pokemon and Buffy started is fascinating (paralleling my observation that Tenchi Universe finished right before Eva started), it also aired concurrent with much of the last season of Sailor Moon.
Pretty Sammy may not quite be the first Magical Girl show officially marketed as Senien rather then Shoujo, but unlike it's peers it captures the spirit of a proper Magical Girl show in a way that anticipates Nanoha and Madoka, but it also never gets as dark as they do or even as dark as Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns. It is a Fun time even when it does get intense.
I think even future writers of Shoujo Magical Girl Anime might have been influenced by this show, it anticipates Pretty Cure not just in the use of the English word "Pretty" but also in the Mascot Characters coming from a sort of parallel Fairy Queendom.
As far as what was on TV goes this is probably now definitively my favorite Magical Girl show of the 90s as I honestly feel it is no where near as flawed as every season of Sailor Moon can be at times. There might be individual episodes of Sailor Moon that no episode of Pretty Sammy can compete with, but that doesn't make the complete package better. It is indeed a perfect example of why two cour shows are the best, and it seems to be the only Magical Girl show to be two core which may be what's holding the genre back.
And it's also probably easily my favorite Tenchi project. If you are one of many Western Tenchi fans for whom Kiyone and Washu were your favorites then this gives you plenty to enjoy.
Sadly it's not easy to find now. It's never been Dubbed into English and is not currently on any of the legal Anime streaming sites or YouTube. There was an official Subtitled release once but that was a long time ago. And even many of the popular unofficial streaming sites don't have this one, even ones said to have pretty much everything. Whoever currently has the rights to it I highly recommend you get on it.
And if you even need to ask, obviously the Yuri is strong with this one if I gave it a 10.
I'm going to try Sasami Magical Girls Club next, It'll probably not get it's own blog post, if I feel like saying anything about it it'll probably be via an Update to this post.
Sunday, June 2, 2019
The Night is Darkest just before the Daybreak
In The Dark Knight (and one of it's trailers) Harvey Dent says "The Night is Darkest just before the Dawn". This is apparently an expression that apparently already existed though in this Millennial Bat-Nerd's mind it will always feel like a reference to that film. It's an expression I've used when explaining why I enjoy so much fiction that can get pretty dark and bleak even though I'm ultimately an optimist who prefers happy hopeful endings. Including in a blog post that I flat out named that in the latter part of 2016.
It happens to fit my theology, since I believe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,The Sun(Shamash/Helios) of Righteousness of Malachi 4:2, happened at Sunrise on the day of the week we happen to have named after the Sun. And in light of some of my recent rethinking of the Biblical Calendar possibly also the Sunrise of the morning after the Spring Equinox, when the days start being longer then the nights. Luke 1:78-79 uses Sunrise terminology in Zacharias' Prophecy.
And that of course includes my controversial defense of the Darker takes on the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre of Manga/Anime (where I often see the main protagonists as Christ-like). Which is why I was positively giddy to see the line used in the Canadian Dub of the last episode of the first season Futari Wa Pretty Cure. And today I'm intrigued to find a pretty good Dark Magical Girl show that is seemingly referencing this idea in it's title.
Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou is the name of a 13 episode Summer 2013 Anime who's official English Title on Crunchyroll and VRV is Day Break Illusion, but MyAnimeList lists the alternative English title "The Sun Penetrates the Illusions". Google Translate actually favors the official title, however much you think it's trustworthy. It's apparently also known in some language(s) under the title Il Sole penetra le illusioni.
Digibro once on a chart implied this was THE darkest Magical Girl show, but that was made before stuff like Raising Project, Site and the possibly upcoming Apocalypse were a thing.
Taiyou is a Japanese word for the Sun, it's not the only one, but from what I've read is the one that would be used when referring to the Sunrise or Sunset. In addition to being in the title of this show it's also the family name of the main protagonist. Her given name is Akari which is a word for Light, making her full name "Sun Light", The Fourth Gospel talked a lot about The Light.
This show actually works better as a darker take on the usual Magical Girl formula then either Madoka or Yuki Yuna in that it partly follows the victim of the week format. It shows how terrifying the idea of a demonic force turning a normal person into a horrible monster over some small emotional insecurity would be. However it explores that darkness while remaining firmly optimistic thanks to it's protagonist. And subverted my expectations in ways that actually worked, unlike a certain 2017 film.
On a broader nerdy note, I found myself comparing the Leguzario who run Sefiro Fiore to The Watcher's Council on Buffy.
Peter Hiett once said to watch all the Harry Potter movies looking for Jesus. This show can also qualify as a Magic School Anime, and I already justified how the MC's name fits.
I notice how Seria Hoshikawa is kind of like the Older Brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Luna Tsukuyomi's name fits with how most commentators seem to think the Moon is Rachel in Genesis 37 and Revelation 12, making Seria Leah. But I've argued the Moon represents Leah in those passages which makes this not fit as well. The text of Genesis gives us no indication Leah was ever jealous of Rachel, it was Rachel who was jealous and I see that as typologically relevant to Romans 9-11.
At any rate it's a good show and I'm annoyed Aniplex hasn't made a Dub for it yet.
It happens to fit my theology, since I believe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,The Sun(Shamash/Helios) of Righteousness of Malachi 4:2, happened at Sunrise on the day of the week we happen to have named after the Sun. And in light of some of my recent rethinking of the Biblical Calendar possibly also the Sunrise of the morning after the Spring Equinox, when the days start being longer then the nights. Luke 1:78-79 uses Sunrise terminology in Zacharias' Prophecy.
And that of course includes my controversial defense of the Darker takes on the Magical Girl Warrior sub-genre of Manga/Anime (where I often see the main protagonists as Christ-like). Which is why I was positively giddy to see the line used in the Canadian Dub of the last episode of the first season Futari Wa Pretty Cure. And today I'm intrigued to find a pretty good Dark Magical Girl show that is seemingly referencing this idea in it's title.
Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou is the name of a 13 episode Summer 2013 Anime who's official English Title on Crunchyroll and VRV is Day Break Illusion, but MyAnimeList lists the alternative English title "The Sun Penetrates the Illusions". Google Translate actually favors the official title, however much you think it's trustworthy. It's apparently also known in some language(s) under the title Il Sole penetra le illusioni.
Digibro once on a chart implied this was THE darkest Magical Girl show, but that was made before stuff like Raising Project, Site and the possibly upcoming Apocalypse were a thing.
Taiyou is a Japanese word for the Sun, it's not the only one, but from what I've read is the one that would be used when referring to the Sunrise or Sunset. In addition to being in the title of this show it's also the family name of the main protagonist. Her given name is Akari which is a word for Light, making her full name "Sun Light", The Fourth Gospel talked a lot about The Light.
This show actually works better as a darker take on the usual Magical Girl formula then either Madoka or Yuki Yuna in that it partly follows the victim of the week format. It shows how terrifying the idea of a demonic force turning a normal person into a horrible monster over some small emotional insecurity would be. However it explores that darkness while remaining firmly optimistic thanks to it's protagonist. And subverted my expectations in ways that actually worked, unlike a certain 2017 film.
On a broader nerdy note, I found myself comparing the Leguzario who run Sefiro Fiore to The Watcher's Council on Buffy.
Peter Hiett once said to watch all the Harry Potter movies looking for Jesus. This show can also qualify as a Magic School Anime, and I already justified how the MC's name fits.
I notice how Seria Hoshikawa is kind of like the Older Brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Luna Tsukuyomi's name fits with how most commentators seem to think the Moon is Rachel in Genesis 37 and Revelation 12, making Seria Leah. But I've argued the Moon represents Leah in those passages which makes this not fit as well. The text of Genesis gives us no indication Leah was ever jealous of Rachel, it was Rachel who was jealous and I see that as typologically relevant to Romans 9-11.
At any rate it's a good show and I'm annoyed Aniplex hasn't made a Dub for it yet.
Saturday, June 1, 2019
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is a Hidden Gem
The thing about being someone who didn't get fully into Anime till 2014-2016 is that learning the history of this art-form and the community of people who are fans of it in the West is a difficult and murky journey.
I spent a long time assuming that the only stuff that got legally localized before 2000 were Saturday morning kids shows, the occasional big movie like Akira, GitS and Ghibli films, and then stuff like Eva, Utena and Lain at the very end of the 90s. And the occasional anomaly like Robotech which I first heard of via SFDebris.
It was mainly discovering Bennett The Sage and his Anime Abandon series on YouTube that made me realize how many OVAs, lesser known movies and even some TV Anime did get properly Dubbed onto VHS and then early DVDs in the 90s and even 80s. Lots of what he's covered is stuff I'd likely never watch myself but that I can certainly enjoy watching him mock. But there is other stuff where I can from watching him humorously crap on them tell that I'd probably unironically enjoy it.
One realization that slowly dawned on me as I watched more and more of those was how many trends I thought of as inherently post 2000 Anime trends did have their roots already planted in the 20th Century, they just usually weren't in TV Anime. What I'm referring to is "Moe" related tropes. I've discovered that it might just be possible to label Project A-Ko the first true Otaku Anime. Then came Tenchi Muyo as the proto-type of the Harem genre, and plenty of other interesting forgotten gems.
The one that is most fascinating to me at the moment is Galaxy Fraulein Yuna. This franchise was originally a series of Video Games, but it had two OVA serieses, a 2 episode one and a 3 episode one, totaling 5 episodes.
It's like a Magical Girl show and a Mecha show at the same time, which gives it unique similarities to Nanoha and Symphogear. I'm also comparing it to Prisma Illya manly because the Dub has the same lead Voice Actress. Further backing up the Nanoha connection is that Shinbo directed the second OVA series.
It's aesthetics do feel 90s, yet it's so ahead of it's time for something I know was made in the 90s.
I can't speak to how things may be different in the games, but these OVAs are possibly the first Magical Girl Warrior Anime without a Het Male love interest thrown in. There is a character who kind of plays the Tuxedo Mask role, but that character is a woman.
Yuna is also explicitly gay, she's a pretty kinky Lesbian in fact. It's played as a joke largely which can be problematic. But this isn't a side character who's there just to be that joke, this is the main Hero of this Universe, she has those Magical Girl protagonist qualities I love about Usagi Tsukino and Nanoha and right on down through the PreCures and good post Madoka stuff, making Superman look look like a cynical nihilist in comparison. And she's made unambiguously gay in a way modern Anime hesitates to even with the joke characters.
I watched the first two episode OVA awhile ago, but put off Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns because I knew it was gonna go down a somewhat darker path. But now that I've seen it, they are worth it, the emotions hit quite well.
They aren't a hidden masterpiece. But they are a fascinating overlooked relic of Anime's past. And I recommend them to anyone who likes Nanoha or Symphogear or Madoka or Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.
I spent a long time assuming that the only stuff that got legally localized before 2000 were Saturday morning kids shows, the occasional big movie like Akira, GitS and Ghibli films, and then stuff like Eva, Utena and Lain at the very end of the 90s. And the occasional anomaly like Robotech which I first heard of via SFDebris.
It was mainly discovering Bennett The Sage and his Anime Abandon series on YouTube that made me realize how many OVAs, lesser known movies and even some TV Anime did get properly Dubbed onto VHS and then early DVDs in the 90s and even 80s. Lots of what he's covered is stuff I'd likely never watch myself but that I can certainly enjoy watching him mock. But there is other stuff where I can from watching him humorously crap on them tell that I'd probably unironically enjoy it.
One realization that slowly dawned on me as I watched more and more of those was how many trends I thought of as inherently post 2000 Anime trends did have their roots already planted in the 20th Century, they just usually weren't in TV Anime. What I'm referring to is "Moe" related tropes. I've discovered that it might just be possible to label Project A-Ko the first true Otaku Anime. Then came Tenchi Muyo as the proto-type of the Harem genre, and plenty of other interesting forgotten gems.
The one that is most fascinating to me at the moment is Galaxy Fraulein Yuna. This franchise was originally a series of Video Games, but it had two OVA serieses, a 2 episode one and a 3 episode one, totaling 5 episodes.
It's like a Magical Girl show and a Mecha show at the same time, which gives it unique similarities to Nanoha and Symphogear. I'm also comparing it to Prisma Illya manly because the Dub has the same lead Voice Actress. Further backing up the Nanoha connection is that Shinbo directed the second OVA series.
It's aesthetics do feel 90s, yet it's so ahead of it's time for something I know was made in the 90s.
I can't speak to how things may be different in the games, but these OVAs are possibly the first Magical Girl Warrior Anime without a Het Male love interest thrown in. There is a character who kind of plays the Tuxedo Mask role, but that character is a woman.
Yuna is also explicitly gay, she's a pretty kinky Lesbian in fact. It's played as a joke largely which can be problematic. But this isn't a side character who's there just to be that joke, this is the main Hero of this Universe, she has those Magical Girl protagonist qualities I love about Usagi Tsukino and Nanoha and right on down through the PreCures and good post Madoka stuff, making Superman look look like a cynical nihilist in comparison. And she's made unambiguously gay in a way modern Anime hesitates to even with the joke characters.
I watched the first two episode OVA awhile ago, but put off Galaxy Fraulein Yuna Returns because I knew it was gonna go down a somewhat darker path. But now that I've seen it, they are worth it, the emotions hit quite well.
They aren't a hidden masterpiece. But they are a fascinating overlooked relic of Anime's past. And I recommend them to anyone who likes Nanoha or Symphogear or Madoka or Yuki Yuna Is A Hero.
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