HetareKing

Rentarou is always willing to move Earth’s orbit for his girlfriends, but somehow him making a tiny little pencil and notebook for Nano felt particularly sweet.

I recently watched Andromeda Stories, a 1982 feature-length TV special based on a manga by Takemiya Keiko (most famous for To Terra) and Mitsuse Ryuu (apparently a pretty well-known SF author), and it was pretty interesting.

It’s about a planet in the Andromeda galaxy that is secretly being invaded from the top down by machine lifeforms that take over people’s bodies and connect them to a network, kind of similar in concept to the Borg in Star Trek, but a few years earlier. However, there is also a group of people from another planet that got taken over by the same machines, fled to this planet and integrated into the local society, and now work to fight against the machines. And their leader is… not the protagonist. Neither of them, as it switches protagonists 1/3 of the way. The first one is Il, a woman warrior from yet another planet who came specifically to fight the machines, but on her own terms. After that she’s replaced by Jimsa, the prince of the first empire to get taken over, who was born earlier in the film, has the power to resist the machines and grew up to be the most powerful momma’s boy in the world. Needless to say, Il is the cooler of the two.

Now, I can’t honestly say this is a great work. The writing is pretty clunky; characters sometime behave inexplicably, there are time where the story tries to make a point, but it doesn’t manage to get the framing right, and it has possibly one of the dumbest deaths in fiction history. I’m not a big fan of the bloodline nonsense, either.

That said, if you’re at all interested in the premise and have some tolerance for awkward storytelling, I do recommend it. It moves at a fast clip and is never boring, has some pretty cool science-fiction concepts and the ending is quite something. It’s a satisfying watch despite its flaws.

Regarding Ghost in the Shell, there is one criminal that has been mentioned in multiple episodes and they haven’t managed to catch yet, so in that sense the overarching plot has already started.

It’s been quite a while since I read Princess Knight, so I don’t remember that much, but from what I can recall, this film (despite literally putting the original work on a pedestal at some point) doesn’t seem to have much to do with the manga other than some proper nouns and vaguely similar character designs. I’ll have to dig up the books and read them again.

That aside, the film didn’t really mesh with me. The production values are high, the backgrounds are very pretty, the music is great, there’s some real cool flashy action scenes, but as a whole it just feels kind of flimsy? Cargo-cultish? There are some developments that you’ll have seen in many other works (like the protagonist obtaining the power to fight the monsters), but it doesn’t feel like the director really understands what makes those moments work and as a result much of the film ends up lacking in gravitas.

It’s also weirdly rich in goofy faces and over-action, and has some unexpected slapstick. I’m usually the person defending these kinds of things, and no moment being too serious for some slapstick comedy is very much in the spirit of Tezuka’s works, but a lot of it here feels kind of lacking in restraint or maybe it’s not getting the timing or the mood right. Kind of reminds me of Cosmic Princess Kaguya in that way. I think if it leaned in more in the film’s deceit that it’s a stage play and made the whole more theatrical, the more exaggerated elements would’ve fit in better.

Well, that’s my stream of consciousness posing as a review. Knowing myself, it’s very possible I just watched it in the wrong mood and am rationalising my feelings, so take it for what it is.

It’s named after the floating island in Gulliver’s Travels, so blame Jonathan Swift for this one.

There’s a comic book series from the 1970s called Altri Mondi ("Other Worlds") by Italian physicist and illustrator Andrea Romoli, that only ever came out in Italian and Spanish. Despite this, it was adapted in the 1980s into a 77 episode TV anime called Spaceship Sagittarius. Most of it are original stories not directly based on the comic books, though.

By the way, watch it if you get the opportunity, it’s good.

This is not Jaadugar, but there was an issue of CoroCoro Comics pulled because of how a manga depicted Genghis Khan after complaints from Mongolian people living in Japan and the Mongolian embassy.

So this sort of thing does happen. I know next to nothing about Mongolian culture or how they balance the reverence many apparently have for Genghis Khan with the historical reality that he had a lot of people slaughtered or enslaved, so I can’t say how these same people would react to Jaadugar’s depiction of the Mongols, but I imagine it might be the reason why it didn’t depict Genghis Khan’s face.

Wouldn’t his mom also be British? And in order to pound her, wouldn’t she have needed to court her first, i.e. talk to a British person?

Waiter! There’s an internal inconsistency in my absurd joke!

That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.

That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.

It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.

I’ve been told that English dubs are way better now than 10 years ago for the last 20 years, but every time I hear something from a new dub, it still ends up having the same old problems. Like, my throat ends up aching because they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.