The Old School Otaku Lounge

Night is Short, Walk on Girl--I watched this in 3 sessions spread out across 2 days. My initial impression of this is favorable. The art design is bold and clever as to be expected from Masaaki Yuasa. The structure is unique. It's probably more clever and quirky than funny, though. Very arthouse comedy, more like something you'd see out of Fellini or Wes Anderson than a standard boy-meets-girl rom-com. It is based on a novel, apparently one considered to be "unfilmable" and it has the feel of those kind of films out there that try to do adapt an "unfilmable" novel.

Mobile Suit Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans - Pretty good. It started off quite impressively gritty but has largely transformed into a fairly standard Gundam show at this point after 13 episodes. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. It gives you a fairly old-school-ish Gundam fix, with a dash of Ryosuke Takahashi. It's not quite as good as full on either old school Gundam or old school Takahashi, but it's a fairly inoffensive modern blend of the two. The 2d mecha animation is also welcome.

Watching the original 70s Star Blazers.

Star Blazers was just a little before my time. I just missed it by a handful of years.

Even with that in mind, I find it curious it wasn't rerun in US or Canadian syndication very much in subsequent years. Most cartoons from the 70s managed to air in the 80s at some point or somehow, but I can't recall Star Blazers every finding its way to any stations I was getting as a kid. Or maybe it did and I just couldn't find it. I wonder how popular the show actually was.

Which brings me to the show itself. It's pretty hardcore science-fiction by 70s-80s US cartoon standards. I haven't really checked any edits lists out there yet comparing Star Blazers to Yamato, but it certainly doesn't gloss over the science fiction stuff in favour of the action. Then again, I'm not sure it could have been edited to favour the action without them slicing off at least half the series' episodes. The crux of most episodes revolves around some kind of gadget, loopy space physics, or super weapon the ship's crew needs to either overcome or get working in their favour. So in that sense, it could be perceived as something of a pretty dry show for kids as at least half of most episodes involve them talking about technical plans or whatnot.

The last time Star Blazers was on TV was to kill off the SyFy "Ani-Monday" block (which by this time it was on Thursday nights) in the spring of 2011. I got a hand full of those episodes recorded and I threw them up on a site that is closed to the public in a way to share with other people, so if you guys want those recordings just PM me and I can send them too you.

I know the US license holders through the 2000s and on are pretty finicky about their hold on the property, so I really didn't look for it much at some point. I'm still pretty shocked it hasn't seen a DVD re-release either.

FWIW, I think it would be a great show nowadays to air on that CometTV network they have on "free" tv.

Picked up Ideon on blu-ray--finally, I will watch this series.

i watch many animes at once but the last episode i watched is of violet evergarden

Made in Abyss and the new re-make of Magical Circle Guru Guru. They are both great shows on their own, and it's interesting to contrast the two approaches to what is basically the same story.

One thing I find especially intriguing is the way adults are portrayed in both series. Made in Abyss hits a lot of those "80s JRPG" buttons really well when you view the story through the childrens' eyes, but if you step back for a moment and ask yourself, "What kind of people remain adventurers as adults? What kind of adults lure children into adventuring and why? What is the economy of adventuring?" it becomes a much darker story (and it is already fairly dark).

With Guru Guru, they touch on these questions in a more light-hearted way, where it turns out that many of the shop-keepers and other random JRPG talking heads are adventurers who got stuck somehow.

i watch many animes at once but the last episode i watched is of violet evergarden myanimelist

Just got back from the City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes premiere at Anime Boston. Really cool and slick action sequences, although it certainly still has the outdated problematic comedy (although it's slightly not as bad as what I've seen so far in the first TV series, but certainly not what would be considered currently socially acceptable here in the US). It has been announced for a theatrical run in the US, so anyone who was a fan of the original series will definitely want to check it out. Even if you haven't seen the original series, I think you more or less get the idea of the different characters pretty quickly - one audience member during Q&A had never seen any City Hunter prior to the movie and loved it. So if you can excuse the sexual harassment comedy and love really sweet guns and explosions action sequences (I'm reminded of the Riding Bean OVA), I'd say it's worth checking out even as a stranger to the franchise