Anime you enjoyed back then, but watched it recently and...

[davemerrill]

Oh it's painfully obvious that they were trying to draw a parallell between the the Illumidas occupation and the American occupation. PAINFULLY obvious. That's one of the problems with the film; if you want to go there then GO THERE and tell us why Earth was fighting the Illumidas and why they lost and maybe who the hell the Illumidas are to begin with, that might be nice. That might give us a little explanation as to who Captain Harlock is and why he's doing what he's doing (other than "ain't nobody gonna push me around, man").

You'll notice how I didn't even get into how one guy builds a gigantic super space battleship in a secret underground hangar. Just one little squat dude. Built it all himself. Still trying to figure that one out.

The movie is full of this kind of stuff, things that could be explained away with a few lines of dialog here and there, but the movie doesn't even bother. And in a better looking, more visually interesting film, you might get away with not explaining it. However, MYIA isn't that movie. It's amazingly static; most of the really interesting shots are from the trailer (which features footage not seen in the movie or lifted wholesale from GALAXY EXRESS) and the rest of the film is "thing on the right moving ponderously towards the left." Katsumata's a TV director. I don't know how he got the directing gig for MYIA. It should have gone to Rin Taro, no questions asked, here's the keys.

Honestly I think Captain Harlock is a character that has never been fully realized in animation; bits and pieces here and there approach the ideal, but mostly he's a great character who's under-served by the vehicles he's given. And while I look forward to the new CG film I don't think it will be any different.

[davemerrill]

Jeez, and that whole "genetic memory of your ancestors in WWII" thing, what is the point of that? I mean seriously, other than to fulfill some kind of Leiji Matsumoto contractural obligation WWII-fetish thing, it is aggressively meaningless.

[greg]

Very well put, Dave! Those issues raised my eyebrows as well. It has been many years since I have seen this movie (I own the DVD), but your points brought back to memory the things that raised my eyebrows. Putting a starship together is not the same as building a hot rod in your garage, and the whole occupation thing wasn't quite explained.

I suppose due to the atomic bombs, Japanese can consider themselves the victims of WWII, especially since generation after generation of students only get a whitewashed version of the history and what really took place. You get these numbskulls who claim that the events in Nanking were all doctored photos, Japanese soldiers were just standing around minding their own business in China when the communists attacked them, etc. I think the only reason why the atomic bombs weren't considered war crimes is because we won the war and the winners can dictate such things. While they were terrible, it's up to the individual in Japan to investigate what exactly transpired during the war and the atrocities perpetrated by Japan.

So this sort of stuff makes me roll my eyes when I see it, but I just consider the source, and use the lame copout, "Well, it is just anime, after all."

[davemerrill]

I like Leiji Matsumoto's work a great deal, but there's a lot of his WWII fetish that I have a big problem with. There's that line in his "The Cockpit" where the Luftwaffe pilot decides to sabotage Germany's A-Bomb because "the nation that uses the atomic bomb will be the nation that sells its soul to the devil." And that's complete BS; the Germans would have gleefully used the atomic bomb early and often, as would the Japanese. It takes a lot of willful blindness to put that kind of dialog in the mouth of a dude who flies for Nazi Germany and had no problems bombing Warsaw, Belgrade, Paris, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry - he's going to balk at a different kind of bomb? Suuuuure he is.

That's not to say the average Japanese citizen didn't suffer greatly during the war - we bombed the holy hell out of Japan - and I'm not going to be the guy defending strategic bombing as a ethical war-fighting tactic. Because it's not. But what happened to Japan in WWII was a direct result of decisions made by their government, which had to be dragged to the negotiating table by two atomic bombs, and which, compared to what happened to postwar Germany, got off lightly. I believe the Japanese citizenry by and large has no idea what was done in their name in China and SE Asia in the 30s and 40s.

On the other hand, the "Sonic Boom Squadron" segment of "The Cockpit" is spectacular, and does not play favorites when discussing the tragedy of war.

[SteveH]

Yeah, Sonic Boom Squadron was tight. Not an ounce of fat on it.

Like I implied, I really think My Youth in Arcadia was a rush job. Lots of fingers in the pie, and that whole 'shared genetic memory' nonsense was cobbled out of a 'The Cockpit' story to pad the time.

But I'm not really gonna bag on it. I think Adieu Galaxy Express is a worse movie, so much so that I actually thought for quite awhile another director did it and not Rin Taro.

Of course when I bag on Adieu Three-nine it makes Patrick Macias try to use his mind rays to punish me for my foolishness.

Matsumoto has done a ton of manga that, while it can seem one-note, is quite interesting and different when taken in small chunks. I will never understand why we couldn't have such things as Sexaroid or more The Cockpit or Diver (Daiba) Zero and instead we get that amazingly crappy DNASights and Maetel Legend and Cosmo Warrior Zero. But then again 1999 was a great year for Matsumoto to not finish stuff (see also Dai Yamato, GE 999 Eternal Fantasy).

[_D_]

I sorta like Otoko Oidon. Sorta a ronin art student in post war Japan. I wonder how much of the life Matsumoto lived as portrayed by the character in the story? Sorta like Robert Crumb's stuff on living on Haight-Ashbury back in the 60s. Yeah, a lot of stuff may be a bit stilted when it comes to Matsumoto's stuff but probably no worse than the Joe Kubert Sgt. Rock stuff which waxes on so eloquently yet he must have killed every German soldier 20 times over in those old books. Ever read the letter pages from those 60's books? Some laughable answers to queries from letter writers. Probably why I preferred series like Enemy Ace over Rock. Half the stories in those old books remind me of "mow 'em down" videogames of a later period. Just laughable. But everyone liked the dinosaurs in Star Spangled War Stories. I certainly did...

[llj]

I actually did watch the TMNT animated series again....and I asked myself..."Why did I like this?". But I will say I liked the TMNT released in the early 2000's because it was much darker and violent. As for the new CG version, it's not bad. But so far the worse was the live-action version in the '90s.

Well, the original TMNT cartoon is quite funny at times...and there was some animation in the first season that was pretty impressive.

My problem with kids' cartoons today is that while they're better written (dialogue wise at least) and sometimes "edgier" than cartoons in the 80s and 90s is that they stop short of going all the way to what they really could be. I can't count the number of times I watch an episode of something like Ben 10 and thought "that was well crafted but strangely bland." Nobody ever dies, and when they do you know they'll be back sooner or later. Relationship dynamics between cast members never fundamentally change. If someone's love is unrequired in episode 1, chances are their love will still be unrequited in episode 41. It's not really fundamentally different than the cartoons we watched in the 70s and 80s, except with better dialogue. There's a lot less that can sneak by the suits today. You watch some 70s and 80s cartoons and every once in a while you'll see an odd episode where someone whips out a cigarette, does something sexually provocative, or drinks something that is CLEARLY NOT A SODA and that was always fun to spot and make you go "How did they sneak that one by the censors?"

There are even certain episodes of Transformers, Jem or even G.I. Joe where scenes would come out just a little more intense than they should be for kids. Obviously, the shows overall were a lot more juvenile than cartoons today and the dialogue laughable but you can see if they were being made today, a lot of network execs would have told the staff to edit out certain scenes in those shows either being too intense or too borderline surreal to suit kids (the fun thing about Sunbow cartoons was that a lot of the animation studios that they used to farm their work out to would sneak in a lot of weird shit from time to time, especially Toei. I remember the "drug" episode in Jem had this music video where this teenaged girl's hair blowing would be lavishly animated amidst this weird surreal backdrop in order to show her emotionally vulnerable state and it was just really weird but kinda cool)

To be honest, I think U.S. syndicated children's television animation peaked creatively around the 90s. You'd never be able to run Batman The Animated Series on Saturday mornings today. Network execs would complain that it's too slow, too focused on mood, and not enough action and plot. You can see Bruce Timm's animated work got more and more plot driven and less mood driven over the years and I have no doubt that part of that is because of more network meddling.

This is where things can get a bit dangerous for old school anime fans who keep saying "they don't make anime like they used to" to a new generation of anime viewers. Have them watch "Voltron" or "Robotech" and not sure how those the younger children will feel towards the stuff that we watched.

I have rewatched "Bubblegum Crisis" and even the "Kimagure Orange Road" LD's and also the "Tenchi Muyou" OVA's and still enjoyed them.

I think Robotech still has merit when compared to the children's cartoons today. Obviously, it doesn't compare to the anime we get to access today with all the uncut anime, and other sci-fi mecha shows like Gundam and stuff, but Robotech certainly isn't more juvenile than the likes of Naruto or Bleach, even in edited form. Watching Robotech today I am mostly only annoyed by how overly wordy the english adaptation is, the slightly ponderous pace, and the animation sucks sometimes (even by 1982 standards the animation in Macross is pretty bad, so I wouldn't chalk that up as an age issue). When Robotech was airing in the U.S. during the 80s, its competition was Transformers, G.I. Joe, Bravestarr, etc,. The characters may have needed to use 10 sentences to say something that could have been done in 3, but at least the topics they broached were several notches above what you usually saw in cartoons at the time, and, I would argue, even in cartoons airing in the U.S. today. The characters dealt with and talked about war, death, romance, depression, marriages, career...stuff that you don't usually see in a children's cartoon. I remember there's this scene late in the series where Lisa/Misa is drinking her problems away at a bar...you don't see this kind of thing in animation for kids most of the time. For all the flak that Macek got in later years, the Macross portion of Robotech largely retains much of its original appeal.

[greg]

Oh, definitely. And Claudia became an alcoholic after Roy's death. I think that when Robotech was re-aired within the past 17 years or whenever it was, they did not air the New Generation (Mospeada) episodes because they involve a transvestite singer. Growing up, us kids knew Lancer was a badass revolutionary freedom fighter. It's not even like he was a gay character, for that matter. Why would it be permissible to air Robotech on UHF syndication in the '80s but not on cable TV in more recent times?

[llj]

I think Cartoon Network aired Robotech, although I don't know if there were any edits. There's nothing especially objectionable in it by today's kiddie cartoon standards (except for the drinking and dying, both of which are pretty tastefully done anyway) but if you were an American animation studio making a television cartoon today for U.S. consumption, you probably would be asked by TV executives to cut down on the romance and character interactions and focus more on action and plot.

[davemerrill]

You won't see Robotech on cable TV today for the same reason you won't see any other 1985-era syndicated cartoon on TV today - no sponsors. That's why you saw it on TV in 1985, sponsors paid for it. In fact, that's why you see anything on TV, ever.

Had a wonderful discussion years ago with a guy who's big plan was to get Star Blazers back on television, and the kids would suddenly quit watching Pokemon and start watching Star Blazers because it was so naturally superior. That was his plan. How he intended to convince TV stations to devote a half-hour of airtime to a show that no sponsor would underwrite is anybody's guess. His OTHER plan was to put Battlestar Galactica back on prime-time network TV. Not a remake, the original 1970s show, just throw it in there Thursdays at 9pm or whatever. Now, as somebody who appreciates weird juxtapositions in his pop culture, I would love to see that, but as any kind of profitable venture, it's a non-starter.

it's irritating to see the complaints fans have about TV networks and why they aren't showing what they ought to be showing. Well, it's a business, kids, and money talks and BS walks, and the reason Cartoon Network shows what it shows is CASH MONEY. End of story. That show you loved that got cancelled? Turns out it didn't make any money. Boom.