What are you Watching?

[greg]

Yes! He was like the best character in the show, but he is murdered in the third episode. At least in the Super Robot Taisen W I'm playing, he is a character I can use.

[llj]

Actually, Yurika is a pretty capable captain. It's just that she's dumb when it comes to everything else. The running joke in the show is that she's actually quite a tactical genius but a complete airhead when it comes to everything else in life. An idiot savant.

That said, Nadesico was always meant to be a parody so it's really not to be taken too seriously. Or at all.

My favorite "space comedy" anime is still Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Nadesico was one of those shows that was just OK to me. I've only watched it once through.

[ParaParaJMo]

Nadesico is ok to me too but would have been the best anime of all time if Gai was the main character. To me, the show lost its heart after episode 3 and why I could always laugh. Most of the other characters just didn't have his charisma.

[Heero]

Actually, Yurika is a pretty capable captain. It's just that she's dumb when it comes to everything else. The running joke in the show is that she's actually quite a tactical genius but a complete airhead when it comes to everything else in life. An idiot savant.

There's actually a further explanation for the whole captain thing. They kind of go into it in the episode where they elect a new captain. And yeah, if the Gekiganger thing didn't drive it home, the whole thing is a parody. I get greg's complaints, but I think you're missing the forest for the trees in some ways. I'm just saying, if you want "intellectual" SciFi, Nadesico ain't it, heck it's not even as "deep" as Gunbuster. It really is a show about a bunch of geeks and nerds on a spaceship. Hell, to this DAY I still have no idea why the mechs are for all intents and purposes wearing rollerskates.

(But I LOVE the sequences where the engineer refuses to listen to Gai spouting the "spirit names" of various things)

[ParaParaJMo]

Yeah, Nadesico is pretty much a parody of the mech genre but kind of loses that spirit after they lost Gai. Gai is the definition of that parody.

[llj]

Usually "Gai types" are the first ones to die in anime because, well, they're inherently dumb characters. But Gurren Lagann is a celebration of the Gai stereotype though, so if you want over-done machismo, that's the show you would want to watch.

[greg]

We recently finished the first DVD of Discotek's Lupin 1st season. I noticed that it seems a bit more violent than the later years. Lupin and Jigen will blow away people with their guns quite a lot. Perhaps this is the result of Miyazaki's influence on the show?

In some ways, I regret getting cable TV. I mean, it's great that we now have access to all sorts of shows and a DVR to record stuff, but every time I suggest starting up the DVD player, my wife and/or daughter gives resistance. Last year, before we got cable TV, we plowed through Yawara, Rose of Versailles, MS Gundam, and several other shows I cannot think of at the moment. Now, I can slowly suggest maybe Lupin, but we've sort of forgotten about GS Mikami, for example. My daughter keeps wanting to watch the dumber shows on NHK and my wife wants to watch those variety shows later on. I mean, NHK has some great shows, but after about 5:30pm, they start getting rather dumb.

[llj]

Ahh yes...hahaha. Unless the person you live with has similar viewing tastes as you, we all have to expect to put up with watching a lot of garbage. Over the years I've lived with my sister, and later with a girlfriend (now ex) and it was nothing but reality shows, game shows, dumb sitcoms, and things I can't stand watching. Eventually I just got used to retreating to my room and watching my own stuff on my own DVD and TV. I guess when you reach some sort of financial stability and get a house, you can build the cliched "man cave" though.

[greg]

Oh yes, I certainly have a man cave. However, I've no place to put even a small TV in there. It is dedicated to my anime, video game, and plastic model collections. There is one corner, however, that is dedicated to my wife's laptop and a small computer desk. She rarely ever uses her laptop. It's 12 years old, slow as hell, and came out in the early days of Windows XP. I want to get her a newer laptop with wifi capabilities. That way, she can use it anywhere, and may even relinquish that desk so that I can put a small TV on it and hook up a DVD player and my game systems to it. That would kick all sorts of ass.

Say... this has made me think of a new topic to start...

REE HEE!

[llj]

Wolf Children--I think I have posted here in the past about my indifference to Mamoru Hosoda. He always struck me as being too concerned with pleasing everyone; he's so eager to please that his films end up sorta bland. Moreover, his films often feel more like TV anime than actual movies. The animation quality in his films aren't so great either--they lack the observational quality of Ghibli's animation and they don't have the interesting filmic compositions and editing of, say, Satoshi Kon's films. Wolf Children, however, I surprisingly enjoyed. Hosoda doesn't necessarily solve the problems that I have with him as a director here, but he's tackling a smaller scaled story and using better reference material from a visual standpoint (it owes a lot visually and animation wise to Ponyo, Totoro, and Only Yesterday). The lead character--the mother--is still a little bland for a protagonist (Mary Sue type) but Hosoda gives her more interesting things to do here than he did with the protagonists of Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. So you end up cheering for her because the film really stacks the odds against her in a much stiffer way than in most films of this sort.

I'm torn as to whether this is actually a *better* movie than Summer Wars from an objective standpoint--Summer Wars is far more ambitious and complex in its plot and its MUCH larger cast, and has better production values, but every time I think about it now, all I remember most is a bunch of CGI rendered net battles and some minimally developed characters tapping on computers, and if there's anything about today's entertainment that I hate, it's a climax involving people tapping furiously on a computer. Wolf Children has worse production values and quite possibly even swipes backgrounds from past anime films I've seen (like the aforementioned Totoro) but the rhythm and pace of the film is a little more involving, the emotional content a little more focused (if overly sentimental at times) and it's more concerned with telling its story than trying to be everything to everyone, which I feel is a step forward for Hosoda. I may be also accepting Hosoda for who he is now, which is to not try to be different and unique and innovative, but to just create some entertaining family-friendly films. I guess I just wish modern fans didn't keep overhyping this kind of populist entertainment all the time and calling Hosoda the next Miyazaki or even making such ridiculous proclamations like "He's already better than most of Miyazaki's last few films!!" We need someone to emerge who isn't the NEXT *insert famous director here* but rather the FIRST of something. That's what made Satoshi Kon's passing so sad. Kon was just Kon; he didn't try to be anyone else out there and now we lost a valuable individualistic voice.

Dallos--Finished this. Well...it's certainly interesting. And I was entertained. But far more so than Megazone 23, you really get the feeling here that this story was compressed mightily. People point to the ending as the problem, but I actually disagree. The open ended ending seems very typical of later Oshii anime actually. You could probably create a sizeable list of all the Oshii anime that ended with someone looking out over a large landscape and cryptically asking about what the future will bring, so I don't see how Dallos is any different in that regard. Where it stumbles is that it skips crucial plot points in order to jump ahead in time. For example, the main character at one point in the show is given a choice to join the resistance group even though his family is against it. Then about 2 scenes later you see him fighting in a big battle with the resistance group. There is no bridging scene that shows him sneaking out of his house to join them, or wrangling over whether to disobey his family or not. This kind of time leap really makes the show feel disjointed.