Anime for people who hate anime

i've kind of been delving into '80s anime without fight scenes (and i guess "anime without fight scenes" meets the criterion of "anime for people who hate anime" right there), and i find myself wondering about this series called "high school! kimengumi". just because none of it has ever even been fan-translated and it was hugely popular, it had, like, seven different OPs. there weren't many anime that seem to have achieved that level of popularity around then... it seems to have been popular on the level of something like "touch" or "maison ikkoku", both of which are watchable (and beloved) in english. also, all the descriptions of the show i can find talk about it as being about a group of 5 male high school students... but looking at the openings of the manga the focus seems to be totally on the character of yui kawa. i mean maybe it is about these 5 high school boys, but they're not the ones in the opening credits, is all i'm saying. (i mean i haven't seen the full OPs, admittedly, but there are _seven_ OPs...)

there does seem to be a fansub of the film from 1986 called "High School! Funny-face Club", and they definitely do have funny faces!

https://i.imgur.com/PPyIYyn.png

yeah, i might wanna check out the film

so here's what i'm pissed about right now... i'm _really_ into weird psychedelic animation, and the '73 cutie honey seems like it has tons of that, alongside some peak '70s funk. i would be so into those bits... _except_ that go nagai is a fucking creep and the '73 cutie honey is full of fucking creepy shit.

anyway here's ilx faves perfume covering the cutie honey theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3DheLP03vY

and here's somebody who _isn't_ into go nagai's creepy misogyny shit talking about early magical girls, this is cool. unfortunately they seem to have ended the series but there is some pretty cool stuff here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUt6PperTKI

ok so i'm reading this book that's from 2015 called the Anime Encyclopedia and i'm enjoying it immensely. i'm the sort of girl who reads encyclopedias cover-to-cover, though in this case i'm only in the "b"s. what i like about this is that it's by some crusty old british grognards who did anime dubbing and importing back in the '90s, i think

they're not shy at expressing their opinions and my feeling is that if you ask them about MAL they'll respond with something like "Mal? That's french for 'bad', isn't it?"

so it's a lot of fun because they'll complain that saying, say, "mangaka" instead of "manga author" is "obstructively arcane" or how the invention of the term "light novel" was unnecessary and duplicative. i have a certain fondness for linguistic prescriptivism. at the same time i never knew what the origin of "yaoi" and "yuri" actually were, or that in Japan they used to refer to TV as a "Braun tube". I also had never heard of "Chokyo".

Which is another little oddity of their encyclopedia - it covers hentai right alongside kids' anime, so that "Anal Vampire" (described in the text as "a demon who sucks ass rather than blood") is covered shortly before Animal Yokocho, which is, in fact, the anime I want to gush about here.

It's pretty unknown among the MAL crowd, who might not be entirely on board with an anime about a cute five-year-old girl who and her three utterly adorable animal friends who try to help her do things like... bake a cake! And do her homework! This is a show that a five-year-old could watch and enjoy lots. It's also just the most _delightful_ thing.

Ami-chan: "What are you doing?"
Iyo the rabbit: "Researching rabbits."
Ami-chan: "You don't have to research it..."
Iyo: "Ami-chan, the most difficult thing in this world... is to understand yourself."

It reminds me a _lot_ of Animaniacs, honestly.

Earlier this week I wrote (and apparently didn't post) a whole long gush about how episode 77 of "Mahoutsukai Sally" absolutely punched above its level in terms of telling a great story (I guess I didn't mention that here? The upshot is that I found it to be a creative, entertaining, and _coherent_ story, which is something that's _extremely_ rare in '60s and '70s anime. To accomplish like that with no budget and no time, in a 60s cartoon for young girls... that's exceptional. Oh, did I mention that the episode hasn't been subbed or dubbed, and that I don't understand Japanese?)

...anyway, Animal Yokocho maybe punches even more above its respective level. It's these shows that fans ignore, maybe because they don't have gratuitous violence or "fanservice"...

One of the other things I like about the Anime Encyclopedia is that, despite gladly reviewing the entirety of the Pink Pineapple catalog, they don't look any more fondly on "fanservice" than I do. Reading their review on Bakemonogatari they'll tell you "Fan service, questionable behavior verging on molestation, and brief, intensely bloody action scenes are part of the mix." I'd rather hear that than ten thousand reviews gushing about how well the story is contructed.

It's a real problem for me watching anime... MAL tends to not level with one about this sorts of stuff. I tried watching an anime about girls making a videogame! One of the programmers was up so late she slept on the floor! Without pants! And didn't put on pants even when a new employee walked through the door and introduced herself!

It's less that it's creepy - though it is creepy - and more that its devotion to being creepy requires them to make all of the characters behave in nonsensical and uninteresting ways. It's the "uninteresting" part that kills this stuff for me. Issa the panda, Kenta the bear, and Iyo the rabbit all behave in nonsensical ways, but their antics are _entertaining_ to watch. "Fanservice" just _isn't_ entertaining most of the time. (Keijo!!!!!!!! is a notable exception.)

I just know I'm going to spend my twilight years doing a marathon of every episode of Sazae-san, in order.

so it's been a while and i've been continuing my anime deep dive. i guess i am kinda talking to myself here. there are spaces where people talk really in-depth about anime and i'm not wanting to get involved in those spaces right now... internet social spaces are a little iffy for me

anyway i'm starting to learn more about my most niche anime interest, which is '70s anime

this month i got to know the name of osamu dezaki. this guy had a very distinct style, and i like it a lot. when i started watching "ashita no joe" it struck me immediately, how different it was from what the anime i was familiar with looked like. like most anime of the time, "ashita no joe" doesn't have fluid or sophisticated animation. what it does have is shit-tons of style. almost like what gets called a "motion comic" sometimes - taking one pretty detailed drawing and panning across it. often in a triple-take, three times in a row... i've heard that this is a cost-saving technique, but mostly i see it used for dynamic impact... the triple takes are really quick, and don't take up that much screen time.

the show i've been really digging into is "aim for the ace!", which is a really well-loved sports anime - i also learned that hideki anno's early anime "gunbuster", which i haven't seen, was an outer space riff on "aim for the ace". anyway, aim for the ace is just a show i love a lot, visually. the character designs are just really different from what i usually think of as character designs. harsh. angular. even the character who's supposed to be the "pretty" one is about a million miles away from the "moe" stereotype.

honestly i just have a hard time finding moe characters super relatable. i just heard about a "girls love" show called "lesbian bear storm". on paper a show called "lesbian bear storm" is right up my alley. in practice, anime seems to have a real problem with the idea that there's anybody in the world older than 15. also, i think this is ... i mean you see fat-shaming everywhere, but it's particularly prevalent in japan. for me as a lesbian, this is a problem. part of what i struggle with in anime particularly is characters who pander to the male gaze, and when i see character designs like the ones in "lesbian bear storm", that's kind of the feeling i get. to me, part of having good representation is being able to see fat dykes! and not just because that's also my aesthetic preference. :)

when it comes for aim for the ace... it's not a queer show. that said, a lot of the emotional drama of this show is driven by the main character, hiromi, wanting to be _really good friends_ with the star player, madame butterfly. this kind of stuff in the modern day sometimes gets dismissed as "yuri bait", teasing lesbianism for the male gaze.

i do wonder how much of it is inherent to the "shoujo" genre. it wasn't until the '60s that women started becoming the major creators of anime for girls. the manga of "aim for the ace" was one of the first of those works. i didn't grow up with shoujo, but i did grow up with the children's book series "something queer is going on". i grew up in an era where you _couldn't_ be out as queer if you were making creative work for an audience that includes children. there's a pretty negative narrative around queer people who do that. it's still stigmatized, but there seem to be exceptions now at least, with non-binary people like rebecca sugar and n.d. stephenson both creating really great work in that medium.

i don't think it really matters whether someone like elizabeth levy, who wrote the "something queer is going on" books, is herself queer. she created a work that allowed me to understand queerness in women and my relationship to that queerness. as an adult, i get the same kind of feeling from the parts of "aim for the ace". from the beginning there _is_ a guy who hiromi's interested in, todo, but this doesn't diminish my ability to read hiromi as queer. there's an episode where the lead character hiromi's best friend teases her about not paying any attention to todo's tennis playing. she _is_ interested in todo! she's just _more_ interested in madame butterfly. this is kind of why there's such a thing as "late bloomer lesbians" - comphet, compulsory heterosexuality. it's not that she's _not_ interested in guys like todo. he's attractive. someone like madame butterfly, though, is just so much more _exciting_! she just wants to be around madame butterfly all the time and wants madame butterfly to like her the way she likes madame butterfly. as a _really good friend_.

the thing that i love most about dezaki's work here is the way he uses his art to portray hiromi's heightened internal emotional states in a dramatic and compelling way. the sound effects... i'm ok with them. i saw a video from a guy complaining about the way japanese television relies on constant sound effects, which does trace back at least as far as this anime. i don't think the use of sound effects _enhances_ the emotional impact of the show. they're a little more obtrusive than the "stingers" used in the west, but no more heavy handed than, say, murray gold's scores for "doctor who".

i've started to come around to gold's work, incidentally. yes, his work is _extremely_ heavy-handed and didactic, basically yelling very loudly at the viewer about how they are supposed to feel. the upside is that by carrying the didactic load of the show, the rest of it is freed to be nuanced and subtle. plus, his music is better than albert glasser's. worst comes to worst i can do like all the millennials do and just read the subtitles... the stereo sound mixing of everything is dogshit. maybe it sounds better in 5.1. i don't know anybody who watches tv in 5.1.

in "aim for the ace", the plots are melodramatic, the music is melodramatic. dezaki's art, though? the best way i can describe it is "surreal". the mean girls mock her and all of a sudden the art starts looking like the spider-man episode "revolt in the fifth dimension". the colors of the backgrounds, too, are not at all remotely naturalistic. it's actually interesting how many of the color schemes in these '70s anime resemble various queer flags. honestly, i just think it's because the flags in question are color-coordinated. if you're doing a background based around two colors, orange and purple are good colors for that, particularly if the sun is setting. it's not intentionally lesbian. i've just gotten really really used to getting my queer content from subtext.

dezaki also has a tendency to use more dutch angles than _battlefield earth_. he uses them better than that film does. also, it's better than the constant low angles anime today _habitually_ uses when showing female characters from behind. every single shot of female characters in anime feels like it's about a three degree angle away from being a creepshot. well, no, there are also shots which are actual creepshots, or as they say in japan, "fan service". because that's certainly what _i_ want as a fan. not a compelling story or characters or art, no, i only watch anime because i want to see drawings of a 12 year old character flashing her underwear. (because i don't usually use sarcasm, i will be super-obvious and say that the preceding is, in fact, sarcasm.)

it's not that i'm a prude. i find the constant jiggle shots in "keijo!!!!!!!" delightful, though not actually tittilating, because they're genuinely plot-relevant. i feel the same way about magical girl transformation sequences. i mean if somebody really gets their rocks off by looking at animation of a naked girl without nipples superimposed on a sea of stars, i personally don't feel exploited as a woman. i just think those sequences look cool.

lol, i had so much more i wanted to talk about here too, but i've already spent an hour gushing about the two episodes of aim for the ace i've seen, so i guess i'll cut it for now. this boring work meeting is almost over.

by the way one of the video essays i watched was by someone who watched every episode of "lupin iii" and said that was a bad idea. which is enough to convince me to _not_ do a marathon of every episode of sazae-san. i did learn that "angel's egg" was originally supposed to be a lupin iii film. after "castle of cagliostro" miyazaki said "hey you know who you should get to make a lupin film, mamoru oshii". and oshii was like ok so i got an idea, a mad scientist builds a new tower of babel in the middle of tokyo and then jumps off it, in the process he discovers a fossilized angel which lupin then becomes interested, by the end of the movie lupin has stolen reality itself

the people making the film said "my friend we got enough shit for 'mystery of mamo', how about no"

in my headcanon, however, there is a prototype cabinet of "cliff hanger ii" wherein one replays the plot of "angel's egg" by entering perfectly timed button presses

(y'all know the story of "cliff hanger"? the first time any of miyazaki's work was seen in the us, if i have my facts right)

when it comes for aim for the ace... it's not a queer show.

it's just, you know. a sports show. about women who play tennis. like, you know, billie jean king. who is namechecked in the show as one of the inspirations for the players. (in fairness, the other tennis player they namecheck, margaret court, is virulently homophobic. also, i was very relieved when reading about billie jean king that, unlike a lot of other women's tennis players of her generation, she does _not_ seem to have been openly transphobic. in 1977, she played in a women's tournament which included renee richards, a trans woman, as a competitor, and she got a lot of shit from players like chris evert and martina navratilova, who are both transphobic to this day, for it.)

frieren is really good

ok so this is the exact opposite of anime for people who hate anime but god damn i can see "gushing over magical girls" becoming my favorite dark magical girl anime of all time

yall utena is just a REALLY REALLY BIG FAN OF MAGICAL GIRLS!!!!!!!!

an anime dub but it's just a dub remix of the original episode soundtrack

preferably "cowboy bebop", i wanna hear the mad professor or someone remix yoko kanno and the seatbelts

but i guess like flcl or something would work