5by8/On Anime: What are you going to watch this week?
originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
edit 5 April 2007: As you may have noted from it’s use in the review [posted next], I’ve settled on a new tagline, “On Anime”, for my animation posts. While this was written as a 5by8, it doesn’t really fit as one of those columns, which is what I was half thinking even as I was writing. Call it an interstitial, and we’ll number it 16.5. The usual 5by8 returns this Monday evening.
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It was a month ago, give or take a few days, that Bob (Noble Founder and Helmsman for Comicsnob.com) opened up the floodgates to moving pictures, and while I for one would like to be the first to welcome our new giant robot overlords admit that change is inevitable, I do have a few reservations. Which is odd, since on top of reading obscene amounts of manga I also watch obscene amounts of anime, and I should be all aquiver at the opportunity to also review my favs on DVD in addition the the ol’ five-by-eights.
But there is the matter of interpreting this new mandate: what can I do, what should I do, and what can I bring myself to do week after week after week, when other commitments (like say, the day job that pays the rent) take up so much of my time?
Oh, I’ll be reviewing anime, but not just the new stuff and not just anything; We’ll be bringing you the titles we like. (or I guess the ones that the general public must absolutely be warned against…)
While of course we endeavor here at Comicsnob to provide timely reviews of new material, we are also equally committed to looking back and recognizing the best of the past. Actually, we may be looking back more than is necessarily healthy, because I think my last column was essentially a review of Astro Boy.
Some folks desperately need the newest of new shows. They buy DVDs as they are released, they scour the nets for info on what’s showing in Japan right now, and odds are good they’ve already seen that show because they started downloading the fansubs last week. After a batch of professional translators and actors have finished a faithful interpretation of the work in question, they will scurry to the nearest internet forum to dis the “real” translation because it didn’t match up to the version put out by a grad student in Tianjin who was translating the show into English from a pirated R3 release using the Chinese subtitles so obviously this new official version is just “wrong” and worthy of all the internet scorn one can muster.
But hey, I don’t hang out in anime forums anymore. Maybe this year they’ve moved on to more insightful debates.
I don’t really care if it’s brand new, because it’s new to me. When I review a series, it’s not (necessarily) because it is the hot new thing. And this goes double or quintuple for anime. If I bother to do a write-up, it’s because I like it. In a world where 60 (or 3000) years of popular culture is available to anyone who can afford to pony up $20-a-month-or-so’s-worth of internet access, the question is not “What’s out there?” but rather “Why should I care?”
This is the second path—our path. Not the quest for what’s new, but rather, the quest for “What can I add to my Netflix queue this week?”
Obviously, since my esteemed colleague kicked off the animation reviews with Heavy Metal, and I did Astro Boy, we’re not concerned with keeping up with the Joneses or the Watanabes. Other sites can chase the very latest; we’ll look a little deeper into the list and find the gems.
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In many ways, this approach to the anime (and we’re going to take on anime in a much larger way over the next six months) is part of the unstated mission of the site: not just to be a blog, but to be a reference. Anyone can say “titles x, y, and z are coming out this Wednesday.” In fact, that’s the easiest post I’ll make in any given week. Cake. But when we then step back and comment on a particular title, the whole mess gets a tad messier.
Archives are something you compile over time. So give us time. My commitment is to only review whole series, and preferably, immediately after I’ve just watched them myself. It’s not going to be new, but it’ll be a work: whole, complete, available now and ready to be judged on its relative merits. What are you going to watch this week? Well, let us tell you…
