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Oh man, finally a place where we can talk about the collective works of Ryosuke Takahashi--he's made more than VOTOMs you know. However, I think the man peaked in mid 80s and hasn't really been a force of creativity and really interesting projects since then. Works like Blue Gender and FLAG have their good points, but they don't ever really reach the heights that his 80s stuff did. FLAG also has some very poor computer generated imagery holding it back, which makes sense since it seems like Takahashi has been the only one working on and supporting it since its inception. A bit of a passion project. I both love and hate the man's work as a whole. VOTOMs is of course a classic, of just anime in general not just mecha, but Dougram, Galient, and Layzner all have fantastic visual aesthetics and story telling. He pretty much succeeded in putting the Japanese robot show into the muck and mire. Tomino founded it, but Takahashi really took this nascent "real robot" subgenre to its next level. The Scope Dog is a mass produced garbage can, and the show really has you buying into these being objects of war. It's not so much a super hero, that would be piloting them, but a manufactured piece of hardware whose armor isn't quite up to the task of taking the rockets and mid sized cannon rounds the VTs are tossing around. Fans of Geass will certainly be able to recognize where the Knightmare Frames got their mobility aesthetics from as well. Just brilliant stuff for the 1980s. I feel like he hit the wall with Gasaraki. An absolutely beautifully animated, voiced, and scored show, it had a a lot going for it. But it was very much operating in a post Evangelion world, and the way certain elements of that show work very much come from the Eva mold full force. For good or for ill. There's also another thing that always got me about the show and that's its politics. One of Takahashi's points of interest are the political intrigues he puts into the show. But in the successful ones, the political musings tend to take on philosophical and a speculative science fiction bent. Interesting stuff reflective in our times, but not something really dumb if you try to apply it 1:1. Gasaraki works a bit differently in that it's operating on a post Gulf War 1 pre 9/11 geopolitical spectrum, with Japan at the forefront of the weapons and technologies development department. There's a dull plot about grain price manipulation, but it all comes off as a very "JAPAN WOULD NEVER START A WAR" FM3 type of deal in the end. I found the Noh dancing and Japanese culture stuff far more interesting. But then again, you wouldn't really have a Takahashi show without the politics. One of the things that I find myself having trouble reconciling is robot fetishization with my own sentiments towards the military industrial complex and militarism in general. Takahashi kind of walks the tightrope, since in VOTOMS the VTs are pieces of garbage and the individual pilots and their stories and tactics are the important part. Gasaraki's TAs on the other hand are these gulf war type superweapons that Americans thought they had after the conflict, but before Afghanistan and Iraq II, whose precision and power blow anything else out of the water. It's something that bothers me a bit about Oshii's work as well, the feeling that this well animated robot battle that we're watching is meant to be seen as "neat". I really respect and admire the man's work, since I think he has also tried to raise the intellectual bar on the genre for quite a while now, it's just that I watch his work and feel a little uncomfortable sometimes. He himself has stated that he hates robots, also like Tomino, but who knows if the corporate modelling and merchandise departments have bugs up his rear end too. He is doing VOTOMS spin off works a lot lately, so who even knows. You'll survive this Mr Takahashi, survive and move on to the next battlefield, alone. TNG fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 06:56
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No idea, but any of you dudes seen REIDEEN THE SUPERIOR!? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feH1hQoNFe4 Ah, the 90s, when everything was 5 pretty boys of differing backgrounds, hobbies, dispositions, and jobs.
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Sep 22, 2015 07:14
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GorfZaplen posted:For example, the scene in Dougram where a father and son on opposing sides of the war come together and affirm their love for one another as human beings is way more important to demonstrating the themes of the show than any of the battles, save one. I always found it interesting that Takahashi has said that he's always hated robots and includes them primarily because "they sell". Tomino says similar things, but I think Tomino operates on a level of materialism that that never appealed to Takahashi aesthetically. There's always a massive amount of commodity fetishism, specifically robots and technology and the neat things they can do, in mecha anime, not to mention sci-fi, and I think Takahashi rejects it on some level while Tomino is disgusted by it but at the same time is fascinated. It's sort of like this, how can something be specifically anti-war if the action and drama of the fights have all this wiz bang techno wonderment? I think Tomino gets around it by being so pessimistic and bitter politically, while Takahashi has his robots being really unglamorous and frail. Gasaraki is a really interesting show in that the TAs exist in this sort of Gulf War mentality where Stealth and "Smart" Bombs actually work the way the US Military says they do as amazing wonder weapons. Something you should feel pride in as well as...pleasure, but the show also has it all based around meddling with magic and combat drugs to even make it work on some level, which undermines it quite nicely. I dunno, as I've grown older, I've just found that robots aren't a romance anymore, but a veneer for something I find very troubling about western society. Especially with what I know about systems like the LCS and F-35... TNG fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Sep 28, 2015 |
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Sep 27, 2015 23:20
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Hbomberguy posted:
I prefer Full Metal Jacket's scene where Joker asks a helicopter gunner who's randomly shooting at the North Vietnamese while maniacally laughing, "How can you shoot women and children?", to which the gunner replies, "Easy, you don't lead em so much." It's fun, if you're a psychopath. The problem with fictionalized violence, and let's focus in on military sci fi, is that a lot of people have trouble making the connection that what is happening is actually deplorable. I used to be one of those awful nerds that followed the development program of the F-22 and thought how cool it would be if it fought some MiG-29s and actually cared about the tactical realism of Space Marine X and how he could fight 100 of Stormtrooper Y and come out unscathed because of his awesome technology. Besides being incredibly stupid, it also is an attitude that prevails a lot of examples of military speculative fiction, anime included: this amazing piece of technology is something you can feel pride and pleasure in because it's so good at what it does, killing people and destroying lots of things. 0080 is a fine counterexample. The action in that is violent, quick, unsatisfying, and awful. That all the new wizbang designs aren't just cool advertisements, but are instead things that get people killed in terrible and pointless ways. I like Tomino a lot as a writer, thinker, and director, but he's also drat good at making engaging and entertaining scenes of action. I'm conflicted about the man ultimately, since I like his work and what it has to say but he's also operating under the sphere of corporate militarism endorsement that underpins a lot of fiction, especially military science fiction. What is the most futuristic element of his work are not mobile suits but, as you said, the Newtypes. I think what I'm interested most in, as an extension of that, is fighting back against the narrative that weapons are in any way cool or desirable. Mecha has a very difficult time with this, since they have to sell a product to get made, and that product in reinforced by American military hegemony which very much has its tendrils sunk deep into the real robot genre. Also, dispelling the notion that techno futurism is any way going to save or benefit humanity. Elon Musk and his cars only rich people can afford and exploding rocket company aren't going to save us. Apple and other Silicon Valley firms aren't going to make the world closer or better. They're all in this mode of corporate expansion where indecency and atrocity is an abstraction as long as it's far away, and a war can be justified if it hits the right social barometer. If we actually want to be futuristic prople and engage with an interesting vision of tomorrow, why do we allow old indignities and crudeness a pass? I think being critical is the first step there.
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Sep 28, 2015 21:06
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I also found it funny how in WXIII, Noa says she's just not really into mecha anymore, and how that got SO many people angry. She's no longer one of us, guys!
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Sep 28, 2015 21:16
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Schwarzwald posted:Ideon is particularly interesting in the context of spiritual mecha, like GimmickMan mentioned earlier: Buff Clan too! Everybody's wagon was fixed but good. Be Invoked is actually a pretty uplifting movie, especially compared to the series where there's always this pervasive aura of doom surrounding everything. The Solo Ship's always running, but there's no escape, no hope, nothing. Every end is met with calamity and disaster. The White Base civilians were at least allowed off, eventually. It's a one way ride if you happened to have the misfortune of being born human in the TV show. Sure Be Invoked had a small child get her head blown off by a bazooka, but the ending actually was a lovely and beautiful celebration.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:10
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Japanese nationalism is always an interesting beast. Your reading of Takahashi's politics got me thinking about Momoru Oshii, and the similarities between the two. Some stories in Patlabor and The Kerberos Saga derive their drama from chafing underneath foreign hegemony. But a lot of the plots of his work come from interdivisional rivalry between different sections of the Japanese security force, operating under the Government. That the lens isn't so much turned on the system that allows this kind of infighting to even happen, although the first GITS movie muses about the emerging cyborg consciousness and what that does to borders both national and digital, but instead towards the corruption in the bureaucracy. Someone smarter than the protagonist, although not always, is able to suss out the "corruption" and the current crop of protagonists can make things return to, relative, normality, with someone resigning, committing suicide, or getting shot. Thing is, I think Oshii is really interested in how all these robots work, move, and fight. It goes to an earlier point about why are the robots even necessary? In GITS, the machinery is something that's directly pointed at the themes of the work. The Cyborg Manifesto, the feminist document, is something I always think about when engaging with Oshii penned poo poo. Since Kusanagi is a cyborg, why should she necessarily fall within the constraints of conventional sexuality, femininity, and even modesty we as a society, American or Japanese, would seek to apply to her? If we're actually creating something new, which the Puppetmaster desired over all else, why shouldn't she be exactly who she is? Although it seems like Oshii likes the the current status quo a little too much to say anything about the last barriers: political, national, and economic, but oh well. I've always liked the first GITS movie because of this, and it's certainly more interesting to me than the spider tanks and active camouflage. Although in recent stories, the transcendental seems to have been replaced by that.
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Sep 29, 2015 23:38
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That's what I always thought was interesting about Gasaraki. The biggest action scene in the show is an American battalion getting ambushed by Symbol TAs, and it kind of recasts the Americans as Iraqis in the first Gulf War and Symbol as the technologically superior Americans. They get slaughtered. But what even enables TAs to move is demon magic and to get one combat effective you have to be pumped full of combat drugs that will kill you. There's this sort of pernicious will driving the robots in that show, literally in some cases, and I feel that it very nicely problematizes what exactly one should expect out of mecha action.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:35
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Probably those sand worm things that haven't exactly built a civilization based around expansion and shooting things. The thing about the Buff Clan and Humanity is that they were both ALL too willing to butcher each other at every turn. The Solo Ship was only running from Solo because the Buff Clan assumed the horrible aliens must have killed their princess and must be attacked and killed in turn. The Ide certainly doesn't help matters, but it isn't like Humanity and Buff Clan wouldn't be punching each other to death if the Ide hadn't thrown a knife into the middle anyway. The ending at least has everyone together, even some of the assholes, happy and celebrating Messiah's birthday.
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Sep 30, 2015 01:16
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I just don't think he's made anything really good since at least 2000, and his peak was in the 80s. And hey, being Mishima with robots isn't necessarily a bad thing, he was a fantastic writer despite being a complete loon. Interesting thing about his coup, they screwed up his seppuku so badly they couldn't even get his head off his shoulders. How's that for your bushido sense of ethics and desire to return to Showa fascism? I really don't think Takahashi's a fascist either. It's just that he has to deal with robots as part of the territory of working in the genre, and that I think his way of dealing with it is very interesting. About the Ide, the way that it interacts with our dimension is with the emotions invoked, blah I know, by life and death. Since it's reawakening in episode 1, it's mostly just been surrounded by death and negativity. Maybe you get an extra dimensional force who kinda breeds that itself with that's all you're throwing into it. Remember, this is the show that had the Buff Clan commit genocide during episode 2 and it gets WORSE from there. Sheryl certainly thinks the Ide is the one that's causing all of it, but the Ide doesn't brainwash Doba into pursing the Solo Ship with everything out of paranoia and sense of Buff Clan Supremacy, Cosmo into thinking EVERYTHING is a Buff Clan plot, Bes into thinking he's the only one saving the universe from Buff Clan domination, and all the other petty Buff Clan and Earth forces that act out of fear and anger and revenge. All the peaceful things the Ide ends up ruining are the result of neither side really wanting to have compassion for the other. And well, the Ide becomes an angry and destructive thing because of it. TNG fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 02:52
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I dunno about recent years, but watch Giant Robo. Everyone should watch Giant Robo. It's the best thing.
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Oct 3, 2015 00:07
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Beck never did get to show us the mysteries of the orient.
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Oct 6, 2015 04:36
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I love the sound design most of all on that show. That electronic piston sound that plays when a Megadeus walks is amazing, or when the Chromebuster charges up.
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Oct 7, 2015 05:29
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I'm glad I stopped paying attention to Aquarion after the movie. which pretty much had the most Aquarion sexual plot resolution of all time: nothing beats two chicks at the same time. Gen Fudo is still the best character of anything though.
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Oct 13, 2015 22:51
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Never seen the show directly, but its OP is the most 80s Real Robot thing I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gRtEfsEIiE
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Oct 13, 2015 23:10
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Droyer posted:I'm glad you specified real robot, otherwise I'd have to post the second Dancouga op. Dancouga OP 2 realizes what is truly 80s is not swarms of well animated missiles, but characters running at the screen in place with monochrome colored shadows.
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Oct 13, 2015 23:37
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Macross Zero's last episode never stops being hilarious to me. "We ran out of budget and time, so some stuff happened and now our characters are doing this."
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Oct 24, 2015 22:41
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Go-Lion sure has an upbeat opening for how grim the show is.
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Oct 25, 2015 03:33
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drrockso20 posted:Yeah it's amazing how violent Go-Lion is, which makes one realize that the team that handled Lion Voltron were really good at their jobs since it manages to be mostly coherent despite how much editing was needed for it to be appropriate for American television YUP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCyhyYjweU Even the loving mice get into it. The writers at World Events sure went the extra mile coming up with all sorts of explanations on why things weren't THAT bad. They even had some new animation made to continue the story after Zarkon eats it, which in the dub he doesn't. TNG fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 14:55
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 03:47 |
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Ahhh, economy of form. My boyfriend is a pilot, but he's also an idol, and someone in a love triangle with me.
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Oct 29, 2015 06:05
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