(no subject)

[owlectomy]

dianamcqueen and I end up watching the same things on TV that we watched in high school: Clamp School Detectives, Escaflowne, the X-Files. I won't wax rhapsodic on the virtues of Clamp School Detectives, though I think it's better at 26 when you assume it's completely tongue-in-cheek than at 16 when you assume it's serious, but I love Escaflowne with all the passion of anyone who's seen up to episode 20 and now has to wait for Netflix to bring disc 7.

I don't want to be one of those people who thinks that good music stopped in 1969, but I wish somebody would tell me about all the new anime coming out now that are as good as Escaflowne*. It could be the Japanese economy. It could just be that I'm not a high school girl any more and I'm a bit less impressed with emoting and melodrama.

But I do wonder if it's anything generational. The popular anime I remember from high school are so apocalyptic -- you have all these villains who are trying to gather immense power to use for the "greater good," ignoring the suffering of actual individual human beings. And I wonder if that mightn't have been a very raw and immediate narrative for those who grew up in the immediate postwar generation, with both Japanese fascism and the atomic bomb very present in their consciousness. You can see that in Miyazaki, certainly. (I totally didn't believe the essay that said there was mushroom cloud imagery in Totoro, but it's there.)

And then I checked on Wikipedia by clicking the name of every anime director I recognized, and mostly they were born between 1960 and 1963, so if it's generational it's not as simple as that.


*As long as they aren't harem comedies with plenty of fan service. I don't care if it has the secret of the universe in it, I'm probably gonna roll my eyes.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem with Escaflowne. I thought it needed to be twice as long as it was and develop more slowly. It was the anime equivalent of watching the landscape go by on a train- there and gone, there and gone, there and gone.