this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Between kbin's issues around the holidays and some of my own issues this month I haven't been very active lately, but I'm still here.
I finally managed to finish watching Penguindrum! That show was weird. I really don't have the words to properly express just how weird it was. Did you know that Penguindrum and Utena share a director? I didn't realize that going into it, but after finishing Penguindrum I felt like giving Utena another try -- and realized that fact after looking up some details about it. It was very much an "ohhhh..." kind of moment. I'm not deeply familiar with the details of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, Night on the Galactic Railroad, etc. that were sources of inspiration for the show; so, a lot of it probably went over my head. I still have a few screenshots left that I never got around to posting -- here's a suitably weird one.
Since the last time I commented on here, I've also gone back and cataloged all the anime I have. I looked up the starting air date for every show and movie, and then sorted them oldest to newest. That was a bit more involved than I expected it to be and I wasn't sure how I should handle some entries (e.g. Index/Railgun, Fate/, FMA, ...) where there's multiple works that are related in a complex fashion. For movies there were often multiple dates associated with a work so I went with public release dates (in Japan) even if they were shown a few months earlier at a film festival or whatever.
The oldest anime movie I've watched is The Castle of Cagliostro from 1979 (which is older than I thought it was), and the oldest series I've watched through (if you count it) is The Mysterious Cities of Gold from 1982. (The oldest series I have is the first season of Lupin III from 1971, but I've only watched a few episodes and the pilot.) It turns out that the year with the most entries I've got in my collection is 2013 with 2012 as a close second; I did a lot of DVD collecting around 2015-ish when I had terrible internet at home, so I suppose that makes sense.
I also realized recently after seeing a post about a nihonga featuring a tiger and a dragon and wondering if it was referenced in ToraDora (didn't see it in the first episode) that Taiga's English voice actor (Cassandra Lee Morris) is the same person who voiced Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, Morgana in Persona 5, Ritsu in K-On, etc. That was a bit trippy.
The content of the frame was already a bit unusual. However, the real icing on the weird cake in this frame is the subtitle. I don't know if I want to know why a girl is doing Lamaze breathing while looking at an enormous frog in front of her face. It is just one of those weird mysteries of life.
It is impressive that you can go through and document your collection like that. I have watched anime in different forms over enough years now that I could not even begin to put together a list of what I have or haven't watched. I don't keep any kind of list of shows/ratings on any of the index sites because each time I thought I should sit down and do it, it is just incredibly overwhelming to try to search through so many years of memories. I no longer have a lot of the discs/tapes I watched some stuff on because it was borrowed from others, disposed of during a move, etc. There are also series that I only ever saw on broadcast television and never actually owned any media for.
Being an anime fan these days is easier than it has ever been with things like simulcasts, official streaming licenses, digital distribution. No longer do you need to have a friend that is able to convince their parents to go across state lines to the only anime convention in the region only happening once each year, find a bootleg dvd or (gasp!) vhs of a show/movie you are interested in while at the con, and then have a sleepover to watch it together. You know...as a hypothetical example.
Writing this out it also strikes me how much things like box art used to matter. Before high speed internet and places to get high quality information about anime, I would often find myself looking at a whole store shelf full of series that I knew nothing about. So, it was often up to the box art to catch my eye in order for me to pick it up and maybe read the blurb on the back. Alternatively I relied a lot on word of mouth, either from friends or store employees, for series recommendations and went in pretty blind.
In this case, the context just makes things weirder. Yes, really. 😅
(I mean, we're talking about a show that involves three invisible penguins, two brothers who aren't really, their terminally ill sister, a posessed novelty hat, a terrorist's ghost, the most inept stalker ever, and a mysterious object that may or may not be able to change the world.)
Ikuhara has two more recent single-cours anime series—Yurikuma Arashi and Sarazanmae—to his credit as well as Utena and Penguindrum. His work is always full of symbolism, magical realism, and miscellaneous lunatic-arthouse-film stuff that can take years to comb through, depending on how far down the rabbithole you want to go. (He also worked on the fourth season of the original Sailor Moon, AKA SuperS. Make the mistake of looking too closely, and you can see nascent bits of Utena in it.)
That got me as well. It proves how influential this movie is to future anime. It was so ahead of its time.