Anime & Donghua

Alas, because we're in the part of the year where Turtle Island has switched to DST and Europe is still on standard time, I've had to put The Owl House on hold for a bit. Or I guess "had to" and had to, since I could just start my shows at 10 PM my time, but I do prefer to start at 11 PM when I can.

People said they liked Trigger Happy Horses, but the chat was pretty dead for most of the movie.

Regarding My Little Pony: A New Generation, come Saturday I'll probably agree with my past self and say that it's a serviceable — if not outright Fun — movie, but still far below MLP G4.

Fireman Sam continues to be a very cute little stop motion slice of life. Once I finish showing series 5 I guess I'll move on to Joshua Jones. But imagine if something like Cardcaptor Sakura were in the Sam-Jones stop motion style, that would rock, right?

SHINE was very technically competent and I think the use of narration was a good choice for the limits of the medium, but unfortunately it never got a second episode.

By contrast, Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors is probably the longest fanime of all time; I'll be showing episode 2 this Wednesday alongside some Soviet movies. What's notable about Magic Heart aside from its length, age (starting in 2007), and weird-ass geometric art style, is the voice acting — it's all Microsoft Sam! The characters have literal ROFLcopter Bonzi Buddy ass voices, presumably because the creator didn't speak English as a first language and didn't have access to any other voice actors (or maybe just didn't want to deal with doing voice direction over the Internet).

My own fanime I'm slowly but surely working on, Blazoner Narazen, also uses machine-synthesized voices — albeit using Retrieval-based Voice Conversion rather than text-to-speech, to give me full control over the intonation and meter of the acting. But ultimately I have to acknowledge that Magic Heart's use of Microsoft Sam is for similar reasons as BlaNara's use of RVC: the only meaningful difference is 20 years of technological advancement.

Camden once said something like, "In the future people will use GenAI to make fanime and it will be indistinguishable from the original thing" — which I thought was honestly pretty disrespectful to the medium. Fanime is to me something defined by its "spirit" first and foremost: the spirit of making things for the sake of making things, even if the end result is poorly drawn, poorly acted, and poorly written, or otherwise "cringeworthy". Offloading that to generative AI just defeats the purpose! The point is not that fanime is an anime-inspired animation created (or in the case of GenAI "created") by an anime fan: the point of fanime is in the creative process, in the drawings that through their flaws show how they were made, you know? So the uses of machine learning technologies that are acceptable in fanime in my view are those that adhere to this Fanime Spirit™.

But that's enough of that tangent.

It was good to return NEW GAME!!. We'll presumably finish it on Sunday, after which we'll have to choose something else to watch together. It was also fun to show ol' Aeroo Chitanda various songs I liked, and she also showed me a song she liked in turn, Bao The Whale's "Final Bow", a Vtuber song that vaguely reminded me of Eir Aoi's "Sirius" from Kill la Kill. I think she might've also shown me another song in the intermissions but I didn't make note of it, alas.

Cardcaptor Sakura remains a favorite of mine, but Garg's wapas were my first time seeing the movies. A good time was had by all.

Magic Knight Rayearth is another CLAMP anime. I've tuned in for the first eight episodes but frankly they haven't impressed me nearly as much as Cardcaptor. Part of that is probably just because it's hard for me to follow along on the chat and the subtitles at the same time, especially when I'm tired and distracted by [gestures broadly at the absolute state of things]. Following along on the subtitles is a much smaller issue when the thing being shown is an anime I've already seen before.

Apropos anime I've already seen before, Gurren Lagann: It fucked way harder than when I watched it for the first time yeeeaaars ago, but the movie was disappointing.

Courage the Cowardly Dog is another old cartoon I'd wanted to get a taste of just to familiarize myself with others' nostalgia. I was surprised that the dog talked, I kinda thought the dog only whimpered. Frankly, I think it would've been better if the dog only whimpered.

Archer and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt are interesting because they're both kinda gross and vulgar for the sake of it, but I didn't care for the former but look forward to the latter every week. I first tried Panty & Stocking yeeeaaars ago and basically rejected it because of the grossness and vulgarity, but this time around I've responded to it much better. Is the social aspect part of my enjoyment? Probably, but that raises the question of why I didn't care for Archer.

I know many people don't like The Catcher In The Rye because the protagonist is a bit of a dick, but I've really been enjoying it, and I'm glad to be reading it with my own two eyes.

All in all Angelic Layer was pretty eh, not to say that I regret watching it to the end, and maybe I'll find more appreciation for it later on — it was just kinda unsatisfying. But at least the main character is cute.

My mom didn't want to watch Tesagure! Bukatsumono entirely because the fansubs (the only subs) are too hard to follow. It's a pretty mid series overall, but I still appreciate it for what it is and represents: it's a very ad libbed series using cheap 3D (MikuMikuDance) animation, being Yaoyorozu's main thing before Kemono Friends. Another good thing about Tesabu is that the episodes are only 11 minutes long, which happens to be around the amount of time I take to eat a meal.

There was a really fun one-off ojou character in one of the Tokyo Mew Mew episodes I watched recently, Saionji Kanna in episode 32. Shame that she is only a one-time character.

Episode 15 of Pokémon is "Battle Aboard The St. Anne", which was the first English-dubbed episode of Pokémon to broadcast on Turtle Island, before the rest of the series was broadcast in order. I always like to watch anime in Norwegian when I can, so it was very good to find out that so much of the Norwegian dub of Pokémon is available for free on YouTube on Pokémon's official channel. Some more of the Norwegian dub is on the Internet Archive, too.

My own relationship to Pokémon is this: I played the original Game Boy games (Red & Blue) through online emulators without save features as a kid. This meant that I had to start at the very beginning every time I played, and accordingly I never finished either game, because how the heck's a kid supposed to beat Pokémon Red in a single sitting, right? I also had a Pokédex on my 3DS, and I had a few toys and maybe even trading cards to boot, but I didn't really watch the cartoons nor know much about the lore. I think I caught part of one of the movies at a classmate's birthday party and that's basically it, and even that is a very hazy memory. I also remember I did a pen and paper trace of Ash Ketchum once, apparently because I'd just turned his age and was thinking "I'm a big kid now! Big enough to go out on adventures, if Ash is any indication!"

But anyways, yeah. Far from being in the Great Red Spot of the Pokémon craze, I was more orbiting around it at a Europa distance, to put it that way. So when I saw you were watching Pokémon for nostalgia and immersion that it was as good a time as any to expose myself to something popular that I sort of missed out on as a kid. The quality of the Norwegian dub is naturally questionable, but I of course respect the work that was put into it nonetheless; I already shared the details with you privately at the time.

I think I was especially fond of the antics of Jessie and James — which figures, they're the adult characters. Overall, though, Pokémon is probably best as a nostalgia watch rather than a first-time watch when you're a grown adult.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is another thing that was popular when I was a kid that I missed out on, and, although certainly flawed, it is genuinely a very good cartoon.

My mom and I are getting very close to the end of Steins;Gate. We're also seven episodes from the end of the first season of Ojamajo Doremi and five from the end of Serial Experiments Lain. Whether we'll continue the extremely long Ojamajo after finishing the 51-episode first season remains to be seen.

Lupin III Part 2 is always a good time. The episode we watched this month was "The Island of Dr. Derange", in which Lupin, Fujiko and Jigen are put on auction, and are bought by Dr. Derange and put on a desert island with killer cyborgs.

Ranma ½ (reboot) is a a very cute show with a very good dub. I like how Ranma and Akane's relationship is developing. There will probably be a season 3, and I look forward to it when it comes out. I already mentioned in a previous thread that SungWon Cho plays Mousse in the dub. Shampoo's voice also stands out to me because of the Chinese accent: I couldn't confirm it but I'd certainly suspect that Grace Lu probably grew up speaking Chinese, because the /ɻ~ʐ/ in how Shampoo says "Ranma" is very distinctive. Shampoo in the English dub of '80s Ranma was voiced by Cathy Weseluck, apparently.

The Squid Girl OVA has been as fun as the main series de geso. It's only three episodes, though, and we've already seen the first two de geso! Ah, cruel fate, that we have almost run out of Squid Girl animated content de geso…

We started Kodocha basically just to have two English dubs in rotation. We've only seen the first episode so far, but it looks very promising, we burst out laughing at several points. I've already seen the first two episodes of Kodocha by myself, but that was years ago, so I don't mind rewatching it. Kodocha is really a bit of a legend among shôjo anime, and many anime fans my age grew up with it, so I look forward to continuing it. Funny Moments™ clip compilations make it seem like a very good time, too.