Redshift #29

Here’s our latest gathering of attention to older anime from around the web, from 1–14 April! There’s a lot of Gundam content this time around, thanks to the anniversary.

As usual, remarks from Feez are in blue and those from Thaliarchus are in red.

NHK broadcast a documentary to mark the fortieth anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam and Cries in Newtype carries a translation of the interviews. As TV documentaries are wont to do, they used short clips, and I often wonder how much retrospective mythologising the participants might be tempted into for this sort of thing, but the range of topics and key figures interviewed here is really impressive! A big shutout to idango for taking on the task to translate this documentary. It’s very interesting to learn that only a single film was initially planned for what would become a beloved movie trilogy.

All the Anime’s company blog has a new article from Jonathan Clements on Mobile Suit Gundam, the events at the premiere of the first Gundam compilation film in 1981, and the shift in anime’s audience reach in the 1980s.

Feez’s series on staff members involved in making Turn A Gundam wraps up with posts on Akino Murata, who played Sochie Heim, and Tetsu Inada, who voiced Harry Ord. 9 April was the show’s twentieth anniversary, and Feez has a post to mark that too; and the Turn A Resource Compilation has been updated, for good measure! Happy twentieth anniversary to my favorite anime!

At Takarabako, Ruben has put up the third and final part of his translation of an extended interview with Toshio Suzuki, former president of Ghibli.

Animehead’s Retroworld has a new extended write-up of the 1987 action series / light-gun advert Red Photon Zillion. I suppose this is a chance for me to plug its charming opening.

Orphan have completed the first English translation for (deep breath) the first of the 1990s trilogy of anime films adapting Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s manga adaptation of the almighty Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Collectr’s post announcing the release is, as usual, also a useful short primer in and of itself.

On Sakugablog, Disgaeamad revisits and reassesses the animated openings for and anime adaptations of ef in the late 2000s. I watched the anime and read the visual novel because the openings caught my eye, so they had to be doing something right.

At Day with the Cart Driver Day and Scamp re-examine the winter 2010 and spring 2010 anime seasons. (See also Podcasting, below.)

Podcasting

The CCP convenes to discuss Metropolis (2001).

Podcastle in the Sky has a new episode considering the 1992 Hashire Melos adaptation (and the source of the source of the source of that adaptation, Schiller’s Die Bürgschaft).

Dynamite in the Brain’s quest to discern which anime can truly be called famous continues with a delve into the output of Tokyo Movie, 1996–2001.

Day with the Cart Driver has a retrospective episode on the winter 2010 anime season, which just scrapes under the wire for inclusion here.

Mobile Suit Breakdown have new episodes out on Mobile Suit Gundam episodes 39 (‘Challia Bull’), 40 (‘Lalah’s Dilemma’) and 41 (‘A Cosmic Glow’).

And welcome to the new podcast Three Times Faster, which is also taking Gundam’s fortieth anniversary as a chance to work through the whole franchise. You can find their first episode (and, below it, an introductory instalment) here.

Translation

Items with no hyperlink have no release post, but can be found on trackers.

• Getter Robo 39 (/m/subs)
• Granzort 14 (GANGO)
• Bonobono (1995) 34 (GANGO)
• Red Baron 13 (SubsDeLaRosa)
• Patalliro 29 (aarinfantasy)
• Attack No. 1 95, 96 (Old Castle)
• Wandering Sun 10, 11 (Old Castle)
• Crayon Shin-chan 19, 20 (BuriBuri)
• Ganba no Bouken 23 (Senritsu)
• Goldfish Warning 53 (Senritsu)
• Sam and Chip’s Great Messy Race (1993) (SES)
• Dragon Quest Dai no Daibouken 37 (tenshi)
• Kindaichi Case Files 137 (Kindaichi Lovers)
• The Three Musketeers 13 (Live-eviL)
• Bakusou Kyoudai Let’s & Go!! WGP 3 (Square)
• Sangokushi Daiichibu Eiyuu-tachi no Yoake (Orphan)

Finally, Orphan are looking for experienced encoders, translators and QCers.

What we’ve been up to

Feez — I recently started a playthrough of Ys VIII now that I’ve had more exposure to the series. As someone who actually likes Celceta, I’m enjoying the updates to the gameplay mechanics and general gameflow. The story and atmosphere are also delivering thus far, so I hope it stays the course or gets better. Super Robot Wars T continues to be a blast, and I agree with Thaliarchus below that this may be the best of the PS4-era of SRW titles. There appears to be more effort put into incorporating all the series and interweaving their plots together. Aside from that, it’s been a very stressful time at home and at work, and my health can’t decide if it wants to stay stable or not. I’m hanging in there though, and I hope everyone else is too! 

Thaliarchus — I’m in Boston for a conference (no, not Anime Boston!), and at the time of writing I’m pretty jetlagged!  But I’ve finally been able to dig in to Super Robot Wars T, which has been a delight (see thread). In keeping with its recent PS4-era cousins it’s an easy game, but it’s on course to be the best of them, in my estimation.

I always try to read something when I fly long-distance, and this time round I read The Girls of Slender Means (Spark) and The Dispossessed (Le Guin). I’d cheerfully recommend both. Now that I’ve arrived, I’ve been tucking in to 1491 (Mann), which pulls together and summarises recent decades of scholarship on the pre-Columbian Americas. It’s a really fine piece of research communication—occasionally marred by some rather sweeping and general ideas about medieval Europe, but then that’s not really Mann’s topic.