“One day, in the future, you or your cyborg descendant is going to walk into your home after a hard day doing space things and say: ‘I want to see The Seven Samurai, but I want them all to be badgers working for Nicole Kidman.’ And Siri will ask you: ‘Do you want to press the anime filter?'”
Over at the Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about the last ten years in anime history.
“I have counted through the images in this sequence, and there are no more than 50 of them. If you were running them through a camera as limited animation, in the style of Astro Boy, then they would take about six seconds, but here they have been judiciously stretched over almost a minute. And these are not cheap little sketches, they are beautifully detailed drawings, and the subject matter is exploding worlds, to the extent that they’re almost saying the human eye can’t really comprehend this, so we are going crude.”
Over at All the Anime, I write about just some of the Easter eggs in the final episode of Gunbuster.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBook edition of Anime: A History (Second Edition) has sneaked out into stores two weeks ahead of the paper version’s 7th September street date.
For all those of you who were disappointed that my Gunbuster commentary track was not included on the recent Blu-ray collectors’ edition, Justin Sevakis has uploaded the whole thing up onto YouTube. So you can sync it up at your leisure and hear me wittering for nearly three hours about my favourite anime.
“If a background is really good, it’s taken for granted —viewers can ignore it and just immerse themselves in the world of the movie,” he said. “If it’s bad, they can’t help noticing it, and lose their concentration. When we remember the good times in our lives, we always remember the background as beautiful, even if we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. That is the kind of realistic beauty that I want to depict.”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the scenic artist Nizo Yamamoto.
“These terrible defeats showed up increasingly in the military dispatches as ‘shattered jewels’. It became media shorthand for a battle in which everybody dies, and the enemy is left with nothing but ruins and ashes.”
Over at All the Anime, I discuss some of the wartime allusions in Hideaki Anno’s Gunbuster.
“Jonathan,” said Mamoru Hosoda, “I wonder if you have ever heard of an anime called Gunbuster? Because there’s this scene in Gunbuster where the mecha comes out and stands with its arms folded on the prow of the ship, and that’s such a fantastic moment in anime, and that’s what I was trying to evoke with Belle on the back of that whale.”
Over at All the Anime, I fold my arms and wait for the alien hordes.
“The chorus of voices that sings ‘“’Gunbuster~~~!’”’ in the eycatch is actually a single man, overdubbed repeatedly to sound like a group of people. The voice is that of the composer, Kohei Tanaka, sneaking his way onto the audio as a bit of cost-cutting DIY.”
Over at All the Anime, I investigate Kohei Tanaka’s wonderful score for the Gunbuster series.
“Toren ended up living in a ‘room’ that was actually a walk-in closet that they had put a bed into. And during the time that he was there, the people of Gainax were working on Gunbuster, and decided that they needed a handsome love interest.”
Over at All the Anime, I explain the genesis of Gunbuster‘s love-interest, Smith Toren.
“A split-second shot of Japan from orbit, seen in the opening credits, actually shows the locations of all today’s nuclear power plants underwater, as if the nation has suffered a series of atomic disasters. When Okada mentioned this in a TV interview, it was mysteriously dropped from the eventual broadcast.”
Over at All the Anime, I reveal just some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on Gunbuster: Aim for the Top.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 