Why Didn't we have cartoons like this growing up?
My dear wife was watching Anime yesterday night, and because I always look for any excuse to cuddle with her, I watched too.
It was this vintage sci-fi Anime series from the early 1970s called "Unchu Senkan Yamato" It was a subtitled edition and I must say I was amazed! Even though the animation isn't as polished as the ones we see in Anime of the present day (you can sometimes see smudges on the animation cels), the story writing was definitely top notch!
In the UK, we had nothing from that era to compare! I think the most powerful scene was one where the crew managed to capture one of their enemies. Now in comparable shows from the 1970s, you'd never see your heroes lose control, but in this cartoon, we see one of our heroes fall apart and attack the prisoner with a knife! Granted poor Sumumu Kodai is one traumatized fellow, but to see him totally fall apart and attack an unarmed man with a knife was just shocking.
But WOW! What progressive writing! I am so sold on this series!
Other interesting parts about it.
-It is progressive for a cartoon today, and it was written in the early 1970s~!
-There is plenty of violence, yet it never seems gratuitous...you feel sad in fact
-You can identify with both the heroes and the villains
The only thing that I had problems with, although it's mostly cultural...
-Those characters, while very expressive of other emotions (the get mad, they express desperations, and even cry when pushed to extremes) have not a single romantic bone in their bodies! Can you imagine a guy never kissing his girlfriend? That's just ABNORMAL. But then again, some people may think the Scottish custom of wife carrying is strange too...but I digress.
Now if you'll excuse me folks...I'm going to go carry my wife!
It was this vintage sci-fi Anime series from the early 1970s called "Unchu Senkan Yamato" It was a subtitled edition and I must say I was amazed! Even though the animation isn't as polished as the ones we see in Anime of the present day (you can sometimes see smudges on the animation cels), the story writing was definitely top notch!
In the UK, we had nothing from that era to compare! I think the most powerful scene was one where the crew managed to capture one of their enemies. Now in comparable shows from the 1970s, you'd never see your heroes lose control, but in this cartoon, we see one of our heroes fall apart and attack the prisoner with a knife! Granted poor Sumumu Kodai is one traumatized fellow, but to see him totally fall apart and attack an unarmed man with a knife was just shocking.
But WOW! What progressive writing! I am so sold on this series!
Other interesting parts about it.
-It is progressive for a cartoon today, and it was written in the early 1970s~!
-There is plenty of violence, yet it never seems gratuitous...you feel sad in fact
-You can identify with both the heroes and the villains
The only thing that I had problems with, although it's mostly cultural...
-Those characters, while very expressive of other emotions (the get mad, they express desperations, and even cry when pushed to extremes) have not a single romantic bone in their bodies! Can you imagine a guy never kissing his girlfriend? That's just ABNORMAL. But then again, some people may think the Scottish custom of wife carrying is strange too...but I digress.
Now if you'll excuse me folks...I'm going to go carry my wife!