this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [Week 7] (ani.social)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by wjs018@ani.social to c/anime@ani.social
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A new Monday means it is a new general discussion thread. We are at or near the halfway point of the season for most of the winter shows. I plan on dedicating next week's thread to a midterm report of sorts, so look forward to it! In the meantime, please use this thread to talk about what you have watched recently, any questions you might have, recommendations, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Like usual, a couple examples:

  • Are there any shows with more suggestive eyecatches than Bravern?
  • Is Metallic Rouge some elaborate experiment to see how long an audience will watch pretty nonsense?
  • Is Kensuke from Dungeon Meshi basically a Pokemon that Laios uses to fight?

As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).

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[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mentioned in a past comment a while back that I made a catalog of my anime. One of the observations I found while making it is that everything except for one movie had an entry on the English language Wikipedia already. That movie is Gundress from 1999. According to my personal journal, I watched this once back in 2014, apparently, but I remembered nothing about it, so I loaded it up recently and rewatched it.

The movie has that "sort of hard to follow if you don't already know the source material" kind of feel -- although I think this is the original work? I checked the Japanese Wikipedia entry about it after watching it. Sticking the article through a translator, there's a description of a seriously screwed up initial showing and mismanagement of production with the film being finished after it aired in theaters initially. The version I have is finished, of course; if half the movie wasn't colored in I'd definitely have remembered that!

The DVD menu prominently credits it as "Masamune Shirow's Gundress", but I'm not sure what his role in the production actually was. He's listed in the opening credits for 設定協力 which got translated to English as "Characters Designed by" -- but different people are credited with character and mech design in the end credits. A literal translation is something like "setting cooperation".

There's definitely a number of familiar elements with some buildings reminiscent of Dominion Tank Police, mech suits that reminded me of designs in GitS:SAC, as well as thermoptic camouflage, cable-based cyborg communication (jacked into the neck), cyberdiving, etc. coming up during the story.

Unusually, this anime features a Little Arabia enclave within the Japanese "Bayside City" the story is set in and one of the main characters is Muslim. I think this may be the only time I've seen Arabic script in anime -- although I don't know what it says.

I clipped some screenshots and stacked them up so you can see what it looks like, if you're curious: https://files.catbox.moe/qtsa0d.png (~8MB)

[–] wjs018@ani.social 2 points 9 months ago

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this movie at all. As for Masamune Shirow, he is listed as the character designer on AniList. However, I am not sure why that would be a prominent enough role to get his name in the title. There has to be some nuance that isn't being captured in the job title. My guess is that character designer probably meant something very different for this production than what character designer would mean in a production today.

Looking at some art and stills, I totally see the Ghost in the Shell comparison. I just looked up GitS now and had no idea that the original manga was published all they way back in 1989. For some reason I thought it more like the mid 90's. However, I guess with how long things took to trickle overseas back then, it was years after things came out, so I probably got the wrong impression of its release. When it was "new" to me, isn't when it was actually new.

I am trying to think of other instances of clearly Muslim or Arabic populations within anime and there are very few I can think of. It is easier to think of "Muslim-coded" people that bear likeness to Arab populations, but set in a fictional world, so not really. I haven't watched much Gundam, but I am guessing that it might be most represented in that series as, from what I have seen of it, they tend to pull characters from around the globe.

Interesting little piece of media. Thanks for the info on it!