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May. 17th, 2010 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI finished Pluto a week or so back - I've been waiting to post on it until I could also get my hands on the original Astro Boy story "The Greatest Robot on Earth" to compare/contrast. My deep thoughts, let me show you them!
1. VERY IMPORTANT POINT - in "The Greatest Robot on Earth," Gesicht/Gerhardt SPARKLES. When he showed up covered in gold alloy, all "I HAVE COME TO PUT THE TROUBLEMAKER BEHIND BARS," I pretty much fell over laughing and could not take anything seriously for the next twenty pages. This was an unanticipated consequence of reading Pluto first!
2. Atom and Uran look much more like robots in the original - the entire theme of the difficulty of distinguishing between robot and human seems to be something that Urasawa was a lot more interested in playing up - but they act much more like normal children, headstrong and bickering and bratty, than the preturnaturally compassionate and wise Atom and Uran of Pluto. Uran also plays a much larger thematic role in the story than she does in Pluto, although that's also partly because the story has a smaller scope. But I wish she'd gotten more to do than she did at the end of Pluto.
3. Epsilon is probably the character who translates most directly from the original story across to Pluto, not to mention one of the most surprisingly complex characters in the original. (Also I guess I can't twit Urasawa too much for his hordes of non-individualized small children, given that they come straight out of Tezuka.)
4. Urasawa's translation of the very literal "and now Atom has TEN TIMES as much horsepower!" to "and now Atom has the power of HATRED!" is kind of a fascinating one, and, I think, says a lot about Urasawa's reading of the themes of "The Greatest Robot On Earth." The Iraq War thing is all Urasawa, though. As is the kind of hilariously sledgehammery "AMERICA BAD!"
5. I thought I was going to get out of Pluto okay without coming close to crying! Like, the Sahad stuff was heartbreaking in earlier volumes but I wanted more out of him in this one, and the Abullah-Goji-Bora thing was kind of unnecessarily convoluted, and the most interesting robots were already dead, and I was reasonably sure that Urasawa was not about to blow up the world, and I was almost at the end . . . and then he pulled that parallel-flashback of Tenma-and-Atom and Gesicht-and-his-kid, and my heartstrings went PAM and I made ridiculous wobbly faces on the subway. Damn you, Urasawa!
Speaking of Urasawa, I have also now watched through the first five episodes of Yawara: A Fashionable Judo Girl. And it is extremely bizarre transitioning from the EPIC GLOBAL THEMES of Urasawa's other work to a cheerful teenage sports comedy! It is especially weird because generally Urasawa's big on exploring psychological motivations and the consequences of actions, and while Yawara is relatively realistic for Japanese comedy, it is still totally over-the-top by Urasawa standards - Yawara's grandfather wanders around kidnapping people and throwing them into lockers and staging getting hit by trucks so that Yawara will have to compete, Sayaka BEATS UP EVERYONE and goes into HISTRIONIC FITS because she is THE RIVAL, Matsuda lurks in bushes and around corners and gets tossed out of buses . . .
Anyway, I kind of hate Yawara's grandfather, but besides that it is entertaining! I do not think that all the judo guys perving on Yawara is as funny as the animators think it is. Predictably, I think Sayaka is awesome. I like Matsuda despite his creepy-stalker behavior on the bus, I think mostly because his character design reminds me of Kenji. I pretty much died when Kazamatsuri was posing on the balcony in his terrifyingly tiny briefs, so I will be okay with him too as long as the animators continue to take him as seriously as they have been, which is to say: not at all.
1. VERY IMPORTANT POINT - in "The Greatest Robot on Earth," Gesicht/Gerhardt SPARKLES. When he showed up covered in gold alloy, all "I HAVE COME TO PUT THE TROUBLEMAKER BEHIND BARS," I pretty much fell over laughing and could not take anything seriously for the next twenty pages. This was an unanticipated consequence of reading Pluto first!
2. Atom and Uran look much more like robots in the original - the entire theme of the difficulty of distinguishing between robot and human seems to be something that Urasawa was a lot more interested in playing up - but they act much more like normal children, headstrong and bickering and bratty, than the preturnaturally compassionate and wise Atom and Uran of Pluto. Uran also plays a much larger thematic role in the story than she does in Pluto, although that's also partly because the story has a smaller scope. But I wish she'd gotten more to do than she did at the end of Pluto.
3. Epsilon is probably the character who translates most directly from the original story across to Pluto, not to mention one of the most surprisingly complex characters in the original. (Also I guess I can't twit Urasawa too much for his hordes of non-individualized small children, given that they come straight out of Tezuka.)
4. Urasawa's translation of the very literal "and now Atom has TEN TIMES as much horsepower!" to "and now Atom has the power of HATRED!" is kind of a fascinating one, and, I think, says a lot about Urasawa's reading of the themes of "The Greatest Robot On Earth." The Iraq War thing is all Urasawa, though. As is the kind of hilariously sledgehammery "AMERICA BAD!"
5. I thought I was going to get out of Pluto okay without coming close to crying! Like, the Sahad stuff was heartbreaking in earlier volumes but I wanted more out of him in this one, and the Abullah-Goji-Bora thing was kind of unnecessarily convoluted, and the most interesting robots were already dead, and I was reasonably sure that Urasawa was not about to blow up the world, and I was almost at the end . . . and then he pulled that parallel-flashback of Tenma-and-Atom and Gesicht-and-his-kid, and my heartstrings went PAM and I made ridiculous wobbly faces on the subway. Damn you, Urasawa!
Speaking of Urasawa, I have also now watched through the first five episodes of Yawara: A Fashionable Judo Girl. And it is extremely bizarre transitioning from the EPIC GLOBAL THEMES of Urasawa's other work to a cheerful teenage sports comedy! It is especially weird because generally Urasawa's big on exploring psychological motivations and the consequences of actions, and while Yawara is relatively realistic for Japanese comedy, it is still totally over-the-top by Urasawa standards - Yawara's grandfather wanders around kidnapping people and throwing them into lockers and staging getting hit by trucks so that Yawara will have to compete, Sayaka BEATS UP EVERYONE and goes into HISTRIONIC FITS because she is THE RIVAL, Matsuda lurks in bushes and around corners and gets tossed out of buses . . .
Anyway, I kind of hate Yawara's grandfather, but besides that it is entertaining! I do not think that all the judo guys perving on Yawara is as funny as the animators think it is. Predictably, I think Sayaka is awesome. I like Matsuda despite his creepy-stalker behavior on the bus, I think mostly because his character design reminds me of Kenji. I pretty much died when Kazamatsuri was posing on the balcony in his terrifyingly tiny briefs, so I will be okay with him too as long as the animators continue to take him as seriously as they have been, which is to say: not at all.
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Date: 2010-05-17 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 06:25 pm (UTC)Without going too much into spoilers, that indecision is one of the things that kept me watching Yawara! to finish the initial story arc. I think it's especially frustrating to watch a series about a young woman with a lot of incredible natural talent and years of good training who seems so desperate to throw it all away for a 'normal' life -- in this case, Japanese housewife life -- when everyone around her (both rivals and fans) is so desperate to see her really give it her all. It took a lot of effort to get past my knee-jerk reaction of constantly wanting to yell at the screen 'Why are you selling yourself so short, Yawara?!' But as the story gradually shows, judo hasn't exactly been a great thing for Yawara or her family, so it makes some sense that she's longing for some semblance of stable domesticity.
One of the comments I've seen about Yawara! is that the real conflict in the story is between Yawara's amazing natural skill and her happiness...or rather, her unhappiness. From what I can tell, it was a new and interesting idea for a sports manga at the time, but I'm not sure if that's a conflict that Urasawa's writing could sustain for umpty-eleven episodes or manga chapters. *shrugs*
(Also, Kazamatsuri is definitely not taken very seriously in the anime, which is a good thing. In the manga, from what I've seen, he gives off a much more skeevy vibe. But it may amuse you to know that his voice actor was the dub voice of Pierce Brosnan's James Bond in Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies.)
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Date: 2010-05-17 06:43 pm (UTC)Huh. That's an interesting point - and one that makes me wonder if the story becomes played less as a comedy as it goes forth, because that really is a conflict worth exploring.
(Hahaha okay good. Yeah, I was pretty nervous about his skeeviness from the time he first showed up in previews. THE HAIR! It sends off skeevy signals all by itself! Although I guess it was acceptable in the early 90s.)
(Oh also! Did you ever get the email I sent you last week?)