Following on from the list of most notable #anime I watched in 2022, here are a few I mostly found disappointing, but generally not so annoying as to actually live rent-free in my head.
1) Macross Frontier - I first watched this in the simulcast fashion of the times when it was released, downloading fansubs week-by-week as it came out. I loved it, and there were even odd bits of synchronicity - I had been sent to a week-long training class in San Francisco, and realized at one point the street
I saw on-screen was the street outside the hotel I was in, perhaps a 30-foot walk from the gym where I was watching the episode (since part of the show takes place in a reconstruction of San Francisco). It created a bizarre sense of connection, and made me wonder a bit how Japanese audiences feel when they watch anime with conspicuous shots of places they've been or or lived in.
Sadly, upon this rewatch the show just didn't feel as...alive, somehow. I was more aware of how it was manipulating
my expectations and emotions as a viewer (and in fairness, that's just something art does; but I'm usually not as conscious of it). It ended up feeling heavy-handed and artificial, and I'm still not sure if the issues is that the series aged poorly or if I did, or if it really only has that impact when it's all still new and surprising?
2) Ranking of Kings - there's a point where the story just starts to drag, and it asks us to sympathize with some people who've done some genuinely monstrous
things for not particularly understandable reasons, AND ALSO throws what looks like Japanese apologism for their colonization of Korea at the viewers. I won't say that it ruined the series for me, but it sure drained a lot of the enthusiasm I felt in the 1st half or so.
3) Lupin III part 6 - I like Lupin, and have pretty much since I started watching the red jacket series on Toonami back in...2001, I think? But if you watch a fair amount of Lupin, you have to admit it isn't all great. I'd say
good filler but weak storylines) and part 5 (which had strong storylines but unimpressive filler episodes).
4) Orbital Children - I'd watched Mitsuo Iso's series #DennouCoil in fansubs maybe a couple seasons after it came out and I was super impressed by it - it was not only entertaining, but genuinely very thoughtful in how it looked at the impact of technologies like ubiquituous distributed computing and its interaction with augmented reality. I didn't know what Orbital Children was about,
but I hoped he'd pull off something similar.
He didn't. Orbital Children looks great, the action moves, the stuff dealing with a Gravity-style disaster in space seems pretty good...but technology-wise he was trying to deal with the idea of post-Singularity AI, and setting aside whether that's even plausible (I don't see any reason to believe human-level AI is in our lifetimes, let alone superhuman AI), he runs into the usual storytelling problem of how to depict something which is smarter than
beings, which is pretty clear way in which these AIs are less capable than humans - we can conceive of objects and even abstract phenomena having minds and personalities, after all; sometimes we don't even think of them as having minds exactly like our own. So the AI angle at the center of this show mostly doesn't work for me, and I don't think giving Iso a full 2-cour series instead of 6 half-hour episodes would have made much difference.
6) To-Y - one of the old 80s OVAs we squeezed in; this
with this show if it didn't have as much of a reputation associated with it from way back when, which probably says more about how anime fandom in the 90s was starved for things to watch.
6) The Legacy of Al-Caral - a science fiction movie which has a couple of interesting ideas but never quite seems to come together script-wise. I don't regret watching it - I think I'd just seen some animated sequences from it and gotten my hopes up too much.
(ah, forgot something else - the link to the prior thread) https://urusai.social/@pcas/109620934587452809
Finally, some other shows I watched and enjoyed this year but don't feel as inclined to write about, at least right now. I number them to help keep track, not so much to indicate which are better or worse:
1. Modern Love Tokyo: He's Playing Our Song (streams on Amazon)
2. My Dress-Up Darling
3. The Faraway Paladin - I wasn't expecting to see an anime Paladin with actual religious sentiment
4. Megaton Musashi S1
Following on from the list of most notable #anime I watched in 2022, here are a few I mostly found disappointing, but generally not so annoying as to actually live rent-free in my head. 1) Macross Frontier - I first watched this in the simulcast fashion of the times when it was released, downloading fansubs week-by-week as it came out. I loved it, and there were even odd bits of synchronicity - I had been sent to a week-long training class in San Francisco, and realized at one point the street
Pasadena CAS