Feb
24
Really Old Anime – YouTube
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Cyborg 009
YouTube is a useful resource for sampling old anime not readily available anywhere else. For instance, Nanto Anime (www.youtube.com/user/NantoAnime) has, at time of writing, subtitled episodes of Cyborg 009, Ribon no Kishi, Gegege no Kitaro series #1, Magical Girl Sally series #1, and Rainbow Sentai Robin. (I never heard of the last one either, but it’s like Cyborg 009 with even less sign of having employed a science adviser).
Quality is surprisingly good – full-screen 360p & full speed with an adequate connection, but each episode is split into 3 segments.
Feb
23
Really Old Anime – Books
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I forgot about printed sources when writing the previous post.
If you are interested in anime movies and OVAs from 1983-1995 then “The Anime Movie Guide” by Helen McCarthy (Titan,1996) is just what you need. There’s also “500 Essential Anime Movies – The Ultimate Guide” by Helen McCarthy [2008] (not seen).
The Anime Encyclopedia by Clements & McCarthy is a larger work (pub.2001, 550pp) which claims to cover Japanese animation since 1917. Hovever its coverage of prewar anime is slight; of the first 30 titles in the AniDB list, it namechecks six and gives detail on none. It does review the famous propoganda movie “Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors” (1945) and its 1943 prequel, but almost all other reviews are post-1960. There’s a later edition (2006, 896pp) (not seen) which reportedly has “added quite a bit of material on prewar and wartime anime.”
Feb
22
Really Old Anime
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I’ve been compiling lists of the pre-war and pre-1970 animation from Japan:
• A list of short pre-war animation from Japan. These titles can be found on a recent DVD/DVD set. Link to Old Anime table (work in progress.) A few samples are also on crunchyroll.com/anime
• A page in the blog with a list of post-war anime, mainly movies: /WEBSITE/Old Anime (work in progress)
For the following AniDB links you need to use MS Internet Explorer, which displays the filter box properly.
• List of old TV anime series, from the 1960’s onwards: external link
or short URL (thanks Giovanni Wassen)
• List of Movies and OVAs: External link
This is a very full list with many titles for each year from 1917 onwards.
Feb
19
Attack no 1 – Italy
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Was fiddling around with my satellite receiver and found that I could get Italia1 (a channel that broadcasts some Japanese animation) on 13 deg E which is one of the easiest satellites to pick up.
Kozue
Also found via Google that the channel “RAI Gulp” on 13 deg. E. (FTA ) broadcasts anime, including Attack no 1 a.k.a “Mimi e la nazionale della pallavolo” on at 19.00 today.
Furthermore, I saw a feed for Italian Ebay which demonstrates that the whole series is available on Italian DVDs and you can buy them for reasonable sums of money. This is a classis sports anime series which I waatched several times in its German version “Mila Superstar”.
Feb
17
Online manga
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Akira (Aoi Hana)
If like me you are vaguely aware of online manga scanlations (that’s fan translations of Japanese comic magazines, to the un-initiated) you might be surprised to find how much this has mushroomed in the past few years. I have been following the manga versions of a couple of anime that I liked, so was aware that there was online manga, but not how much.
In fact, the quantity of scanlated manga is comparable with the higher-profile and more contentious quantity of digital fansub anime.
At this point I could give a lengthy guide with links to the databases, the scanlator’s websites, the subgenres and so forth, but since this would involve re-hashing much material from other sites I’ll save myself the bother and let the interested reader search it out for her/himself.
Freed from the the commercial constraints of animation, the range of material and subject matter in manga is wider than in anime, and so is the quality. If you are fortunate enough to find a series whose art, story and characters you really like, downloading and reading successive chapters can become highly addictive.
Enjoy.
Feb
8
Site outages
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Apologies for any site outages you may have noticed in tle last couple of days. The blog has now been updated to the latest MySQL and Wordpress versions.