Jinchuu

[wombat1138]

Feh. The back-from-the-dead RK forum has crashed again right after I composed another post. Figured I might as well splat down the text here instead.

...Eh, I'm personally doubtful about the "strict constructionist" approach. IMHO, it's equally possible to make a rote-faithful adaptation that suffers from not being flexible enough to take account of the difference between mediums (i.e., the first Harry Potter movie) as to make an adaptation whose changes improve on the original (the first RK OVA?).

The thing is, I think it's *really* unlikely that whoever owns the current RK animation license would whip up an entire fourth-season treatment of Jinchuu; aside from the economics of whatever it takes to run a regular show on broadcast TV instead of releasing something straight to video, it's just a heck of a lot more animation for people to do.

Would the entire Jinchuu Arc be tellable in OVA format? Most of the OVAs on our shelf are 6-8 episodes, though sometimes there are sequel OVAs that tie closely together (frex, the original Tenchi OVAs and Crest/Banner of the Stars). Thingyhen was fairly plot-dense and took four half-hour eps to cover considerably fewer manga volumes than the surrounding Jinchuu material. Anyone have a guesstimate on the minimum time that would be needed to give justice to Jinchuu, so to speak?

Comments

[chapbook.livejournal.com]

I've friended you, if that's OK with you. If not, let me know and I will cease and desist.

I have not yet seen any of RK, but then, I'm still not done reading Buddha and Nausicaa and viewing Graveyard of the Fireflies, Millenium Actress, Last Exile, CoS and BoS. Indeed, the number of series and films I've seen seem paltry: Vision of Escaflowne (series), Earth Girl Arjuna, 12 Kingdoms, Tokyo Godfathers, and most of the Studio Ghibli films available on DVD in the US.

Would you recommend starting with the manga or the anime incarnations of RK?

Songster

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. There are various schools of thought of this (among which the fighting is vicious because the stakes are so low). Some people say to start with the manga, since that came first and everything else proceeds from there, but ever since the Viz manga translations started coming out, I've discovered rather to my dismay that I don't much like them. Part of this is due to piffly superficial considerations-- I don't like the font they're using, or the way they splat huge sound effects across the panels. Watsuki (the original mangaka) also had huge sound effects to start with, but (as one would expect) did a better job of integrating them into the artistic design, imho.

The first two seasons followed the manga rather closely, but the third season was freshly-plotted filler as the animators waited for the Jinchuu Arc to resolve in the manga. By that time, the viewer ratings had dropped so low that the tv series was cancelled. The two RK OVAs and one movie were made after that, but due to weird licensing splitups, they're under a different title in the US: "Samurai X".

The first OVA ("Samurai X: Trust/Betrayal") can be watched on its own without knowing anything else about RK, but I don't think it would have quite as much impact without having seen the first two tv seasons beforehand, which is the way I started. (I've never bothered watching the third.) Most of the RK timeline takes place ten years after the Meiji restoration; "Trust/Betrayal" is based on an extended flashback from the restoration/revolution that sets up the Jinchuu Arc and is much darker and grimmer, making the tv series look rather frivolous by comparison. OTOH, the tv series provides a fuller introduction to certain secondary characters who also appear in the OVA, but you have to watch the entire first two seasons to get to that point.

I wasn't particularly impressed by the movie, but it was okay. The second OVA ("Reflections") is widely panned for various reasons; definitely don't start there, because it won't make any sense if you're not already familiar with the series. (Some people say it makes even less sense if you *are* already familiar with the series.)

Shortish answer: try to follow the manga chronology via just reading the manga if you like that, or by watching the first two tv seasons if that feels easier. (The first tv season has a bit of filler, but it introduces the main cast; I'm not sure it's possible to just leap directly into the Kyoto Arc at the start of the second season.) If you don't like either the manga or the tv series enough to get to the end of the Kyoto Arc-- they may seem annoyingly fluffy or formulaic at times; the wombat-consort really had to drag me through to that point-- go ahead and watch Trust/Betrayal, which exploded my fragile little mind. If you don't like that either, then you're probably just not meant to like RK. It happens.

Actually, I don't think I have that much anime overlap with your viewing record as stated; I've seen Crest/Banner of the Stars, Grave of the Fireflies, Vision of Escaflowne, and 12 Kingdoms, plus some of the Ghibli movies but not all of them (oddly, Ghibli stuff seem to hit an emotional blind spot for me, in that I can appreciate their technical artistry but don't get viscerally engaged by them; nonetheless, I am looking forward to see what happens with Earthsea).

[dewlettizzle.livejournal.com]

I know it's unlikely that they'll ever animate the Jinchuu arc, especially considering that petition is years old.. but a girl can dream, ne?

I think it's just a shame that they never did, but things happen. :/

[sangotaijiya.livejournal.com]

I love your icon. Kaoru and Yahiko will probably be beating each other up when Kenji gets married.

As for the main topic, I'd say just read the manga. I find all the animated incarnations of RuroKen inferior compared to the original story.

Is RK Dreams down again?

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

RKDreams been blinking in and out all day. Wonder if a backup LJ community would be useful.

...but if all the animated incarnations are inferior, why even bother asking Sony to rehash Jinchuu?

Seriously, ISTR hearing (though possibly in error) that the main reason that both Seisouhen and the third Tenchi OVA were made is because of good US sales for the previously-existing material, but despite that, most of the US fans I know of for those respective series *hate* those. Really, *really* hate those. Intensity of a zillion burning Kamiya Chili Specials, complete violation of everything the previous material stood for, etc. etc. (I have no idea of what fans back in Japan thought about them.) On an anecdotal basis, that suggests to me that those sequels may've been warped by whatever notion the Japanese creators may've had of what American fans would want, and also that they were primarily driven by monetary reward rather than artistic integrity. Whatever that means in the anime world anyway.

(Man alive, how many ripoffs of Evangelion do we need? Gasaraki? Sucked. RahXephon? Sucked. Okay, not complete abject suckitude on all possible levels, but despite the pretty animation and expert voicework, the drama seemed rote and the characters seemed like dead puppets being steered around by plot contingency, with no inner lives of their own. IMHO.)

...though one of the reasons I wasn't terribly impressed by my first encounter with RK was because we were renting our way through the series at the same time as Trigun, and the Kenshin/Sano/Kaoru team struck me as being awfully similar to Vash/Wolfwood/Meryl. And I'm still not completely certain why I dislike the Viz reprints of the RK manga, but ngeh-- I should probably make like fujifunmum and just interleave maigo-chan's translations with the Japanese tankoubons, since I have those anyway.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Wait! Whoa! Huh? You thought Gasaraki sucked?!

Well, YMMV. I wasn't crazy about its not-exactly-atypical bizarro view of U.S./Japan relations, but I quite liked the series as a whole. I thought we'd discussed it?

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Did we? Don't recall... but basically, I didn't get any sense of simpatico from any of Gasaraki's characters, the abstract concepts behind the series didn't strike me as particularly compelling (whatever they were; I don't have much specific memory of them now, other than medieval (p)reincarnation flashbacks), and, well, the whole series just felt to me like a beautifully-crafted but inert lump.

"Sucked" was probably too strong a word, in that I don't think the series lacked production values or overall thoughtfulness, but none of it made me much care one way or the other about what was going on; i.e., Heydt's eight-deadly-words maxim of "I don't care what happens to these people."

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Dammit, Isabel, I'm trying to type!

Anyway. I can see where you're coming from, but early on I felt pretty sympathetic to whatshisname and Miharu's slow figuring out of who they were. For reasons outside the story, this lessens somewhat when whatshisname attacks the Air Force base for no immediately apparent reason, and when Nutso Mishima-Like Guy tries to start a war with the US, seemingly with the story's approval. I did like the overall shape of (most of) the series--it's probably worth noting that, aside from the two movies, I've never seen Evangelion--possibly more for technical reasons than anything else: the geek in me likes hydraulics-using mecha that look workable in the present day, and a combination of that with Japanese culture and alien aliens is the sort of thing I'm hardwired to like.

Eh. I got into Gasaraki during my last great flurry of anime-interest some years ago, which I think mainly encompassed that, Crest of the Stars, NieA_7, The Big O, Cowboy Bebop and Escaflowne; of those, CotS and Escaflowne eventually lost me (the latter for its who-cares ending, the former for always seeming to be about Jinto and Lafiel stuck on some stupid planet).

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

I don't recall any aliens in Gasaraki; various online summaries seem to reinforce my vague memory that the otherness factor was a matter of sketchily-defined occult forces rather than interstellar BEMs. Then again, theoretically the same could be said about Evangelion, though imho Eva's weird-ass antagonists had a much wider range of design/conceptual detail. Of the various angsty quasi-arcane mecha skiffy that come to mind at the moment, RahXephon probably had the most SFnalish alien antags. Maybe.

I'd chide you for not seeing Eva by drawing comparisons to reading Robert Jordan and Dragonlance without reading Tolkien first, except that I've practically never seen any of Gundam.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Well, might be a matter of differing interpretations, but I seem to clearly remember the otherworldly entities at the end of Gasaraki being deeply nonhuman inhabitants of another dimension who weren't, I thought, portrayed in an occult manner, just alien and not particularly knowable. (There were no glowing Trees of Life manifesting anywhere, for one thing.)

Speaking of which, having seen the two end-of-series movies, I have at least a rough idea of them. As to Gundam, well, it's basically the ur-giant-robots-as-space-tanks anime. I've seen the "movie trilogy", which as far as I can tell is basically the original Mobile Suit Gundam series with the credit sequences cut out.

(I've also seen the live-action Gundam movie G-Saviour, which takes place long after the originals. Most people despise it, but I enjoy getting to see photorealistic mecha dueling on the hull of an O'Neill colony, being unsophisticated and all. Of course, when Blu Mankuma appears in an important supporting role, that usually tells you something, even if it's not Mankuma's fault. With great originality, I refer to this phenomenon as the Curse of Blu Mankuma, which strikes many actors, particularly in low-budget genre fare: good and charismatic actor you can't help but like, and everything he's in always sucks. It struck Rutger Hauer sometime in the 1980s, and has slowly infected Max von Sydow.)

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

The Eva movies didn't really have time to build up the characterizations that were developed throughout the preceding episodes, though, and those are a large part of why I like the series-- everyone gets their surface personalities established, and then the surface gets peeled back to expose the various ways in which they're deeply messed up and how it happened. (Ditto for Escaflowne, though to a lesser extent.) Also, Eva's casual use of the term "Pribnow box" utterly enchanted me.

Almost all of the characters in Gasaraki just blurred together for me-- Yuushiro's brothers, some political blahblah to do with Belgistan, and whatever else was going on; I don't think the other members of Yuushiro's mecha team were really individualized at all? Ah well. We can't all like the same things, or life would be boringly agreeable. Can't have that, now can we?

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

"Pribnow box"

??

Ah well. We can't all like the same things, or life would be boringly agreeable. Can't have that, now can we?

Naturellement. But wait: when life's boring, it isn't agreeable. I think.