As an anime fan, I often find myself going back to some of my old Saturday morning favorites and thinking about how awesome they would look redone anime style. Truthfully I think I'm looking to capture some of that nostalgia, and update it in a way that makes it relevant to my modern life and interests.
You can imagine, then, that I was initially pretty excited when I found this:
"The X-Men are reunited following the death of a teammate, and are summoned by Charles Xavier to Japan following the abduction of Hisako Ichiki (Armor). There, they confront the U-Men, a lunatic cult that steals and transplants mutant organs to further strengthen their own army, and the battle for justice is on.
The anime will premiere on Animax on April 1."
It looks pretty awesome. The storyline sounds engaging. I am excited. I am also nervous, and cautious. I find myself wondering how much they are going to change the characters, and how these changes will be received by hardcore fans of the original comic and cartoon. I also wonder if the actual series will be any good. Let's face it, the trailer for the Iron Man anime totally rocked but when the series actually came out it wasn't nearly as well-done. Many people were disappointed.
To a certain extent I think that our memories of the old series, and more importantly our memories of our emotions watching the old series tend to get in the way. We remember how excited we were hearing the theme song music, feeling our little hearts thudding along with the beat. We remember how we could get excited during the fight scenes, secure in the innocent knowledge that the good guy always wins. We were young enough that we didn't care about things like artistry, shading, or corny dialogue. The show was awesome and that's all that mattered. The good guys fought evil, and evil always lost.
Today we hope that the anime will capture us in the same way, and bring back some of that feeling, and yet... it never quite manages to reach our expectations. We're no longer children. We notice how things are drawn, whether by hand or CGI. We've learned enough about artistry to pay attention to the shading, coloring, and enough about writing to critique the dialogue. It's harder to suspend our disbelief for the 30 minutes of the show and just immerse ourselves in it. And, unlike so many of the new anime series out there that we can appreciate completely, we have something to compare the adaptations to. It never quite measures up.
I for one will be trying to overcome this phenomenon, and I hope that I can give the X-Men anime adaptaion the chance that it deserves.
No comments:
Post a Comment