New listening thread means the return of intermittent posts about long forgotten films/shows, kind of forgot about the other thread at the ends, oops. But I’ll be doing something similar here again, I won’t have a home post but I’ll try to watch things a bit more regularly (I hope). So, thanks @omk3 for hosting the thread!!
Last night I ventured into that deep abyss of YouTube again and watched one of those long forgotten OVAs. I won’t list it here because I don’t think it’s really supposed to be on YT, but that lonely YT vid from several years ago is probably the only video of existence of this anime, these things were usually released in extremely limited quantities on media that existed for like three months way back in '87 or something
Two episodes made up the anime, at about 40 mins each. I think I fully understood about 30% of it, and can stretch that to about 50% with understanding from context of the images. Every time I watch/read something it reminds me how far I’ve have still yet to go.
It was, what I think, to be about some kind of ancient curse set down by Izanagi I think… I think, there was so much info dump from the narrator that I was lost in about 5 seconds, then happily pointing at the screen because I recognise who Izanagi and Amaterasu are. Magic demons, ancient Buddha monk powers, Oni (specifically Gakki it seems) and magic space cosmic time powers(??) All make for a good recipe.
And all this ties into modern day (well the then modern day of the late 80s) and some investigator guy looking into this curse for reasons I couldn’t understand, and then some kid who turns out to be a target of the curse because he resembles a hero of ancient times. It was a pretty standard dark fantasy plot of any 80s anime really.
What I love about this era is that there is always an absolute mad moment (or several) somewhere along the line. Everything seems normal, happy sort of thing then BAM super intense gore out of nowhere, then everyone goes back to mundane life like they didn’t just see Takashi-kun get his entrails sprawled around a tree like tinsel
Really wish there was a modern equivalent for this type of thing, I love dark mythology stories but they seemed to die out at some point. One thing I miss that I don’t see in modern anime anymore is that one scene of an anime that makes you stare at the screen in wonder at what in the ever-loving 何 did you just witness.
Though the productions standards aren’t always great for these old OVAs - tincan sound, lips that move before the words can even start, still pictures with EXCESSIVE shaky camera, I think the biggest thing is the really sharp cuts between scenes, it never feels like the scene is properly finished before they blast through another ten cuts.
One thing though is that it means all my reading about Japanese myths has paid off, most of the words I could recognise were mythology words, so that’s good. Now, if only I could understand normal, everyday conversations that’d be great.