howeird | Anime follow-up (Reply)

By some strange miracle, the San Jose Public Library has a copy of Arcadia of My Youth [which I understand is the original Harlock & Emeralda story (?)] in four of their branches , so I went to the main branch and checked out a copy. I've watched enough of it to understand why I have not become a fan of anime, and also to understand why others have. My problem with anime is the kindergarten level of animation. It's more like a slide show than an animation most of the time. Arcadia's art work is a little better, maybe junior high quality, with some moments of inspired high school work. And the script is about what one would expect from a comic book. A pleasant surprise, though, is this copy has grammatically correct English subtitles all the way through, though I caught some cheating on a couple of the translations (which is amusing since I know maybe 20 words of Japanese and only simple syntax).

However, the score is decent, and the story is engaging. If Arcadia had been written as a standard print book with occasional illustrations a la Alice in Wonderland, it may have become one of my favorite juvie sci-fi. I'll watch it all the way through to see how it comes out, but that's probably all. Thanks to

laragoth for the suggestion, and BTW, your costumes were spot on. But you knew that already. :-) And

didjiman, in Arcadia, Emeralda is a flaming redhead, not a blonde - but also, all the red in the costumes and the oncoming sunset bled into the photo you commented on, nothing is wrong with the color balance.