#Daicon Film

[animenostalgia]

Happy 40th Anniversary to the original Daicon 4 Film! It was first screened at Daicon IV opening ceremonies in Japan on August 20th, 1983. Hideaki Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga and Takami Akai would later go on to found Gainax. You can read a translation of the production report from 1983 published in now defunct Animec magazine on Zimmerit here!

[daiconarchives]

DAICON IV cels

[knchr]

ハイパーペーパートイ 1/72スケールマットアロー１号（DAICON FILM版 帰ってきたウルトラマン）

[cruelangel94]

On the 20th of August 1983, Daicon IV was released. It was made by Daicon Film, a 12 man studio with the 3 founding members being Hideaki Anno, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and Takami Akai. The studio would later go on to become Gainax studios.

Happy 40th Anniversary! 🎉

[aeonmagnus]

Transformers: Arcee: Dreams of Daicon

[mediaomnivore]

If you haven’t watched the fan-made short Arcee: Dreams of Daicon, it’s a “run, don’t walk” situation.

[bangjiazheng]

Daicon Film's Return Of Ultraman - 1080p HD [English Subs]

[rawafmovies]

-☠️

[moonlit-trolls]

<- is afflicted by emotion

[patzweigz]

there's actually an article about otaku culture at the time i had in mind when saying this!

all your issues with modern anime are this cunt's fault btw

[canmom]

Do you think Hideaki Anno is right-wing or is it too difficult to tell from his works?

Haha that's a question.

I'll focus on nationalism rather than trying to get into, say, gender politics here, since that's the accusation that most seems to follow Anno around.

Anno's politics are... hard to pin down from his work alone, I think. He's like... a prototypical case of that generation of 'apolitical' otaku that followed after the Anpo generation, with Eva pretty much the definitive statement of the 90s psychological turn. But that said... I can definitely see the argument that there are nationalist themes in some of his works like Gunbuster, though I definitely don't buy every reading in this series (lots of dubious kanji reading). He definitely has that otaku fascination with war machinery and war media (apparently he's a big fan of The Battle for Okinawa and watched it over 100 times), which can easily blend into imperialist ideology.

But there's complications here. For example, the Animekritik series cites the setting of Gunbuster in Okinawa as something formative to the nationalist ideology they are trying to illustrate - in part in relation to the ongoing controversy over American military bases in Okinawa. Anno has at least been on record as saying he's disinterested in Western culture, and I can see the reading of Jung-Freud as an external Other who is shown up by the Japanese girls, somehow simultaneously representing the USSR, Europe and the States. But anti-Americanism in Japan can come in both left and right wing flavours (c.f. Anpo). Communists want the Americans out too! Portraying Okinawa as a military training camp in a Japan-led military coalition certainly comes across as a more nationalist take on that whole matter, but I feel like it's got about the same level of serious nationalist commitment as Doctor Who putting random British people all over space.

When Gainax has played around with nationalist imagery it's usually been in a kind of ironic sendup way - see Ash's writeup about the Aikoku Sentai Dai Nippon controversy, in which Daicon Film staff were disdainful at the accusation that their goofy toku film reflected a genuine nationalist sentiment. While Imaishi takes it further, a lot of Anno's work is also about playfully reappropriating past works. In Anno's case a lot of that is classic tokusatsu, Ultraman in particular, and also Leiji Matsumoto's scifi, notably Space Battleship Yamato, which, well... you know the deal there lol. But it's not so simple to go from that to 'Anno is a nationalist'.

Eva doesn't tend to attract these accusations, but I recall the controversy came back around with Shin Godzilla, though to my mind it's hard to find a straightforwardly nationalist reading of that movie. (It's a film about the experience of the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, and it's critical of Japan's bureaucracy, but equally one where the JSDF repeatedly get their shit handed to them and civilian infrastructure is what actually stops Godzilla - not to mention Godzilla is painted as quite a tragic figure here!) It all feels pretty tenuous.

I haven't seen as many of Anno's live action films as I'd like, so I can't comment as much on the more recent Shin films, Love & Pop, Shiki-Jitsu etc. And it's always possible for subtler allusions to slip by the anglophone viewer. Still, I don't personally think Anno's post-Gunbuster work is particularly nationalist in outlook. I certainly haven't seen any evidence of him favouring, say, war crime denial, anti-Korean sentiment, remilitarisation, etc etc. - he's definitely not as dubious a figure as someone like Hajime Isayama. But it's not like, anti-nationalist either! It's just kind of hard to read in those terms.

So I lean towards your second option, I'm not convinced he's a nationalist or particularly right wing. He happily associates with Hayao Miyazaki, who's definitely not a right wing guy. But Anno'll also let hilariously cooked stuff like whatever On A Gloomy Night was supposed to be into the Animator Expo. So I don't think he's particularly left wing either, he's no Ikuni! But Anno's fiction is very individual focused, full of psychoanalytic themes and internal conflict. He can vividly portray trauma and complex power dynamics. There's a lot to appreciate in works like Eva from a left-wing angle. I don't really know why this association of nationalism follows him around.

Idk, maybe there's a bunch of interviews I'm missing! Presumably you have a reason for asking this question...

[centrally-unplanned]

Ever ask yourself, "Man, I love it when creatives get into mudslinging shitfight about their work and try to cancel each other, I wonder if I could read over 3000 words about that happening in a niche subculture in Japan 40 years ago?"

So have I! So I wrote that.

Before Gainax, before even Daicon IV, the "Daicon Films" group, lead by Toshio Okada (with Hideaki Anno working on special effects) made the tokusatsu film "Aikoku Sentai Dai Nippon/Patriotic Squadron Great Japan", where nationalist Japanese Sentai heroes fight off the Red Menace via ridiculous antics. It was aired at sci fi convention TOKON-8 in 1982, and was a huge hit.

And it also sparked a two-year slugfest over whether or not it was fascist propaganda via magazine editorials and con panels that became the talk of the town of the SF community.

Half of this article is history. If you want scenes of Toshio Okada leading con audiences in a dance parody mocking the victims of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki atomic bombings - depending on who you ask of course - you are going to get that! If you have seen your share of Social Media fandom drama you will feel right at home.

But since this is me, its not really about that - instead I am hoping to use the drama as a lens to understand the radical changes happening in Japanese "subculture" at the time. This occurred right in the middle of the rise of "Otaku" as a coherent identity, and the undercurrent of the spat was that Japan's nerds were changing, and not everyone was okay with it. Some of the contours of that shift can be seen in the criticisms being leveled by both sides.

I thought about subtitling it "The Anpo Generation Tries to Cancel the New Anime Century" but I quaked in the face of being that insufferable. I probably shouldn't have.

Anyway for the ~5 people who may eventually read this, as always if you see typos or have comments let me know. Also shout-out to @himitsusentaiblog, the one other person who has ever talked about this film on Tumblr.

[knchr]

ハイパーペーパートイ 1/72スケールマットジャイロ（DAICON FILM版 帰ってきたウルトラマン）

[jeeperso]

An homage to the groundwork fan-film that was Daicon IV

which was done by the people who would go on to create Studio Gainax, and would be referenced in other works, such as FLCL

I'm not quite sure what I just watched, but it is rad as hell!

[xtrain]

1979-1990 Anime Primer

I wrote this primer to serve as an introduction to those new to 80s anime. It features 50 titles (plus one bonus title), all of which are either films or OVAs for ease of viewing. Please note that Studio Ghibli films from this era were purposefully excluded since they are already so well-known (I consider Nausicaä to be pre-Ghibli).

1979    Aim for the Ace!

1979    Galaxy Express 999　

1979    Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro　

1981    Ashita no Joe 2

1981    The Door into Summer 1981    The Fantastic Adventures of Unico　

1981    Mobile Suit Gundam: The Movie Trilogy

1982    Arcadia of My Youth

1982    Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie

1983    Urusei Yatsura Movie 1: Only You

1984    Birth

1981    Daicon IV

1984    Macross: Do You Remember Love?

1984    Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

1984    The Star of Cottonland

1984    Urusei Yatsura Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer

1985    Angel’s Egg

1985    GoShogun: The Time Étranger

1985    Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko

1985    Megazone 23

1985    Minky Momo: La Ronde in My Dream 1985    Night on the Galactic Railroad 1986    Fist of the North Star

1986    Megazone 23 Part II

1986    Project A-ko

1986    Windaria

1987    Black Magic M-66

1987    Bubblegum Crisis

1987    Devilman: The Birth/Demon Bird

1987    Dirty Pair: Project Eden

1987    Neo-Tokyo

1987    Robot Carnival

1987    Royal Space Force: Wings of the Honnêamise

1987    To-y

1987    Twilight of the Cockroaches

1988    Akira

1988    Dominion Tank Police

1988    Dragon’s Heaven

1988    Gunbuster

1988    Legend of the Galactic Heroes: My Conquest is the Sea of Stars

1988    One Pound Gospel

1988    Vampire Princess Miyu

1989    The Five Star Stories

1989    Gosenzo-sama Banbanzai!

1989    Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

1989    Patlabor: The Movie

1989    Venus Wars

1990    Cyber City Oedo 808

1990    Nineteen 19

1990    Record of Lodoss War

BONUS    Blue Blazes

[mediaomnivore]

The joke of the name DAICON is divine. It means both "big con[vention]" but is also a homophone for daikon, as in the Japanese radish. Thus the spaceship radish in the intro animation.