#with all the Japanese light novels that have been getting translated in the U.S. recently-

[bunnymajo]

Hey Bunny! I was wondering; Do you have any idea if the novel for "Ocean Waves" is one to one with the Ghibli film version of it? I recently watched a video about the unintended queer subtext between Taku and Yutaka and I was wondering whether this was something that wasn't in the light novel and added by Ghibli, or if it had more focus in the Light Novel which was downplayed in the Ghibli movie (like how so many 70s shoujo had to basically pull a no homo in the final chapter)

I don't unfortunately (I was hoping those scans I did years ago would peak someone's interest enough into translating it, but I don't think it did as far as I know) if there is a translation for the novel out there I'd love to read it.

The love triangle is still present in the novel from what I can tell looking at Japanese wikipedia so it's very possible it could be one or the other. I'm looking at the author's (Saeko Himuro) body of work and it looks like she's famous for writing dramas aimed at girls/women and mentions Moto Haigo as one of her inspirations. Just from that I'm willing to bet that the novel has more subtext between Taku & Yutaka than the ghibli film lets on haha

Pretty sure I know the video you're talking about, definitely my favorite video regarding Ocean Waves!

[nomadicism]

What is the corect order to watch the anime Yamato that you have talk about? And same with Lotgh (about the order if theres more than one adaptation), also, you know where can someone find the novels on english?? After reading a lot of your posts on both animes I'm really curious to know more about them :)

Hello, thank you for the Ask!

I’m so glad that you are curious about Yamato and LotGH! (◕ᴗ◕✿)

In reverse order:

I. Legend of the Galactic Heroes

[ 銀河英雄伝説  Ginga Eiyū Densetsu ] by Yoshiki Tanaka [ 田中 芳樹 Tanaka Yoshiki ]

Novels: Originally published between 1982 – 1987. Volumes 1-8 of the 10 volume novel series are available in English, published by Viz Media through their Haikasoru imprint. The translations of the novels are by Daniel Huddleston (vol. 1-3, and 7), Tyran Grillo (vol. 4-6), and Matt Treyvaud (vol. 8). Presumably the 9th and 10th volumes will be translated and released in the coming year. They can be purchased at RightStuf Anime, Amazon, Barnes & Noble all carry them. Amazon also has a Kindle version available, and of course used copies for sale as well. The Gaiden (Side Stories) novels have not been translated and released in English yet.

Anime, recently released: LotGH: Die Neue These is the remake (maybe qualifies as reboot?) of original series and there are quite a few differences (so far) if you were to compare them episode by episode. It is streaming in Japanese with English subtitles on CrunchyRoll and Funimation. Funimation also has the English dub. I strongly recommend watching this first, it’s only 12 episodes (first season as it were). If you love it enough that you can’t wait for more, then dive into the original. The BD/DVD of Season 1 is available for pre-order on RightStuf and Funimation.

Anime OG Run: Three films, the main OVA series, and two OVA side story series. HIDIVE is streaming all of these in Japanese with English subtitles. HIDIVE organizes them together under “Legend of the Galactic Heroes” with Season One being the 110 episodes that comprise the main OVA series, and “Season Two” (also called LotGH: Gaiden) being the combination of the two OVA side story series with 52 episodes, and Movie 1, Movie 2, and Movie 3 are the films titled “LotGH: My Conquest is the Sea of Stars”, “LotGH: Overture to a New War”, and “LotGH: Golden Wings”. Worth noting that Golden Wings was released before Overture to a New War, HIDIVE has them ordered chronologically.

Note: on the chance anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the term, ‘OVA’ refers to ‘Original Video Animation’ (called OAV in the U.S.) and indicates that the series was direct-to-video, rather than a television series. In the early days of “Finally we’re getting officially licensed and translated anime in the U.S.!” (e.g. early 90s), most of the anime brought over during that time were OVAs. OVAs are generally higher quality and more adult than anime made for broadcast.

II. LotGH Watch Order

Good luck! You won’t go wrong just watching the entire main OVA series all the way through…all 110 episodes! BUT, the films and the Gaiden OVAs take place before and during the main OVA series.

Hardcore LotGH fans might recommend differently, but you could probably watch in the following order:

The first film—My Conquest is the Sea of Stars—is a prelude to the main OVA series. (Movie 1 on HIDIVE)

The third film—Overture to a New War—or—first two episodes of the main OVA series. This film is a remake of the first two episodes and connects with the first film. (Movie 2 on HIDIVE)

Episodes 1-54 of the main OVA series.

The second film—Golden Wings. (Movie 3 on HIDIVE)

Episodes 55-110 of the main OVA series.

Episodes 1-52 of the two Gaiden OVA series as ordered on HIDIVE (called Season Two).

HIDIVE has their “Season Two” ordered a little differently as the two separate OVA Gaiden series are comprised of short stories that cover the early military careers of Reinhard and Yang. They are not ordered by release date, nor ordered relative to which series they were apart of, basically, the ordering on HIDIVE jumps back and forth between the two Gaiden series. It’s weird, but it makes sense.

The first arc—Spiral Labyrinth—of the second Gaiden series comes first, listed as ep 1-14. Then the first arc—The Silver White Valley—from the first Gaiden series comes next, listed as episodes 15-18. After that, the three middle arcs from the second Gaiden series—The Mutineer, The Duelist, and The Retriever—are listed as episodes 19-30. Following is the second arc of the first Gaiden series—Dreams of Morning, Songs of Night—listed as episodes 31-34, and then the final (fourth) arc of the first Gaiden series—A Hundred Billion Stars, a Hundred Billion Lights—listed as episodes 35-46. Finally, the final (fifth) arc of the second Gaiden series—The Third Tiamat Battle—listed as episodes 47-48, and the third arc of the first Gaiden series—Dishonor/Disgrace—is listed as episodes 50-52.

As they are side stories, they take place at different times relative to the narrative of the main OVA series. Personally, I think they are better to watch after finishing the main OVA series, but others may disagree.

III. Space Battleship Yamato / Star Blazers

[ 宇宙戦艦ヤマト Uchū Senkan Yamato ] by Leiji Matsumoto [ 松本 零士 Matsumoto Reiji ] and Yoshinobu Nishizaki [ 西崎 義展 Nishizaki Yoshinobu ]

I know very little about the original series (1974-1975) other than the basic facts easily found on Wikipedia. I have seen a handful of episodes from the original series, both Japanese and the English dubbed Star Blazers. The true fans of this series can be found on Tumblr and they can answer about the watch order for the original better than I. I can tell you that there were three TV series total for original, so the first run and then two sequel series in the 80s. Then there are several movies and an OVA. There was also a live action movie which I’ve heard good things about but have not seen.

When I post on Tumblr about SBY, it’s about the remakes that began in 2012. These are streaming online and available on BD/DVD (more further below).

Where/how to watch original series:

Amazon Prime Video has Star Blazer season 1 (this is the English dub of the 1974-1975 series), and you can find all three seasons of the English dub on YouTube (I can’t vouch for the quality or completeness). The three TV series (English dub) can be purchased on DVD. They are collected in three sets: Star Blazers The Quest for Iscandar, Star Blazers Comet Empire, and Star Blazers The Bolar Wars. I have no clue about the movies or where/how to watch the original series in Japanese.

The remakes: There are three so far, a TV series called Space Battleship Yamato 2199, a film called Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Odyssey of the Celestial Ark [ 星巡る方舟 Hoshi-meguru Hakobune ]  and the chapter-film series Space Battleship Yamato 2202: Warriors of Love [ 愛の戦士たち Ai no Senshi-tachi ]. Funimation adds “Star Blazers” to the beginning of the titles for English-language recognition, while I use the shortest name possible when referring to them, so Yamato 2199 and Yamato 2202, and Odyssey of the Celestial Ark (aka Ark of the Stars).

Where/How to watch 2199 and 2202: Both of the Yamato 2199 and Yamato 2202 series are streaming on Funimation in Japanese with English subtitles, and as English dubs. Yamato 2199 can be purchased in as two BD/DVD sets from RightStuf, Funimation, Amazon, etc. The first set of Yamato 2202 is available for pre-order from the same. The blu-ray of Odyssey of the Celestial Ark film is available to purchase on Amazon, it is an import from Japan. If you are in the U.S. then your blu-ray player can play it (unlike DVDs, the U.S. and Japan are in the same region for BDs). The Japanese blu-ray also has English subtitles.

IV. Yamato 2199 and 2202 Watch Order

The titles are conveniently chronological. 2199 comes before 2202. So watch Yamato 2199 first, and then move onto Yamato 2202. The Odyssey of the Celestial Ark film takes place before the end of the 2199 TV series. You do not need to watch it before watching 2202. The film can be stand-alone (though it is clearly setting up for 2202) and act as the pilot episode to the 2202 series. That doesn’t mean that its story is superfluous, it’s quite good and I love how it is structured.

I hope this helps! Enjoy!

[recentanimenews]

INTERVIEW: Roland Kelts On Fantasy Worlds And The Impact of Streaming

  Roland Kelts, half-Japanese author of JAPANAMERICA: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S., has made a name for himself covering the unique nuances of American and Japanese cultural-exchange. Kelts recently presented a talk titled "Anime and Race" with Arthell Isom for this year's Virtual Crunchyroll Expo. We had the opportunity to ask Kelts a few questions about the impact of streaming, adapting international webcomics, the appeal of isekai, and of course, Twitter.

  English-language and Japanese-language editions of JAPANAMERICA

  With Crunchyroll hitting three million paid subscribers as of July, it’s evident that anime streaming is thriving, especially with young adults. Simulcasts now allow essentially anyone access to the latest hours after airing in Japan. How have you seen this constant finger on anime’s pulse change how fans engage with Japanese pop culture, versus the heavily curated experience of exclusively watching whatever made it to American television networks?

  Everything’s faster. Fans I meet from Boston to Kansas to Los Angeles now ask me about shows that were just released months or even weeks ago on my TV in Tokyo. And simulcasts have also made the US fans hungrier, more demanding, sometimes even whiny. (“Why don’t we have this yet? When’s this coming out? Where’s that title?”)

  At the same time, it creates a zone of delusion, a kind of third universe between the US and Japan where fans think they know everything that’s happening in Japan and what’s right and wrong about the anime industry and how it works just because streaming media delivers the entertainment they want when they want it. 

  I still call that third universe JAPANAMERICA, neither here (Japan) nor there (US) but some kind of hybrid space, and in some ways streaming has only expanded its borders. 

  Image via Netflix

  Anime produced and released for streaming services have seen major cultural impact lately. In 2018, Netflix released Devilman Crybaby to critical acclaim, and more recently Crunchyroll has begun streaming its own originals shows like Tower of God in 2020. In previous interviews, you’ve described younger animators butting heads against the old guards in Japan’s traditional anime industry, compared to other industries like games or design. Nowadays, you have younger studios such as Studio Trigger and Science Saru signing streaming deals to distribute their shows to a wider demographic. Do you see this pivot to web-original anime as a way for younger animators, producers, and even veterans to exercise new ideas they may otherwise not be able to explore?

  Definitely. Masaaki Yuasa told me that if it weren’t for streaming services, Devilman Crybaby would be an old-school OAD collecting dust in the adult video corner of Tsutaya that may have aired once in wee-hour programming on domestic Japanese TV. 

  Two years ago, Go Nagai, the manga artist who created the original Devilman in 1972, told me backstage at Anime Expo in Los Angeles that streaming was the only reason he’d been invited to Los Angeles. “Hey, I’m an old man,” he said, laughing.

  There were always innovative upstart studios like Trigger. The difference is that web-original anime and streaming platforms get Trigger’s works screened in major American cinemas by national distributors like GKIDS, and around the world online, and gets Trigger artists and people like Yuasa and Nagai the VIP treatment at overseas anime cons.

  Emilia and Subaru from Re:Zero

  One of the biggest trends in anime recently is the boom of a genre called “isekai,” i.e “another world” stories where average protagonists get transported into fantastical worlds. In the last ten years, isekai has already explored virtual reality MMO worlds like Sword Art Online to self-aware “Groundhog Day” stories like Re: Zero. Although portal fantasies have always been present in traditional Japanese folklore and a staple of global speculative fiction, why do you think this particular narrative may have gained so much traction with young adults recently?

  One of the trends I write about in JAPANAMERICA is how the constant presence of the internet in our lives can diminish our satisfaction with the real worlds we inhabit. 

  You’re right, of course: portal fantasies have long been a part of Japanese literature, folklore, fantasy, and spirituality. 

  But the world-within-the-world of the internet has arguably overtaken our realities. It’s not only ever-present, it’s superior: brighter, freer (we can click on anything and almost immediately see and hear what we want), and faster. It’s also portable and ubiquitous. 

  Many of us greet the morning not as sunlight through our blinds or the sound of birdsong, but as the OLED or LCD light from our smartphone screen. Our sense of “home” is the emails we recognize, the apps we check, our news, our weather, our sports updates. It ain’t called an “I” phone for nothing. Online, everything’s for me.

  So it makes a kind of sense to me that young adults might be kind of bored with stories that don’t feature immediate and easy access to virtual realities and other worlds and role-playing lives. Stories without isekai-type narratives might feel outdated, boring, even irrelevant to the way we all live now.

    Original creator comics, such as Webtoon series like God of High School, have recently been adapted into series exclusively streamed on Crunchyroll. Series like God of High School feature diverse characters from all across the world in a tournament set in Seoul, a setting we rarely see in television anime. Although many Japanese web novels and amateur projects have since been adapted into professionally produced shows, such treatment is less common for non-Japanese properties. In terms of broadening the horizons for intellectual property, did you ever anticipate the world of Japanese animation and international webcomics to cross paths? 

  I wrote about it in JAPANAMERICA and thought it would happen sooner, actually. On book tours at anime cons, fan artists and amateur comics artists ask me to sign JAPANAMERICA and hand me a copy of their own work in return. I’d read their work on the plane to the next city and sometimes I’d think, this might make a great anime series or feature. 

  But I couldn’t generate much enthusiasm when I got back to Japan. Part of the problem was obvious: language and culture barriers. 

  But also, the Japanese industry is sitting on piles of great intellectual property from decades of manga about every imaginable type of topic and character, plus all the great doujin fan-art that powers the record crowds at the biannual Comiket and fills the floors at Mandarake. Why would they reach overseas to work with someone who doesn’t speak the language and/or understand the codes of cultural and business behavior to take a risk on a property from a foreign land?

  Obviously, the increased involvement of non-Japanese producers like Crunchyroll and others are changing that. Also, newer generations of artists from outside Japan have an even greater sense of how Japanese-made anime works, how it gets made, and how to behave in Japanese business transactions. Plus, I do think online translators, as bad as they may be, have helped ease the transition between languages on both sides, Japanese and non-Japanese.

  Tokyo Big Sight during Comiket 96 last year (photo by Daryl Harding)

  Fourteen years ago, there was no such thing as Twitter. It goes without saying it’s huge now, especially among anime fans. With major events like Comiket canceled this year, alongside dozens of conventions in the states, more fans than ever are converging online. Nowadays, it’s not only incredibly easy to find anime, but also discover a whole community buzzing with activity regardless of what language you speak. How much of a role do you think social media has played in pushing anime from niche to ubiquitous, and what do you hope to come out of this zealous digital convergence for fans everywhere?

  I write about the importance of fan forums and chatrooms in JAPANAMERICA. Anime fans were one of the key drivers of Usenet groups and BBS sites back in the day. In a chapter I called DIY (“do it yourself”), I explain how anime fandom is a bottom-up phenomenon, fired by shared communal passion and the sharing of that passion. 

  But I didn’t know how massive social media platforms would become, or how crucial they would be for Japanese pop culture fandom.

  What sucks is that the discourse on social media is so coarse. When you go back and read exchanges between diehard anime fans on Usenet and old chatrooms and forums from the mid-2000s, they read like middlebrow literature compared to what you see on Twitter, Reddit, and Discord. So many social media posts are made just to get hits, not to communicate or share ideas, and the most provocative, cruel, or just plain daft stuff gets liked and retweeted a thousand times. 

  An ex-friend of mine once told me he was going to market his book entirely on Twitter. I said, well then you’ll get a bunch of responses from people who don’t read a lot of books. But he said he just wanted to sell a lot of copies. He didn’t care about the quality of the people who read them or followed him.

  But I guess that’s the state of most things in America right now, politics in particular. Mass appeal is all that matters.

    Roland Kelts' blog can be found here. Follow him on Twitter at @rolandkelts!

More information on JAPANAMERICA can be found here. A Japanese-language edition is also available from Kodansha.

      Blake P. is a weekly columnist for Crunchyroll Features. He is still thinking about Hellshake Yano. His twitter is @_dispossessed. His bylines include Fanbyte,��VRV, Unwinnable, and more.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com