Forum - View topicREVIEW: Zipang DVD 7
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daedelus
 Posts: 743 Location: Texas City, TX (ajd: 6/11/05) |
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On a side note, I just found volume 3 today which completes my collection of this series. I have yet to watch a single episode though. What initially attracted me to this series is the similarity to the 80's movie "The Final Countdown" with Kirk Douglas.
The Geneon situation caused me to buy this a little quicker than I initially planned, but at least I will be able to see all of it when I do finally get around to it. |
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mike.motaku
 Posts: 160 Location: Indiana |
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It really is a fantastic series. I don't mind the "inconclusive" ending as much as others might. Anything based on a manga or novel series is ultimately going to slide into the slice-of-life category anyway as we almost never get absolutely everything the storytellers have to tell.
Just because something has a sci-fi/historical element to it doesn't mean that what we get of the story can't be a slice of those characters lives. But I blather. |
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Jedi General
 Posts: 2485 Location: Tucson, AZ |
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I loved this series. Until the ending, that is, which ultimately made this series a waste of my time. Why even make the series if virtually nothing was resolved in the end?
Oh, and I hated the fact that Yosuke's English VA was changed for the final 3 episodes. I liked the original VA much, much better. The new guy was ... how do I put it ... boring. Although it is interesting to note that Yosuke's original English VA has a relatively major role in the video game "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare." Well, I'm not completely certain, but the character sounds so much like Yosuke that I'd be shocked if it weren't the same guy. My brother and I feel that it is a viable reason why he didn't voice the final 3 episodes of Zipang. EDIT: Forgot a word Last edited by Jedi General on Mon Dec 17, 2007 2:25 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
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Admittedly this may be a 'in the weeds' political/historical point that doesn't touch on all the merits of the series, but considering all the praise this series gets as 'the one where the Japanese deal with their past', it really seems to mostly side-step the most controversial heart of Japan's war efforts. Actually, from watching the series I got a sense the writers were passing Japan off as an equivalent of WWI era Germany, where colonial hubris led into a catastrophic and pointless conflict with other European powers (before ensnaring the US). To bring it to the point, imagine if 'Zipang' had a companion show 'DeutschReich', in which a modern German submarine finds itself in the waters of a 1942 Atlantic ocean. Imagine that it takes the exact same tact as 'Zipang'; a German crew feeling remorse for Nazi hubris but still finding love for the homeland and planning to deliver 'a defeat with honor', making moral equivalence points about the allies, and most importantly entirely ignoring the Holocaust. Would it fly? No way. That's the problem with 'Zipang's' 'critical focus'. It looks at militaristic imperialism as the problem (one apparently confined to a relatively small selection of elites in this telling), and really 'soft-pedals' Japans unbelievably savage, orchestrated conduct in what amounted to a race war against it's Asian neighbors (veritable ethnic cleansing in China, sex slaves captured from Korea, etc.) starting in the 30's, as well as wide spread organized torture, slave labor, and execution of military and civilian prisoners. That's the dark heart of the Japanese war effort which the Japanese are often criticized for refusing to acknowledge, and for all the talk of a 'challenging, self-critical tone', 'Zipang' seems to largely miss that mark as well. In the big picture I agree with the reviewer that 'Zipang' comes across as a well-maintained 'alt history' show with lots of appeal to military buffs, but in the smaller scale, there's just something in the 'missing a big point' camp involved with the philosophical heart of the effort to me. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18185 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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The story does touch on some of these points a little bit, but I'll agree that the series does not forthrightly acknowledge these aspects of Japan's war culpability. In fairness, though, most of those aspects are beyond the scope of a series almost exclusively focused on naval activity and matters directly relating to it. Trying to force them in would have distracted from the story the series is trying to tell. For as self-analytical as the story is, it is still a dramatic story, not a documentary. And let's not forget that admitting that things went wrong because of hubris is far more palatable than admitting to outright cruelties and racial agendas. |
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TheVok
Posts: 613 Location: North York, Ontario, Canada |
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I don't read reviews on this site much ... are they always this late? This disc came out just over two months ago ... and I don't know about you others, but late October was when I rented and watched it. Why a review only now?
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Randall Miyashiro
 Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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When reviews come out this late I forget which events happen in which DVDs. There was a thread in the anime forum where a few of us discussed our opinions of the last volume a couple of months ago.
I'm really relieved that this, Ergo Proxy, and Fate/Stay made their last volumes before Geneon stopped releasing DVDs. The last DVD does feel like the end of a chapter spoiler[with the realization that affect this past will not nullify the Mirai's crews existence or memories. There seems to be a general this world is not the one we came from feeling by the end of this disc. The next chapter feels like the action might theoretically shift from the seafaring navel settings to a big manhunt in China. All in all this does feel like an end of the first volume of a much larger story.] I also really like the special animation used in the ED which helped give the episode a special farewell. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18185 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Not usually. This one just happened to get stuck in the system for several weeks while higher-profile stuff passed it by. (Late-series reviews also tend to get lower posting priority.) |
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Rei Sentoki
 Posts: 56 |
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The biggest problem I had with Zipang was not so much the inconclusiveness of the ending as the disclosure of the meaning of the title's name. spoiler[After much ballyhooing about modern sensibilities, it’s disclosed that they’re keen to carve a new state called "Zipang" out of some location nebulously in China. Hello? Did someone skip a few pages of history? The war in the Pacific started with Japan’s plans doing the same thing in Manchuria.]
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