Forum - View topic

Errinundra's Beautiful Fighting Girl #133: Taiman Blues: Ladies' Chapter - Mayumi

My name is Lupin the Third. I'm the grandson of the infamous phantom thief, Lupin. Police the world over desperately want to apprehend me, not that they can! Not to brag, but I'm an elusive thief who always gets what I want. That's me, Lupin the Third. Daisuke Jigen, my partner - he's a professional cool gunman who can quick draw in 0.3 seconds. He's reliable with a strong sense of duty. Goemon Ishekawa XIII - he's a descendant of the great thief of lore, Goemon Ishikawa. He can sever anything with his mastery in the quick sword draw. He's scary when he's angry! Inspector Zenigata - as you know, he's descended from Heiji Zenigata. He's a skilled officer in the MPD. This troublesome old man has made capturing me his goal in life. The mysterious woman, Fujiko Mine - even I don't know if this mysterious chick is a thief or spy. She puts me in tight spots, but I don't hate her. See, I'm a softy with cuties! Now then, what type of heists will I pull today when surrounded by such a quirky crew?

If you seek enlightenment outside yourself, then your performing even ten thousand practices and ten thousand good deeds will be in vain... unless one perceives the nature of one’s life, one’s practice will become an endless, painful austerity.

Transformation – whether of a toy car that transforms into a spaceship, or a character that transforms from one form to another – has a particularly powerful impact on the 3-through-7 year old. The child below approximately 8 years old does not have the cognitive sophistication of the 8 + year old and this limits his ability to see and discern the beginning, middle and end of a transformation process and hold it in his mind all at once. A transformational event, therefore, appears magical to him and has a great deal of surprise impact.

After approximately the age of 7, the child’s brain is developing sufficiently so that he/ she can, in a sense, see behind the curtain and know that X has changed to Y but still remains X ‘really’. The 7 + year old will still enjoy the transformations but will ‘know the trick’, so to speak. He will also demand more and more sophisticated transformations in order to be impressed. (Daniel Acuff with Robert Reiher, What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids, New York: Free Press, 1997: 69)

A warm welcome to my new cohort of 5ch fans. Look out for the leg-pull!

泥棒外人 presents,

Beautiful Fighting Girl #30: Lucy-May Popple, aka

Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow


This droll image of Lucy-May stalking a rabbit nicely captures her comic and her inquisitive sides.

Synopsis: Frustrated by their limited opportunities in Britain, the Popple family move to South Australia with the dream of owning a farm much larger than the family holdings they left behind. They arrive in Adelaide when it is little more than surveyed streets and pegs in the ground. The Australian landscape, wildlife and indigenous people (who, ominously, fade out of the story) are sources of wonder and challenge, but the family work hard to establish themselves and save money. Circumstances - mainly in the form of the wealthy and spiteful Mr Pettywell who duds them of the farm they were buying - conspire against them, however. The father drifts into alcoholism, the oldest son travels around for work and the oldest daughter becomes engaged to a sailor. After Lucy wins the affections of the even more wealthy Princeton couple, she makes a brave decision that will open up new opportunities for the struggling family, a metaphorical rainbow after the rain.

Production details:
Premiere: 10 January 1982
Director: Hiroshi Saitō (Maya the Honey Bee, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Story of Perrine, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to name some.)
Studio: Nippon Animation
Source material: Southern Rainbow by Phyllis Piddington (b 09 October 1910 Melbourne, Victoria; d 08 July 2001 Adelaide, South Australia), published by Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1982. The genesis of the anime project is intriguingly opaque. From my research the Melbourne imprint appears to be the only edition ever published. That is, apart from a Japanese serialisation of the novel in the magazine Living Book, as mentioned in the The Anime Encyclopaedia, though I haven't been able to determine the dates. The odd thing, though, is that the anime premiered very early the same year the novel was published. ANN says that it is the only World Masterpiece Theatre instalment where the writer was still alive when it aired. It may also have been the only instance where the so-called masterpiece hadn't even been published yet. The book itself is now nigh on unobtainable, even in Australia. The National Library website suggests there are 26 copies available in various libraries around Australia, invariably in special collections that only allow reading in situ, or with the blunt note, "missing".
Script: Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Ran)
Music: Koichi Sakata, who, most notably for contemporary anime viewers, wrote the theme song for From up on Poppy Hil.


Adelaide, as it grows through 50 episodes. That's a 1950s photograph bottom right.
The anime compresses 30+ years of development into about 5 years of storytelling.

Note on the versions watched: The anime was dubbed into multiple languages, including Arabic, French, German, Italian, Persian and Spanish, but, of course, not English. As I've lamented so often, the Anglophone world was, at the time, averse to anime with female protagonists. The series, known as The Immigrants, was particularly well-received in Iran, where it was a staple for children growing up. It seems that post-revolutionary Iran was more open than we were to female protagonists. Only the first three episodes have been fan-subbed, so I a watched a French dub of the series, via Youtube. Consider this: I, an Australian, was reduced to watching a Japanese adaptation, dubbed into French, of an Australian "masterpiece" set in Australia, written by a fellow Melburnian whom, perhaps, only one in a thousand Australians have ever heard of. Life can be so peculiar at times. Given that most episodes were in a language I barely understood, I no doubt found it duller than I may have, had it been in English. The Japanese Hajime Yuki website (see link below) was helpful in understanding what was going on, even with the quaint Google translation.

Comments: Lucy-May isn't a fighter but, in this pre-Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind era, I'm watching a broad range of anime in my search for the roots of the beautiful fighing girl. Besides, how could I overlook the most well known, and probably only, anime series set in my native country.

Compared with the other three anime I've seen that are now considered under the World Masterpiece Theartre rubric - Heidi, Girl of the Alps, Marco - From the Apennines to the Andes and Anne of Green Gables, along with their spiritual sibling from TMS, Nobody's Boy Remi, Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow inverts the crisis of the search for family. Heidi, Marco, Anne and Remi are all without family - their tale is to find it. Lucy-May is happily embedded in a cohesive family that, due to the challenges of the strange, new environment and the perfidy of human nature, is slowly coming apart. It will take an act of emotional courage from Lucy-May towards the end of the series to give her family a reprieve and a new hope. The theme is common in Australian literature, most famously in the works of Henry Lawson and in nobel-laureate Patrick White's The Tree of Man, where, despite the magnificence of the prose, the hopes of the pioneer farmer are dissipated in the empty, mundane lives of his children. Southern Rainbow is more hopeful and more family friendly, so don't think for a moment, despite the occasional death, that it is a gloomy work. The enduring sense of wonder - mediated through the eyes of Lucy-May and her nearest sister, Kate - and the ever-present comic tone, mitigate any negativity. The threats are mild; you can expect things to end well. It's a strength of the anime that it can present such a serious theme in an overall lighthearted package. There's also an ongoing paradox. Despite the gnawing disappointments, outwardly the family's situation appears to improve - they start with a one room shed, build an annexe with prefabricated materials, take on Doctor Deighton as a boarder and build him a surgery on the property (more on him later), and eventually move into a two storey house. There are subtle improvements: more furniture appears over time, the inside walls get painted; pictures can be seen on said walls; the cutlery and crockery are upgraded; and so on.


Top left: the Popple family and a couple of ring-ins (the man with the moustache and the boy on the right).
Top right: Mr Pettywell.
Bottom: the Princetons. Love the newspaper headline.

More than the other series I've mentioned, Southern Rainbow is an ensemble piece. Lucy-May is, for the most part, an observer until the bushranger and the amnesia arcs late in the series. Prior to Pettywell's spiteful intervention in episode 32, and the subsequent three-year time skip, the Australian setting is the main driver of the drama. The large cast is entertaining, thanks to the well-delineated characters. Lucy-May is, at times recklessly, curious, with an expression that ranges from wondrous to deadpan comic (both of which are beautifully captured in the top image of this post). With her thin, but protruding, lips and her receding chin she has a chimp-like appearance in profile that I'm sure is deliberate, giving her an aura of mischief and activity even when motionless. Her closest sister, Kate, may be a little older, but she's timid and petulant by comparison, and thus the perfect foil. The oldest sister, Clara, conforms sweetly to the docile, domestic, dutiful daughter stereotype - the one, naturally, earmarked for marriage. Continuing clockwise around the image just above, Annie is the patient, long-suffering, mother and wife, while Arthur is strong and hard-working, but a dreamer nonetheless who, despite his competence, isn't mentally equipped to create a prosperous life for a family of seven in a strange land. Ben is a likely lad who, along with Clara working as a shop-assistant in a bakery, becomes the family mainstay when their father turns to drink. Tob the ankle-biter is a crawling hazard who, after the time skip, becomes a gentle, effeminate boy in a sailor suit.

The supporting characters are mostly comic, in an almost Dickensian way (including the expressive names). Pettywell - he gets fatter as the series progresses - is irritable, spiteful, loud-mouthed, pompous and, despite the contrary evidence of his burgeoning wealth, incompetent. He may be the ongoing nemesis for the Popple family, but among the pleasures of Southern Rainbow are his frequent comeuppances. In the early episodes the weather and the landscape do him in - when his tent collapses at night in the rain, the look on the face of his snooty, imperious wife (who gives him constant hell) is a highlight of the series. Later he suffers agonies and indignities at the hands of a drunkard ship's surgeon (left behind while in a stupor), Doctor Deighton, who takes sadistic pleasure in manipulating Pettywell's aching back and who later "accidentally" pulls out the wrong infected tooth. There's an appropriately slow-witted bullocky who delivers the Popple's prefabricated house and a pessimistic builder whom Arthur and Ben find moaning in the scrub with a broken leg. He and his son Billy (the ring-ins in the tent image) will repay the kindness with their skills. The kind-hearted and fabulously wealthy Princetons provide a more subtle threat late in the series when Lucy-May loses her memory after being struck by a startled horse. Taking her in while they try to find her family, the childless couple quickly become enamoured of her. Lucy-May duly regains her memory (thanks to Little, her pet dingo - yes, dingo), leading to her reunion with her family and Princeton offering to adopt her. In return he will employ Arthur as the manager of his vast farm holdings along with a sprawling farmhouse. In the best scene of the series, Lucy-May - unbeknownst to either her family or Princeton - listens in to the entire conversation from the adjacent hallway in dumbfounded silence.


Struggling to comprehend: Mrs Pettywell in the rain; Lucy-May overhearing an offer too good to refuse.

Like all insecure Australians - it's a national trait - much of my pleasure in watching Lucy of the Southern Rainbow was observing and judging how Australia is portrayed. (John Cleese: Q. Why are Australians so well balanced? A. They have a chip on both shoulders.) I've mentioned already how Adelaide's growth is speeded up by some some 600%. That's fine by me - I'm ready to forgive the artistic licence in this instance, especially given how some notable buildings are rendered well, such as the town hall, the post office and the bridges over the River Torrens. Speaking of which, despite its grand, perennial depiction in the anime, the real River Torrens is a pretentious name for a watercourse that is often little more than a trickle (though it does flood from time to time). Settlers quickly ruined it. Anthony Trollope wrote sometime before 1880, "anything in the guise of a river more ugly than the Torrens would be impossible to either see or describe," These days the River Torrens in central Adelaide appears as an attractive watercourse courtesy of weirs that make it seem much more important than it really is. The native animals are mostly depicted quite well, other than the animators failing to replicate the characteristically fluid, graceful movements of hopping kangaroos. I've had the good fortune to have seen them many times, yet the beauty of their motion still enchants me, except when they suddenly appear in front of my motorcycle. (I lived in Yarra Glen for several years - no, it isn't my film - though I was on the other side of town from Lubra Bend, and, um, lubra is an odious name for an aboriginal woman. It surprises me that the name still appears on signs.) And, while on the subject of indigenous Australians, their depiction in the anime is cringe-inducing. The Kaurna nation of the Adelaide Plains were almost completely destroyed within a few decades, though their culture and language were extensively documented. Lucy-May's pet dingo Little is also problematic. While its a great character in the context of the story, it's more labrador than dingo in its behaviour. Dingoes rarely bark - they chirrup and howl - and, although they can be tamed, their behaviour is quite different from domestic breeds. The singing of the birds sounds authentically Australian - check out the link below the image at the top of the post. It was also a pleasure to hear kookaburras laughing in their proper environment, not in some overseas jungle.

Landscapes are another matter, ranging from very good to very bad. Southern Rainbow constantly emphasises the otherworldliness of the Australian environment (well, not for me, though I can see what the creators are trying to do). The OP has a sequence of pioneer images that nicely set the tone for each episode. (I've posted images from the OP here.) The anime captures well the flatness of the landscape but fails dismally in capturing the scorchng Australian light. Adelaide is a hot, not quite arid, city. In the anime people overdress, no one suffers from heat stress, the vegetation is too often the wrong colour green and the sky lacks the contradictory Australian qualities of shimmering transparency and eucalyptus haze. The trunks of the eucalypts are usually done beautifully. Some of the the Nippon Animation background artists appear to have been enamoured of the peeling bark of the predominant River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), with their variety of patterns and colours. Other artists from the team paint them a prosaic, uniform grey. For all the attention to the bark, the artists never get the leaves right. Eucalypt leaves are slender, curved and hang vertically. In the anime they resemble oval, horizontal northern hemisphere foliage. In an autumn / winter sequence the bush is even depicted as turning brown. Huh? Australian summers are brutal, so by February and March the landscape looks fagged out and dessicated. As winter (beginning in June in Australia) approaches the bush, lacking deciduous trees, greens up again. In one major non sequitur Ben cuts down bamboo from the bush to make a kite for an ill Lucy-May. The problem is, the nearest natural growing bamboo to the Adelaide Plains is more than 2,000 km away. All is forgiven, though, when his gift leads to a magical dream sequence.


That's Little the dingo with Lucy-May bottom left.
And a western red kangaroo of T rex proportions middle right.

Rating: good. I'm torn in two directions. The setting strokes my national pride, even if the Japanese interpretation doesn't always get it quite right, while the French dub left the speech largely incomprehensible and thereby rendering much of the 20 hours of viewing something of a chore. In fact, I found the French dialogue in a familiar Australian setting highly incongruous. I'd rate it somewhat below Heidi, Girl of the Alps or Anne of Green Gables visually and thematically, although, unlike the latter series, it improves in the last third. Thanks to its setting it is one of the most distinctive anime I've ever seen. Combine that with the World Masterpiece Theatre's outward looking gaze - rare in anime these days - and with their emphasis on character over style, watching it has been rewarding. If you aren't Australian, however, it isn't worth watching 47 episodes in French, (unless, of course, you're French).

Resources:
The font of all knowledge
Lucy of the Southern Rainbow at Hajima-yuki.com (google translated)
AustLit
ANN
The Anime Encyclopaedia, Jonathon Clements and Helen McCarthy, Stone Bridge Press via Kindle
YouTube
TV Tropes
Random Stuff's The Most Amazing Facts About Adelaide and South Australia


Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) from the OP.

The image above from the anime captivated me. I think Mountain Ash (E regnans), native to Victoria and Tasmania, is the most beautiful tree in the world. But, then, I'm biased and ignorant. That it isn't found on the Adelaide Plains isn't an issue as the OP consists of general Australian pioneering images not specific to South Australia. Creating what you see above required some effort due to the animation being an extended diagonal pan with Japanese text visible the entire time. The pan enabled me to make multiple images without any text, then stitch them together. I've filled the white space created by the diagonal pan with a couple of Mountain Ash photographs. The photo in the top right, going by the clothes, was probably taken in the 1920s. I first visited the tree - about 50 or 60 km north east of Melbourne - in the 1980s, by which time it had snapped in half and was completely hollow. There would have been room for twenty people inside. They could have looked up and seen sunlight. Since then it has collapsed; not a trace remains. Pretty much all the Victorian giants have long succumbed to logging and bushfire. A few monsters siill exist in Tasmania, like the 84 metre tree bottom left. The red circle highlights a human climber. Just how awesome this tree is can be seen better here, while an even taller example can be seen here.

17 February edit: My schedule was to watch 16 episodes (including the notorious death episode) of Fairy Princess Minky Momo and review it this weekend, but I've realised that it is more interesting than I first supposed. I now intend to watch it right through and review in two to three weeks.

^
The anime gets the blend of comedy and drama just right. I'd love to own a subtitled version of this series.

Did you know that, at the time the anime was broadcast, Japan was Australia's biggest source of tourism? The Japanese-friendly-sounding Yepoon on the Queensland tropical coast became a favourite destination, though not without some conflict from reactionary Australians. (Yohachiro Iwasaki still owns the resort.)