Otaku no video
| Original video animation | |
|---|---|
| title | Otaku no video |
| Original title | お た く の ビ デ オ |
| transcription | Otaku no Bideo |
| Country of production |
 Japan
|
| original language | Japanese |
| year | 1991 |
| Studio | Gainax |
| length | 50 minutes |
| Episodes | 2 |
| genre | Comedy , parody |
| Director | Takeshi Mori |
| music | Kōhei Tanaka |
Otaku no Video ( Japanese お た く の ビ デ オ , Otaku no Bideo ) is an original video animation by the Gainax studio from 1991. The story of the two-part film takes place at the beginning of the 1980s and tells the story of a typical Otaku - a fan of Japanese comics , Animated films and games - who set up his own merchandise company.
content
Otaku no video
The student Ken Kubo is an average young man, a member of the university tennis club, and has been with his girlfriend Yoshiko for some time. One day he meets his childhood friend Tanaka again. He is an avid fan of anime, manga and the like and introduces Kubo to the world of otaku , where he gets to know fanart artists, martial arts enthusiasts and military fans. Soon Kubo is so busy with his new friends that he leaves the tennis club and his girlfriend leaves him. Thereupon he vows to become the greatest of all otaku - the "otaking".
Together with Tanaka and other fans, Kubo sells self-made models and similar merchandise for well-known series to fans. The small home workshop quickly turns into a large company that opens more and more stores and eventually builds a factory in China. But her company is bought up by the competition and thrown out. Both could not be discouraged and start a second attempt with the illustrator Misuzu Fukuhara. Her self-created character “Misty May” and her mascot with her own series are the basis of her second success. In the end, they even succeed in ousting their competitors and buying back their old company. Finally, in 1999 they set up an amusement park for Otaku with “Otakuland” and Tanaka sees his goal as achieved. Decades later, when Tokyo and the park are underwater, the two friends head to the park's main attraction. They meet their old friends there and fly into space with the attraction built as a spaceship.
A Portrait of an Otaku
In addition to the story told in the anime, the OVA contains several posed interviews with otakus who tell of their passion. These are repeatedly pushed into the plot. The unrecognizable interviewees are played by employees of the studio or their friends. They exaggerate prejudices about fans and their actual behavior. In addition, information on the historical classification of the events and statistical information on the fan scene is inserted.
Production and publication
The OVA, consisting of two 50-minute episodes, was created in 1991 at Studio Gainax under the direction of Takeshi Mori based on a script by Hiroyuki Yamaga based on the idea of Toshio Okada . Shinji Higuchi directed the interviews . The character design was done by Ken'ichi Sonoda and the artistic director was Hitoshi Nagao . The responsible producers were Kazuhiko Inomata and Yoshimi Kanda .
The anime was released in two parts on September 27, 1991 and December 20, 1991 by Toshiba Eiba Soft in Japan. A German subtitled version was released on DVD by ACOG in 2003. AnimEigo released an English version: 1993 on VHS, 2002 on DVD and 2016 on Blu-Ray. The last publication was funded by a campaign on the Kickstarter.com platform . Dybex published a French and Dutch version and Dynit published the anime in Italy.
synchronization
| role | Japanese speaker ( seiyū ) |
|---|---|
| Kubo | Kōji Tsujitani |
| Tanaka | Toshiharu Sakurai |
| Misty May | Kikuko Inoue |
| Misuzu Fukuhara | Yūko Kobayashi |
| Yuri Sato | Yuri Amano |
music
The music of the anime was composed by Kōhei Tanaka . The opening credits are underlaid with the song Tatakae! Otaking ( 戦 え! お た キ ン グ , Tatakae! Otakingu ), sung by Kōji Tsujitani , and Otaku no Mayoimichi ( お た く の 迷 い 道 ) sung by Toshiharu Sakurai and Kikuko Inoue for the credits .
Background and interpretation
The story is based on the origins of the Gainax studio itself, which was founded by fans in the 1980s as a company that produced merchandising and later films. In addition, allusions to well-known animes of the time appear again and again in the course of the plot, mostly in the form of cosplay of the characters or merchandise items. Most of those involved in the anime were still founding members, according to Toshio Okada. According to Thomas Lamarre , Okada represented himself in the character of Tanaka - and for a time referred to himself as "otaking". In addition to the idealized history of the studio, the plot also showed the ideas that the staff, and especially Okada, connected with the otaku culture, and were a reaction to the criticism of otaku that emerged in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their background was in particular the serial murders of Tsutomu Miyazaki , who murdered girls and was also a fan of girl manga. Lamarre suspects that Gainax's strategy against criticism was to portray the otaku in the story and the interviews in Otaku no Video as cranky and infatuated with their hobby, but at the same time as unrealistic, harmless and yet lovable.
Lamarre compares the visual style with those of the films that the Gainax team had produced for the Daicon fairs at the beginning of their career: the anime is rich in allusions and generally has a high density of information, which is divided into several levels of images and content. As the two major narrative levels, he makes up the epic narrative of the rise of the otaku company on the one hand and the otaku interviews on the other, each of which portrays a single person. In this regard, the structure of the plot is similar to the series Hideaki Annos , the most famous director of the Gainax studio. Its The Power of the Magic Stone and Neon Genesis Evangelion also emerged during this time, also took up and attacked developments in the otaku scene and alternated in their plot between an epic narrative and character portraits.
Reception and aftermath
Toshio Okada took up the ideas conveyed in the anime about what constitutes otaku in his 1996 book Otaku-gaku Nyumon . In this, however, he uses a more serious and positive concept of the scene and moves away from the characterization of the otaku as eccentric couch potatoes. At this time he had already separated from the Gainax studio and was at odds with their director Hideaki Anno about how to deal with otaku culture - which he did not see as positive.
Otaku no Video is described in the Anime Encyclopedia as "ironic, amiable, self-parodying and living out the wishes of every fan" . It is a "wonderful snapshot of a bygone era of fans". Lawrence Eng recognizes Otaku no Video as the earliest and most comprehensive statement on otaku culture and also attributes the film to having made the term "otaku" and the associated fan scene known in the USA and Europe. The anime conveyed "passion and open-mindedness, [...] questioning conventions, clinging to dreams and realizing them" and was thus able to convey a positive message from Otaku. It was understood as “a kind of otaku bible” and, before the era of the Internet, gave the otaku a sense of community, connected them, conveyed behavioral models and presented a game to the fans. In his review of the anime, which is popular among fans in the USA, Justin Sevakis regrets that the allusions to many series no longer work with the later viewers, as many of the series have been forgotten. The humor suffers as a result and the anime has therefore "aged badly". In another aspect, the film still works well: It gives an insight into the world of fans and the passion with which they devote themselves to their hobby. From today's perspective, this insight is also associated with nostalgia. The interviews that were inserted are not very entertaining, but always bring calm to the plot.
The German magazine Animania praises the anime as a successful mixture of fiction and documentation, which does not always take its topic very seriously, loosens up the documentary scenes with a funny and entertaining story and also offers good quality animation for its time. The review concludes: "An entertaining and rousing otaku success story and an anime cult classic on top of that".
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Justin Sevakis: Buried Treasure - In Praise of Nerdiness . Ed .: Anime News Network. November 15, 2007 ( animenewsnetwork.com [accessed November 27, 2016]).
- ↑ a b Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy: The Anime Encyclopedia. Revised & Expanded Edition . Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley 2006, ISBN 978-1-933330-10-5 , pp. 471 .
- ↑ a b OtaKing and Millionaire . In: AnimaniA 05/2003, p. 12.
- ↑ a b c d Thomas Lamarre : The Anime Machine. A Media Theory of Animation . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2009, ISBN 978-0-8166-5154-2 , pp. 150-152, 248 .
- ↑ Yasuhiro Takeda : The Memoirs Notenki - Studio Gainax and the Man who created Evangelion . ADV Manga, 2005 (English). P. 174.
- ↑ AnimEigo Launches Otaku no Video Kickstarter on June 2. Anime News Network, May 29, 2015, accessed November 27, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Lawrence Eng : The Fans who became Kings - Gainax and the Otaku Culture in: Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF / German Filmmuseum & Museum of Applied Arts (ed.): Ga-netchû! Das Manga Anime Syndrom , pp. 88f, 92. Henschel Verlag, 2008.
Web links
- Entry at Anime News Network (English)