I just discovered that there was an anime adaptation of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS, from way back in 1988, released only on Laserdisc. Of course I had to see it. STARSHIP TROOPERS is, among other things, the invention of the Giant Robot epic. How could you not want to see the Japanese take on it?

Heinlein wrote the novel in 1959, and it's heavily influenced by WW2 and Korean War military experience (although not firsthand). Heinlein was a military R+D researcher during the war (and after for a while, I think), and he was a big supporter of nuclear weapons testing.

Contrast that with the Japanese war experience, imperial military culture, and most importantly the Japanese take on nuclear weapons.

I've always been interested in how Japanese animation has been affected by the experience of nuclear weapons. In a lot of early anime, and to some extent in current work, the explosions were drawn in a manner very similar to nuclear explosions. Not necessarily mushroom clouds, but as a glowing, expanding hemisphere. And I think it's echoed in the big, one-shot energy weapons/attacks that end up in nearly everything.

Anyways, the anime is a pretty creative re-imagining of the novel. Johnnie Rico is a blond, blue-eyed running-back on the high school football team for starters. I had thought he was Argentinian, although according to Wikipedia he was Filipino. The characters from the books are included, but they're constructed differently. Kitten Smith, for example, who got his nickname in the novel for not being aggressive enough in training exercises, is presented as a 2nd generation soldier who excels at everything. Shujumi is a smart-alecky character, which I found interesting in it's own. He's drawn extra Asian-y. In other anime with non-Japanese settings, the Japanese characters are usually drawn fairly normal, or handsomely, and the slanty eyes are reserved for Chinese or other Asian ethnicities.

Johnnie's relationship with his parents is reconstructed as well. While in the novel, his father refuses to speak to him, and his mother is a maudlin mess. In the anime, though, the father respects his son's decision in a very father-son bonding, coming-of-age way. The mother, on the other hand, is given leeway to be interesting. This seems to be a particularly noteworthy comparison, but since the parental relationship is not described in much detail in either work, it's hard to really see where that's going.

One scene that I particularly wanted to point out was the scene where Zim discusses the relatively low-impact role of infantry in high-tech warfare. In the scene, Sergeant Zim was instructing the recruits in knife-throwing. He's interrupted by a recruits, making the fairly obvious question of why they learn the difficult skill of knife-throwing, when people typically fight in giant robots.

The American film version included the scene as well, in a hokey but concise and memorable display.

[SON OF A BITCH! 2/3 of the post disappeared. Continued here.]

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Starship Troopers