A Rocket Scientist's Guide to Space Anime

Rocketeer — Tue, 31/08/2010 - 11:09am

Reposted by request:

Here's something a little different ;-) Some of the best and most interesting depictions of near-future space technology in recent fiction have been in the medium of anime, or Japanese animation. I gave a talk on this subject at the UK anime convention Aya Revolution, discussing some of the best space anime and how they touch on real-world space technology.

A video of slides and clips from the talk is available for download. Apologies for the quality, but it had to be compressed quite heavily to create a reasonable file size (the original MOV generated by Keynote was 1GB in size!).

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Good job you've done

Domain (not verified) — Mon, 13/12/2010 - 9:27pm

Good job you've done compressing this movie to a appropriate size, thanks a lot.

Re: Originally posted by: Sefte Blog — Tue, 31/08/2010 - 11:09am

Information Request

pughar — Fri, 06/08/2010 - 10:14pm

Would there be any way to get the speech. It appears that it is no longer hosted at the link you provided... I am interested to see both 'which' anime's you touch on and what kind of space technology they portray. Do you go into how accurate their dialogue about space topics is?

OK, I've fixed the links to

Rocketeer — Tue, 31/08/2010 - 11:10am

OK, I've fixed the links to the movie file...

Thanks for your interest, and

Rocketeer — Tue, 10/08/2010 - 12:40am

Thanks for your interest, and for pointing out the broken link. I'll try uploading a low-resolution version to YouTube -- as I mentioned, the original file was too large to host easily.

In answer to your question, yes, within the constraints of a basically light-hearted presentation targeted towards a general audience. I chose a selection of space-related anime which I felt were important, or which I personally liked, and used each one to illustrate some aspect of aerospace engineering, space history or space science... discussing where and how the anime actually get it *right*.

As for the anime concerned:

* Wings of Honneamise
* Wandaba Style
* Twin Spica
* Stellvia of the Universe
* Stratos 4
* Rocket Girls
* Planetes
* Moonlight Mile

Also, the video is not a recording of my speech, it's just a reproduction of the slides and video clips that I used to illustrate the talk.

UPDATE

Rocketeer — Tue, 10/08/2010 - 12:52am

Heh, it's about a minute and a half too long for Youtube :-p

I may have to edit/re-export it. I'll get back to you...

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