blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine

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What’s the chef cookin’ tonight?

Overview

  • Reserved time: 180 minutes
  • Angoroj: 60 minutes
  • Angel of the Sea: 75 minutes
    • Each episodes is ~11 minutes
  • TV☆3SIS flourishes: 7 minutes
  • Estimated door-holding: 15 minutes
  • Estimated slack: 23 minutes
    • If we have at least 10 minutes left at the end we’ll watch Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors episode 19.

The spoonful of sugar

Angoroj (1964)

Angoroj or Agonies is the first feature film to be produced entirely in Esperanto. A crime story set in the outskirts of Paris, the film was neither successful at the time, nor has it gained much of a cult following in the half-century since its release, as it has been very much overshadowed by the only other feature film in Esperanto, Inkubo (Incubus) starring William Shatner. As a matter of fact, Inkubo was what I had originally planned on showing tonight, until I stumbled upon a subtitled upload of Angoroj and decided to take the road less traveled. Less traveled indeed, as very little information about Angoroj has been published in English. Nearly every copy of Angoroj was destroyed as the director fell into a depression from the movie’s lack of success, so thank God for piracy making it easier to preserve these sorts of historical documents!

The medicine

What is fanime?

A fanime (etym. blend of fan + anime) is basically when someone makes an anime-style cartoon show by drawing frames in MS Paint; compositing them in Windows Movie Maker with pirated music, stock sound effects, and dialog recorded in one take on potato microphones; and posting the result to YouTube. This isn’t necessarily accurate of all fanime, but the throughline is in any case that fanime is a form of democratized amateur animation combining anime aesthetics with “Internet Ugly”. The style is most associated with the Western anime fandom of the mid-2000s through mid-2010s, where it was often difficult to distinguish sincere fanime shows from parodies of the genre.

Angel of the Sea

Angel of the Sea is an action-adventure fantasy fanime by Vairi published since 2019. Originally created for the 2019 Fanime Weekly Challenge, however one episode a week proved to be too difficult a release schedule, so the episodes ended up instead just sort of releasing whenever was convenient for the creator. As the Lord intended. We’ll be watching the seven released episodes.

Plot description from Fanime Realm:

This is a story about a glassmaker named Angel, a seagull boy, and a mysterious entity that surrounds their island home!

While Doing Research for this announcement post, I found out that the creator of this fanime, Vairi, despite making works in a space literally founded on blatantly copyright-infringing derivative works, themself[1] claims copyright over all their fanime and asks people not to reupload it. So it’s sort of an interesting coincidence that I’m pairing Angel of the Sea with a work that was very nearly lost for good, where piracy has been vital for its preservation.

Content warnings and accessibility

Audio description: Not available

Sign language: Not available

Captions:

  • German, English, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese and Russian softsubs (Angoroj)
  • Not available (Angel of the Sea)

Language of audio:

  • Esperanto (Angoroj)
  • English (Angel of the Sea)

Content warnings:

  • FLASHING LIGHTS
  • A character is shot to death
  • Blood

Sources: Esperanto-language plot description of Angoroj, YouTube channel description of Vairi. That channel description is more of a general CW list for all of Vairi’s fanime, though, and it also mentions “swearing”, “disturbing imagery”, and “mature themes and references”, which I feel is kinda too vague to be useful. All of Vairi’s fanime are self-rated as 16+. To be honest, though, Angel of the Sea looks really tame, so I don’t know how many of these warnings actually apply to Angel of the Sea specifically.

♫ Uniting nations at the speeeed of liiiiight ♫
[epic sax solo]
♫ Station of the '20s — TV☆3SIS! ♫

  1. The last time Vairi publicly stated their pronouns was in a 2017 forum post, however the last time I used that specific forum post as a source for a fanimetor’s pronouns… it turned out that the fanimetor in question had actually changed pronouns in the near-decade since the forum post, and just didn’t mention this fact on any of their social media. So in absence of a more recent source for Vairi’s pronouns, I’m not going to risk misgendering them by using an outdated source, so I’ve chosen to default to they/them. ↩︎