I’ve always had an odd affinity for movies released in the year I was born, which was 1968. Three awesome movies happened to come out that year: the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the hardcore sci-fi films Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I especially love 2001, because of the huge scale of its story and unparalleled visual presentation, although you have to appreciate the movie for its wabi and sabi (sober refinement and austere serenity) as it’s not an action film. If there’s an anime version of 2001, it’d have to be Sunrise’s cult series Planetes, an realistic hardcore sci-fi series about humans living in space whose job is to recover floating space debris in orbit around Earth. It’s kind of like a super-realistic version of a Gundam series without the mobile suits.
In the show, the staff of the Space Debris Section has a certain keyword they use to indicate they’ve understood what they’ve just been told: aikopii, which seemed like a mysterious and oddly cute-sounding word of gibberish to me. It took me several episodes to realize that this mysterious word was actually the English phrase “I copy.” This inability to recognize English words pronounced with a Japanese accent is something that happens from time to time, due to the unfamiliar phonetic system of the Japanese, but after studying the language and living here for so long, I was surprised it could still happen to me. Guess I better crack open some Japanese textbooks again…
Planetes is a hardcore SF anime I like a lot. You copy?
