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What’s the chef cookin’ tonight?

Overview

  • Reserved time: 210 minutes
  • Ante: 151 minutes
    • Each episode is ~25 minutes
  • Supernova ☆: 16 minutes
  • TV☆3SIS flourishes: 8 minutes
  • Estimated door-holding: 15 minutes
  • Estimated slack: 20 minutes
    • If we have at least 10 minutes left at the end we’ll watch Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors episode 12.

The spoonful of sugar

Ante

Ante is a 1975 children’s drama miniseries that I saw the first episode of in lower secondary school. It was a pretty revolutionary show for its time: for one, it was pretty much the first time ever that a movie or show about Sámi people was centered on them and presented from their perspective, instead of being some exoticizing crap made by non-Sámi weirdos (although Ante was still directed by a non-Sámi, I should say). Beyond that, Ante presented the plight of the Sámi people and criticized contemporary Norwegianization policies in a way that was both appropriate for children while still being SHOCKINGLY real, and I do mean SHOCKINGLY real even today. Like, Ante doesn’t sugarcoat the anti-Sámi racism of the time, nor does it hide the fact that average Sámi families faced difficult decisions as a result of colonization that created nuanced internal conflicts.

On the whole, Ante is a reflection of the national conversation on Sámi rights in its era, 1975 being the peak of the Alta dam conflict, which you might remember from last week that I described it as a paradigm shift for Sámi issues in Norway. The milestones for Sámi representation in media that Ante represented also paved the way for later works like Pathfinder (1987), the directorial debut of Nils Gaup, who later went on to make The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008), which we watched two weeks ago.

As for a plot description…

A mischievous Sámi boy named Ante is struggling to fit in at a residential school in Guovdageaidnu(Kautokeino), where he is forbidden from speaking his native language and practicing his culture. Over the course of the series, we see him pursue his dream of becoming a great reindeer herder already as a child; meanwhile his father sells his own reindeer to go work in the mines.

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.

Supernova ☆

Supernova ☆ is a 1.5-episode 2015-2017 magical girl fanime by latteswiirl. I wasn’t originally planning on showing a fanime this week, but I eventually decided that I’d have to start Ante half an hour earlier for the slack anyways, so I might as well find a fanime to show tonight as a bonus. And that’s when I stumbled upon Supernova ☆ on Fanime Realm. It looks remarkably well animated, which is perhaps why the second episode was only ever half finished. This fanime is also notable for being an adaptation of a webcomic.

One more thing that stands out to me about this fanime: the opening theme of the first episode is BeForU - “Morning Glory” from the video game Dance Dance Revolution SuperNova… Which feels like “environmental storytelling” to me, like the creator was just playing DDR and thought “this song would make a bangin’ anime OP, but what should the anime be called?” and looked at the game’s cover art and was like “Brilliant!”.

Plot description from Fanime Realm:

Four lucid dreamers are recruited into the newest team: the Supernova Brigade. Follow their journey through the depths of a surreal, Nightmare-ridden land that holds the puzzle pieces needed to solve a grim mystery unfolding in their waking world.

Content warnings and accessibility

Audio description: Not available.

Sign language: Not available

Captions:

  • English softsubs; Norwegian hardsubs under Northern Sámi dialog; Northern Sámi hardsubs under Norwegian dialog (Ante, Supernova ☆ episode 1)
  • Not available (Supernova ☆ episode 2)

Language of audio:

  • Northern Sámi, Norwegian (Ante)
  • English (Supernova ☆)

Content warnings:

  • LOUD NOISES
  • FLASHING LIGHTS
  • Anti-Indigenous racism
  • Reindeer killed
  • Children in peril

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