Watching the Space Adventure Cobra movie last night kind of reminded me of the feeling I got catching random OVAs and movies on the Sci-Fi channel. There's sort of a mysterious quality to them, a lack of context that kind of forces you to turn off the 'rational' part of your brain and just engage with the work on it's own.
I think some part of that is an effect of how a lot of this stuff was released in the West, at least originally. Things like Cobra, Toward the Terra, and Read or Die all had longer works associated with them, and Japanese audiences would either have awareness of the work going in, or would be able to find the work afterword and get the remaining context. However, because of how the Western market worked, we only got a movie or the OVA divorced from the context it was released in.
I wonder if there's an equivalent to that type of experience these days? More anime, manga, and even light novels are being localized, and info's readily available on the internet, so can you capture that feeling of just stumbling on something with no expectations or knowledge going in? Maybe I'm just lamenting growing up and losing a little of that sense of the unknown 😅
Also, I want to make it clear that I'm NOT suggesting that the people who made these things had no idea what they were doing or couldn't possibly be making weird, avant-garde art! Things like Angel's Egg and Belladonna of Sadness are standalone works that also have that vibe to them (at least for me). I'm just wondering if some of these works were able to get away with being so weird because they had a pre-existing property to fall back on, and if Japanese audiences were able to "fill in the gaps" because they had awareness of those properties.
