Boku no Oldies wa All-Color

After Heart Cocktail, Watase Seizou released three more anime collections based on his stories:

• 1987: Boku no Oldies wa All-Color (My All-Color Oldies)
  
• 1988: Chalk-iro no People (Chalk-Colored People)
  
• 1992: Two on the Road

Like Heart Cocktail, these OVAs never made it across the Digital Divide and are available only on VHS tape and laserdisc. (Oldies and Two aren't even listed in AniDB.) Unlike Heart Cocktail, they have minimal animation and no dialog. Like a silent movie (or A-Girl), they have constant music, and signs or intertitles provide the dialog.

The first, Boku no Oldies wa All-Color (My All-Color Oldies), has five stories set to classic songs:

1. Riding a Wave to Ten Years Ago ("Love Me Tender")
2. Twenty Minutes to Kaguya-Hime ("Calendar Girl", "Fly Me to the Moon")
3. A Long Distance Call from a Town in the West ("Rhythm of the Rain")
4. 250km ("Moonlight Serenade")
5. The Two of Them Requested Gentle Rain ("Gentle Rain")

The opening and closing credits feature silhouettes (elegant, but minimally animated) of a couple, dancing to "Autumn Romance," which sounds vintage but was actually composed for the show. The stories are standard Watase Seizou: a man and woman, romance found and lost, the passage of time. The songs are covered, quite ably, by Japanese musicians and singers. They're in English, so they haven't been subtitled.

Once again, Darkonius (DarkWispers), MartyMcflies (LonelyChaser), and I (Orphan) collaborated on this project. Darkonius translated. Yume translation checked. Darkonius timed, and I fine-timed. I edited and typeset. Nemesis and Rezo QCed. The raw is a Japanese laserdisc, ripped on the Domesday Duplicator and encoded by an anonymous friend. We will be doing Chalk-iro no People next; we're still looking for a source for Two on the Road.

Because there's no dialog, and the signs linger long enough for even the slowest readers, Boku no Oldies wa All-Color seems to move more slowly that Heart Cocktail, which was already fairly laid-back. Still, I like the music and the stories. You can get the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.