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The year 2011 gave us an epic and surprisingly dark spin on the magical girl genre called "Monica Magika." Every couple of years or so, nostalgia for my early fandom gets me re-watching it. The last time I did, one scene caught my attention midway through the series. One of the characters, Blue Sayaka, goes to visit her friend Kiyosuke at the hospital. The dude is a violinist who's run into health complications and so he can't play anymore.
Hold up! Cause a CD player that's open... My first thought was okay, it probably just exists in the show, but let's dig deeper. Out of curiosity, keen-eyed Redditors did some digging and found it to be real – sort of. The CD player turned out to be based on a concept from 2007 that never materialized into an actual product.
It's certainly of its time, the designer made it as a hybrid CD slash MP3 player. Of course, this was in the middle of the iPod days and people were still trying to figure out whether they wanted physical or digital, and a lot of us ended up having both. I would have loved to have one if not just for the novelty of the design.
But it's not to say that the concept is totally impossible. While not exactly the same thing, look back at the heyday of Sony innovation in the late 80s – it's the Discman D88! If you guys are genuinely curious about this product, there's a really cool video on the Tecmo channel doing a full breakdown.
The D88 is genuinely a fascinating product. Absolutely impractical to play in public, especially since CDs scratch if you so much as look at them again... This thing literally spins your discs out in the open! But come on, for the 80s, this thing's pretty cool!
A bit of an obvious statement, but the scope of technology doesn't just stop at the physical items you can hold with your hands. Devices are mere vehicles for software ecosystems, ideas, and concepts... As you'll see with the next few examples, abstract facets of technology can play a huge role in the environment an anime takes place in and can even affect its characters and stories.
While many of us are begrudgingly letting Web 3 into our lives, Fame director Mamora Hosoda used the Metaverse as the backdrop for his 2021 film "Belle." It's best described as a modern-day take on the classic "Beauty and the Beast."
The way the film explores the concept of people living different lives in the virtual world through avatars is equal parts positive and negative. It can break people out of their shell to become better versions of themselves, but likewise, if there's anything the internet has taught us already, it's that anonymity can also give way to people being the absolute worst.
In my opinion, I think it does the whole Metaverse thing pretty well at least considering that this is a film made for general audiences. Mamora Hosoda is all too familiar with making movies about bleeding-edge tech – apart from Belle, back in the year 2000, Hosoda directed the "Digimon: Our War Game" film.
Which featured real aspects of tech back in the day – we're talking computers running Windows 98, email viruses... But of course, anime is truly the best when it's visual and active, not just static shots of computer screens. So, Hosoda used tunnels and 3D spaces to visually represent the internet in a space separate from the real world.
Go figure for a movie based around digital monsters in a digital world – but that Digimon movie turned out to be a beta for what would be his 2009 film "Summer Wars." Which is basically that Digimon movie but with a standalone story and incorporates more online gaming and esports into its thematic makeup.
It's pretty safe to say if there's any significant advancement of tech in our lives and culture, Mamora Hosoda will probably be there to make a film about it. There are so many other interesting real-tech references in anime that I want to cover, but sadly, this is all the time I got for this video.
If you liked it, give me a thumbs up and let me know what other anime tech you'd like me to cover next. Thank you for getting Dinky Channel to over 50,000 subscribers! And otherwise, I'll catch y'all later!