Let's talk about Anime!

I haven't seen some of the "perennial anime classics". I haven't seen Cowboy Beepop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, any Gundams or Serial Experiments Lain, to name a few. Haven't seen Ghost in the Shell either, but that one looks kind of depressing.

iguanaDitty wrote: dead leaves is a great dose of wtf did i just watch.

If you liked Dead Leaves, FLCL is by the same director (EDIT: I was wrong, they aren't) and every bit as crazy. It's an energetic tale of adolescence with all kinds of weird, unsuble symbolysm in a very Japanese vein and the animation is great, it has dozens of fun moments of crazyness that are rare in Japanese animation.

I was lucky to find the whole series at bargain price because they divided it in several tomes to nickel and dime our asses.


I have the first five tomes of the Welcome to the NHK manga and I'll probably sell them. It's fun but I reached a point in which I just couldn't stand yet another disgrace. Burn out, I suppose, but damn.

I also saw The Tower of Druaga because I like the game a lot but I didn't think it was anything special. Sure, some scenes and really have weight in them, by the end of the first season you start feeling the pressure of climbing the Tower. But all the generic shonen tropes that permeate it are a big mark against it, I think. I enjoyed it in a "rainy saturday" way but it's kind of forgettable.

Feel free to tell me what to watch, I'll have a lot of free time with Christmas around the corner.

My girlfriend is a serious anime freak and has watched nearly everything, but I have only enjoyed a limited amount of it. I will give you a rundown on the stuff that I remember by name.

See everything by Hayao Miyazaki. He is the absolute best. Everything that he does is gorgeous and often somewhat deep and moving. Princess Mononoke was the one that changed my mind about the potential of anime.

Cowboy Bebop - highly overrated, imo. Sometimes the main characters seem like little more than arbitrary collections of quirks. The music is good and there is plenty of action. Overall, the stories make sense even though the main characters are somewhat random.

Samurai Champloo - made by the same team that did Cowboy Bebop, but much better. Really very good.

Akira - Good, but has a pacing problem often seen in Japanese movies. Their idea of a dramatic conclusion is to slow down the action and then slow it down even more, to practically a crawl. It leaves you on the edge of your seat until you fall off into impatience or even boredom.

Ninja Scroll - Ludicrous waste of time. Everybody leaps like a super-grasshopper, because the animators apparently were unable to draw people walking. It's the anime equivalent of Rob Liefeld's inability to draw feet.

Perfect Blue - Hitchcock style suspense meets japanese pop music. It's okay, but a bit too depraved for my tastes.

Texhnolyze - First episode is brilliant, with great storytelling despite zero dialogue for the first 15 or 20 minutes. Eventually the bodycount piles up beyond belief and even blows past our human concept of genocide into something even more extreme. Interesting, but unpleasant.

Ghost in the Shell - Has some pacing problems, but is a high-quality production. There was one really great fight scene.

Urotsukidoji - Horrible, stupid, offensive, and extreme. This was unfortunately my first exposure to anime, and I avoided it all for several years after that.

Rumbling Hearts - Love triangle drama, but really well done. My girlfriend and I wept during the final episode.

Then there is a whole slew of forgettable stuff that I have been exposed to thanks to my girlfriend. She is really into magical princess and high school drama anime, plus some very bizarre stuff. There was one about a cursed pair of panties that kept talking dirty. And then there was one series that I really wish I could remember the name of... something about private investigators and the head of the agency really loved pasta. Anyway, there were three consecutive episodes of it that did an awesome Rashomon kind of thing. Three different overlapping stories, each told from the viewpoint of a different character. Loved that show, but I didn't get to see most of it before my girlfriend finished it and sent it back to Netflix.

Jeff White wrote: I don't buy games that look like they've even been even remotely influenced by anime. Not a fan of the style.

Exactly where I am. It's one of the few things that truly vetoes a game for me.

S.

I personally did not care for Serial Experiments Lain, although it has one of the best intro songs of any anime I've seen.

Another show I liked- Genshiken. It's about college anime / manga nerds. I found it funny.

Edit- also Ju Oh Sei

I've watched a lot of anime. More than I'd care to type out in a list here. I mainly like science fiction stuff and anime has a lot more of that than US cartoons do. One of my favorites is Planetes because its played mostly serious and goes for a hard science approach.

Erik Twice wrote:

THE ONLY WAY TO WATCH THE MELANCHOLY OF HARUHI SUZUMIYA IS IN 2009 BROADCAST ORDER YOU BAKA FUCKING GAIJIN

oh hey, sorry I was late to get into this thread and haven't read through it but La Blue Girl isn't bad I guess

Quick break from lurking. Haven't liked much anime I've seen in the last few years. But thought Moribito : Guardian of the Sacred Spirit was just great. Highly recommend, even (especially?) if you don't like anime.

Mad Dog wrote: I've watched a lot of anime. More than I'd care to type out in a list here. I mainly like science fiction stuff and anime has a lot more of that than US cartoons do. One of my favorites is Planetes because its played mostly serious and goes for a hard science approach.

Yea, I'm in a similar boat with an extra dash on top of "my childhood cartoon memories are dominated by that big "2nd wave" of anime ("Japanimation" back then) that hit the US: Star Blazers, Robotech, Battle of the Planets/G-Force [and man was my mind blown when I finally saw the original unedited version. The changes were so substantial, I wasn't sure I was watching the same series...and that was before realizing that the original big villain was actually a hermaphrodite). In addition, the "1st wave" shows like Speed Racer and Astro Boy would still pop up from time to time (Speed Racer was actually inescapable; the other 60s series aired far less frequently). Pretty much a life-long appreciation for the stuff since.


Frank (I think) mentioned earlier that movies and OVA are generally more reliably even. That's almost always true because I've yet to see any series with more than 13 episodes that doesn't have a completely meaningless/useless "filler" episode every 7 episodes or so. Worse are long-running series that end up with extended pointless "filler plots." I understand they have to fill out a full season, but it can be a drag.


As for series I think are worth watching, most have already been named (MooFrank and I apparently have fairly similar tastes in the genre). I also really dug Planetes. Of the newer stuff, the initial Fullmetal Alchemist series is pretty solid all in all. The subsequent "Brotherhood" series sure seems like a money-grab to me. I am also a huge fan of the Inuyasha series. It's basically a buddy-picture/highschool romance (err, between teen girl and petulant adolescent dog-demon) story written mostly for teenage girls, but it's got descent character development and general writing. You will, however, tire of the Bronte-sister-esque "'Inuyaaaashhhhaaaa'....'Kaaaagooooommmmmmeeeee'...." exchanges between the two leads in just about every episode. I also liked the Giant Robo OVA quite a bit.

Some folks have mentioned Ghost in the Shell--the movie was pretty great at the time. I'm not sure how well it holds up these days. In the end, though, it's enough of a riff on Blade Runner to feel vaguely familiar and thus derivative. The recent series, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, on the other hand, is a good police procedural with a decent lightweight commentary on "cogs in the machine of society" subtext (were not talking Fritz Lang's Metropolis here, but it's not so heavyhanded as it could be....)

Samurai 7 was a decent reworking of Seven Samurai [with a bit of a nod to the Magnificent Seven, too].

I'm also a big fan of the Lupin III stuff, but you have to take it for what it is--one giant sexual innuendo wrapped around a "grifter procedural"-type story. It's a series that's run in some form since the early 70s, and it embodies all that "Austin Powers" "yea baby" kind of shit. But it's almost all fun as hell (and Studio Ghibli actually did a Lupin movie--Castle of Cagliostro, and it's one of the darkest of the stories I think I've ever seen. Kind of an unexpected twist all around).

Another I love is Black Jack, which is sort of a "medical magician" (think "Dr. House"--and they apparently did an animated promo with Black Jack teaming up with House on a case a few years ago) story. Good character and decent writing from the creator of Astro Boy. It's solid.

Noir: pair of female assassins refreshingly light on the fan-service, but a little heavy on the incomprehensible "mysterious secret society" backstory. Watchable.

Big O: I loved this 13-episode series even though it made precisely no fucking sense at any level anywhere along the way. Apparently I wasn't alone because the reception in the US was so substantial that the studio was persuaded to produce another 13-episode series (cleverly named Big O II) as a result. (Initial domestic reception was lousy enough that the studio cut the original order from 26 to 13 episodes, so this 2nd batch was more of a "resurrection" than a "new order", I guess.)

As for the billion or so mecha series out there--if this floats your boat, you can find about a billion series to choose from. I'm content with Robotech and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I've avoided the "world of Gundam" stuff because it reminds me of trying to collect Frank Zappa albums--once you start, it looks to be a never-friggin'-ending process. Just too much material.

I have a bunch of other series that I'd recommend for the average viewer that aren't too out there or too overwhelmingly dependent on the T&A factor, but I'd have to go digging through my DVD shelves. I'll try to do that during some down time this holiday week.