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I don't often have "favorites", but Mushishi is my favorite anime. It does everything right for me.

I've probably already said this in the thread somewhere.

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There hasn't been anything good out recently, but the last thing I saw that I would highly recommend to any one who likes anime is Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai, or Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. In English. The only simulcast that's been able to hold my attention is Yurumate3Dei, which is a three minute episode dumb little thing.

I've been wanting to watch A Certain Scientific Rail-gun on the Funanimation website, but they really suck at updating it. It is by far one of the worst for pay streaming experiences I've had. It been in beta for over a year and they still haven't improved it.

But other then that I've found my self re-watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Toradora. I'm enjoying both again .

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Watched Panty and Stocking recently. It was stylish, juvenile fun with the worst jokes. I think I'm giving it leeway because of the amount of referential stuff to animation tropes from all regions but I found myself laughing at many of the digs and homages just for existing.

The show didn't have much of a plot and the humor could get insanely crude, but the show is ridiculously well animated and thought out with great use of all tools available. I had way too much fun for a show named "Panty & Stocking & Garterbelt."

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Yeah I personally can't stand actually watching Panty & Stocking, but that animation.....................my god.

AND THE MUSIC OH LORD!

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I finished watching Monster a week ago, all seventy-five episodes of it. I've always heard it talked about as the high water mark of dramatic anime, but I was horribly disappointed. Far, far too much of the series was spent in the protagonist's shoes as he agonized over whether he, as a doctor, had the right to take life as well as give it. It just wasn't an interesting question because, problematic god complex aside, the life he'd be taking was that of a serial killer who murdered a half-dozen people directly or indirectly while our hero sat wringing his hands.

I don't know. I feel like this thread I'm reviving should be about good anime to recommend, not bad anime to avoid, but I was just shocked by how bland and boring this was. Every time the protagonist would go into hiding, I'd get excited, just because there was a chance I'd get to spend some time with a minor character not caught in a cartoonishly black-and-white dilemma. At least Trigun had the decency to couch the same themes in a space western.

Also, the Serial Experiments Lain remaster just got released last week and it looks just amazing. Even the Blu-ray menu is great, with a Mac OS-style presentation layer. If only FUNimation didn't publish it, which means cramming fourteen episodes onto two discs and front-loading both with forced previews, like we're back in the VHS days...

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Planetes is pretty cool.

Talking about disappointing anime, I did not like Trigun. I thought it was so poorly paced. The majority of the episodes are super random stories featuring weird creeps, and then suddenly it becomes this extremely serious and bombastic space opera that we're supposed to care about. I tell you the truth, most anime do not understand good pacing.

A proper space opera/fantasy anime is Escaflowne. Really nice stuff in there.

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God damn, i love Escaflowne, definitely an old favorite.

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Talking about disappointing anime, I did not like Trigun. I thought it was so poorly paced. The majority of the episodes are super random stories featuring weird creeps, and then suddenly it becomes this extremely serious and bombastic space opera that we're supposed to care about. I tell you the truth, most anime do not understand good pacing.

If I were to make a defense of Trigun's weird pacing, which it shares with Cowboy Bebop and other contemporaries, I'd say that it pretends to waste your time for ten episodes to make the tonal shift in the teens hit home harder, but I'm not sure that's intentional and it certainly doesn't work for everyone.

But hey, at least it was a third as long as Monster.

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I hate Escaflowne. I actively hate it and tell everyone I know to avoid it at all costs. I know a lot of people like it, though, so I immediately follow with a, "Well, but that's just my opinion."

I found Trigun to be decent, but nothing to write home about.

I've been watching Hyouka. It was a recommendation from a friend whose recommendations I trust without reservation. At first, I was a little put off by the setting (ughh Japanese school ughhhh), but it has a nice mood to it, and, somewhat ironically, has animation that's better than most anime that deserve good animation - i.e., action-y stuff. It's like if Sherlock Holmes was an incredibly lazy Japanese schooldude. Of course, that description is itself incredibly offputting... But I like it. I dunno. U:

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I'm feeling like randomly making recommendations for two series that i quite like. (Apparently both based on source material from one particular author, as i understand it, but still different stories, to be clear.)

Baccano.

Durarara.

I have no reservations about these recommendations.

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They're both great, and also by the same studio, and also very different, and also pretty similar.

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Yeah, whenever i recommend one of those, it seems natural to recommend the other. They go together quite well, but are very different, all at once.

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Baccano! also has one of the best anime OPs of all time, up there with the first season of Bleach and the second season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

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I think I've watched maybe half of Baccano on Netflix and like it, also I can't imagine watching it in Japanese which is pretty much how I prefer to watch everything, but since it's in New York and the people have New York accents I feel like watching it in a different language would be a worse experience.

As for Escaflowne and Trigun, I really liked both when I watched them, but that was probably close to 10 years ago, maybe even more, so I was I guess 12 at the time. I didn't have a problem with the pacing in Trigun. The whole thing where the first bunch of episodes don't have any real ongoing plot and are mostly one-offs, but as it goes on a real plot and story develop towards the end is so common in anime that at this point if I'm watching something I expect to have to watch maybe 10+ episodes before I have a real sense of what's going on.

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Funnily enough I was just coming in here to recommend Baccano, as it's one of the diamonds in the rough that is anime. And yes, watch the dubs, they're spot on. Unfortunately it's off Netflix Instant now and the Funimation YT only has subs.

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I don't watch much Anime, or tv shows at all. In fact I can name every TV show I've really liked in the past decade off the top of my head because there are so few.

But the two Animes were Fooly Cooly and Cowboy Bebop (favorite tv show ever). Any recommendations as such, or as I suspect, am I SOL? And yes I know about Samurai Champloo. Promising and then went batshite in the second season.

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Baccano! and GitS are the only two anime I will ever recommend. And I recommend them here.

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@Orv as Sno mentions above Durarara!! really is worth watching if you enjoyed Baccano! (at the very least it has the same errant love for exclamation marks in titles). Also which of the many GitS's are your recommending? I re-watched most of them recently and found myself pretty ambivalent about most of them, and actually strongly disliking GitS 2.

In the end I think I only really feel positive about the original GitS, and there's a part of me that worries even that is just the afterglow of nostalgia. Yes it had a great opening sequence, some good set pieces and visual design, and a half decent cyberpunk overplot, but the dialogue at times is pretty damn terrible. If GitS hadn't been one of the 1st Anime I had seen i'm unsure i'd be half as fond of it as I am.

Akira on the other hand............... damn, if anything it keeps getting better the more I watch it. Although I do know some people who feel strongly about the changes it made to condense a story down from a multi volume manga to a single film (while I just feel they did a near perfect job of cutting out everything that didn't really matter).

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Funnily enough I was just coming in here to recommend Baccano, as it's one of the diamonds in the rough that is anime. And yes, watch the dubs, they're spot on. Unfortunately it's off Netflix Instant now and the Funimation YT only has subs.

It is? Damn, I guess it will be a while before I finish it unless Funimation puts the dubs on YT, or its on Hulu+ or something.

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