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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).

I can take or leave the Ghost in the Shell movies, because they're really only as good as your taste for cyberpunk, but both seasons of the TV series are a near-perfect fusion of police procedural and near-future conspiracy freakout.

If I were to recommend generally excellent dude-oriented anime, it would be Planetes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot subtitled Brotherhood, although the last of these is a bit too shounen at times to be an unqualified mention.

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GitS is the only reason anyone talking to me about anime gets any more time out of me than it takes me to punch them in the face. Without GitS I would have no respect for the stuff at all. Note that Bebop doesn't count because I saw it after GitS, or it would be the reason.

That said, SAC and GitS 1 are the only things I'd recommend, and even then SAC is hit and miss. It is good enough however that it is worth watching both seasons.

@Baron: Because Funimation is a pretty cool company, you can find all of the Baccano! dubs here for free. http://www.funimatio...accano/episodes

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If I were to recommend generally excellent dude-oriented anime, it would be Planetes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot subtitled Brotherhood, although the last of these is a bit too shounen at times to be an unqualified mention.

Planetes is one of my favourite hard sci fi films or series,(Its up there with Moon imo) it just does a brilliant job of making both its cast of characters and the world they live in plausible. Also I think I'm with you in feeling Space Brothers is indeed a poor man's version of it.

Don't feel this season has any stand out shows, but if you go back to the beginning of this year Kids on the Slope was worth watching if for nothing more than just to see what Watanabe gets up to when he turns his hand to directing something less outlandish than bounty hunting space cowboys or hip hop samurai's.

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It's funny 'cause GitS is pretty good, but not even close to the best.

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It's funny 'cause GitS is pretty good, but not even close to the best.

It was the first anime that was ever presented to me that wasn't weird high school kids shit, or stuff that made zero sense. For instance, the first thing someone tried to get me into anime with was a dude who had magical hands and could make the best bread ever. There was also some kind of Highlander shit going on between bread chefs or something, I don't know.

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Hah! Yeah, that's Yakitate!! Japan. God knows why he chose that as your gateway anime.

I had a friend get introduced to anime through a series about a puppeteer and his crime-solving marionette. The way I see, it only goes up from there.

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Yakitate Japan is good because it's so ridiculous. But it does get pretty tiresome pretty quickly.

Seirei no Moribito is a really good one. Directed by the director of Ghost in the Shell, too! Kemono no Souja Erin is another decent one, and for some reason I always remember it when I think of Seirei no Moribito. They're both relatively calm fantasy things, so that's probably it.

(I'd use the English titles, but I know them by their Japanese ones. Also the apparently accepted English translation of Kemono sounds horrid. "The Beast Player Erin". What.)

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It's funny 'cause GitS is pretty good, but not even close to the best.

Eh, I think it's good and succeeds at what it tries to do. Outside of other things cyberpunk it's comparing apples to oranges so whether it's the "best" or close or whatever doesn't really matter.

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I don't agree with the idea that you can't compare things in different genres, but whatever.

I really like GitS. I just wouldn't recommend it to someone as an example of the best of anime. EDIT: That said, I've always argued against people who try to classify anime as its own thing (as I believe doing so is a disservice to this or that series which really stands out), so I guess I kind of hate myself right now for being a hypocrite. SUE ME.

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What would you recommend as an example?

To me it doesn't make sense to pick anything as being the best as anime is so broad, it's just as broad as any other type of movie. I think Bladerunner is really good, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone as an example of the best of film (or even think of it in that context). I can recommend people examples of anime that I think are good, but ranking them further than that wouldn't really work, at least for me.

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I dunno, I'm not good at picking bests. I just know that I'd never rank GitS that highly. But anyway, I edited my post because I am a darned fool.

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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.

Personally, I think the series continuity is much, much better than the film continuity. (So i'm recommending Stand Alone Complex and its sequels.)

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If we're going into more general recommendations, how many of you guys have seen mushishi?

...and the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot subtitled Brotherhood, although the last of these is a bit too shounen at times to be an unqualified mention.

The first ten episodes or so where they're just trying to blow through material shared with the first series is incredibly rough and awkward, but the last few arcs of Brotherhood are fucking awesome. It is ABSOLUTELY shonen, but it is just about the best shonen you will find in anime.

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Oh, the GitS movies suck. I hate them. The series is the good stuff.

Er, but there are some movies that fall within the series continuity. I don't remember all the details. I think all the SAC stuff is the good stuff?

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The film continuity is: Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.

The series continuity is: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2ndGIG, and Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society

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You know, the thing about anime is that it can easily get so much more annoying than their (often) manga inspiration. Anime can have weird pacing, lame music, annoying voice acting, just a ton of things that distract you. I will almost always recommend reading the manga of a series instead of the anime.

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Try Kemonozume, Kaiba, or Tatami Galaxy for TV shows maybe if you want a trippier and artsy mixed flavor?

I don't know if they are great but I love the director's other works, but I should probably get around to watching all of the shows myself.

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All three of those are pretty good. Tatami Galaxy is my favorite by a lot.

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I can take or leave the Ghost in the Shell movies, because they're really only as good as your taste for cyberpunk, but both seasons of the TV series are a near-perfect fusion of police procedural and near-future conspiracy freakout.

If I were to recommend generally excellent dude-oriented anime, it would be Planetes, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot subtitled Brotherhood, although the last of these is a bit too shounen at times to be an unqualified mention.

Thanks for the recommendations (sooooo many!) And I did enjoy the first season of Suzumiya, and didn't mention it only because I watched 1 episode of season 2 before realizing they'd lost whatever it was they had from 1 and quitting.

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So Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 came out a couple months back and the second Berserk movie just got subtitled, so this feels like the perfect time for me to revive this thread. My two favorite anime series of the nineties are getting multi-movie theatrical reboots! And all I can think is that neither replaces their predecessor, though each for separate and telling reasons.

The Rebuild movies are really good. I can't say that enough. It's great to see Hideaki Anno, the creator and director, come back and weave the same story and atmosphere with radically different tone and themes. It's made me realize that, for all that "infinite replayability" is tossed around in various industries, the Evangelion franchise is one of the few for me that really deserves it. Every time I watch the show all the way through, depending on my mood, it becomes something different: a Gnosticism-flavored giant-robot sci-fi, a time capsule of millennarial apocalypticism, a multi-tiered psychological study, a parable of human inadequacy and frailty, and so on... To see Anno explore different themes using the same iconic characters and events is thrilling, because it realizes the potential of the franchise so well. The new Evangelion movies do not replace the series because there are more stories to be told.

On the other hand, the new Berserk movies are pretty good. I have to keep saying that. True, I find the computer-drawn art uncanny to the point of distraction, but the series I know and love is still present, albeit in two-hour chunks. But that's really the problem: it's the same damn story. Berserk is great for being hard-nosed and unflinching with the consequences its characters incur, but its narrative of trust, betrayal, and vengeance is not terribly deep. It lives to shock you, but a movie reboot that's pretty much shot-for-shot doesn't do that too much, not unless you're so steeped in the series that, like me, you notice when they cut a recurring cameo early or telegraph a future plot point better. Maybe this'll be like the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot, where it'll improve drastically once out from under the shadow of its forerunner, but I'm not holding my breath. The new Berserk movies do not replace the series because the series has already told their story.

Damn, but it was nice to see the "century-slayer" scene go down without the animators struggling to cut costs, though. I could watch a whole damn movie of Guts just killing people, which is precisely what the manga turns into after the Golden Age arc the movies cover. So maybe I am a bit optimistic, I don't know. Has anyone else seen anything good lately?

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Don't really watch anime much these days, although I did rent and highly enjoyed the evangelion movies. Looking forward to 3.0

Ninja scroll = best film eva

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Ninja Scroll is really good, absolutely.

Hey, apparently the remake of the Space Battleship Yamato anime is quite something. Anyone seen it?

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Ninja Scroll is really good, absolutely.

Hey, apparently the remake of the Space Battleship Yamato anime is quite something. Anyone seen it?

I had a friend recommend that to me recently, I am kind of getting the idea I need to give it a watch.

I don't know about best anime, it seems to move around as I watch more stuff. I seem to have a super soft spot at the moment for "Steins;Gate" that show is AMAZING. Time travel looping insanity that oddly seems to have some form of science that works. Also, amazing characters.

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About once a year I get the sudden, powerful urge to watch anime, and that's a nerve that's definitely been itching for the past few weeks. Unfortunately I can't think of anything to watch right now.

I'm just skimming through this thread but there's a couple of things that people mentioned that I wanted to touch on:

I watched the first half of Steins;Gate and thought it was okay. I remember it being compared to Doctor Who when it was contemporary, and it definitely has the same kind of feeling to me: cheap and crudely-fashioned, but somehow endearing. One thing that I hated about it, though, was that it follows suit with the very strange Japanese media trope of being surprisingly open about containing LGBT characters, but having very insulting depictions of them. Ruka is clearly trans, but her closest friends still refer to her as being male. That just rubs me the wrong way.

REDLINE is secretly a far better movie than it pretends to be. If you glossed it over or wrote it off as a fun, over-the-top action movie; watch it again. Not that it isn't enjoyable if you appreciate it as such; but I seriously find some new, incredibly subtle thread connecting the characters together every time I watch it. Literally every time. There's also lots of great little character moments (the stuff like JP blowing on hot soup or adjusting his jacket just gets me).

The story of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, while very much glorifying of a very foolhardy philosophy, has some really strong themes behind it, especially the visual motif of the spiral. I like how well Gainax retrofitted a very common element of old super robot anime (the drill weapon) into a metaphor for the pervasive attitudes behind those stories. I'm pretty glad that Gainax really does seem to funnel all of the money they must make off of terrifyingly creepy Evangelion merchandise into making actual interesting work.

Also, I think the scene that best encapsulates this series is when Kamina first meets Viral. Kamina starts drawing his sword to illustrate bravado while also trash-talking him. The general rule of badassery states that he can't finish drawing the sword until he's done talking, but his speech is so wordy that by the time he's finished drawing his sword it's approximately nine feet long and curved like a protractor. It's just self-aware enough to be hilarious.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was one of the series that made me hate anime. Initially I just didn't like it for being the flagship of the new wave of creepy, pandering otaku shit with OPs and EDs consisting of awkward, stilted dance routines (see also: Lucky Star). The more I think about it though, the more I realize that the whole show is basically that one episode of the Twilight Zone with the creepy demon kid wishing people into the cornfield if it had taken every opportunity to make the character endearing in a transparent, plastic way.

I do not like Haruhi Suzumiya.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is the most loving tribute to trashy American pop culture and cartoons ever, and it's the outsider perspective that really sells it. Every detail is spot-on, like all of the written text being in English instead of Japanese, and a lot of the nods to popular culture are things that I don't think a Japanese audience would really get as well as a western one. I have a bit of a background in animation, and I always thought it was very strange that this seems to be a very one-sided cultural attitude for animators. I still watch the first Scanty and Kneesocks episode from time to time. Oh, and making their transformation sequence into an actual striptease with no embellishment whatsoever is the greatest pisstake in anime history.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica was the anime that I was in the trenches for. It's the only series I've ever felt was improved by watching it simultaneously as it aired and joining in some fan discussion. Seeing predictions come to pass, watching real-time responses to shocking reveals, and waiting for fans to translate the runes were all pretty remarkable on their own; but I remember the most amazing thing ever being the discovery that the Latin phrase "Puella Magi," which was initially passed off as a lazy attempt at originality, didn't just translate to "Magical Girl," but also to "Slave to the Deceiver." That's probably the moment where I went beyond the proverbial looking glass.

I first watched Neon Genesis Evangelion in its entire original run in a single weekend as a teenager in which I was sick with some horrible fever. I sat through all 26 episodes plus End of Evangelion in some terrifying stupor, and I maintain that it was the best possible introduction to the series. I haven't really gone back to the series since then, but I've been really enjoying the Rebuild movies. My favourite detail was finally paying off on Shinji's SDAT player. Every time he's shown using it, it's always when he's alone and thinking about himself, and always portrayed as he skips back from track 26 to 25... the two episodes of the series where his introspection finally comes full circle. In the new movies, now that Hideaki Anno is over his crippling depression, Shinji finally gets the opportunity to change the way his life is going... and the player skips ahead to track 27. It took fifteen fucking years, but it finally paid off.

Plus Asuka gets Wonderswan to mirror it now. Kind of unintentionally hilarious that she's using it to play a Famicom cartridge though.

I didn't see it mentioned, but Summer Wars is a movie that people here should see. It is several things: the most clichéd, awful-sounding premise for a film ever; an examination of what a social network really is in a post-internet society; a spiritual successor to the Digimon movie of all things; and a gorgeous portrait of the things we take for granted. It's also the best argument for product placement I've ever seen; it's chock-full of brand-name items that are all specifically chosen to evoke character traits. ie: the only character who wears brand-name clothing is a very intense, competitive kid who exclusively wears Adidas clothing. Every character continues the Japanese obsession for shitty, generic flip phones except for the distant, elitist, iPhone-brandishing prick who spent ten years in America. Etc. These things just keep stacking up.

Oh, also, watch the way people drink in this movie. Every character holds their drinks in a different way, and it always reflects their personality. Our perpetually nervous lead holds everything with two hands trying not to spill it, the intense kid holds his juice by the rim and sips it in a very methodical way, the rowdy uncle is the only one who doesn't even bother pouring his booze into a glass and just drinks straight from the bottle, etc. It's so great.

also also this film has a scene where a dude does math so hard that his nose starts bleeding seriously you should watch it

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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was one of the series that made me hate anime. Initially I just didn't like it for being the flagship of the new wave of creepy, pandering otaku shit with OPs and EDs consisting of awkward, stilted dance routines (see also: Lucky Star). The more I think about it though, the more I realize that the whole show is basically that one episode of the Twilight Zone with the creepy demon kid wishing people into the cornfield if it had taken every opportunity to make the character endearing in a transparent, plastic way.

I do not like Haruhi Suzumiya.

The thing is, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya wants you to think it's just another Lucky Star, but it's actually about God falling in love, which is why themes of disappointment and disillusionment, compulsion and free will appear in every episode. Each character in the SOS Brigade is such a pointed caricature of high school slice-of-life anime archetypes after the mid-2000s moe boom (the Rei expy, the moe blob, the tsundere, the wonder boy, the potato-kun) that, if people really think it's the flagship for all that, they're not far removed from those arguing (not without cause) that Fight Club endorses fascism. I don't know, the "Endless Eight" arc in the second season and the subsequent movie really drove home to me that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is fine with you thinking it's just slice-of-life with an omnipotent asshole at the reins, but there is more to it if you're willing to look (especially if you watch the episodes in broadcast order rather than DVD order, the latter being Kyon's POV but the former Haruhi's).

Awesome point about Anno's masterful use of visual matches and extended motifs in the Rebuild movies, though. Totally agree. He knows what he's doing there to a frightening degree, especially when he calls back to End of Evangelion:

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I don't buy the sequel argument, but this is a good collection of paired images from the old and new runs.

Hey, apparently the remake of the Space Battleship Yamato anime is quite something. Anyone seen it?

I just downloaded and watched a couple episodes. It's good, I guess. I mean, I think I'll keep watching, but it's really just Space Battleship Yamato with CGI. Lasers flash, ships explode, men give speeches, and the good guys win. Except the seventies hair and the jingoism goes down a little less smooth, maybe.

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