anime

[BadHat]

Yeah, ZnT was a mess of an ending.

The US goverment's involvement was already exposed though with the introduction of that white-haired lady. Fucking hell she was unbearable.

Also the whole world or something had no electricity now, so there's no way that she can contact her mum, and everyone is therefore homeless or something.

 

Baccano!, Tatami Galaxy, Kuroko's Basketball, Time of Eve, Evangelion (pffffft I kid but seriously if the end of rebirth doesn't blow everyone away there's going to be a lot of pissed fans.)

 

Maybe my memory is fractured on account of splitting the show in two, but I didn't think the US agents knew about Five's (white haired lady) past? It seemed like she was using them for her own ends and they were only really after the nuke, but maybe I missed/forgot something. Which reminds me: why did they just let Twelve and Lisa go after the whole ferris wheel thing? It seemed like they just kind of inserted Five losing consciousness as a way to scene transition and then hope you forgot about it, but they clearly had agents stationed all around so it's not like they could have easily escaped... and then they kill Twelve later for knowing too much (but not Nine for some reason I still fail to grasp?), so... why... what... ahhh my head.

 

I'm pretty sure the EMP blast only took out Tokyo/maybe Japan? Since they only had to ground planes in the immediate area. I'm also kind of foggy on why that was necessary/productive to get their story out since, forgetting for a moment that they risked a bunch of lives gambling on all those planes being grounded (which itself seemed like manufactured drama to ratchet up the tension of a fucking nuke going off... what?), they also ruined countless livelihoods in the process and probably further ruined the country's economy, ensuring that even if their story is heard the world will still ultimately regard them as villains. But the show seems to want us to think that their actions were ultimately justified, since the moral compass stand-in detective guy exonerates them and vows to help them. Honestly, I could rant for days about how dumb it is that the misdeeds of anime anti-heroes are frequently moralized with But They Had It Real Bad Too! despite how fucking inexcusable they actually are, but this is a pretty mild case as far as those go so I'll save it. :v

 

While I'm ranting again: what is the point of them showing up to school for the first day of class and then never again? Like I'm pretty sure that was only there a) to inject Lisa into the plot, and/or b) to create the impression that it's another wacky insane high schoolers fucking shit up anime like Code Geass or whatever (full disclosure: I freaking love Code Geass). Like seriously, does anyone else get the impression that an exec looked at the original script and went "mm, it's alright but write in an adorably incompetent female love interest" and then they kind of half-heartedly put Lisa in there?

 

Thanks for the recommendations. I've actually seen most of those already but I'd meant to get around to Tatami Galaxy, so I'll give that a look.  

[Ozzie]

I don't even agree that ZnT was well directed. I mean, a capable director would have cut the lines in the ferris wheel scene to a bare minimum, let the music and the expressions on the character's faces do the talking, let the suspense grow. But no, all the stupid talking ruins that. A shame. The anime is a terrible waste of awesome music. But I wrote my thoughts on the anime already a few pages back, no need to restate them I guess.

 

Tatami Galaxy is indeed awesome, I can't recommend it enough, it's probably my favorite anime of them all.

[Codicier]

Just finished re-watcing Uchouten Kazoku/The Eccentric Family, and to put it simply it just gets better every time, it truly is flawless.

[Gormongous]

Still making my way through Bakuman. No further comments until the end, but here's some unintentional hilarity: one of the manga being made in the show has "PCP" as the acronym for its title, and twice in just a few episodes someone has said something like "Yeah, we're going to do PCP!" or "I love PCP!" It's not like I expect Japanese people to run everything by an English speaker, but maybe the stuff in English at least.

Also, the chief editor is hilariously bad at his job. I know the intent is to make him seem cool and decisive, but it would be a living nightmare working under someone who is so powerful and yet so mercurial.


EDIT: "We can't let PCP beat us!" "Come to think of it, you helped to create PCP!" "You wanted to beat PCP, didn't you?" "Please continue enriching us with PCP." "Even if just one person out there learns how good PCP is, then I'll be happy." "That would make PCP lose its appeal for sure..." "It's thanks to you that PCP is popular." I could go on forever. These are just from the four episodes I've watched tonight.

[Twig]

Yesterday I did the following, because I am a sad, sad individual:

 

1) Finished the Cell Saga in Dragon Ball Z Kai. My friend and I started this from the beginning of Dragon Ball I don't even remember how long ago, and now we're done with the Cell Saga! The Buu Saga has not fully aired, yet, unfortunately, but we will be doing that at some point.

 

2) Watched the first Dragon Ball movie, Curse of the Blood Rubies, which is a weirdly accelerated and alternate-universe version of the original Emperor Pilaf arc (that's the very first arc in Dragon Ball), except there's no Pilaf. He's replaced with a giant reptilian glutton who, as far as I could gather, has a stomach ache he thinks he can fix by... eating the Dragon Balls? It was well not good.

 

3) Finished rewatching the first season of Durarara!!, which I ended up enjoying (again) because the show stopped focusing on weird stalker girlfriend and I remembered why I liked every other character. (I still hate her and the guy she was stalking. They're both dumb.) I fucking love that song that kicks in every time shit's about to go down.

Anyway it's good.

 

4) Started watching and caught up to Durarara!!x2 (japan why these names why) and the animation is even better and also there's a bunch of new interesting characters and such. Thumbs up. Will continue watching!

 

Today I think I'll finish season one of Chihayafuru because it's been sitting there at episode 21 in my Crunchyroll queue for a long time. And I have the day off work because Dallas doesn't know what ice is. (I mean it's already late enough that I would've been home from work anyway, but whatever.)

[Gaizokubanou]

Bit of an 'old' series but recently finished Eureka 7.  To give out MASSIVE SPOILERS,

I liked the "boy-meets-alien-girl-and-their-love-is-awesome-inter-species-communication" angle a lot, but whoa did the whole "this is how the world ends" angle feel dumb or what?

[Twig]

I just thought it was super rad-looking and colorful and that's mostly why I liked it.

 

Don't watch the sequel series, though. Just don't.

[Gaizokubanou]

I just thought it was super rad-looking and colorful and that's mostly why I liked it.

 

Don't watch the sequel series, though. Just don't.

 

Oh yeah I thoroughly enjoyed the spectacles the production staff put together on it.  Wonderful stuff.

 

And I wikied the sequel the moment I finished first one and yeah, I'll take your advice it read really lame on wiki (and this is coming from someone who adores reading wikis).

[Blambo]

Just completed Kids on the Slope, and rewatched From up on Poppy Hill. I really like the setting of postwar Japan because it's a slightly edgy, rejuvenative period of a country in transition after a major conflict, with people banding together and working towards some semblance of peace and community. The respective plots of both pieces are pretty generic and clichéd but the setting and tone really carry them, especially Poppy Hill which has this weird ability to invoke nostalgia even though I've never set foot in Japan. I really want more of this kind of stuff, but a quick google search doesn't net me much.

Watching kids get together and achieve something positive in a realistic setting is cool cause it displays idealism without hiding reality.

[Roderick]

I liked From up on Poppy Hill and agree about the nostalgia factor. It had a great sense of location, especially surrounding the student house.

 

Me and my girlfriend are watching Yurikuma together. It's about lesbian bears, cute schoolgirls and sexual angst. I regret nothing.

 

[Gormongous]

I finished Bakuman. I was annoyed with it until the very end, meaning that I was annoyed with it for most of the latter two seasons, at least from the hospital onward. I think this just means that I'm totally soured on the shounen formula, in which it's all about fighting a new challenger and failure only presages future triumph, even if the formula's used to cover a completely different subject. More on it later, if I feel like it.

 

Me and my girlfriend are watching Yurikuma together. It's about lesbian bears, cute schoolgirls and sexual angst. I regret nothing.

 

 

I'm still waiting for Yuri Kuma Arashi to come together like I wish it would. I'm pretty sure it won't, and even if it does, it won't be on the level of everything else that Ikuhara's done. Time to find a different yardstick by which to measure it, I guess.

[Roderick]

Since I rarely watch anime anymore, for me it's this insane injection into a pop culture zeitgeist I haven't been actively following. It's fantastic. I have few expectations on where it might or might not be going, I'm just enjoying the weirdness.

 

So far the only episode that disappointed me was when the bears went into the story of the bear kingdom and the princess. It was a traditional bit of exposition, which I disliked for various reasons, even if the story itself was enjoyable. Look, I really don't need to know what this is about, just give me more weird bear shenanigans, life judges and staircase tumbling transformational lesbian metaphors.

[Gormongous]

Since I rarely watch anime anymore, for me it's this insane injection into a pop culture zeitgeist I haven't been actively following. It's fantastic. I have few expectations on where it might or might not be going, I'm just enjoying the weirdness.

 

So far the only episode that disappointed me was when the bears went into the story of the bear kingdom and the princess. It was a traditional bit of exposition, which I disliked for various reasons, even if the story itself was enjoyable. Look, I really don't need to know what this is about, just give me more weird bear shenanigans, life judges and staircase tumbling transformational lesbian metaphors.

 

Have you seen Penguindrum? That might be a good thing with which to follow up Yuri Kuma Arashi. It has the same kind of feeling that it's half-baked masterwork by Ikuhara, but it's also more substantive, with real characters that just exist in an absurd allegory, and less of an obsession with fairytale-type presentation.

 

Also, it's actually funny:

[Codicier]

I'm still waiting for Yuri Kuma Arashi to come together like I wish it would. I'm pretty sure it won't, and even if it does, it won't be on the level of everything else that Ikuhara's done. Time to find a different yardstick by which to measure it, I guess.

I think I've given up waiting for anything significant from Yuri Kuma Arashi i don't feel so far it's saying anything unquie or intresting about love, youth, sexuality or about storytelling in general. It's enjoyable stylistically but it otherwise feels pretty empty. I'm certainly a long way from building any real empathy with the characters and it's attempts at comedy almost universally fall flat, or at very best manage to generate a feeling guess that I probably should be laughing here, but I'm not.

I guess where I'm at now is basically Princess Tutu did many of the same thing a hell of a lot better.

[Gormongous]

I think I've given up waiting for anything significant from Yuri Kuma Arashi i don't feel so far it's saying anything unquie or intresting about love, youth, sexuality or about storytelling in general. It's enjoyable stylistically but it otherwise feels pretty empty. I'm certainly a long way from building any real empathy with the characters and it's attempts at comedy almost universally fall flat, or at very best manage to generate a feeling guess that I probably should be laughing here, but I'm not.

I guess where I'm at now is basically Princess Tutu did many of the same thing a hell of a lot better.

 

I'm glad you brought Princess Tutu into the conversation, because I've been wracking my brain for something that presents itself allegorically like Yuri Kuma Arashi does but in the service of making actual commentary through said allegory, and I should have thought of Princess Tutu, which I did just watch last year. It had something to say about the nature of narrative, of dreams, and of self in a way that suited its presentation, while Yuri Kuma Arashi is an allegory only through the one-to-one replacement of intangibles with tangibles, taking place in a low-rent version of Ohtori Academy and kept going entirely off of Ikuhara's ritualistic blend of visual and aural flair.

 

Penguindrum was incoherent a lot of the time because it was doing too much all at once with not enough episodes to get it all done (for instance, all of the Ringo bullshit that I loved to watch but was totally irrelevant to the plot as defined by its themes) but at least it tried something. I don't feel like Yuri Kuma Arashi is trying more than its surface-level allegory. If it has more to say than that sometimes the people we love are monsters, that keeping monsters out of our lives is impossible, and that sometimes loving monsters is okay, then I will die of shooock. Kuma shock!

[Blambo]

Completed Non Non Biyori. Don't really know what I expected. It's just moe moe moe, just at a slower pace than usual. I kept watching because even though the characters are all sort of cliché, they're watered down because the focus of the series is the ambience of the countryside, and the low-key tone allowed for some funny dry humor. Though it would be much more convincing as a naturalistic stroll in the countryside if the characters seemed like actual children, rather than porcelain dolls meant to look and act like someone's idea of what elementary to middle school girls are like.

I guess I'm still not over the creepy feeling I get when watching moe. It just seems too engineered and transparent for me to latch on at all.

A series with a similar tone, Barakamon (thanks for the recommendation, thread), pulled off the "cute kids in the country are funny" thing way better and with decidedly less conventional moe.

Though anyway I'm starting to really like anime with ambience art and atmosphere as a priority over plot. I'm looking into Mushishi which looks incredibly relaxing. Basically right now I'm only watching anime that are exactly like the first half of any Ghibli film.

[Twig]

YES MUSHISHI IS THE BEST

[Roderick]

If it has more to say than that sometimes the people we love are monsters, that keeping monsters out of our lives is impossible, and that sometimes loving monsters is okay, then I will die of shooock. Kuma shock!

 

I agree, and would even say that this type of anime often shoots itself in the foot by making things so arcane that it stands in the way of a clear emotional connection. Seeing beyond the smoke and mirrors and processing the metaphors seems the anime's point, rather than reaching the kernel of truth and then having a deeper understanding of it for your effort.

[Codicier]

I've been wracking my brain for something that presents itself allegorically like Yuri Kuma Arashi does but in the service of making actual commentary through said allegory, and I should have thought of Princess Tutu, which I did just watch last year. It had something to say about the nature of narrative, of dreams, and of self in a way that suited its presentation, while Yuri Kuma Arashi is an allegor

Im sure it's all been said before but under its big old Sci fi dressing doesn't the original Eva series do a fairly good job at this sorta of thing?

With the Eva's themselves representing how teenagers often have a awkward relationship with their own bodies, & the ATF Field representing social awkwardness & vulnerability.

ALL WITH GIANT ROBOTS, ALIENS & EXPLOSIONS!

[Zeusthecat]

Just wanted to drop in and mention that I'm about 20 episodes into Space Dandy and absolutely loving it. What a fantastic, fun and random ass show.

[elvaq]

Mushishi is the best thing to watch right before bed. Cool, dreamy storytelling there. Need to check out that new series from last year, is it good?

[Dewar]

My wife absolutely loves the second season.

[Twig]

how many times to i have to say MUSHISHI IS THE BEST

[elvaq]

Well alrighty then. I will finish up Jojo Does Egypt and then that is definitely next

[Mangela Lansbury]

how many times to i have to say MUSHISHI IS THE BEST

I loved, loved, loved the first season. How was the recent season?