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Haha it's funny that my rant in any way helped you build a coherent thought because I typed it out in a blinding fit of nerd rage. You and Gorm would be awesome cogent core hosts to balance out my appearances as a blathering ideologue.

 

 

Eh I think your post came off fine, don't worry about it.  Have you seen Gundam SEED BTW?  Everyone looks the same in that show except for extras and older guys getting narrower eyes.

 

I haven't, though a cursory google image search kind of makes me want to avoid it. I don't like the aesthetic in general, and making it gender equal won't faze that. But I think it's really funny to have guy-chan designs in the mix too.

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Haha it's funny that my rant in any way helped you build a coherent thought because I typed it out in a blinding fit of nerd rage. You and Gorm would be awesome cogent core hosts to balance out my appearances as a blathering ideologue.

I haven't, though a cursory google image search kind of makes me want to avoid it. I don't like the aesthetic in general, and making it gender equal won't faze that. But I think it's really funny to have guy-chan designs in the mix too.

aAjU9Rn.gif

MWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! YOUR RAGE ONLY FEEDS ME!

seriously though having your own moment of nerd rage (as I did with ep 18) at something then seeing someone else have a similar moment but throw it out in as thorough way as you did is super useful.

I'd be really interested in your opinion of From the New World if you can make time for it at some point, because I honestly do feel that uses some of the same masking techniques I talked about & some of the Moe as a iconified ideal stuf you mentioned, but used them in a way which on reflection is actually far smarter than I gave it credit for when I first watched it. In fact I'm actually gonna Re-watch at least couple of episodes because of this whole conversation.

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I haven't, though a cursory google image search kind of makes me want to avoid it. I don't like the aesthetic in general, and making it gender equal won't faze that. But I think it's really funny to have guy-chan designs in the mix too.

 

I actually mentioned it not as a praise to that show, but to poke fun at its uber laziness ;)

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Surprise! The Ghost in the Shell: Arise anime on TV is really just the four-episode OVA series recut into twenty-minute chunks, with some "bonus content" here and there. I'm having trouble not calling this unconscionable. Apparently Arise was a success as an OVA, so they profit off of that not by making more Arise, but by repackaging what they've already released for a technically different audience that has almost complete overlap? Fuck that.

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Yeah I found out it was going to be that but for some reason never mentioned it.

Bleh.

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I mean, it makes sense, as it'll attract a larger viewer base, and the die-hard fans are contempt re-watching it so they can see the added bits. Still blows though.

 

I finished Yoru no Yatterman the other day. Huh. That was a bizarre ending. It started off so strongly as well, to just peter out into nothing. And then the last fight scenes were weird. Loads of repeated animations and stuff. My guess is that they ran out of time, or it was a confusing in-joke about repeated animations in old animes? I suspect the former though.

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Wow, I got into the anime auteurs list and just saw Wolf Children. What a beautiful story! I've never cried this much before during watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. And I'm still having trouble holding back the tears 15 min after it's over. I'm now eager to watch Mamoru Hosodas other work as well, although I really should take care of some stuff before I indulge myself.

 

Yesterday I watched several Makoto Shinkai movies (animes? what's the best word <-- anime noob here) and while I had seen 5cm/s before and liked it, I was kind of disappointed that all his works were so similar, even seemed like all started at a desk positioned in a similar place in a classroom. I was a little bored in the end, but I really liked The Garden of Words, it just looked so pretty.

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(animes? what's the best word <-- anime noob here)

Honestly I just use "anime" to describe the style/origin, for the most part. A movie is still a movie, and a series is still a series. The only weird thing anime has going for it is "OVA" (or OAV???), which can be anything ranging from a short movie to a miniseries.

 

Anyway yeah the story of Garden of Words is so-so, but holy heck if it ain't drop-dead gorgeous!

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I finished the first 26 episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (which is basically season 1 I guess?). By the end of it, I had warmed up to this series quite a bit but I still have mixed feelings about it overall.

 

On the positive side, I think the lore is really solid and there are a lot of interesting and believable details about the world that are surprisingly well fleshed out. The various crimes they solve and the way they go about executing things and communicating with each other also feels very well thought out. Generally speaking, I don't really have any complaints about the premise or story and quite enjoyed that aspect of the show.

 

However, there were a few problems I did have that I think kept me from being IGN.com'd by the show. Probably my two biggest complaints are that there was way too much talking and even with all that talking, there were still things that I felt weren't explained very well. I think for me it was a fundamental problem with how flat and monotonous the English voice actors were combined with the heavy dialog that made a lot of things very hard to follow. Whenever there was an extended conversation between two characters, it just seemed like they were talking so fast and with so little intonation that I regularly found my mind trailing off and then had to rewind it to watch again and try to catch the points that I missed. This was exacerbated by the fact that a lot of what they were talking about was often steeped in lore that I barely had a grasp on because it was explained earlier in another fast talking segment that I also had a hard time following. I didn't even really know what a Ghost was until I was over half way through because as far as I could tell, they never explained it and just assumed that anyone watching would automatically know what that was. From the context, it was fairly obvious but it is still not completely clear to me what they mean when they talk about the possibility of an AI attaining a Ghost. I assume Ghost is basically their word for soul and it may be obvious enough to most people but it kind of bothered me that with all that talking, they really didn't seem to go into it much (and maybe they actually did and I missed it because again, a lot of that dialog was hard to follow).

 

Also, I think I have to echo a little bit of what syntheticgerbil said earlier. That ridiculous leotard outfit is gaudy and distracting and way out of place in this show. It didn't really bother me too much but it was enough of an annoyance to me that I figured it was worth mentioning. I mean, that strap in the front is barely wide enough to cover her thingy and with everything else being so serious and grounded in reality, I can only assume that this type of outfit was conceived purely for titillation. 

 

I also really liked the music in the intro but was a little disappointed that there wasn't a whole lot of other good tracks that stood out to me throughout the show.

 

Gormongous, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what it is about this show that you find really appealing and if you feel like my complaints are off base. I strongly suspect I would like the show much more on a second watch and probably even more so if I had a chance to watch the subbed version (I think having subtitles to read would make it much easier for some of these things to become cemented in my brain). I started season 2 last night and I'm already liking it quite a bit more than season 1. But that is probably also because at this point, I've put in enough time to at least have a basic understanding of a lot of these details.

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Wow, I got into the anime auteurs list and just saw Wolf Children. What a beautiful story! I've never cried this much before during watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. And I'm still having trouble holding back the tears 15 min after it's over. I'm now eager to watch Mamoru Hosodas other work as well, although I really should take care of some stuff before I indulge myself.

 

Yesterday I watched several Makoto Shinkai movies (animes? what's the best word <-- anime noob here) and while I had seen 5cm/s before and liked it, I was kind of disappointed that all his works were so similar, even seemed like all started at a desk positioned in a similar place in a classroom. I was a little bored in the end, but I really liked The Garden of Words, it just looked so pretty.

 

Mamoru Hosoda is probably the most promising director working in longer form anime atm, Wolf Children is great and probably the strongest technically, & most mature in terms of the subtlety of its themes and storytelling work in his portfolio  but I think I might prefer The Girl Who Leapt through time by a whisker, its a more raw and more silly and less original work in some ways but I think I just watched it at a time where it's simple but strong story would affect me most.

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Gormongous, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what it is about this show that you find really appealing and if you feel like my complaints are off base. I strongly suspect I would like the show much more on a second watch and probably even more so if I had a chance to watch the subbed version (I think having subtitles to read would make it much easier for some of these things to become cemented in my brain). I started season 2 last night and I'm already liking it quite a bit more than season 1. But that is probably also because at this point, I've put in enough time to at least have a basic understanding of a lot of these details.

 

Okay, the reason that I think Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is so great is because it's the best (and pretty much the only) attempt to do a traditional police procedural in a futuristic sci-fi setting. Because of that structure, the changes and consequences of the technology in the series have to be plotted out in sufficient breadth and depth to withstand repeated scrutiny, leaving us with an incredibly coherent world. With the Arise prequel, you can see what an accomplishment it really is, because the attempt to walk back the timeline without sacrificing any distinctive elements of the universe leaves a world a lot more silly, like ghost-dubbing being much more widespread and not that big a deal despite being virtually identical to a process that was an unspeakable crime in SAC. I also like that both seasons of the anime have seemingly unrelated cases in different episodes gradually build the picture of a widespread societal ill, like corporate corruption surrounding cybernetics-related medical treatments, that each season's "big bad" comes to embody. I think the Individual Eleven are objectively a slightly weaker through-line than the Laughing Man, but both are fascinating and iconic. Finally, I enjoy the balance of the ensemble cast, none of which match the competency of the Major overall, but all of which have specialties in given areas that make them together incredibly effective. There's no dead weight or drama in Section 9 (the closest things to useless members are Boma and Saito, the demolition man and sniper, which is not the norm among shows with guns) and that feels a little special to me.

 

As for your critiques:

  • Yeah, the density and delivery of dialogue in all Ghost in the Shell properties is a genuine stumbling block for some people. Generally speaking, you like the universe enough to develop an ear for it or you stop watching and become one of those people who calls Ghost in the Shell: Innocence "massively overrated CGI porn." I honestly prefer the English dub three times out of five, because I feel that the Major's seiyuu is weirdly indistinct in Japanese, but like every dub track except the generic garbage that FUNi does, it's all to taste. Also, the question of subs or dubs is complicated in Ghost in the Shell: SAC by the fact that the subs are the literal translation of the Japanese and the dubs are substantially rewritten to take up more or less time, to fit the length of the scenes. If you want to be totally confused, watch the dubs with subtitles on and everyone's saying two different things at once!
  • It sounds like a cop-out, but every flaw in Ghost in the Shell: SAC is from the manga and the first movie. The pervasive use of the word "ghost" is from the first movie, where there's an in-depth explanation of it, and I kind of like that they don't retread it, but it does mean that you have to watch a fictionally unrelated movie to understand an invented lexicon for this show. I also hate the monokini/leotard, which is from the manga and the first movie, but the Major increasingly wears a jacket and shorts over it, so it's not something with which you have to put up for the entire run of the anime.
  • It's definitely one of Yoko Kanno's more restrained soundtracks, for sure. There's a bit more daring stuff in the second season, but it's just not a music-driven anime for Yoko Kanno, like Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo.

 

Wow, I got into the anime auteurs list and just saw Wolf Children. What a beautiful story! I've never cried this much before during watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. And I'm still having trouble holding back the tears 15 min after it's over. I'm now eager to watch Mamoru Hosodas other work as well, although I really should take care of some stuff before I indulge myself.

 

Yesterday I watched several Makoto Shinkai movies (animes? what's the best word <-- anime noob here) and while I had seen 5cm/s before and liked it, I was kind of disappointed that all his works were so similar, even seemed like all started at a desk positioned in a similar place in a classroom. I was a little bored in the end, but I really liked The Garden of Words, it just looked so pretty.

 

The biggest flaw about Wolf Children, which actually isn't a flaw, is that it's called "Wolf Children" and therefore is a little hard to sell to complete anime-phobes as a powerful tale of parenthood and responsibility. All of Hosoda's work is great like that. For me, I love Summer Wars the most, because it was what I needed when I needed it, but all three of his movie offerings are excellent.

 

Makoto Shinkai is a tougher nut. I did a rewatch project of his entire oeuvre last year and was bothered by the sameness, but I think there are truly excellent things in The Place Promised in Our Early DaysFive Centimeters per Second, and The Garden of Words that reward repeat viewing. It definitely would help for him to bring on someone else to help him write his stuff, because not everyone has the chops for being a traditional-style auteur, but at the very least, his thematic obsessions resonated really deeply with me in 5 cm/s and that's good enough for me, even if the rest of his career (like that goddamn Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) turns out to be a damp squib.

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Thanks for the response Gormongous! I definitely like it enough to keep going so we'll see if my opinion changes by the time I get to the end of the second season. 

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Thanks for the response Gormongous! I definitely like it enough to keep going so we'll see if my opinion changes by the time I get to the end of the second season. 

 

No problem! As great as the Laughing Man is, second season is the better season overall. Saito's character episode, the fourteenth one I think, is a particular standout for the entire show, even though it's nominally not a part of the main plot.

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I forgot how much I enjoyed the ending theme of From the New World. Sort of reminds me of Music era Madonna some ways sonically, and the animation though a bit loose for my taste overall works well for the song &  the "dream/memories" subject of the ending.

 

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I don't know if this belongs in the anime thread, but I just saw a French "anime" called Lolirock about a musical band of girls that just happen to be princesses from another word who fight evil when not doing concerts... So like a reverse Creamy Mami?

 

Just look at the transformation sequence! <3

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extremely dubious of anything anime related that includes the letters "loli"

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I have no idea why they chose such a name, but I can guarantee this show is 100% safe and it's on Disney, so it's not what it sounds like.

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Which reminds me, has Wakfu been translated into any other languages? I've always wanted to watch it, but it's always in French. I wouldn't mind seeing it subbed, if there aren't other options.

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Yeah, I watched the clip, and it looks like an at-least-decent ("decent") magical girl thing.

 

But man. Strange naming decisions were made. But admittedly, I know zero French, so maybe if I did I'd find it less strange.

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Which reminds me, has Wakfu been translated into any other languages? I've always wanted to watch it, but it's always in French. I wouldn't mind seeing it subbed, if there aren't other options.

 

There was a huuuge kickstarter to get wakfu officially translated and released on blu-ray. I'm pretty sure it's out now too. I didn't back it because it was a dub and not a sub, and the sub was a stretch goal. Which is utter madness.

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Wait, shouldn't that be the other way around? Shouldn't there be some fan dub already they could use for cheap, cheap than dubbing a full show?

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It took thirty-odd episodes, but I really have come around to thinking of Teekyuu as a brilliant show. I was put off in the beginning by the internet consensus of it as "saving anime from itself," but it's actually an interesting elaboration on gag anime that's kinetic and hyper-focused on landing joke after joke. The next best thing of its type that I've seen, Plastic Nee-san, doesn't even hold a candle, except for the scene contained by this .gif:

 

tumblr_n7l9pdINCW1tbskwzo2_500.gif

 

Really, this season's Takamiya Nasuno Desu! doesn't hold that candle either, even though it's a spinoff of Teekyuu.

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