anime

[Codicier]

Anyone watching Aku no Hana? Had my doubt's about the Rotoscoping initially, but it's been used to really good effect so far with some of the expressions on the characters face's genuinely creeping me out a bit.

I'm not sure how much this is intentional and how much because it actually steps into uncanny valley territory at times, showing something that doesn't feel like a abstraction of a human or a real human.

[Gormongous]

So Hot Scoops asked for anime recommendations on his Twitter. At first, I was not surprised to see the usual suspects everyone always recommends anyone who's seen and liked Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop: Azumanga Daioh, FLCL, Serial Experiments Lain, Samurai Champloo, all stuff from the 1995-2005 "golden age." But then I tried to think what I'd recommend for him in their stead and it's still from the same "golden age," , even really deep pulls: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gankutsuou, Planetes, Ergo Proxy.

 

I've never really bought into the idea, probably because I watch so much anime anyway, but maybe there was a brief time when American and Japanese sensibilities converged to produce a bunch of anime with perfect crossover appeal, before the US market collapsed under the bubble and the Japanese market was devoured by the moeblob. What do you guys think? Does anime have a sweet spot for you?

 

 

P.S. Other anime I'd recommend to someone like Steve, if I had Twitter, because I feel like I know him (but know I don't, see this thread): Eden of the East, Last Exile, Mawaru Penguindrum. All flawed shows, but with their own sense of futurism.

[Codicier]

Apparently someone recommended Steve "Attack on Titan" which he has seemingly devoured ravenously. I'm not sure about that series overall, it goes for shock value scenes so often I started getting a bit jaded on it fairly quickly. Though I do endorse the following statement by him on that series.

 

I would play a video game of this so hard. Spider-Man 2 meets Shadow of the Colossus meets Valkyria Chronicles?? Hell yeah

 

As for a golden age with a slight adjust we get 1998 to 2006 or as it's otherwise known Satoshi Kon's directing career.

[tegan]

DID SOMEBODY SAY ANIME RECOMMENDATIONS?

 

Because I wish I had been around to recommend things to Mr. Scoops. 

[Tanukitsune]

I'm always up for recommendations on comedy or light hearted anime?

[tegan]

Ouran High School Host Club and Nichijou.

 

All day, every day.

[Gormongous]

Apparently someone recommended Steve "Attack on Titan" which he has seemingly devoured ravenously. I'm not sure about that series overall, it goes for shock value scenes so often I started getting a bit jaded on it fairly quickly.

 

As several people have pointed out, it's just Berserk for today's audiences. Which works fine, because the movie versions of Berserk are awful.

 

I'm always up for recommendations on comedy or light hearted anime?

 

I agree with Tegan. Nichijou is so good. It kills me that Bandai considers it a failure because its DVD singles didn't sell at ¥80,000.

 

I actually don't like live-action serial comedy very much. The last one I watched was How I Met Your Mother back when it first started and I burned out almost immediately. But I'm a huge fan of anime comedy. Oh! Edo Rocket and The Wallflower (Yamato Nadescio Shichi Henge) are two of my favorites. Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is amazing, but pretty dark. Maybe School Rumble? Depending on your tolerance for totally contrived love triangles, it can be a good time.

 

I'm watching Excel Saga right now, since I missed it the first time around, and I think it may be genius? Six episodes in, it seems like it.

[tegan]

On the one had I want to second Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, but I also know that it's ridiculously hard to get into. It's one of those things that you practically have to watch with a guidebook because there's so many blink-and-you'll-miss-it puns and pop culture references and other things that flat-out do not translate. I'd love to see a total localization of it that made all of those things work in English, because it's the kind of thing that I would totally get into.

Also the opening animations are always spectacular and there's an episode late in the series built entirely around setting up a shot-for-shot parody of Asuka's big action sequence from End of Evangelion.

 

One thing I should note about my previous recommendation of Ouran High School Host Club: the English dub is one of the best I've ever seen, and the tone and humour just work so much better when you watch in a language you can actually speak, so I highly recommend watching it that way. I also recommend watching the outtakes from the dub, because they're amazing. The lady who plays Haruhi spent so long flubbing a line about swimming that she eventually settled on "POOL GOOD" and one point a dude forgets his lines and resorts to quoting Star Wars while staying perfectly in character.

 

EDIT: oh heeeey, here it is! (spoilerz y'all)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyZNDyTQNjs

[Twig]

Nichijou is boss. Oh! Edo Rocket is, similarly, boss. Azumangah Daioh! is the predecessor to Nichijou, and not as good (five episodes in, where I am now), but you gotta give it credit.

 

Excel Saga is old. I loved it in high school? I'm... not sure if I would today? It was a great parody of anime tropes from its time. Most of which, hilariously and sadly, probably still apply today.

 

Cromartie High School would easily reach the top few of my list of comedy anime, were I to construct such a list.

[Gormongous]

Nichijou is boss. Oh! Edo Rocket is, similarly, boss. Azumangah Daioh! is the predecessor to Nichijou, and not as good (five episodes in, where I am now), but you gotta give it credit.

 

Excel Saga is old. I loved it in high school? I'm... not sure if I would today? It was a great parody of anime tropes from its time. Most of which, hilariously and sadly, probably still apply today.

 

Cromartie High School would easily reach the top few of my list of comedy anime, were I to construct such a list.

 

Excel Saga holds up completely, so far. You're right, it's probably pretty damning that it does. I'm just a big fan of everything Watanabe Shinichi (see The Wallflower above) and had put off his seminal anime for way too long.

 

Cromartie High is super funny, but I will say that you shouldn't marathon it, since so much of the humor is about repetition.

 

On the one had I want to second Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, but I also know that it's ridiculously hard to get into. It's one of those things that you practically have to watch with a guidebook because there's so many blink-and-you'll-miss-it puns and pop culture references and other things that flat-out do not translate. I'd love to see a total localization of it that made all of those things work in English, because it's the kind of thing that I would totally get into.

Also the opening animations are always spectacular and there's an episode late in the series built entirely around setting up a shot-for-shot parody of Asuka's big action sequence from End of Evangelion.

 

One thing I should note about my previous recommendation of Ouran High School Host Club: the English dub is one of the best I've ever seen, and the tone and humour just work so much better when you watch in a language you can actually speak, so I highly recommend watching it that way. I also recommend watching the outtakes from the dub, because they're amazing. The lady who plays Haruhi spent so long flubbing a line about swimming that she eventually settled on "POOL GOOD" and one point a dude forgets his lines and resorts to quoting Star Wars for several minutes while staying perfectly in character.

 

I had a couple of my friends rewatch the entire run of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei with me about six months back. One had no familiarity with Japanese culture at all, but they both rather enjoyed it in the end. So much of what Kumeta Koji rails against is the corruption and perversity of modern society, which anyone alive today should understand. Sure, a neophyte will get confused about Maria being a tsukkomi for New Year's boke and why Commodore Perry is charging around the school opening everything (because "to open Japan" and "to open school" are homophones, of course), but even I miss a lot of references and I own all the manga. Missing references is part of the fun!

 

You're totally right about the Evangelion references. My favorite is the end of a sketch where the class finds out that it's Hito Nami's birthday and has to improvise a celebration, much like another improvised celebration/ending:

 

 

There's a mostly complete list here, I think. Is Ouran High School Host Club really that good? I always put it in the same mental box as InuYasha: anime for preteen girls because preteen girls cosplay it at cons.

[tegan]

 Is Ouran High School Host Club really that good? I always put it in the same mental box as InuYasha: anime for preteen girls because preteen girls cosplay it at cons.

 

It's an absolutely brilliant parody of overly-dramatic shoujo romances that requires only the most basic familiarty of those types of anime, plus it has some interesting things to say about gender roles and expression.

 

It also has this:

 

[Codicier]

Nichijou is boss. Oh! Edo Rocket is, similarly, boss. Azumangah Daioh! is the predecessor to Nichijou, and not as good (five episodes in, where I am now), but you gotta give it credit.

 

Excel Saga is old. I loved it in high school? I'm... not sure if I would today? It was a great parody of anime tropes from its time. Most of which, hilariously and sadly, probably still apply today.

 

Cromartie High School would easily reach the top few of my list of comedy anime, were I to construct such a list.

 

Detroit Metal City is worth a watch if you enjoy Cromartie.(doubly so if you have any fondness for the music they are parodying)

[Codicier]

As several people have pointed out, it's just Berserk for today's audiences. Which works fine, because the movie versions of Berserk are awful.

 

I don't really agree with comparing those two, they may have superficial links with the medieval germanic art design and hyper violence but i don't think so far Titan has done anything with the story of its world and characters to suggest that the violence is anything but gratuitous.

 

Berserk's world was almost Lovecraftian with its hidden gods playing with the fate of it inhabitants. Humans were portrayed as utterly insignificant in the greater scheme of things. In berserk Human life didn't matter because well, most humans didn't matter alive or dead in the face of the timeless malice of the forces guiding that world.

 

So to me in Berserk we have antagonists (the apostles) that are a part of the world they inhabit and who's violence is a  representation of that worlds nihilism, and in the other we have antagonists (the Titans) who exist only to inflict violence on humans.

It's the difference between someone stepping on a bug without realizing it, and another person pulling the legs of a spider.

 

Now don't get me wrong Berserk isn't perfect by any means, or its violence particularly meaningful, and it has a downright hideous attitude to women. However we are given a reason why that world seems to treats it's inhabitants so terribly, something i just don't feel Titan has done.

 

It's violence utterly without reason.

[Twig]

Detroit Metal City is worth a watch if you enjoy Cromartie.(doubly so if you have any fondness for the music they are parodying)

Oh yes, it definitely is! Forgot about it. I also watched the live action movie, unfortunately. Nowhere near as funny as the anime.

[Codicier]

I've been re-watching the whole Eva series to give myself a refreshed memory before trying to put down what i feel about Eva 3.33.

 

I was watching a scene in The End of Evangelion where Misato has just hacked into a database to discover "what is second impact?", and the result flashes up on screen for half a second. Now in the past id always assumed this was Lorem Ipsum text but this time I paused it and found the nice little Gainax History Easter egg you can see bellow. (don't worry it doesn't have anything to do with the plot)

 

 

[seamus2389]

I've never really bought into the idea, probably because I watch so much anime anyway, but maybe there was a brief time when American and Japanese sensibilities converged to produce a bunch of anime with perfect crossover appeal, before the US market collapsed under the bubble and the Japanese market was devoured by the moeblob. What do you guys think? Does anime have a sweet spot for you?

 

 

Most of the anime I would suggest to others/ really enjoy is from that era. Once I went through stuff from that era my interest in anime fell off a cliff till last year when I checked out Kids on the slope and Baccano both of which were god but not up to the likes of Cowboy and the rest. The only show I am watching at the moment is the Worlds End which is decent but I was hoping for more with the premise but I really liked the animation and the clothing design.

[Coods]

All the Kerbal talk on the cast lately made me want to rewatch Planetes, which I haven't seen in years. Still incredible, and a branch of science fiction that isn't visited often enough.

[Gormongous]

All the Kerbal talk on the cast lately made me want to rewatch Planetes, which I haven't seen in years. Still incredible, and a branch of science fiction that isn't visited often enough.

 

Yeah, if you want really near-future hard sci-fi, you have Planetes, the first ninety minutes of Sunshine, scattered moments of various Mars movies, and a whole lot of novels. Unless you've got a month free to read Red Mars and its two sequels, Planetes is totally your best bet.

[Roderick]

You had to rip open the Sunshine wound... Those ninety minutes were glorious, just glorious. Then... not so much.

[Codicier]

I do wish we'd get more shows like Planetes. Weightlessness and the problems surrounding it on-screen seem a obvious reason why we don't get more live action drama set in space. It's expensive to simulate and it's absence is tricky to explain in plots unless you jump straight into magic doohicky territory, but that's not something that i feel should bother animators, sure it can be tricky but it's not as mindbogglingly impractical as it would be for live action.

It can't help wonder if it's just a market issue. That this particular kind of hard sci-fi is stuck half way between traditional drama & the spectacle driven sci-fi of space operas, and probably struggle to appeal to enough of either audience to justify its budget.

That said we do have thing that are sort of 'edge cases' of hard(ish) sci-fi plus drama that have succeeded, Summer Wars, Ghost in the Shell, and Patlabor, and Eve No Jikan, being the ones that springs to my mind which have a semblance of plausibility and have technology as a key theme (although I must admit I'm stretching it with Eve & GiTS). Of those Patlabor reminds me most of Planetes, and perhaps it's existence helped pave the way for other sci-fi shows that focused on the lives and jobs of their protagonists more than the machines they were operating.

[tegan]

I finally watched Arrietty! I loved all of the playing with scale in the movie; I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. I really liked the story and the generally relaxed tone of the whole thing. Really weird hearing music with English lyrics at points in the dub, though. So-so voice acting, but that fucking Summertime song was so distracting and off-putting.

 

Also, there's a bit where a dude counts on his fingers in binary and I was all "how many people would even know what he's doing there?"

[Codicier]

I finally watched Arrietty! I loved all of the playing with scale in the movie; I'm a sucker for that kind of thing

 

100% agree. For me the way they played with the way water behaves at small scales in a few scenes really was a gawd damn joy to behold.

[Gormongous]

For me it was the sound that drove it home, especially how totally mundane noises can be majestic or earth-shattering when you're tiny.

[Coods]

Apparently someone recommended Steve "Attack on Titan" which he has seemingly devoured ravenously. I'm not sure about that series overall, it goes for shock value scenes so often I started getting a bit jaded on it fairly quickly. Though I do endorse the following statement by him on that series.

 

 

As for a golden age with a slight adjust we get 1998 to 2006 or as it's otherwise known Satoshi Kon's directing career.

 

Attack On Titan reminds me of something I've longed for an anime to do since TTGL:

kill off the main character

 

and then I was disappointing when it wasnt actually true. Still really good though.

[Ucantalas]

So I took a trip down childhood/teenage-hood lane and have been watching "Shaman King". I almost forgot how much I loved this show. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

And say what you will about 4Kids dubs, I will never be able to see Ryu as anything but a guy with a "Spanish" accent named Rio.