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Then I watched it again recently and it was gross. I forced myself to finish it out of spite and there was still some good stuff in there but I basically hate it for all the same reasons. Then I tried watching the second series whatever it's called... Nise? Neko? I think Nise... Anyway, the first episode involved Araragi's little sister's best friend (snake girl IIRC) fawning over Araragi again and I never watched the second episode. ):

 

The Nadeko stuff has a big payoff that makes it all worth it in my opinion, more so than any other character, but yeah, she's gross and it's hard to watch her.

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Damnit now I want to read Punpun more than ever. My GF has been hounding me to read it for ages.

 

One thing I really loved about Bakemonogatari (and I presume the later seasons, I never watched them) was the dialouge. It was fast and word-play heavy, but it felt weirdly natural. Or at least more natural than other anime. After reading this thread I also want  to start watching the show again. I stopped after Bakemonogatari too. Personally I really hate the Shaft style. Mekaku City Actors was also really bad for it. I can't stand how they take the original author's work, and then completely re-draw it to their own style.

 

Also, on the talk about Bakemonogatari, there is an amazing anime series called Katanagatari which is written by the same author as Bake, but isn't as awful. I really emplore you all to check it out, as it's really good.

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Katanagatari is pretty good, as I recall!

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Terry Crews no Monogatari

Edit:

I just started Planetes. It's pretty good so far, though the animation quality is kind of bad, I'm loving the character designs and technology. It all feels grounded but not grim, and coupled with some pretty stirring music it's space as fuck. The characters look like actual human beings, which is big plus for me.

The dialogue feels a little put on though. It feels kind of like a daytime TV drama the way everything is so condensed and people say exactly what they should say. There was a moment in the first episode where two of the characters just got into a weird debate about whether or not they should scrap a commemorative peace plate that was on a collision course to a war satellite, which is made even more put on and cheesy when they're debating while on the job. Also the main character is weirdly inept and untrained for her job, even though she has to go into space and cooperate with trained astronauts. I doubt being an astronaut has become so safe in 2075 that rookie office workers can just tag along on missions, but that's what the rationale would be I guess.

So far there's a lot of wacky sound effects and base humor that would make the tone this really interesting mix of hard science and emotional realism with a light veneer of happy if it was actually funny and if the presentation was diegetic. Ideally I'd prefer ghibli humor and lightheartedness, which doesn't tend to break away from the sense of wonder that the pieces otherwise elicit.

Overall my impression is that it doesn't feel tonally consistent, and the way it's written and executed might not take special advantage of the emotional impact of its setting (it's in space. There's so much you can do.) I feel like it doesn't trust the viewer to be entertained by long stretches of scenery and music a-la Cowboy Bebop so it packs every minute full of dialogue, which is a huge shame because the music and art is great.

Another thing: it keeps playing its awesome music while there's conversation going on, which ruins the mood. It feels like it's constantly blowing its load and pushing everything they have at once.

I'm definitely going to keep watching though. I really hope the characters that were introduced as weird flat one dimensional caricatures get some time to develop, or at least get some nice cowboy bebop style weighted dialogue.

Edit 2: this is the most inane, badly written plot I could've imagined.

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this is the most inane, badly written plot I could've imagined.

 

There was this brief period, ten or fifteen years ago, when every seinen show that had a reasonably dark or serious plot felt obligated to start out with a half-dozen episodes of shounen silliness. It was something that the genre eventually grew out of, probably because producers learned to trust the 15-21 male audience with adult themes, but it's definitely annoying to have to tell people to hang on through Trigun until the Gung-Ho Guns show up. Once you're past the moon ninjas in Planetes, the plot never dips close to that low again.

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Oh geez I think Trigun becomes significantly less good once the Gung-Ho Guns show up. It definitely and undeniably redeems itself by the end (as I think I wrote in here when I rewatched it recently), but man it goes from a fun goofy sci-fi western to a self-serious unearned boring Real Story on a dime.

 

Maybe it would've been better if the first half hadn't existed, but I watched Badlands Rumble immediately after finishing the series. It embraces the earlier, goofier tone and in my opinion is so much better for it.

 

*cough*

 

Anyway, I recently cleaned up my anime spreadsheet and I have way too many things on my "will watch" list. ): Graaaanted, most of them are shitty DBZ movies, so those don't really count!!!

 

ALSO I HAVEN'T MENTIONED LATELY HOW STOKED I AM FOR DRAGON BALL SUPER (YES THAT'S WHAT IT'S CALLED) (SHUT UP)

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I still haven't watched eva, and it's looking more and more weird.

 

I loved it, lived it, hated it, and now annoyed by it (too much of it now seems pretentious or nonsensical but that might have a lot to do with lash back from how much I adored it)... it's definitely a memorable experience, highly recommend it.

 

I actually prefer the manga cause of it's oddly happier ending and overall faster pacing seem to help tighten up the storytelling.

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don't recommend it because it's a pile of hot garbage!

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I've tried to watch eva, like, 4 times. Maybe one day I'll get past the first half dozen episodes so I can have an actual opinion on it other than "the first half dozen episodes are bad".

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I've tried to watch eva, like, 4 times. Maybe one day I'll get past the first half dozen episodes so I can have an actual opinion on it other than "the first half dozen episodes are bad".

If you've watched anime at all, you've gotten the gist of Eva. It's not that important to watch if you don't dig teen angst overlaid with pointless religious imagery.

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If you've watched anime at all, you've gotten the gist of Eva. It's not that important to watch if you don't dig teen angst overlaid with pointless religious imagery.

 

Man, that's not fair. There's a lot of considered stuff in Eva about mental illness and child psychology that's totally ignored in its intellectual imitators. 

 

I probably just need to stop bringing up Eva in this thread if I don't want to hear people slagging it off as overrated. I'll try to be better about that.

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Man, that's not fair. There's a lot of considered stuff in Eva about mental illness and child psychology that's totally ignored in its intellectual imitators.

I probably just need to stop bringing up Eva in this thread if I don't want to hear people slagging it off as overrated. I'll try to be better about that.

There's a lot considered, kind of thoughtful stuff in Eva, but it's wrapped in so much nonsense that I don't think it's really worth the effort. It's a confused show -- in part because it was a trailblazer, so it's kind of forgivable. It's an interesting character study that gets way up its ass with a convoluted, gimmicky plot, which ends up shelving the characters a bit too often, and then they end up having explosive development.

It can be worthwhile, but it takes a lot of effort and you have to slog through a lot of bad to get to the good. I just think it's too much work, but I can see why you would disagree.

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Do any of you feel that eva has a thesis? I'm willing to trudge through some pretentious garbage if it's tending toward a coherent point.

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Do any of you feel that eva has a thesis? I'm willing to trudge through some pretentious garbage if it's tending toward a coherent point.

Yes. Without a doubt.

 

Even if they aren't your bag, I always recommend that people watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena. More than any anime ever made, and more than most fictional works, they are About Something Big in a major way.

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To be completely real and honest, the only thing I ever got out of Evangelion was a huge waste of my time. I honestly don't get it at all. It's so far beyond my understanding. I hated it. A lot. I can't even say why I hated it, except that I remember that I was bored the entire time and nothing meaningful ever seemed to happen except that one time that dude did a thing that cemented in my mind that the movie wasn't going to redeem the series.

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Even if they aren't your bag, I always recommend that people watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena. More than any anime ever made, and more than most fictional works, they are About Something Big in a major way.

And, for as many bad things as I can say about Evangelion, if someone says that it's meaningless garbage, boy do I get obnoxious about how wrong they are.

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Even if they aren't your bag, I always recommend that people watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena. More than any anime ever made, and more than most fictional works, they are About Something Big in a major way.

 

You'd think they'd employ better animation and art direction for shows that are so important. I know of one person that likes Utena and I'm not convinced, but I hate most things anyway.

 

Something about Eva has always put me off as super nerdy and otaku and not for me. If I wasn't susceptible to renting the tapes from Blockbuster along with the other garbage I was checking out at that time (Ranma, Tenchi Muyo, Crying Freeman), I can't imagine I'd ever change my mind now.

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You'd think they'd employ better animation and art direction for shows that are so important.

 

I mean, they didn't know they were going to be important. In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion, GAINAX had been using their previous job's payday to pay the current job's expenses for almost a decade and, close to the time they started doing pre-production for Evangelion, had let go of all the staff members who were brave enough to admit that they couldn't go a month or more without getting paid. Following the expensive failures of Nadia, the "phantom project" Olympia, and the sequel to Royal Space Force Honneamise, GAINAX was really betting the farm on Evangelion and I'm sure there are more timelines in the multiverse where it didn't pay off than where it did. The desperation (or ignorance) that led them to give their first full-length television show to a mostly self-trained animator who only took part in other production roles under extreme duress and who was just recently out of an in-patient stay at a mental hospital must have been immense.

 

I'm not nearly as well acquainted with the production details of Utena, but when Ikuhara did start getting huge production budgets over a decade later with Penguindrum and Yuri Kuma Arashi, they sadly did not result in better anime. Them's the breaks.

 

- - -

 

Actually, to change tack a little, I just finished reading The Notenki Memoirs, an autobiography by one of the founders of General Products and GAINAX, and overall I found it a really disappointing book. The first half, about the late-seventies and early-eighties explosion of sci-fi fandom in Japan, is really detailed and interesting. Takeda has a great memory for names, relationships, and moments, which he fearlessly assembles into a complete portrait of a bygone era. But then GP is founded and the narrative grinds to a halt. Takeda is simply unwilling to speak poorly about anyone with whom he ever had a professional relationship, making me wonder why he wanted to write a memoir at all. Even Sawamura, the former GAINAX president who cost them millions in tax fraud, is treated to a lengthy but vague apology from Takeda, who sincerely seems to believe that Sawamura wasn't aware his actions (like opening a company branch in Texas, which was a tax haven compared to Japan, and funneling hundreds of thousands through it) were illegal. It's really frustrating, because GAINAX was full of unspeakably brilliant and influential people in its early days, especially before the Gonzo split in 2002, and yet Takeda paints them all with the same blandly kind brush. When projects fail, like they did constantly in the first decade of the company's existence, it's because of external factors that are always vaguely defined. "Everyone was really excited for Olympia, especially Anno, and we all worked very hard on it, but this and that happened, so we had to halt production. It was unfortunate, but that was how business went." That's a paraphrase, but strikingly close to the actual way Takeda writes about his former colleagues, especially his repeated use of "this and that" to gloss over missing information. The closest he gets to any opinion is obliquely criticizing people who left the company when they weren't getting paid, as mentioned above, and a slightly hard edge when talking about his "friend" Okada Toshio, but at least with the latter, it's not like anyone really believes in the "Otaking" mystique anymore, so Takeda's really just softballing it there, too.

 

I wasn't exactly expecting a tell-all memoir from someone who's clearly on good terms with everybody about whom he's writing, but I was expecting him to have some kind of opinion about him, at least. The editors include a brief interview with Akai Takami, Yamaga Hiroyuki, and Anno Hideaki about Yasuhiro Takeda, and they certainly don't pull punches, so it's not a Japanese thing or a GAINAX thing... I don't know.

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I want to second what Mangala Lansbury said, except that I still think it's worth watching but then again, I don't watch too much anime overall so perhaps I'm missing out on how much of its elements are being re-used these days.

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You'd think they'd employ better animation and art direction for shows that are so important. I know of one person that likes Utena and I'm not convinced, but I hate most things anyway.

 

The other thing you forgot to mention in relation to this was that budgeting was severely cut when all the sponsors of the show pulled out half way through production.

 

I feel that nowadays studios know when they got a hit on their hands. Take AoT. Whilst I know it's got a lot of vitriol around here, and it's not a good comparison to EVA or Utena, it's fucking popular as eggs, and the animation studio knew that. The budgeting and animation reflect that well. For a TV anime, combat with the 3D gear is really well animated, and it looks lovely.

 

If the bad animation bothers you that much, watch the rebuild films, which are a retelling. Kinda. Although I doubt you'll get the same impact I experienced for the 2nd film, which is honestly the best anime film I've ever watched.

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Yeah. I felt that it was a bit of a disappointment. There was a lot of potential, especially considering the importance of Kaoru to Shinji, but it kinda flopped around on everything. The piano scene was ace though.

 

I think the main problem was that after the events of the second film, everything felt so pointless.

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