Anime for people who hate anime

Inspired by this exchange on the Evangelion thread:

while mourning my lack of fresh Eva content I've spent most of today trying to find other anime series that I don't find intensely grating on one level or another - after a bunch of false starts, Masaaki Yuasa's stuff seems pretty solidly up my alley

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 1:48 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who am I kidding I will totally rewatch it when 4.0 comes out, this franchise is built on (and fosters) masochism

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 2:04 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

[...]

simon, have you seen either mushi-shi, serial experiments: lain or kino's journey? they aren't at all like eva tone-wise but pretty much free from most anime cliches and are v cerebral and emotionally engaging.

― hello, it me (clouds), Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:02 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ all 3 of those are excellent, especially Mushishi. Someone should make a anime recommendation site for people who hate anime

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:09 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have not but Lain is on my to-check-out consideration list. Currently watching Ping Pong, which feels oddly substantive given the subject matter? I've seen Bebop (eh) and FLCL (neat). Basically hated what I saw of Death Note, Future Diary, and a few others that aren't immediately coming to me.

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 4:19 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the biggest problem is that all anime gets marketed essentially the same in english-speaking countries, as if "anime" were one monolithic genre -- so you get this phenomenon of the same people recommending in the same breath stuff made for teenage boys like death note also recommending more complex shows like steins;gate or the others i mentioned. it seems to me that the targeted demographic for these shows are quite distinct in japan, though i could be wrong.

― hello, it me (clouds), Sunday, September 13, 2015 5:00 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is exactly why i had a bad time whenever i went to an anime convention

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 7:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anyway all of anno's pre-eva miyazaki-inspired series nadia is on hulu and i recommend it; it's very digressive but also very charming. another gentle, kinda perfect, nontraditional anime, by lain's character designer: haibane renmei

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 7:49 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

attending an anime convention sounds like my idea of hell!

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, September 13, 2015 8:54 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Coffee

welp that's Nichijou added to the queue

lol

paranoia agent

in 72 point bold red font

yeah that one

<3 nichijou

ghost hound. sorta like twin peaks x lain with an amazing dark ambient score.

i don't really like anime but i much enjoyed serial experiments: lain and texhnolyze

def rec all of yuasa's stuff, especially Ping Pong and my favorite, The Tatami Galaxy. funny (even if you don't really "get" anime humor) and manic and inspiring and brilliantly animated.

my other favorite ever is kids on the slope, a coming of age story from shinichiro watanabe ( cowboy bebop, samurai champloo ) about a love triangle between three jazz-obsessed teenagers in 1960s small town japan. the music sequences are incredible.

would recommend Wandering Son (Hourou Musuko), a show about a boy who likes to dress as a girl and a girl who likes to dress as a boy. Surprisingly thoughtful exploration of transsexualism and gender identity, a million miles away from how these subjects are usually handled in anime. Also has a beautiful watercolour art style.

paranoia agent

in 72 point bold red font

― Bouncy Castlevania (Will M.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 11:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that one

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 11:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

oh yeah, kids on the slope! I've only seen a few episodes but the premise kills me

kids on the slope is pretty good, otm about the music sequences

my rec is Redline, one movie that i might say is more intense and thrilling from start to finish than mad max

mad max fury road that is

fyi there's also this thread Animation Snob Thread (no Disney, no Pixar, no mainstream anime, mention Family Guy and you get kicked out a window), puppet films are allowed whihc i've had bookmarked forever

if strongo were still here he'd tell you to check out Mind game. he's not so I'm going to tell you to check out mind game.

Redline is really good in places but I don't think it has the momentum or overall quality of Fury Road. I felt the character development was unnecessary.

just finished Berserk which was enjoyable but it might be too "anime"

As to the question of the thread, it depends on what one hates about anime. I'm generally not a fan but I can deal with the things I don't like if there's enough other good things going on. But I can't pretend I haven't seen a lot of ecchi trash (a true guilty pleasure).
A lot of the better anime still has a lot of the things some people dislike about anime, like the drawing styles. I've always preferred far more textured animation and unusual expressive techniques.

The thing that impressed me about the Satoshi Kon stuff is how well the scenes are composed. Most of the anime I had seen was very sloppy and badly edited.
Paranoia Agent is actually my least favourite of his works. It's probably supposed to be confounding but I don't think it really carried off on the intrigue they built early on, I found a lot of it a tad boring and the animation quality drops in a few places.

Like I recommend in Animation Snob Thread, Keita Kurosaka is the least typical Japanese animator I know of but his work isn't easy to find. Angel's Egg is a lovely science fiction mood piece without much (any?) dialogue, with designs by Yoshitaka Amano.

Berserk (90s tv version) does an impressive job of telling the early best part of the comic saga despite clear time/budget constraints and even improving some parts of the story. Great soundtrack too.
The later film series version doesn't allow the story time to develope and breathe properly. It feels too much like a summary.

Satoshi Kon is definitely one of the go-to anime directors for people who aren't anime fans. Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers are all great movies in different ways. Paprika was a bit weak story-wise IMO, but is still worth a watch.

Paranoia Agent is pretty great too, although I think the series loses a lot of momentum once it abandons the initial set-up - those stand alone episodes in the middle are great, but the over-arching plot kinda gets lost.

I'll second the recommendations for Mushishi, Kino and Lain above, and add Haibane Renmei, which is intriguing and reflective in a similar way.

Planetes is a pretty solid sci-fi series with good characters and little in the way of anime cliches.

Haibane is excellent but I gotta disagree about Planetes, i watched the series after reading the manga and was super disappointed with the adaption, they really anime-ed it up by adding in lots of comedy sidekicks and useless drama. Don't even get me started about that last episode :(

haibane renmei is incidentally all on hulu plus

I liked Haibane Renmei too. I'll also throw Psycho Pass out there for anyone into Philip K Dick sort of themes. It's on Netflix for easy access.

thx for the many recs y'all, I need as much distraction as possible at present

Seconding Mind Game, and reposting from the Netflix thread to remind people that Studio 4C put up a batch of films a couple of weeks ago- Mind Game, Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond (which are both mixed, but each has a fairly lengthy short from respectively Masaaki Yuasa and Koji Morimoto that are among the best things either have ever done), and Princess Arete (which I haven't watched yet but is supposed to be a gentle, Ghibli-esque thing?).

I don't know how easy it is to get outside the kickstarter, but Yuasa's Kick-Heart is pretty fun. And the adaptation of Taiyo Matsumoto's Ping Pong is well worth your time- I love Michael Arias's Tekkonkinkreet movie, but Ping Pong is a much more faithful translation of Matsumoto's style to animation and it's gorgeous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSuAhbtIFg

Crap, sorry, didn't see Ping Pong was already recommended twice >_<

Less than four minutes long, but this Ken Ishii video by Morimoto is kind of a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6maVVFs0As

One last thing before I shut up about Morimoto:

NOISEMAN SOUND INSECT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOlYfHdpwU

Dumb qn from someone v.far outside but a lot of suggestions seem to be, say, post-PKD-ish ... is there much in the way of, IDK, George Eliot/Jane Austen-y stuff?

Josei anime would be the term, from a quick look at manga categories, I guess?

This was Google's first result, anyone want to comment on any of these? http://www.themarysue.com/josei-anime/

wow, that ping pong series looks amazing! excited to see it's on hulu.

From that Josei list:
Michiko & Hatchin stars two female characters but it's much closer to Black Lagoon/Tarantino territory, lots of action set pieces and stylish baddies. It's really well made but is twice as long as it needs to be tbh, towards the end you will be dreading yet another car chase. Which is rarely said about Jane Austen.
Princess Jellyfish is really good, lots of interesting characters although some can be a bit too one dimensional, particularly the one mentioned in the article.
A series that is currently airing called Snow White With The Red Hair caught me by surprise and might be the purest Josei show I've ever enjoyed. As you can guess from the title it has a fairytale like quality, with a commoner girl and a dashing young prince falling in love. What sets it apart though is the title character, a strong willed girl who feels like she's walked out of a Ghibli movie, you can't help but cheer her on.

etc, you might want to look into honey & clover (about a group of students at an art school), nana (about the friendship between two women, one a fashion student and one a rock musician), nodame cantabile (about the romantic relationship between a pianist and an aspiring conductor), his and her circumstances (the show hideaki anno made after evangelion, about the romantic relationship between two high school students), and revolutionary girl utena (hard to summarize?)

also, a lot of the shows mentioned itt originally aired as part of fuji tv's noitamina block, which is specifically dedicated to programming that appeals to ppl outside of the young male demographic. the noitamina lineup is a p good place to look for "mature" anime in a bunch of different genres

reporting back

PING PONG

Watched all of this one - the animation is obv incredible but what surprised me about it is the persistent and convincing bittersweetness, which helped offset how predictable many/most of the plot/character beats really are. Into it.

KIDS ON THE SLOPE

Also watched all of this, liked it less. The musical sequences are incredible and kept me going. As w/ many shows like this (regardless of genre) the relatively subtly homoerotic friendship >>>>>> the neverending tedium of the actual "romances." (Tho I admit that I have a problem w/ series wherein 100% of the long-running conflicts could be solved with one frank conversation.)

tried UTENA but it's just too mid-90s for me. a couple eps into MUSHI-SHI - animation's gorgeous, stories seem a bit intert? will keep trying.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-AHo-_XEV6E

Maybe most of you guys know all this stuff but its just a little video about the difficulties of making anime.

good timing on that as it frequently refers to Manglobe (Champloo, Michiko) who finally filed for bankruptcy the other day

Just finished watching Gosenzosama Banbanzai, a pretty bizarre and funny six-part OVA from the late 80s. It's one of Mamoru Oshii's more obscure efforts (like that odd "Twilight Q" short), about a girl who travels back in time to live with her ancestors. The whole thing is presented like a stage play, making it pretty unique.

I know Oshii made a big splash with Ghost in the Shell, but I actually think that was his last really good film (though I haven't seen his live action stuff, and discount Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, which he wrote but didn't direct).

so uh toonami is producing two new season of flcl

Nice!

brave new world

oops. didn't realize this was a 3 month revive

I've just started the new anime version of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, and it really defies description (although Merritt Kopas's phrase "Twink Peaks" is pretty apt, as long as you bear in mind that it also involves spectral combat and Gauguin-like color clashes): an escaped serial killer has just been fused into a living statue by a vengeful high school student after attempting to infiltrate the student's house as a malign spirit in rainwater, and this is two episodes in. Idk what kind of relation to anime the ideal viewer would have, but it's certainly distinctive.

Jojo is so batshit, i love it

Neo-Tokyo was really good

finishing up 'puella magi madoka magica' after reading that it rivals evangelion (it doesn't, but i still have a few eps left so maybe it will!)
it's on netflix with or without subs so check it out!

though in the spirit of this thread, i think people who hate anime would hate this one

yeh Madoka is hella anime. You have to put off watching the last two episodes for two months to get the authentic original release experience!

the crossover hit this year in Japan had been the new Shinkai (5cm/second, Garden Of Words) film Your Name.
It's already the 7th highest grossing film at the Japanese box office and looks like it's going to overhaul Howl and Mononoke soon.
Sounds like it became an anime for people who don't normally watch anime!
Looks like it's getting a very limited release in the West though.

Mamoru Hosada's latest The Boy and the Beast will be released in DK next month. Checking his stuff out, the plots are quite intriguing, and Summer Wars was in Locarno. I have no idea what is hatable and non-hatable anime, though. Are people mad at Miyazaki? Or Ghost in the Shell type stuff?

neither i think, just really specific genre stuff i'm guessing. madoka is magical girl for instance

incidentally i gotta see madoka, report back diamonddave

little witch academia y'all

been meaning to watch madoka for ages but the animation style really puts me off

cosign little witch academia. dennou coil is another good one

I loooove Mindgame! And as often as it veers into utterly silly and corny porny territory I find it really inspiring. The whole "live your life to the fullest" theme is for some reason really infectious (which for me translated to getting off Facebook for a few days and getting a jumpstart on errands and chores to free up time for making music and catching up with friends, not exactly an epic adventure but a net plus)

Has anyone here seen Ergo Proxy? It felt like some kind of cross between Book of the New Sun (not saying it's anywhere near the brilliance, just some similar vibes) and the hazy memories I have of Final Fantasy plots from countless hours I used to spend watching friends play while not totally knowing what was going on. It's probably my fav anime series after NGE.

I think the reason Madoka gets compared to Evangelion is that both shows approach their respective genre in unconventional ways; if Eva is a "deconstruction" of giant mecha shows, then Madoka is the same for magical girl stories.

And yes, the two Little Witch Academia films are great!

yall weren't kidding about Mind Game. that film was incredible.

finished madoka, the final episodes were excellent: poignant while also attempting to reach for the stars in those confusing and mind-bending ways that we love anime for

watched the first episode of kill la kill last night and i'm torn. on the one hand, it has the most over the top insane, funny, frantic animation i think i've ever seen. on the other hand, waay over the top fan-service to the point of absurdity

it's not fan service, it's a parody of it

I haven't seen it but according to fans it does at times fully embrace plain fanservice.

Can you call it a parody if it's indistinguishable from the thing it's supposedly parodying?
e.g. Nisioisin plays around a lot with tropes and stereotypes in the Monogatari series but sometimes falls flat on his face, leading to some incredibly gross scenes. I keep watching because there's some great stuff in there but goddamn it goes off the rails in awful ways sometimes.

See Xtreme 90s American comics doing affectionate parodies of their own work.

idk just watch it it's all explained and makes sense as a part of the plot (seriously)

kill la kill is one of the most stunning anime series ever imo

fanservice isn't any less fanservice if it's explained or justified by the plot—the plot and setting of a given piece of fictional media aren't givens that exist outside of the control of the creator

No, you see these upskirts are ironic

Anyway I've watched all of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure up to the current point over the last couple of months or so and all I can really say is that it's probably the most accurately named thing I've seen in my life. I don't think this series has been as good as the one before it but now that shit's getting real it's seriously compelling

i've been meaning to read jjba for years and years but could never bring myself to get into a series with decades' worth of plot. i should probably just watch the show

wow, the golgo 13 manga has been going for 48 years

I don't read manga (not out of principle, just never got round to it I guess) but I can definitely recommend the JJBA anime as long as you can get past the first ten or so episodes (not bad but the prequel is very different in tone from the rest of it).

Jojo has separate parts that can mostly be taken separately. And unless you're going to go for fan unauthorized versions, there's only three parts available so it's not overwhelming at all. The third part is where it really gets going, you might even start there.
I was never interested in any of the anime versions because they don't come close to Araki's drawing, which is sometimes really brilliant.

Check out those house keyrings
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/jjba/images/e/e1/Jojo6251.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110530230310

I've never read Golgo 13 but isn't it only short self-contained stories featuring the same guy?

idk i haven't read it either, i was just looking at a list of the longest-running manga

Yes Golgo 13 is episodic and as it's long running some stories are good, some terrible, some are hilariously weird - usually when they intersect with real life events - Golgo gets hired to assassinate Princess Diana, was in prison with Mandela and cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

Knights of Sidonia S1 is for people who hate anime; S2 is... not.

Unless you can dig a pervert's spin on the tiredest of anime romcom cliches, and why would you, as an anime hater.

ahahaha yeah that was a weird one

apparently in the manga they get married

I could handle a romance between a human and a foul-smelling mutant with a talking dick, but the mutant having the personality of a little girl crossed a line imo.

In other news, an adaptation of Nihei Tsutomu’s opus magnum Blame is coming to Netflix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwy806RC2-Q

There's a decent discussion of this thread's subject in a comment thread here:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/11/wot-i-think-recettear-an-item-shops-tale/#comment-508137

I downloaded the first episode of pretty much all of them and.. have to get back to that project. But Akagi, a nerves-of-steel thriller about games of Mahjongg, is absolutely amazing.

Paranoia Agent is very good - one note is that the first episode contains an awful lot of people refusing to believe a young woman's account of events.

I have gotten somewhat more into anime over the past year or two, and really into anime over the past month or two. Here are my thoughts on everything I've watched lately:

Serial Experiments Lain: this was fun and everything I hoped it would be (stylized, super 90s, v cyberpunk, confusing). I felt like it was one of those shows where I could just take it all in and appreciate it aesthetically and not pay SUPER DUPER close attn to what was going on bcz even if you do it's still confusing as hell.

Genocyber: This was bad. I saw this mentioned a lot when I was researching cyberpunk anime, it is hyper violent which also intrigued me but the violence is sparse and really clunky, everything about it is poorly executed (animation, acting, writing, etc), and it quickly offset the novelty of the whole thing. It's a slog to watch and not even worth it for the shock value.

Battle Angel/Battle Angel Alita/Gunnm: This was cute, I liked this a lot. I wish it was longer than 2 episodes and I suppose I could read the manga (or a summary of the manga) but I'm fine just leaving it at this nice little 50-minute adventure. This def scratched my cyberpunk itch more than Genocyber did

Sekko Boys: The premise of this is that this woman is a manager for an idol group but all the members are marble busts, I thought this was the funniest thing ever and I laughed out loud a lot for the first few episodes but then the joke kinda wore off. I expected it to be more of a pointed commentary than it actually is.

OjiSan and Marshmallow: This is a series of 3 minute episodes about this adorable daddybear-looking dude who loves this one brand of marshmallow and this weird coworker who has a crush on him who keeps taunting him w them. It is super adorable but also the woman is like REALLY thirsty for him and it's a little wacky at times, but I'm really enjoying it

Polar Bear Cafe: I just started watching this yesterday and I am hooked so hard, it is about this anthropomorphic polar bear who runs a cafe and his regular customers who come in, set in a world where people and animals coexist w/o question, one of the characters is a panda and gets a job at the local zoo to just be their panda??? it's very humdrum slice of life and it is very soothing and SOOOO charming. I can't believe how in love with this show I am.

Ping Pong: Wow this is gorgeous!! I appreciate the simplicity of it bcz most of the anime I've watched is full of like ACTION or MYSTERY or INTRIGUE and this is just abt some students who play ping pong.

Next on my to-do list, in no real order:
Armitage III
Bubblegum Crisis
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Cowboy Bebop (I've seen the first 1/4 or so but never finished it)
Mononoke (just Mononoke, not Princess Mononoke)

I think I used to have it in my head that most anime was shounen and that I liked the exceptions to the rule that were not shounen, but I have come to realize that sooooo much anime is not shounen, and I actually like a lot of it??? I don't like meandering 100+ episode-of-the-week type stuff that doesn't really go anywhere, fan service, romance/excessive sentimentality, but I think I am open to most everything else, especially stranger weirder stuff.

Ping Pong really is incredible, a modern classic
don't know Armitage III but the others on your to-do list are all solid picks

Katsuhiro Otomo announced he is making a movie, "Orbital Era", only his third after "Akira" in 1988 and "Steamboy" in 2004.
Akira is getting a 4K remaster next year, good timing to tie in with the Olympics I guess.
More controversially there is also a new Akira "project" in the works covering the whole manga story, no word if it's TV or movies.

now I'm trying to think what a real Modern Classic Anime list would look like

yurucamp

the new akira thing is gonna be a tv series not a movie

stevie pls check out urusei yatsura: beautiful dreamer, did i already insist you watch this movie

Stevie, IIRC Bubblegum Crisis (I'm just going off the original OAV series here) may disappoint you - there's some cool robots-run-amok stuff but most of what's cyberpunky is just nakedly lifted from Blade Runner. It filled a niche at the time, and I was into it, but I don't think it really has any questions or answers of its own.

oh mannnnnnnn i love Beautiful Dreamer, high five to BN

it sorta depends on you knowing the show (which is a show worth at least dipping into), but i imagine you could get most of what it's doing if you just walk in with "this is based on a popular sitcom about a womanizing teenager who got technically engaged to an alien but won't admit he loves her, hijinks ensue with huge support cast."

i've never seen the show and i did spend like half the movie trying to figure out everyone's relationships to each other, also the whole "building a nazi-themed bar for the school festival" plotline is... weird, otherwise: a perfect movie

I rewatched Bubblegum Crisis last year and really enjoyed it, yes it is heavily influenced by Bladerunner but there was some nice body horror stuff going on in there and some beautiful animation. Plus it has some of the greatest "using random English as part of computer screens" in anime, one screen I didn't recognize turned out to be the lyrics to a David Sylvian song lol

https://i.imgur.com/7la8oVO.jpg

i do love "konya wa hurricane" and back in the day i had a soft spot for "bye bye my crisis" after taping it off a night when the college radio station played nothing but anime music for three hours.

oh yes Beautiful Dreamer is on my list!

tbh I kinda expect Bubblegum Crisis to not be excellent but I also love cyberpunk enough that I will watch derivative mediocre shit if it's cool looking enough (e.g. Johnny Mnemonic, which I love)

ahhhh cool, yeah, you should def watch it then!

I saw the spinoff Bubblegum Crash many years ago it wasn't that interesting but the poor slave robot was memorable. Looking up this series, I had no idea AD Police was set in the same universe but that makes a lot of sense, but it had a lot more sex, violence and perhaps immature seriousness.

I finished FLCL, it's a lot of fun but the music is the highlight by a wide margin. I'm still curious about the two new seasons, though.

I'm watching Kill La Kill now (fanservice caveats of course), it starts off great (fanservice aside) but I may have hit an anime saturation point because the wacky anime face faults are losing their shine.

my sister told me to watch fairy tail wow what garbage i told her to watch evangelion and she had about the same reaction lol

yayy Stevie I'm so glad you liked Polar Bear Cafe, it really is such a cute show

if you liked that you should seek out Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-San, it's a slice-of-life anime based around the staff of a bookstore and essential if you've ever worked in customer service with awful people

awful news, 13+ dead at Kyoto Animation studio after arson attack
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49027178

yeah this is fucked

33 dead, 36 injured

what a nightmare

There’s never any sense to attacks like this, but firebombing an animation studio seems even more fucked up.

clouds, Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san is so up my alley and my dude + I have had a v fun time watching it

I just finished Revolutionary Girl Utena and WOW, it was wild, perhaps a little too convoluted for its own good, it felt like there were a lot of superfluous twists and turns and it got hard to follow at times. I still v much loved it

Does anyone have recommendations for legitimately creepy/horror-y anime that's effective and not corny?

I think next on my list is The Big O, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Mononoke (the ghost one, not the Studio Ghibli one)

i haven't seen mononoke but it's the thing i most often see recommended for your above question so it seems like you're on the right track

I’m sure I didn’t see Yuri On Ice mentioned here? Anyway this thread reminded me to look at where that film is, answer still ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ should’ve done a second series

Does anyone have recommendations for legitimately creepy/horror-y anime that's effective and not corny?

the answer to this should have been the recent TV series "Junji Ito Collection" but unfortunately the adaption was garbage, stay away :(

"Ghost Hound" has a creepy vibe and amazing sound design iirc. The writing in the latter half loses steam, but it's still worth watching. There was a superstar team behind it including the creator of Ghost in the Shell and some of the Lain & Texhnolyze staff, both of which also had a similarly creepy vibe now I think of it, so also watch those as well if you haven't already (although Texhnolyze is also depressing as fuuuuuuuck)

lol funny, this was inspired by my boyf sending me a link to the Junji Ito Collection this morning like "omg did you know about this?!?!?!" and then me reading up on it and seeing that it got very middling reviews

I LOOOOVE Ghost in the Shell and Lain but have never seen Texhnolyze, I will add it to my list along w Ghost Hound

Re: horror, Petit Cossette is supposed to be very good but as with most stuff I cant get along with the drawing style.

yay stevie i'm glad you liked honda-san!

you've seen pop team epic right?

what's the most impressive anime in the past decade would you say from just a purely technical perspective?

probably mob psycho for tv anime? but the actual answer will be a movie which i havent seen much of from this decade

Yeh some movie as they have more time & budget to animate with (Redline maybe?)
In terms of TV Kyoani have probably been the most consistent studio over the last 10 years, but there are individual scenes from the likes of Mob, Space Dandy, 1st season of One Punch etc that stand out in the memory. Also probably PA Works but outside of Eccentric Family I can't stand their stuff >.<

I have NOT seen pop team epic!

wait yes I have, I watched an episode or 2, it was cute but it felt a bit like it was trying too hard to be weird for the sake of being weird

i didn't notice they made an anime of it, i just know it via people reposting the comics all the time

it's only 12 episodes, I should just watch it probably

I went on a rampage this weekend and downloaded the following:

Blue Submarine No. 6
Chi's Sweet Home
Genius PartyGiant Robo
Memories
Neo Tokyo
Panda Kopanda
Riding Bean
Robot Carnival
Tatami Galaxy
Texhnolyze

Neo Tokyo has the amazing “Running Man” short which I haven’t seen surpassed in terms of pure visual satisfaction, and I wonder if the death of cel-based animation is to blame. From a cost perspective, we should be able to have CG counterparts that are much more beautiful and fluid (a lot of shots in Running Man are static and cyclicly twitchy which lend it a very effectively unsettling atmosphere, but at the same time is obviously a cost/time-saving move) but I’ve yet to see anything like that outside of the Pixar paradigm. For something as highly packed with digital signs and readouts as “Running Man”, it’s doubly ironic that no one seems to be able to make something as good or better using a digital workflow.

i don't hate anime? but i just don't have a lot of time for it

so i just watch anime named after records i like

so far i have seen "angel's egg" and "pale cocoon" and they are both great

fuuuck i completely forgot about blue submarine no. 6, i remember loving it

angel's egg is a masterpiece

"running man" was nice but it could use more james taylor

xp most anime is still hand drawn though, not CG

My understanding is that it’s all done on tablets now (and I’m assuming at least the tweening is handled by computers rather than jr. level interns)

i'm pretty sure most studios still use a big pool of poorly paid contractors for the tweening

everything's composited digitally now and you'll see CG being used for stuff like action shots of vehicles or mechas but by and large the characters are still traditionally animated afaik

following up on the horror thing, an adaption of Junji Ito's Uzumaki aka Spiral is coming next year
directed by Hiroshi Nagahama (Mushishi), who I trust will get the creepiness down

short teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDEQyK5ZH-E

A bunch of anime nerds just discovered Colin Stetson.

don't think anime nerds are the ito fans really, hence this being a cartoon network thing

I'm 10 episodes into Paranoia Agent and I'm kind of wondering now if we'll ever return from this orthogonal detour.

Just finished Watanabe's new Netflix series, Carol and Tuesday. It was enjoyable, but I lost a good deal of interest when it settled into being about a Martian talent show. The closing credits are fantastic though!

Pretty much my sentiments. The music has been pretty good too, and I was kind of ranking the songs in my head -- "The Loneliest Girl" is tops, but the songs from the fake FKA Twigs are up there for me. (Angela is overrated.)

Pow-pow!

I always knew that fan communities could be intense and there's obviously nasty bullying but I didn't realize that fan art that was deemed problematic could lead to immense harassment from large parts of the community and two Jojo fan artists have ended up in hospital over it.

People have been bullied out of jobs and more than one person has been bullied to suicide. A Japanese fanartist had someone put needles in cookies they’d baked for her.

That's horrible. I also heard about it happening among Steven Universe fans on tumblr.

Was that latter artist bullied by people inside and/or outside japan? I remember Falcoon (fan artist who turned pro, worked for SNK) got bullied about his weight but that was maybe too early for culture war stuff (and I don't know how much japan goes for that).

my partner and i have been burning through anime like it's our job during quarantine. here's my anime logg with ratings:

completed
* Arslan Senki - 6
* Death Note - 8
* Elfen Lied - 6
* Kill la Kill - 10
* Little Witch Academia - 8
* Ghost in the Shell: SAC - 8
* Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam - 9
* Steins;Gate - 9
* Gurren Lagann - 9

watching
* Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ - i like the goofiness but they made the argama crew seem completely inept. also where tf is quattro??
* Legend of the Galactic Heroes - watched the first 30 episodes a few years back and it was a solid 10
* Ghost in the Shell: SAC2 - more cyberpunk awesomeness, minus the creepy hotel scene

looking for some good 80s/90s deep cuts, any recommendations?

you can also probably tell that i'm a Trigger fanboy -- i've never seen more joyful, maximalist animation. their stuff is like a love letter to everything anime good, band, and in-between

revolutionary girl utena

I recently watched NANA and loved it and tbh I have no idea if it's super well known or a deep cut and it's also from the 2000s but basically my point is if you haven't watched NANA you gotta

i watched the first saga of utena a few years back and really liked it! no better time to go back and finish

I remember a fair amount of people loved Nana, or the comic at least.

there's gunbuster and diebuster if you haven't seen those, kind of the origin point of the gainax/trigger style along with flcl

Is Nana streaming anywhere right now in the US? Looks like it's not on Prime or Netflix anymore :/

i don't see it anywhere

a lot of 00s and even some early 10s stuff is in limbo these days

Utena is critical viewing, Gunbuster is also great. If you’re a total nerd and curious about anime history, I really loved Otaku no Video, a 2-ep OVA abt the creation of Gainax.

Here’s some 80s/90s stuff I liked:

Bubblegum Crisis
Riding Bean
Battle Angel
Armitage III
Serial Experiments Lain
The Big O
Excel Saga

Ppl seem to like Blue Submarine No. 6 but I thought it was boring.

If you want ultra graphic pulpy garbage, Mad Bull 34 and Genocyber are ridic to the point of being kinda entertaining, but I would feel guilty actually *recommending* them

oh yeah definitely need to watch gunbuster and flcl

as for streaming, there's a great android app called "AnYme" you can use depending on the copyright laws in your country

It's probably super dated, but I loved the Vision of Escaflowne TV series back then.
Lain is great. After that, check out Paranoia Agent.

escaflowne is still good other than the ugly character designs

turn a gundam is my favorite mecha anime from that era

i haven't really seen much from the 90s though other than the big names, need to do a deeper dive

would love to read a book about the 80s bubble economy OVA scene, where any huckster or madman seemingly could get an anime made.
e.g. watched Dragon's Heaven OVA from 1988 the other day.
it's not that great, the main pull being that it's a complete ripoff of Moebius artwork brought to life.
it's also 42 minutes long but only 24 minutes is animation. there's a 5 minute live action intro featuring closeups of a model of the main mecha/robot, and then an outro of about 12 minutes of the model being lovingly constructed and filmed. so indulgent!

Excel Saga

oh i'm glad this show holds up? i haven't seen it since high school but i was a huge fan

here are 80's and 90's OVAs i would add to the list ... most of them are on youtube

dallos
megazone 23
goku midnight eye
record of lodoss war
paradise dolls
cyber city odeo 808
spirit warrior
black lion
wizardry
captain herlock: the endless odyssey

definitely check out retrocrush.tv, they have a ton of stuff on there from the '80s/'90s
That said we're probably getting away from the topic of this thread - everything we're talking about here is generally beloved anime

I'm currently watching through Monster, all of which is up on Youtube (in my part of the world at least); it's a slow burn but I'm enjoying it. More or less a straight-up crime thriller, there'a a few cliches but it's written well.

I'm a bit surprised that it seems to be the only Naoki Urusawa series that's been adapted into anime.

oh yeah megazone 23 and cyber city oedo 808 are rad

excel saga is SO funny and wacky and i was #blessed enough to wind up with a subtitle track that has pop-up-video style explanations of all of the obscure references, which has added to my appreciateion of it

if you are down w torrenting, nyaa dot si is an incredibly comprehensive resource, sometimes TOO comprehensive (like way too many rips of the same thing), they also skew towards placebo-level encoding (like FLAC audio and some insanely high video bitrate) which can be annoying

the most annoying anime release group thing i've come across is where they use an obscure feature in MKV that isn't really widely supported to chop off the intros and outros into their own files to save space

I'm largely anime ignorant, but are Ghost In the Shell and Akira still considered the gold standard of classic anime? I need a new thing to obsess over to distract myself from the end of civilization and am looking for entertaining diversions to stave off total despair

from a western perspective they definitely are still considered god tier

mamoru oshii's best work is unparalleled in anime not to mention cinema

ghost in the shell is among that best work

Haven't seen the anime for Monster but the manga is one of my favorites. Love Urasawa.
GITS probably holds up? Akira is amazing landmark animation but as a film it's always been kinda rough - bear in mind the manga was still going when they made the movie so it ends strangely.

I would say Ghost in the Shell and Akira are god-tier but they are not the entire god tier, I would also throw in like Spirited Away and probably a Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue? Millennium Actress?)

millennium actress is the best satoshi kon by a mile imo

check out Metropolis as well if u haven't seen it -- based on a manga from 1949 by Osamu Tezuka, it's directed by Rintaro and written by the director of Akira.

the last episode of gunbuster is a work of art

it's only like 6 eps, right? I really should rewatch it. Or maybe just watch Diebuster. My understanding is that E1 of Gunbuster is a parody of, like, sports anime? but sadly the context is lost on me :(

my kids have gotten into anime in a big way, usually shitty high school stories like haikyu

they like attack on titan too, which is..... HORRIFIC

they also like my hero academia, and they want me to subscribe to crunchyroll, but the video quality on crunchyroll is SO BAD and almost nothing is dubbed either

the crunchyroll player defaults to 480p if you aren't subscribed but you can tick it up to 1080p even without a subscription iirc

they only paywall new/currently airing shows for the most part

Lol I liked the first series of attack on Titan, never watched the rest. Series loves its gore though.

the subs are an issue for them - just a little too much work.

My understanding is that E1 of Gunbuster is a parody of, like, sports anime? but sadly the context is lost on me :(

it kinda starts out as like a light parody of mecha/school anime but then turns into something incredible about halfway through. 6 episodes so it's an easy watch

they are now super into 'Food Wars'

haikyuu to attack on titan to food wars is quite the downward slide

lol

help me help them, they have no taste and no filter

i need to finish watching food wars. love the orgasmic depictions of flavor

yeah that's their favourite part :)

Mob Psycho 100 is the best recent shonen action series imo, but really i have no clue what teens might like, i only watch boring adult anime

have we talked about DoroHeDoro yet? if not, we really need to

my kids aren't teens yet - frankly i find attack on titan too gruesome for them but they claim it doesn't bother them

if Polar Bear's Cafe has a dub, see if they like that? they might find it really boring tho

xp dorohedoro is cool but obv doesn't belong in the middle of a discussion about anime for kids lol

Will watch Ghost in the Shell someday, as a treat.

Little Witch Academia is tame enough for kids but still entertaining as an adult

hah sorry I didn't know we were talking about kids anime but still.. incredible mind melting stuff

the manga art is really good and detailed in ways that can't be replicated in tv animation but they still did a great job with the setting/backgrounds and overall execution

that's re: dorohedoro i mean

I liked it but couldn’t figure out if the objectification of its women characters was so grotesque as to constitute a comment on the theme or really just unfortunate.

that’s how i feel about food wars

but everything else about it i find amazingly bonkers. my kids now both want to actually create dishes in real life that my wife and i are to judge. i really hope they don’t want us to cosplay.

thats really sweet :)

the last episode of gunbuster is a work of art

― diamonddave85​​ (diamonddave85), Sunday, June 21, 2020 7:37 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's only like 6 eps, right? I really should rewatch it. Or maybe just watch Diebuster. My understanding is that E1 of Gunbuster is a parody of, like, sports anime? but sadly the context is lost on me :(

― vision joanna newsom (Stevie D(eux)), Sunday, June 21, 2020 10:46 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

i’m rewatching gunbuster right now bc of this exchange! i’ve owned the dvds for at least a decade but somehow had only watched them once? i had forgotten almost everything about this incredible show, including all the proto-evangelion echoes (profound dedication to pseudoscientific babble, screwed up father figure who almost never takes off his sunglasses, arrogant german redhead who’s preternaturally good at piloting robots)

the alien spaceship design is dazzling, just these overgrown organic horrors floating through space. feels really influenced by anno’s time working with miyazaki (which, incidentally, the main character has a nausicaa poster in her room)

maybe i should finally watch all of nadia after this

gunbuster overall feels like a picture of anno before he realized how depressed he was, or a version of eva that’s not so psychedelically fucked up and is instead pared down to pure emotion

Brad I am LIVING for your Gunbuster rewatch. Plz lmk if you watch Diebuster and if it’s any good.

“Gunbustaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”

diebuster is good in a 'solid sequel that lives in the shadow of the original' sort of way iirc

at first i was like "diebuster isn't directed by anno? no thanks" but it's kazuya tsurumaki of flcl so i'll prob watch it

did anyone watch those flcl sequels, are they any good

i haven't bc no one seemed to like them. they're not even made by ex-gainax folks for the most part afaik so its a sequel in name only

I was going to post various articles on various threads but screw it, just skim the first few pages of this blog for anything that catches your interest. Includes some podcast discussion of Gunbuster and Diebuster.
https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/

I've been reading Jonathan Clements' articles since last summer when I discovered his entries on china and japan on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia but he's a general historian of Japan, China, Finland; he writes 2000AD novels; he writes lots about anime, he translates and does voice acting; probably does a bunch of other things I've forgotten.
I tore my hair out at some of the copyright/translation and secondhand market practices of japan and there's lot of good stuff to scroll through. Old Finnish films.

Y’all I’m trying to watch JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and its... not great. I know everyone says the first few arcs are meh and Stardust Crusaders is where it’s at, but the specific things I dislike about this (the colors, the way its animated so something’s always moving or trembling, the nonstop mindless action) make me think the rest of it isn’t going to be THAT much better. What should I do?

I had the same problem so I quit

it's not good imo

Read the manga (Araki draws waaaaaaaaaay better than any of the anime visuals) or play the 2d fighting game.

the flcl sequels were bad and had no reason to exist

as far as jojo goes, stardust crusaders is still pretty mediocre for the most part, it's mostly just villain of the week stuff without anything more interesting happening. my rec is just try diamond is unbreakable if you are desperate to see how good jojo can be, it's certainly the best of the parts that have been adapted so far, but if you hate the weird colours that never changes. you don't really need to have watched the previous parts to understand anything, there's a few characters who reappear (one who's a main character) but that's it. starting with stardust crusaders the action certainly gets less mindless and more about creative & ridiculous applications of weird goofy superpowers but again this gets more interesting as it goes along & diamond is unbreakable is a lot better in that regard and has more fun characters and a goofy slice-of-life vibe to it.

like the first three parts bored me to death but i loved diamond is unbreakable, and stone ocean and steel ball run (parts 6 and 7, not yet adapted) are fantastic too

I missed the discussion of food wars. I’d read the manga (or at least the bits I could find to read for free) so I kind of knew what to expect but the objectification really is too much. The jiggly squelchy noises really are too much. I guess you could say, given the orgasmic delight effects men and women and the odd naked male arse, that it’s equal opportunity objectification, but know this is aimed at teenage boys and it’s just too sexist.

Which is a shame because the setup and the food bits are good and I like that soma can whip up decisions dishes from whatever is laying around.

I’ve been watching Oishinbo on Hulu japan which is also about food although less about cooking than celebrating japanese food culture (which the authors thought was under threat when the series started in the 80s). There’s also a father and son dynamic, they often battle over who can provide the best dish.

omg Oishinbo sounds so charming and up my alley, I need to track this down

I just started Patlabor, less out of desire and more as a homework assignment cuz I wanna familiarize myself w mecha anime tropes. It’s not bad but, as one would predict, fairly straightforward.

I think I’m gonna start either Texhnolyze, Baccano!, or Tatami Galaxy as well so I have something weirder to watch

I’m sad that like... now that I’ve finished Evangelion, Paranoia Agent, Serial Experiments Lain, FLCL, Utena, Madoka Magica... like what is even left in that realm??

I wanna familiarize myself w mecha anime tropes

have you watched mobile suit gundam? that's where it all begins plus it has the greatest theme song of all time
its sequel series zeta is even better

like what is even left in that realm??

apparently ergo proxy is supposed to be but i got bored half way through

Xp no bcz I tend to avoid stuff that’s longer than like 25-30 episodes, I like my anime to have a narrative arc and not just kinda meander forever

whats the commonality supposed to be in that list? just classic anime?

while i wouldn't say that they don't meander, the first 3 series (+ movie) of MSG together form a pretty well defined story arc. maybe try the "war in the pocket" ova to see if you catch the bug

have you watched mobile suit gundam? that's where it all begins

― diamonddave85​​ (diamonddave85), Monday, July 6, 2020 11:00 PM

Does Mazinger Z not introduce any tropes apart from the big robot itself?

oh man, i completely forgot about war in the pocket

whats the commonality supposed to be in that list? just classic anime?

I guess you could even say anime for ppl who hate anime?

hmm ok

well Tatami Galaxy fits that, Baccano i don't think i would call cerebral but it still owns

maybe try Dennou Coil, that's one of my favs

i probably shouldn't be posting in this thread though since i love anime

Haibane Renmei perhaps? made by Lain peeps, similarish vintage

xp lol is there even a "main" anime thread?? I thought the same thing, my tastes and interests are specific but I too love anime! But when I looked up other anime threads they all had like <50 posts and hadn't been touched in years, and it'd be incredibly on-brand for a thread like like this to be "the one" on ILX lmao

If I liked Castlevania and LOVED Dorohedoro, what else is like that on Netflix UK right now? There's loads of stuff, obvs, but a lot of it looks like it could be daft or just for schoolkids and teens?

there's a hidden I Love Anime board that unlocks once you've watched every episode of lucky star

Afraid what will happen if I finally open a Cartoon Network thread

If I liked Castlevania and LOVED Dorohedoro, what else is like that on Netflix UK right now?

i don't know what is on Netflix UK but try Kakegurui which is by the Dorohedoro guy and is similarly batshit insane

thats a little misleading imo, its the same director but the source mangas are thoroughly unrelated

misleading???

oh i just meant when i see 'the dorohedoro guy' i would assume it to mean the original creator and not the director of the anime adaptation

also fwiw this is the other anime thread i'm aware of but no one uses it really

Anime S/D (COD hahahaha d'oh)

I keep seeing Azumanga Daioh mentioned (incl in that thread), can anyone recommend it? I've seen it namechecked along side Polar Bear Cafe which is one of my v v v favorites

i don't think those two are much alike

azumanga's a pretty influential series that set the template for the many 'high school girls do whatever' sketch comedy anime that are adapted from 4-panel comic strip manga. it still holds up fine but there's plenty of other ones since that are funnier imo, like i'd easily recommend Nichijou over it

ahhhh okay yeah someone I trust has already strongly recommended Nichijou and I have that queued up. For me, the charm of Polar Bear Cafe is how humdrum it is, it is almost entirely devoid of romance and high school stuff, the two things most Slice of Life animes seem to be centered around to varying degrees. Basically any Slice of Life anime that has nothing to do with love or school (see also: Skull-Faced Bookseller Honda San, which is completely different in regard to like tone and pacing but has a similar "here's a fun depiction of something completely ordinary")

second the recommendation for Tatami Galaxy, just visually stunning and short enough to watch in a few days

i'm glad you liked honda san!

have you seen pop team epic yet?

Yes! I've gotten a few episodes in, I enjoy it from time to time but I'm not totally hooked, at times it's SO frenetic and breakneck that the jokes don't really land

omg Oishinbo sounds so charming and up my alley, I need to track this down

― vision joanna newsom (Stevie D(eux)), Tuesday, 7 July 2020 4:27 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

There are collection of some of the manga translated into English. The Sushi one is super interesting because a lot of it focuses on all the terrible parasites you can ingest if you don’t prepare it right. The sake one has some views that are a little dated but is very educational, especially about the sake industry as it was in the 80s but maybe this is only of interest to a sake geek.

It’s interesting, not least because it comes from a place of deep unease about Japanese culture, especially food culture, being subsumed by and excitement about new and exciting western things. A lot of the episodes revolve around a Japanese obsessive about something western being introduced to a Japanese equivalent that is as good or better.

One of the early episodes of the anime has a contest between foie gras and simmered monkfish liver and a bunch of gourmets are astounded that japan has something so good. (Having eaten monkfish liver in japan I am a little skeptical)

Is this also the manga thread for people who don’t really like manga (comics, graphic novels etc.), because I have a lot of manga for someone who does really like manga?

if there's one thing manga and anime has taught me is that all Japanese food is oishii and woe betide anyone who suggests otherwise (apart from that one girl who for some reason can only make a purple mess of death)

damn don't harsh on misato's cooking like that

and yes someone make a manga thread so I can tell you all about how this Ito version of No Longer Human is really cheering me up haha

my boyfriend told me to watch an episode of Food Wars bcz I love food and... this is not for me, I would prefer not to watch children being raped by squids I think??? Though it lead to a whole convo about fan service and whatnot, my boyfriend loves exploitation cinema and Russ Meyer and stuff so he didn't mind it as much, but tbh this feels a lot grosser than that to my eyes (also I don't love exploitation cinema)

I would prefer not to watch children being raped by squids I think???

wait what?? maybe i should have been keeping a closer eye on this :(

ya in the first 5 or 10 minutes of ep 1 when the guy feeds that girl the peanut butter squid there's a whole tentacle rape thing

that part was gross but my bf and i watched the first two seasons and found it mostly really endearing and entertaining! you really start to love the chars once you get to know them all.

honestly that peanut butter squid thing is the worst the show gets afaicr

I've said it upthread somewhere but Redline is fun.

Foodwars continues to be massively sexist and objectifying.

Yeah it’s not great. I’ve talked with my kids about it. They immediately jump to its defense with all kinds of cockamamie reasons why actually it’s not sexist etc

Cue Miyazaki "Anime was a mistake" gif!

I'm very conflicted because the bits that aren't massively sexist and objectifying are quite good. It's also from this decade, not the 80s which has me RMDE at both Japan and Netflix. I should just pay for Paravi and watch the 3 seasons of Wakakozake I haven't yet watched.

Anyone seen the Ulysses 31 series? It was a french-japanese co-production.

I used to get some interesting anime recommendations on youtube but never see them anymore. It was the type of stuff that sold all over the world before anime had a real global audience. It tended to be fairy tales and I remember one of the earliest things I ever saw that didn't seem to be an american/japanese cartoon like GI Joe or X-Men or any number of saturday morning toy line stuff was Wizard Of Oz (there's different versions). I often wonder how much the fairy tales, X-Men, Thundercats etc got people ready for fully japanese cartoons.

watched Ulysses 31 as a kid as it was broadcast on UK TV, completely forgot about it until now and yet can immediately sing the whole theme tune. brains r weird.

there was another japanese-french one from the 80s that my kids have seen, the mysterious cities of gold. they loved it.

I need another pile of unread food manga like I need aa hole in the head, however a magazine just turned up with a list of the best food manga series and this one (Osen) looks so cool

http://goinjapanesque.com/ja/14343/

https://blog.alltheanime.com/podcast67/
Mentioned the podcast earlier when I was talking about Jonathan Clements but now I've listened to it. A lot of talk of of the original version of Gunbuster being difficult (or did they say impossible?) to find.
Funny story about pseudonyms; Tezuka being a dick to a musician.
Brilliant stuff about which animes succeed better abroad and then they're compelled to make more many years later (Trigun), or pretend they have more episodes than they do, so they can make them later. I'm kind of delighted that Urotsukidoji was a possibly bigger in the UK than anywhere else BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA! And he does talk about the irony of how it was portrayed as being what those sickos in japan watch, but actually Britain likes it more.

xps my first encounters with Anime was French kids TV in the eighties. They were showing Dragonball on Saturday mornings way before it hit the UK. Lots of other shows too - yes Ulysses, Cities of Gold (which were shown in the UK at the time), but also Olive et Tom, Ecole Des Champions, Nicky Larsson and many other French/Japanese productions. Anime was standard French kids' TV back then. Not sure what inspired it though

anime seems to have been more successful in most places than it was in the uk. there was a lot of anime on the tv in Chile when I used to visit in the 90s as a kid

Boogiepop Phantom and Serial Expeeiments: Alain are highly recommended, especially for us who have become shut-ins or already were pre-pandemic.

I haven’t seen it yet, but Dennou Coil (Den-Noh Coil) has gotten rapturous reviews

Serial Experiments: LAIN, not Alain, lol

It's interesting that anime never got much of a foothold in the UK, or Ireland. The only time it really had mainstream visibility here was during the late 90s/early 00s Pokemon craze, with a few other shows with names ending in "mon" and a heavily butchered dub of Card Captor Sakura. There have been a few attempts at anime-focused satellite channels over the years, and they all disappeared in a matter of weeks.

It seems like France and Italy are the big European anime/manga markets, both countries have a long history of anime shows on television (going back to the 70s at least).

Germany is quite into manga, i remember a few years ago looking up books on amazon and getting frustated cos a few books I wanted to buy were only translated into German. iirc when Tokyopop collapsed in the late 00s the only bit that survived was Tokyopop Gmbh cos it was profitable, and is still going today.

It's interesting that it has caught on in Africa so much too; how about south asia and middle east?

Another thing in that podcast above (which is quite well known to be fair) is about how much Chinese authorities view japanese cartoons as a threat, they were appalled when they found out that the majority of popular cartoons were japanese and I think they banned a bunch of stuff.

I heard a good theory that manga and anime have been so accessible is because the faces of the characters are mostly very simplified and almost like emoticons. That's disconcerting for me because that's the thing I most dislike about it. It's quite hard to find artists who draw faces like Dave Cooper (when he's not in his old timey cartoons mode) but I've found a few I can't remember the names of.

I’m enjoying Carol and Tuesday on Netflix right now about two teenagers who set out to conquer the Martian music business. 11 episodes in the fact that they live on mars seems entirely incidental to the plot, especially as the bit of mars they live in looks like Brooklyn. Nevertheless there are lots of robots and AI’s, they hire a small drunken arsehole of a robot to direct a recreation of the thriller video in episode 4.

The whole arc is about the battle between Carol and Tuesday’s homespun, handmade, honest to goodness sparkly pop sounds and Angela, former model, who is working with the mysterious Tao and his AI to manufacture the ultimate pop career.

i think its on mars because its by the cowboy bebop guy and 'genre setting + music focus' is his entire thing

omfg I’m finishing up my second viewing of Kill la Kill which much to my delight my bf is LOVING, I wish this didn’t have so much gross sexual shit (incest, sexualized children, etc), it’s hard to like wholeheartedly recommended, but what a trip. Should I watch Gurren Lagaan next?

kill la kill is the weakest of the big gainax/trigger shows imo, the second half is kind of a drag.

gurren lagann is better though still very much the work of the same director & writer so a lot of the beats are similar. same with promare though its a movie so its a nice concise take on the formula

Isn't Gainax and Trigger anime for people who love anime?

for sure, but this thread was originally spun off of eva discussion which is also gainax...

I feel like Kill la Kill is at once perfect for ppl who both love and don’t love anime

also i mostly think of this thread more as 'anime with crossover appeal outside of anime fandom' which trigger stuff definitely is. imaishi's even making the cyberpunk 2077 tie-in netflix series lol

I've been working my way through the original Patlabor OVA and it's interesting, it's slower in pace that what I would have expected from a mecha anime, like more of a drama with robots than an ACTION!!! series. The characters are well developed and it also has a timelessness about it, like it doesn't really lean into pop culture or era-specific tropes too much? I like it! It doesn't feel groundbreaking or mind-blowing but it's sturdy and pleasant. I'm almost done and then I'm going to watch the first 2 movies.

the 1st movie is my fav anime movie

I decided to watch some anime again this year after a long time of not watching it. I don't hate anime but I often feel underwhelmed. But figured there must be something worth watching from the past fifteen years

Mob Psycho 100 is funny and enjoyable and visually interesting for such a well-trodden genre. Several friends also recommended Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which was not bad but felt very standard for its genre (never saw the original series). I know there are much longer series but it still felt overly long. At least the ending was sufficiently epic

oh shit i should watch patlabor

Yes do it, it’s only 7 eps and then 2 movies! Somehow I only just the other day realized it was Mamoru Oahii

my bf and i have been going through jojo's bizarre adventure: stardust crusaders and have been loving it

second patlabor movie is my fav oshii but I haven't seen the first one for at least a decade

kenji kawai score is excellent too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmlwhaEEgE

it's probably been even longer for the OVAs, but if memory serves, oshii directs some of the moodier ones there too

first movie is more like the ovas, 2nd is off doing its own thing

That's a beautiful piece of music.

As a young anime watcher the Patlabor movie totally confounded me with how little action there was. But then Wings Of Honneamise was similarly uncommercial for such a big production.
Then I remember even the Fist Of The North Star feature length turned all the outrageous fantasy violence into a horrible disempowering downer of an ending and the very commercial seeming Street Fighter Alpha mortified me by having my favorite characters brutalized in such a depressing fashion by some schmuck who isn't even in the games.

It's weird looking back on all that and I wonder if anime is still doing this to kids these days.

I was 9 or 10 years old when the school janitor loaned me Akira and it made me feel really sick but I mostly liked it.

the body horror stuff in akira still ooks me out

can't remember if i said this here but my kids' mother-in-law bought them the entire series of tokyo ghoul

they are 11 and 9 years old

i think it's....... a bit fucking much

yeahhhhhhh probably not age-appropriate

i was still watching pokemon when i was 12. it was brand new at the time though and thus probably cooler than it is to tweens now

my 9-y-o is dunzo with pokemon

they are HUGE fans of carole and tuesday. need 200 more episodes ASAP to wash the taste of tokyo ghoul out of my mouth

11-y-o is also starting to read assassination classroom, which i feel like would probably be actually illegal in the united states

i would say the age i saw akira at, 13, is the perfect age to see akira

pokemon/sailor moon/dragon ball z were my world at ages 11-12 but they were all airing "new" episodes at that time. evangelion broke open the rest of the anime world for me but i didn't see it in full until i was 14. i definitely watched ninja scroll not long after akira and i liked it but i was def 1) too young to be watching it 2) ninja scroll is the fucking worst trash. i think if my parents were at all interested in what i was watching they would've probably have not let me see a lot of these, but they had checked out of controlling the media i consumed by the time i was 7 or so? i grew up watching robocop and schwarzenegger and james bond movies, ultraviolence was my bag until psychologically and metaphysically deep art were my bag lol

in fact, anime basically conducted that transition

mtv and the simpsons were the last battles my parents waged and they lost both

my dad shunned the simpsons ever since they went up against the cosby show. 'i don't watch cartoons' was his line.

my mom was really strict about that stuff until i hit high school and then she went back to work and stopped caring much. so i basically went straight from pokemon to cowboy bebop

though bebop wasn't nearly as violent as i remembered on a rewatch, it probably just seemed that way at the time due to that jump lol

xps Ass Class is actually pretty wholesome for the most part (except for the sexy honeypot teacher)

ultraviolence was my bag until psychologically and metaphysically deep art were my bag

"evangelion was my bag but then evangelion was my bag"

lol

Just finished the two Devilman OVA’s from 1987/1990 and W O W, these were fucking amazing. The monster design was WILD, like so creepy and grotesque, and it had a lot of v filmy touches to it. Super fun to watch.

I am quite fond of them, I thought they were genuinely spooky at times but the fight with the demon bird lady in the second one didn't do much for me and it goes on a long time.

Always found it tad troubling that the blonde guy is perfectly happy to kill people to become a demon.

Fiiiinally finished Bubblegum Crisis and started the 3-episode AD Police Files OVA and it’s incredible, it’s a lot darker grittier trashier then Bubblegum Crisis, as someone w a soft spot for both cyberpunk and sleazy 90s OVAs this is perfect

Tatami Galaxy, episode 1: this guy talks way too fucking fast

Cat Soup: I tried to watch this a few months ago but I rewatched it last night and I like it a lot more, prob bcz I already knew it was kinda dark. Weird and fun!

Megazone 23, Part I: hahaha this is ridic and I love it so much, it is SOOO distinctively 80s and there is even a mall montage w pop music over it and I really enjoyed the direction it went in

i finished the patlabor ova and it was quite nice even though, in this particular year, watching a show about the police clashing with environmental activists was... hm. last episode did have a quite funny joke and the expense of commies tbf

gotta log back into hidive and watch the movies now

i'm also glad that the ova ultimately did not deal too much with them apprehending "criminals" or "environmental terrorists" and kinda ended up being a cops vs. the military story

the movies are incredible, enjoy

I liked that the OVA was a drama with robots instead of like ACTION anime!

Brad I think you might really love Megazone 23

xp wait I literally just said that upthread

anyway incidentally enough I had the first Patlabor queued up and was abt to start watching (and am now 5 minutes in, the animation is stellar) and I just want to point out that every time I watch Patlabor in my head I hear Erykah Badu singing “Paaatlabor, you gon’ hurt your back”

tatami galaxy is worth sticking with-- the rest of the episodes aren't nearly as fast as the first one

still pretty fast though

made a rare attempt to watch an anime for people who like anime (Kill La Kill) and deeply regretted my decision within an hour, save for the enjoyable overkill of the animation style

like I get that it's making a meta statement about anime but still....not for me, oof.

but, yknow, it's good to test yr limits of taste now and again

okay yeah wow the Patlabor movie is in a league of its own, like the OVA is really great but the movie is next-level and I can clearly see why it gets the praise that it does

Simon, what specifically did you hate about Kill la Kill?

I really don't know if there was anything I liked about it lol

aaaahahaha okay fair, I enjoyed its frenetic energy and its twisty turny batshit plot and send-ups of lots of diff anime tropes and conventions but ya it is def not for everyone

what have you watched lately that you've enjoyed?

Japan’s most evil yakuza makes its cutest househusband! Follow Tatsu’s journey from underworld legend to domestic bliss when the anime adaptation of Kousuke Oono’s hit comedy manga The Way of the Househusband premieres in 2021. pic.twitter.com/V7tdVIaYVc

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) October 27, 2020

have you read the comic?

No, I just thought it sounded funny.

I read a bit and it's ok, but not as funny as Hinamatsuri tho

ok so the first patlabor movie was several orders better than the ova, and the second patlabor movie was.... a godlike masterpiece?????

they're the best anime movies

pretty much

I made it 40 minutes into Patlabor 2 but fell asleep bcz I was stoned, it was v v dialogue heavy! I'm going to rewatch it tonight.

i'm prepared to call patlabor 2 the best oshii film i've ever seen. the balance is just right, feels less rushed than ghost in the shell, less philosophy 101 than gits 2, more serious, contemplative, and quietly surreal than urusei yatsura: beautiful dreamer or patlabor 1

it also has the best score of any movie ever

hoooooly shit Patlabor 2 WOW

it’s wild to think this is connected with the OVA in any way, they’re so thematically different

https://www.instagram.com/drivemeawaytroubledheart/
A lot of really good classic anime and Zelda vibes here.

it’s wild to think this is connected with the OVA in any way, they’re so thematically different

― Warmed Regards, (Stevie D(eux)), Saturday, November 14, 2020 11:27 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's wild but also it's like... an active deconstruction of the ova, cf. noa's speech about not wanting to be "the girl who loves a giant robot" anymore

yeah you are so right!!

cops questioning their own existence and purpose bc they are maintaining an order and a peace that are in and of themselves fictions, god inject it into my fucking veins

Been meaning to chase down this theme music for Ichi The Killer anime forever, it's hilarious and cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfoZZTmXWG0
When I first saw it, I thought it was quite uneventful but I actually think about it quite a lot, especially the way Ichi goes into an inarticulate rage at people who know what he's really like ("you idiot!")

rewatching ghost in the shell: stand alone complex and this show is even better than i remembered

really remarkable that they carried over the cinematic feeling of the moment to the series, there are quiet and slow moments in nearly every episode that give me chills, and yet they still pack a ton of action and plot swerving into 22 minutes

the cinematic feeling of the movie*

I've always debated whether or not to devote the time to Stand Alone Complex, perhaps I should????

haven't gotten to the end yet but i sure like it

It is definitely worth your attention.

rurouni kenshin: tsuioku-hen is incredible

having not seen the series before and then watching episode 1 after the OVA, the difference in tone was shocking

if that's the prequel one, I think I did the same thing - saw the OVA and never saw the TV series

ghost in the shell sac was really great btw. i started 2nd gig but something about the recipe feels off, having trouble getting into it

Kenshin TV series, along with Sailor Moon, is what got me into anime. It gets amazing when Shishio comes into it but you have to suffer about 25 episodes of crap to get there

Anyone seen Heidi: Girl Of The Alps? A lot of episodes on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hKi1VlE94A

Thought maybe the thread was revived for this incredibly weird moment

Any anime fans out there? I always loved Studio Ghibli after I worked with them - however I don’t know much else.

But, I just saw “Your Name” and it blew me away. What is out there? C’mon, some of you guys have to be nerds. Fess up!

— Jim Belushi (@JimBelushi) December 28, 2020

lol, you want a weird anime moment

What the fuck the screenwriter for Pulp Fiction just gave the Konosuba movie 5 stars pic.twitter.com/l0kTc8ScT6

— Protokahn (@Protokahn) November 16, 2019

Easily one of the best experiences in a cinema I’ve ever had. I would go as far as saying it’s the reason cinema was invented.

— Roger Avary (@AVARY) November 17, 2019

amazing

I'm currently doing my best to binge Revolutionary Girl Utena, which I've wanted to watch for quite some time, even though binging isn't in my nature. This is because I discovered it was on Amazon Prime just the other day, AND it's due to expire later this month!

The visuals are pretty amazing. I love the two shadow girls! My only (minor) gripe is that the sword duels are starting to feel a tad repetitive (at least on a marathon).

That Count de Monte Cristo anime is also there and soon to expire, godammit!

how far in are you? make sure to watch the movie afterward too

yeah do not miss the film. the duels are repetitive by nature, it's a magical girl anime, though some of them are really inventive still especially in the third arc

I’m about four episodes into the black rose storyline and it's really good! It’s getting pretty damn creepy too, I’ll bet the creator is a horror fan. I’m curious about how some of the characters actually end up in that interview room...

show only gets weirder enjoy the ride

and the black rose arc is prob the most repetitive wrt duels... things get a little less predictable after

the last two episodes of the black rose arc.... i've watched them so many times and they still make me go "wtf was THAT"

WTF was THAT indeed. Loved Utena, and was fully expecting further symbolic bafflement at the end, so it didn't disappoint (not really happy about certain developments/changes from the manga, but never mind). I might re-watch those two Black Rose episodes and the final episodes before they're taken down.

Managed to finish Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo too, pretty great "anime for people who hate anime". Loose adaptation of the story, set in an anachronistic future/past, 19th Century Europe with huge airships and art-deco cars and digital screens, and, like, aliens hanging around all over the place; The Count is basically Space Dracula. Interesting mix of eastern and western art styles, some janky 3D environments that are dated now, but still fit into the visual aesthetic. Pretty emotional too, the final episode had me welling up.

may not surprise you that as someone who saw the anime first i can't stand the manga

the utena manga was a pretty separate project to the anime, one isn't an adaptation of the other or anything, they just came up with the character designs & vague plot outline together & then the anime staff did their own thing & the manga artist did her own thing, only occasionally discussing concepts. i've never really seen anyone who's read/watched both say the manga is particularly worthwhile at all

That makes sense. The series was a lot better and more memorable than the manga overall, though I wanna go back and give it another read. But next: the movie!

The movie is v special and it's debatable whether it's a complete retelling set in a parallel universe or if it's a continuation set within the same continuity as the anime series (I am firmly in the latter camp)

going to try "So I'm a Spider, So What?" which was a fun manga

one of many many series where the lead is reincarnated as a minor character in a role playing game

theres so many of those now that i am fatigued of them just by their existence without even having to watch any

so i'm a spider's manga is pretty good!

one of many many series where the lead is reincarnated as a minor character in a role playing game

sword art online was just the right mix of compelling and amateurishly bad to cause a bunch of aspiring nerd writers to think 'i bet i could do this better' and it's turned into a huge feedback loop

March Comes in Like a Lion is definitely worth a watch-- it'll make you cry from happiness, kawaiiness, and sadness

all of the good parts of monogatari's direction without all the indefensible shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWnvzR_hrDA

i'm so sick of mmorpg animes

I haven't seen the anime, but Erased doesn't really fit in that list, really loved the manga. (Though I guess it heavily involves "reincarnation" of a sort.) Weird to see how different the anime style is from the original. I know it's on Netflix (as is the live-action version?) Anyone seen them already and can tell me if it's worth the time?

Haven't read the manga, but I enjoyed the Erased anime. Didn't set my world on fire but worth seeing. Little bit meandering at points, but given the short length, easy to overlook

Lately I've been watching Haruhi Suzumiya, which I know is pretty well-known but I'd never seen. Liked the weird ordering of episodes and the overarcing plot, but as usual the fan service sucks and it was too cliched at times to really recommend. It's been a looong time since I've seen an anime I loved

I decided to give Serial Experiments Lain a re-watch over the last week. I had vague memories of a "cool" show that went way over my head; I was worried it would just turn out to be dated and pretentious. By the third or fourth episode, I was completely hooked. Like one poster says upthread, the best approach is to just take it all in, and maybe reach your own conclusions, since we're only being fed bits and pieces of a larger story anyway (or at least, that's how I see it).

btw a very poor english translation of the playstation lain game, which precedes the show and is significantly different from it afaict, is online here: https://3d.laingame.net/#/game

friend of mine is working on making the translation better

whaaaaaat

wow now I want to rewatch Lain

https://blog.alltheanime.com/books-leiji-matsumoto/

the one episode that's mostly the history of computers >>>>>>

トレンドにガンダムＷがあるけど、ガンダムＷというと映画「ブレードランナー2049」「ラ・ラ・ランド」に出てたライアン・ゴズリングとヒイロ・ユイとの完全一致画像を思い出せずにはいられない。#ガンダムW pic.twitter.com/fYHohjugiN

— てんげるまん🌀tengelmam (@fcbliebe1900) April 15, 2021

I cannot stress enough just how much you need to stop whatever it is you are doing and watch the opening titles of this documentary. I promise you're not ready for what's coming. https://t.co/UenN1Zs9iO

— non anime enjoyer (@VoltySquirrel) May 27, 2021

I could have posted that on a more specific thread, but that would spoil the surprise!

omg lol

trailer for TV series that adapts Japanese literature classic Tale of the Heike
starts airing in Sept and has an amazing staff list including director Naoko Yamada (A Silent Voice, Liz and the Blue Bird)
super excited for this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OQpRQ8syqw

yeah looks great. excited to see yamada working in a different visual style, as much as i like kyoani stuff

The stylish film noir thriller ODDTAXI is the best anime I've seen in years. While there's no direct connection, it feels like it carries forward Satoshi Kon's legacy, to the point that one episode could almost slot right into the first half of Paranoia Agent. Beautiful animation, great soundtrack, and some of the finest writing I've ever seen in an anime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kdvfKp1EG0

anyway all of anno's pre-eva miyazaki-inspired series nadia is on hulu and i recommend it; it's very digressive but also very charming

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 7:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love that i said this six years ago and am just now picking up nadia again. gonna finish it this time!!!!!

will try oddtaxi!

odd taxi is a masterpiece

where/how are you guys watching it?

it's on crunchyroll i think. also the usual suspects.
https://www.crunchyroll.com/oddtaxi

thanks.

my usual t o r r e n t sites don’t have it but i’m not on any anime specific ones tbf

n/m "found" it

i'm only 15 episodes in and nadia is surprisingly brutal. i guess i shouldn't be surprised given anno made evangelion after but this is still significantly more traumatized than gunbuster

watched Odd Taxi this week and loved it, wasn't the furry bullshit it looked like from the outside

i am currently working my way through Haijime no Ippo which follows the manga INCREDIBLY faithfully and is great before bedtime stuff. Season 1 is 75 20 minute episodes, which is insane.

i've reached nadia's infamous filler arc, where the main characters are stranded on a deserted island for like seven episodes. it's godawful, even the animation is bad

the show before this arc started was kind of a masterpiece

thats the only thing i know about nadia because literally everyone has the same reaction to it

i was hoping it was not as bad as everyone has said for years and years. it is

nadia's vegetarianism is one of my favorite things about her character but they devote so much energy in the deserted island arc to making her look obstinate and stupid in her vegetarianism and i'm like... so angry about it

they can't even draw nadia's hair right from scene to scene lol

Nice video about Cyber City Oedo 808 and cyberpunk in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOoQDtuehoo
I've never actually seen this. A friend gave me a loan of it and the vhs player instantly chewed it up (I've never bought into VHS nostalgia, they were shit). No region B bluray yet, but I'm waiting.

Region 2 BR here https://www.animebluray.co.uk/Home/Product/1786

Thankyouverymuch!

Watched the three Mobile Suit Gundam movies on netflix, which stitch together the original anime series. Was surprised by how much of what I associate with Evangelion - trauma relating to an unloving, distant father figure; youngsters manipulated and instrumentalized by a cruel militarized authority - was actually introduced in this show. The animation is sometimes charmingly primitive but, as with much manga and anime from the 70's and 80's, the character models feel to me like they're strongly influenced by bande dessinee, and I certainly prefer that over the sort of garish sensory overload that a lot of anime after that seems to go for. The story, despite having giant robots in it, sometimes feels more like one of those bitter WWI novels; it's pretty unflinching about the War Is Hell stuff. The second movie has some soundtrack jams, including an E Street Band type rocker with lyrics that apparently are all about the sadness of loss and tragedy of war while the backing gets all fist pumping. I looked up the dude who recorded it, Tadao Inoue, and he's also responsible for this album with an all-time great cover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUAt_y8EdZM

Anyway, I felt like by the third film it all got weighed down with too much pseudoscience babble and (admitidely cool) psychedelics, but that's kinda appropriate for something like this. Made me want to check out the next series at least, which apparently is from the pov of the faction that the protagonists in this one are fighting!

i don't like zeta gundam as much as the original but it's an interesting direction at least. i do like ZZ though which seems to be generally disliked for being sillier

if you want to see the best gundam series, it's Turn A by a fair margin imo

new season of mob psycho announced, anyone here watch that

me, i'm most excited for the new season of jojo, which is one of those shows that is so good but so hard to explain to normies that you can't recommend it to normal ppl lol, plus the body horror stuff turns ppl off

i liked the first three eps of mob psycho, does it develop into something?

i read the first three cycles of jojo and don't think i could handle the pacing if it were animated.

thanks ciderpress, the amount of different series is indeed intimidating!

apparently zeta gundam's soundtrack is Neil Sedaka songs with new Japanese lyrics

it looks intimidating but most of them are standalone series, only zeta/zz and char's counterattack directly follow on from the original

it's aliiiiiive!
Mitsuo Iso's long awaited film Chikyugai Shonen Shojo has a trailer and a date
(if you don't know Iso he was a key animator on various Gundams, Porco Rosso, Ghost in the Shell film, Evangelion, Perfect Blue, FLCL etc etc + director of the criminally underrated Dennou Coil)

【特報公開】#電脳コイル 磯光雄監督最新作

オリジナルアニメ『#地球外少年少女』

2022年1月28日前編、2月11日後編、各2週間限定劇場上映
劇場公開版Blu-ray&DVD同時発売予定https://t.co/Xiyb31IpHA pic.twitter.com/HDLImA2jue

— 地球外少年少女_オリジナルアニメ公式 (@Chikyugai_BG) October 27, 2021

nice, hope he's still got it, i'm a huge fan of dennou coil

Cyber City Oedo 808- it's nice enough, love the insanely tall buildings, the futuristic vampire story and half robot sabretooth tigers. A lot of what interested me most was in the features. The screenwriter written 3 novels continuing the story and he went on to write futuristic ghost stories.

It wasn't that successful in japan and the UK version is almost a different film. Manga Entertainment not only added new soundtracks to some of their films/series but they deliberately tried to make the dialogue swearier and edgier to put the age rating up and added jokes that weren't originally there too (this makes me look at Devilman in a new light). The tone of the original japanese Cyber City is totally different, a surprising number of people prefer the UK version. I understand people preferring the UK soundtrack (it's included as a bonus disc), I absolutely love the UK soundtrack to Fist Of The North Star series because there was a greater feeling of desolation. One of the guys at Manga Entertainment talks about why he created new soundtracks and I do think that maybe in japan they're a bit too willing to just slap some cheesy pop or rock in there, maybe those bands are popular? I would generally prefer to hear what the director intended but I can't deny how good some of the new soundtracks are.

Manga Entertainment's catalogue was quite limited in genre (mostly violent action and cyberpunk) and targeted young men too much (they used Celtic Frost and KMFDM in their advertising) and it was a surprise to some that Cyber City had a lot of girl fans who loved Benten. I didn't realize that anime fans are actually quite keen on all the fan culture and history that develop outside japan, I thought they might deem it impure.

Big thanks to Zappi for the bluray link

Den-noh Coil has just turned up on Netflix, I've been wanting to watch that one for quite some time now! I managed to track down another long-time anime curiosity, Princess Tutu, on HiDive, and I'm completely hooked.

those are the 2 best animes of the 00s, enjoy

I am, and also just discovered (not Princess) Mononoke is on Youtube, apparently in its entirety, I'm gettin completely spoiled here

that's #3

canadian netflix has every ghibli movie fwiw

I'm also watching Den-noh Coil. It's some of the most fresh and original cyberpunk I've ever seen on film. The way the show translates internet phenomena from its time into a fantastical yet mundane augmented reality future net is so much fun. All of the children in it are so well drawn. This show understands the 5th grade mindset on a deep level.

there's also Kaiba if you want another really unique take on cyberpunk anime. dunno if its streaming anywhere though

weirdly Kaiba just got a blu ray release in the UK, not that I’m complaining but such an odd decision
thread is making me want to rewatch Dennou Coil, great show even though it destroyed Mitsuo Iso’s career for a decade

apparently it's on Netflix? at least in the UK it is

Both Den-nou and Orbital Children are on US Netflix, just checked. Will try to check them out!
The screen of Den-nou I saw actually reminds me a lot of Inio Asano's manga, Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction

Got to see INU-OH on the big screen recently. Hadn't seen anything by its director before but this pretty much blew me away: blind kid reaches Noh fame by singing the songs of a defeated tribe, joins up with neglected son of Noh director and they become glam rock stars in feudal Japan. Some amazing visuals; the songs might go on for a bit too long for some tastes but I couldn't get enough of them. Well worth checking out.

for sure check out other stuff by Yuasa if you liked that. The Tatami Galaxy, Ping Pong the Animation, Kaiba, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken are all great series

You gotta check out Mind Game

it's phenomenal

i forgot to post about it, but everyone needs to watch YA BOY KONGMING

lol, i've been reading the manga. it is super nerdy.

i liked the first bit of the anime but cooled on it as it got less funny and more dramatic

it pretty much turned me into a three kingdoms otaku, to the extent that i imported a pc-engine cd game from japan featuring a soundtrack by ymo's yukihiro takahashi

Where is that streaming?

hidive, apparently
https://www.hidive.com/tv/ya-boy-kongming?q=kongming

Well, I'm on Hi-Yah! but no HiDive... shrug

KONGMING also has a top 10 greatest opening tunes of all time, all the way from ecuador via hungary to japan

http://i.imgur.com/f7cCy6I.png

truthbomb

I get around that by never talking about anime to anyone I know lol

The first thirty episodes of Monster are on Netflix now, well worth a watch

Strange they'd only do the first half, but I guess streaming rights are funky. I should really dig into that, the manga is one of my all-time favorites.

been getting into anime lately in a quest to fulfill all of the trans girl stereotypes, here's what i've found so far

ashita no joe - only saw the first episode but this shit fucks, apparently the sequel is even better?
cromartie high school - saw first episode again, kinda adult swim style but without the gross-out stuff, a little too "lol random" for me but i was surprised to find that the king crimson-style prog group bi kyo ran did the soundtrack. as crim clones go i prefer anekdoten but it certainly gives the anime a unique feel
garzey's wing - this is what people who don't watch anime think anime is like
legend of the galactic heroes - i'm eating this shit up, epic space opera of my dreams here

i've got a long list of other stuff to check out but legend of the galactic heroes is like 110 episodes, and after that's done i want to check out galaxy express 999, which is even longer...

original LoGH so good! I tried watching the recent remake but iirc they replaced all the classical music with bombastic anime slop, booo.

I've been watching Aura Battler Dunbine which is this nutso series from 1983 made by Gundam people, it has all this crazy fantasy stuff as well as the mecha. don't know if I even like it yet, but it's certainly unique and unpredictable - one early episode had a drunken fairy spy infiltrating an army made up of unicorn cavalry and giant insect mechs?!?

i was inspired by your post and i put it on my "to check out" list, so it turns out the reason it has mechas is because the gundam guy did a manga that was supposed to be a change of pace, but when it came time to do the anime the suits were like "so, uh, there are gonna be mechas in this, right?" and he was like "uh... wasn't planning on it" and they were like "well, truth be told, the reason we green-lit this is because we were under the impression there would be mechas in it" and he sighed and was like "fine, i'll put in mechas"

i also found out that it was the first isekai anime. i've been watching this guy named, uh, geoff thew, who is somehow american despite having one of the most british names i've ever heard anywhere, and he just super hates isekai. which also means that i've been paying attention to him a lot, because it turns out that the people who hate anime are the same people as the people who really love anime. i guess that makes sense.

it also turns out that the particular isekai world, called byston well, is also the setting for one of the most incoherent OVAs I've ever seen called Garzey's Wing, which i found out about at a panel on "the worst anime ever" at gencon in 2011. i would definitely class this as "anime for people who hate anime" because it's hilarious.

i can't believe 2011 was 12 years ago. anyway it looks like a lot has happened in anime since then. i admit i've gone on a bit of a binge.

most depressing thing in anime is looking for lgbtq+ content. apparently there's one anime that handles trans themes well called hourou musuko, and it was made in fucking 2011. other than that it's all subtext. geoff thew did a video on what he called a "lesbian golf anime" and it's all subtext. anime seems to be really, really into queer-baiting. birdie wing is a really fucking good show from what i've seen, tho.

also, why is nobody a fucking adult in any goddamn anime ever? i know i'm not the first person to remark on this but seriously, it doesn't matter what genre i'm in, there are just no goddamn adults around and it's more than creepy, it's _irritating_.

it's really not hard to find queer anime at all, there's plenty of stuff with direct gay romances, especially recently. the current gundam series, one of the biggest franchises there is, is centred around one - that's admittedly well outside the norm, but there are extensive subgenres dedicated to gay romance so just look up those if that's what you want

the romance in birdie wing is currently subtext (because it's focused on being an absurd golf soap opera) but it's weird to call it queerbaiting when the characters are pretty openly gay

hourou musuko is pretty mediocre overall (just kinda basic and uninteresting) but deserves some credit for being an ok trans 101 story that started publication back in 2002 (the manga that is)

for a long time it was subtextual bc of tv censors

at least this is my understanding from being a kunihiko ikuhara fan

re: trans rep there's not much at all in the way of good anime focused on transness but there's not exactly a plethora of good western tv focused on transness either.

you do casually encounter solid trans representation from time to time though, even in very mainstream stuff. hunter x hunter had a trans character as a major character in one arc, and even one piece, which otherwise has an extremely messy record wrt queer representation, had a trans woman side character recently who was handled well

Princess Jellyfish had a decent attempt at writing a trans character iirc
I thought the Hourou Musuko anime was really good, the manga is better tho and goes into more depth
can't say I'm an expert but it feels like there is very little stuff in between queer baiting and then full on yaoi/yuri porn

the character in princess jellyfish isn't really trans, he's an effeminate man with a crossdressing hobby who can pass as a woman but doesn't identify as one, which is a weirdly common trope. trans-adjacent, sure, but pretty detached from transness as it actually exists

it feels like there is very little stuff in between queer baiting and then full on yaoi/yuri porn

this is kinda true for stuff about gay male romance (not like it's nonexistent though, there's been the occasional prominent anime like yuri on ice in recent times) but definitely not for lesbian stuff

the first time i encountered lesbian relationships in media was through anime, it was like every other show (may be inaccurate due to sample size)

Yuri on Ice is gay, yeah, they even kiss in it. There’s also all kinds of interesting subtexts like the fact that Victor shot to stardom as a skater with long hair and would wear androgynous costumes (he actually says “because my hair was long then, my costume emphasised both masculinity and femininity.”) Another character has a breakthrough when he realises he needs to identify with the woman in a skating performance. None of this is played for laughs. It’s subtle, but it’s very present.

an effeminate man with a crossdressing hobby who can pass as a woman but doesn't identify as one, which is a weirdly common trope

would you say lancer / yellow dancer from robotech s3 / genesis climber mospeada qualifies?

i was a member of my high school’s anime club (91-95) and people were really into fist of the north star, akira, vampire hunter d etc

but what was *really* popular was ranma 1/2, like super popular. a lot of meetings we just watched ranma. that’s the one where the main guy changes into a girl when he falls into water (and his dad turns into a, uh, bear). maybe i’m imagining but iirc there are similar plot points in dragonball?

curious how / if that sort of stuff relates

i haven’t watched it in a long time but i do recall the water thing was presented as a “curse”

would you say lancer / yellow dancer from robotech s3 / genesis climber mospeada qualifies?

i have no idea about robotech but after some quick googling this seems to fall into what i described while still not being exactly the sort of thing i was thinking of when i said it's a common trope, just based on vibes

but what was *really* popular was ranma 1/2, like super popular. a lot of meetings we just watched ranma. that’s the one where the main guy changes into a girl when he falls into water (and his dad turns into a, uh, bear). maybe i’m imagining but iirc there are similar plot points in dragonball?

curious how / if that sort of stuff relates

― the late great

ranma is a _huge_ influence on a lot of the trans people i know, my particular form of denial meant that i worked really hard to avoid that kind of stuff. but a lot of trans folks come from a background of being into "transformation fic", where (typically) men are transformed into women and gosh darn it wouldn't you know they wind up liking it a lot. gender swap was also a theme in the acclaimed film _your name_ but there's a fuck of a lot more going on in that movie. personally i'd like to see a gender-swap anime where the characters have to deal with dysphoria. i think that would really be interesting.

the ones on my check-out list (i'm more interested in lesbian representation than gay male representation) are adachi and shimamura, bloom into you, liz to aoi tori, and asagao to kase-san

one of them i guess is a side movie to hibike euphonium? which is now on my list because fucking euphonium, shit

maybe i'm being too demanding, particularly not having seen all of the series. i did read the first couple issues of the manga of "wandering son" (hourou musuko) and it was really good quite honestly, _particularly_ knowing that it was from 2002! i'm just sensitive because there _is_ a lot of... problematic stuff in anime, at least from what i've heard... lots of noncon slavery and apparently incest, incest seems to be huge over there. also, like, sexualizing 12-year-olds, and constant fucking creepshots. i feel like i really need to tread carefully, at least with the historical stuff - which i'm really into!

one of the things i've been delving into... one of my friends did english dubbing in the phillipines for some anime broadcasts... he worked on mazinger z and the last two parts of the "robot romance" trilogy, voltes v and daimos. he was working on the questor productions dubs, not the m&m productions dubs (which were out of hawaii). well, let me just quote what he says about his work on those shows:

That wiki lists the original dubbing cast, but it was a lot more flexible than that.
The dubbing team was made up of theater and film actors doing it for a hoot and some extra money.
Most of the time we didn't even know what the episode was all about because we only saw the scenes we would be in.
The directors weren't worried about doing a good sync. The animation quality basically allowed you to fit your line in however you were able to as long as your character was onscreen.

he mostly did villains and old men. the story on that is pretty interesting, marcos pulled it from airing a few episodes before the finale on the grounds of "excessive violence", but nobody believed that. it turns out he caught on that at least one of the animes was a story of rebellion against an evil dictator... apparently the stories are fondly remembered there. not sure if there are english dubs of voltes v and daimos that _aren't_ by questor...

his working on english dubs has kind of made me delve into more dubs... one of the famous ones is for a 2000 series called "ghost stories". it's kind of a mediocre anime from what i've seen... the dubbing team were led to believe that it was a flop and they were desperate to get it a us release, though this may not be true. whatever the reason, the dubbing team were given _very limited_ constraints - basically make sure you keep the basic plot and characters - and just overdubbed it with the most outrageous shit they could... often so-called "gag dubs" are fucking awful but from what i've seen of it this dub is actually fucking great. there's some stuff that would've been considered ok in the era but wouldn't be today, but it's the kind of "offensive" stuff that i find actually funny rather than being offensive for its own sake. anyway definitely recommended for people into "anime for people who hate anime".

i also found this very prescient description for bubblegum crisis, one of those other animes that was really big in the '90s but doesn't get talked about now:

Originally created to benefit humanity, the mysterious corporation known as Genom now produces Boomers with incredible destructive power as a new type of advanced weaponry, capable of disguising themselves as humans.

The AD Police is a new special unit to counter the ever-increasing Boomer-related crimes. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of crimes and disparity in strength, the AD Police poses little opposition to the Boomers. A mysterious vigilante force known as the Knight Sabers, wearing powersuits more advanced than the military, is the citizens' only hope for protection. Led by Sylia Stingray, Priscilla "Priss" Asagiri, Nene Romanova, and Linna Yamazaki, these beautiful girls take out any Boomer that steps out of line.

an effeminate man with a crossdressing hobby who can pass as a woman but doesn't identify as one, which is a weirdly common trope

would you say lancer / yellow dancer from robotech s3 / genesis climber mospeada qualifies?

― the late great

there seems to be a character like that in tengen toppa gurren lagann... which was one of the first anime i really saw, i saw the two movies at the same convention where i heard about garzey's wing (which i've started confusing with birdie wing, because, you know, they're so fucking similar). honestly it's not any weirder than the gender stereotypes in the us... back in the '70s effeminacy and homosexuality were linked but starting in the '80s you had the whole "menergy" thing, and by the time i was really aware of gay men the idea of them was hypermasc dudes. in truth there is a lot of overlap between gender diversity and queerness... one of the things that's surprised me most is that while i don't really think of myself as "butch" or "femme" my default presentation is on the butch side.

the ones on my check-out list (i'm more interested in lesbian representation than gay male representation) are adachi and shimamura, bloom into you, liz to aoi tori, and asagao to kase-san

I read the first couple of Adachi and Shimamura books, thought they did a good job of expressing the inner turmoil of first love (tho have heard that later books are just the same with no progression). watched some episodes of the anime but they were missing that inner dialog, so felt a lot more shallow.
Sound Euphonium is a decent show and beautifully made, but the yuri baiting was really lame and the worst part of it. the film Liz & The Blue Bird however is a lot better written, and works as a stand alone piece.

xp it will take me awhile to reply (if i do at all) since i got to go run around and get stuff done now, plus i don’t know most of those references but i do appreciate the reply and look forward to reading more closely later

replies*

the character in gurren lagann is just an effeminate gay caricature, a different thing that's more common. what i was referring to before is more like 'this character comes pretty close to being a trans character but explicitly is not and the writing doesn't even seem to be really aware of transness as it actually exists' thing

someone like ed from the original cowboy bebop? (note that i haven't seen cowboy bebop, yes, it's on my to-watch list, a lot of stuff i'm just familiar with through cultural osmosis)

ah not really at all, ed's just an eccentric tomboyish teen who often gets mistaken for a boy and doesn't really care, but that's all fairly incidental? like it isn't really interested in ed's relationship to gender at all or anything, she's just wild and free-spirited etc.

just a random vent, so i'm just kind of running through anime that's hyped as the Best Anime Of All Time(TM) and i get to steins;gate and i see the first episode and yeah it's really likable and funny and the dub is fucking great actually and then i get halfway through episode two and...

for FUCK'S sake that is some of the MOST GRATUITOUSLY UNNECESSARY transphobia i have seen in a while

i admit i haven't done exhaustive research but god if i'd known in advance i would've just avoided watching the show entirely, now i've watched a couple episodes and it _is_ a good show and i _do_ like it a lot except for the COMPLETELY GRATUITOUS AND EGREGIOUS TRANSPHOBIA

can anyone let me know of any other widely acclaimed anime i should specifically avoid? yu yu hashuko is already on my "avoid" list.

kate have YOU seen UTENA, idek what stein;gate is, semicolons in the title are a real dealbreaker

if you use best anime lists from like myanimelist or youtubers you are gonna end up with the taste of a 16 year old dude please don't do that

#notallyoutubers, stevm's top100 has been very useful to me, v cool to check out those 60's Toei ones.

i'm not gonna defend steins;gate as good trans representation or anything but it does actually go somewhere with luka as a trans character (though it's still messy) instead of just sticking to the 'androgynous crossdressing boy played for comic relief' trope that it starts out as. it's a mess but not totally irredeemable

ciderpress otm

with widely acclaimed anime there are often much bigger issues than transphobia (which certainly shows up but isn't the most common), just because a lot of the anime fandom is really quite terrible and is often happy to look past pretty reprehensible stuff, and so something that some youtuber or myanimelist will hype up might turn out to be extremely creepy about children, or be a bland power fantasy featuring gratuitous sexual assault, or so on. please do your research in general. both a problem with the industry and the fandom

otm

my son has just gotten really into Baki, but i can’t tell if it’s problematic beyond just big hulking dudes smashing other dudes (not like that)

i don't think steins;gate is a bad show but it's one of those gateway things with a 'mindblowing' story that people tend to move beyond as they become enthusiasts, like uhhh fight club or christopher nolan movies. i think if you polled only people who have seen a lot of anime it would probably not crack the list

a lot of the stuff you see on anime recommendation lists fall into that category though since most people have not seen a lot of anime, much moreso than with movies

will admit I'd never heard of steins gate before now, when I hear "entry level best anime ever" I think Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, Gundam, One Piece?

anyway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFIL7MjPsMQ

that looks like a good list. glad to see more people talking up On-Gaku which is my favorite anime movie of recent years

posts got me thinking about more modern anime that could now be considered entry level
definitely Attack on Titan, JoJo, maybe Demon Slayer, maybe One Punch Man/Mob Psycho, anything else? feel like Fate Zero and Madoka Magica were this for a while but their stars have faded somewhat.

yeah mostly just the big shonen manga adaptations + anything by the imaishi/yoshinari half of trigger + romcoms are more popular than they used to be so probably more people going straight to those without fear of being called gay for liking girly stuff or w/e

the shonen jump stuff used to run year round so there werent discrete hype cycles for it which left space for other seasonal stuff like the aforementioned to get attention from the 'entry-level' crowd whereas now theres a big shonen or three every season

I don't watch shonen but it's interesting to see which ones become canonised and which ones fade out
like Black Clover is hugely popular within the shonen world but doesn't seem to have much reach outside it, whereas Demon Slayer reached a much wider audience, with Jujutsu Kaisen seemingly stuck between

ok here's The Long List of anime on my to-watch list, there's some other stuff on there as well that i have for like novelty value, or because my friend worked on the english dubs, etc. i do have certain biases, i don't really like the hyperviolent teen boy anime - and steins;gate, for the record, _isn't_ one of those kind of animes. that's the shitty thing, it's genuinely a really good anime with great characters and story. also a really great dub - it's an extremely loose dub but it's really enjoyable and captures the spirit of things very well.

there's just this one scene in the second episode where, i'm gonna just spoiler this for transphobia the main character, rintaro, has a friend named ruka who's a shrine maiden and also a trans woman, and after he visits her he goes off on this internal monologue where he's... actually it's a really good representation of how transphobes struggle with dealing with the reality of trans people. like ruka is clearly and obviously a woman but rintaro can't accept this and keeps repeating "he's a dude". also rintaro has... has issues with reality, he's _not_ a reliable narrator, but usually when he goes off on his crazy rants one of his friends is around to call him on his bullshit. but not here.

anyway the character herself is fine but the way the show handles it is just _captain rainbow_ levels of awful

not as bad as _Mad Bull 34_ mind you, and yes I know _Mad Bull 34_ is satire

also i decided that i just _wasn't_ gonna do ranma 1/2 for personal reasons

anyway The List so far, in order roughly by year

Ashita No Joe
Lupin III
Aim for the Ace! (this actually looks profoundly mediocre but IDK sports anime interests me even though I'm not interested in actual sports)
Galaxy Express 999
Future Boy Conan
Anne of Green Gables
The Rose of Versailles (the consensus here BTW is that Oscar is _not_ transmasc, and based on what I've read I tend to agree; haven't seen the show yet tho)
Ashita No Joe 2
Urusei Yatsura
Touch (even though I know The Twist already)
Maison Ikkoku
Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Tanoshii Moomin Ikka
Sailor Moon
Slam Dunk
The Irresonsible Captain Tylor
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Martian Successor Nadesico
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Cowboy Bebop
Great Teacher Onizuka
Ghost Stories (OK the dub is _very_ South Park/Family Guy inspired and I don't like either of those shows but personal taste, I genuinely find it funny. Including the transphobic joke early in the series. I can see why other people would want to avoid it like the plague though.)
Cromartie High School (actually this might get stricken from the list, it's very Adult Swim style, I don't think it's that funny, and the King Crimson-style soundtrack by Bi Kyo Ran only goes so far; I mean, I don't actually listen to any of Bi Kyo Ran's albums...)
Monster
Windy Tales
Major
Mushishi
Gurren Lagann (one of the first animes I really got into, I saw the movies of these at Gencon in 2011 and they fuck)
Lucky Star
Baccano!
Casshern Sins
Golgo 13 (a guilty pleasure)
Kaiba
Monogatari
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood (not my usual thing but I can't entirely avoid that sort of thing... I won't go near One Piece because people say if I start watching that I will NEVER STOP)
Welcome to Irabu's Office
The Tatami Galaxy
Hunter X Hunter (another one that, you know, just because it's acclaimed)
Kyousa Giga
Hourou Musuko
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica
Inferno Cop
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (really NOT my style but I feel like I have an obligation for the sake of cultural competency)
Kids on the Slope
Teekyuu
Space Dandy
Your Lie in April
Ping Pong the Animation
NINJA Slayer from ANIMATION
Hibike Euphonium (just because EUPHONIUM, I've heard the first season queerbaits and then backs out in S2 but that Liz To Aoi Tori is genuinely queer)
Keijo!!!!!!!! (look i'm sorry but an ecchi about a sport where girls try to knock each other off platforms using only their boobs and butts sounds like _the hottest trash_. one i'm obviously very down with sports anime and two it reminds me of Kosho from The Prisoner)
Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu
Yagate Kimi Ni Naru (again, Actual Lesbians)
Adachi and Shimamura (Actual Lesbians)
Odd Taxi
Cyberpunk - Edgerunners (not my thing but..)
Heike Monogatari
Bocchi the Rock!
Birdie Wing

Movies on my To Watch list. I've seen Miyazaki's films and I think Grave of the Fireflies, as well as Angel's Egg, Pale Cocoon, Paprika, Your Name, and Night is Short Walk On Girl.

Belladonna of Sadness
Jack and the Beanstalk
Golgo 13 The Professional
Kenya Boy
Birth
A Penguin's Memory (the story of a penguin who has PTSD from Vietnam, no, seriously)
Wings of Tsubasa
Akira
Memories
1001 Nights
Jin-Roh - The Wolf Brigade
Princess Arete
A Tree of Palme
Dead Leaves
Mind Game
Tekkon Kinkreet
Genius Party
Redline
The Garden of Sinners
Little Witch Academia
The Garden of Words
Promare
Asagao to Kase-San (Actual Lesbians)
The Girl from the Other Side

The spring '23 anime that I'm interested in seeing:

Skip and Loafer
Oshi No Ko
Birdie Wing Season 2
Kamikatsu (this seems like _incredibly hot_ trash)

i like almost all of the shows on that first list... havent seen some of the sports stuff. Your Lie in April sticks out as the biggest dud there. i found bloom into you and adachi&shimamura to be kinda bland but maybe you'll get more out of them

i ended up watching cromartie after going down a google rabbit hole of notable dubs. it's kinder than adult swim stuff i find? it is goofy and stonery tho, so i can see how it'd feel like that

also on this kick i watched a few eps of the you're under arrest! dub, which is delightful, but i didn't get as far as the trans (or... not trans? idk how they play the character and/or if it's different in sub v dub) character in that one so i can't speak to it. the dub absolutely rules tho at the very least watch the 60 second clips ppl have posted to twitter with extremely southern non-actor children mumbling their lines

adding my default "put paranoia agent on the list" position altho tbh it's been so long since i've watched it that i have no idea how it's held up

sry if these are all mentioned i tried to do a ctrl-f here and ther

adding my default "put paranoia agent on the list" position altho tbh it's been so long since i've watched it that i have no idea how it's held up

― Ryan seaQuest (Will M.)

saving my satoshi kon binge for another time, haha, kinda like i haven't seen eva because it seems... intimidating

i did add a few things to my to-watch list as a result of the stevem video for sure though he was halfway through his "arthouse" list before he got to something that wasn't already on my list haha

i feel like that's a good sign tho

only thing mentioned that i would definitely recommend avoiding is monogatari but i don't know everything on that list

yeah.. stay away from monogatari. i love the director but it's far too indefensible. maybe add march comes in like a lion instead

thanks, monogatari is off the list!

saw episodes 4 and 5 of "birdie wing". ok, before episode 4 i was iffy on the "lesbian" angle but no, absolutely, this is _incredibly_ lesbian and i am _here_ for it. i mean as soon as vipere showed up everything got like 10,000 times more sapphic.

i also saw watched the first episode of keijo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!121 . i had incredibly high hopes for this and it did not disappoint. like hey, let's take this incredibly ecchi premise and just treat the whole thing as if it was ace wo nerae. i absolutely would have _no_ interest in watching this show if they took any other approach to it... when it comes to ecchi i am _clearly_ not the intended audience.

finally, i dearly love that franz kafka has his own page on MAL. https://myanimelist.net/people/6693/Franz_Kafka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrfkGV4SrX4

This movie rules in general but I particularly want to point out that the woodland creatures training sumo moves around 6 minutes in are totally adorable.

ok, recent watches

binged the first 13 episodes of slam dunk (1993) with a friend. much more light-hearted and comedy focused than i thought. also verrrry slow-moving. it sort of assumes that the viewer knows nothing at all about basketball, so the protagonist also knows nothing at all. so it's, like, episode 10 before they talk about dribbling, for instance. even though i have no interest in sports i do find that i'm very fond of sports anime.

i've also been watching a lot of art anime. mirae muzui is knocking me out, "dreamland" is absolutely fantastic. it's like the video game crystal castles if it was also "yantra" by james whitney. _strongly_ recommended for people who hate anime. (still not really sure what it means to "hate anime".)

watched the first episode of the three-episode OVA "cybercity oedo 808", which has a legendary sweary dub. it's _definitely_ the point where "hey this is MATURE anime for MATURE ADULTS" becomes completely ridiculous. every character in this thing talks like malcolm tucker.

biggest disappointment is that apparently some of the biggest people subbing old anime are russian putin stans. would prefer if somebody who _isn't_ fash would sub the 1970s tv series about a baseball player who is also the descendent of ninja and wins at baseball using ninpo.

i gave yuru yuri season 3 a shot - i heard it was by a different company from the first two seasons and is much more slice-of-life. this is indeed the case. just to compare i checked out one of the eps from the first two seasons and i got probably five minutes in. it was just completely disgusting and vile. probably anime for people who like anime, it's that bad. i really do prefer my anime with _actual adults_, but, i mean, i'm not the target audience for a lot of the older stuff. obviously.

the big trepidation i had was in checking out stop!! hikari-kun. i've seen some praise for its trans representation... there's a wide diversity of opinions among trans people, so i figured i might find it, you know, disgusting and vile.

which in some ways it is - like, it's super racist and fatphobic and, like a lot of anime, is definitely sexually obsessed with teenage girls - but no really it's _unusually_ trans-affirming for the era. the biggest complaint i see about the series' representation is that everybody else in the show treats her like a boy and misgenders her constantly, but my view is that it's pretty much truth in television. i was alive in 1983. _nobody_ would have treated hikari like the girl she is. apparently the series creator is one of those classic "boy i wish i could have been a girl but obviously that was impossible so i drew this manga instead" people you see sometimes, a real kalonymus ben kalonymus type.

like basically the whole humor of the show is that hikari is a totally normal teenage girl and acts like a totally normal teenage girl (well i mean she's a little bit mary-sue, but honestly i'm gonna give eguchi hisashi a free pass on that one), and it's everybody else who's all weird about it and keeps saying that she's a "pervert", and they all look stupid and weird for saying it. which they are! so mission accomplished, i'd say. oh and by "normal girl" by the way i mean hikari doesn't fall into the stereotype julia serano talks about in "skirt chasers", she's not an exaggerated image of hyper-femininity or anything like that.

apparently the creator sort of ran out of ideas midway through and the later issues/episodes are more stereotypical and lame, and it doesn't have a proper ending. i know there are a lot of people clamoring for a ranma 1/2 remake... idk given that the humor in this show (aside from, like, the racism and fatphobia) is pretty much all making fun of transphobes, it'd probably be possible to do a remake of it and have it turn out pretty good. i really appreciate that it's not all serious and dramatic and shit.

anyway. i really loved the episode i saw. a girl who responds to everyone around her freaking out about her being trans (and yes this is an anachronistic interpolation, but she behaves more like a trans girl than basically any other representation of a gender non-conforming character i've seen in this era) with an attitude of "what's your problem, anyway?" is absolutely the kind of representation i want and, well, mostly don't get.

Lately I've been thinking of the racist western perception of anime in the 80's/90's as quickly made, shoddy product without effort and artistry going into it, and comparing that with all the stories of animators all but falling dead at their desks from insane fucking workloads. Bitter lols.

doubly sad cos the quality of the animation in anime during the 80s/90s is probably the peak of the medium, just watching random OVAs made during the bubble times can be really eye opening. also I've been watching lots of Cat's Eye and City Hunter recently and I love the aesthetic so much.

i think i'm gonna have to watch city hunter even though the plot doesn't interest me at all because it seems like the absolute _most_ '80s economic bubble anime ever. just, like, the "outrun" of anime.

re: animators all but falling dead at their desks... the main one who comes to mind there is Eiichiro Oda, who does have an insane fucking workload but more because he's an obsessive artist who apparently has devoted his entire life to One Piece. that said yeah animators and mangaka aren't exactly highly valued, any more than anyone who does creative work under capitalism... ah, well, i'm not gonna preach to the choir on _that_ one again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2HCVOH6DtA

oh my god i think i found the perfect anime for people who hate anime: yokohama kaidashi kikou

it’s soooooo good

best slice of life shit ever

the comics are probably even better…

and amazingly after decades of waiting the manga are currently being released in English for the first time, just got the third omnibus the other day!

yeah classic manga. you could also try Aria or Windy Tales if you want more anime like that

one of the genres of anime i'm binging on is slice of life, for sure. that and sports anime. did i mention watching 13 episodes of "slam dunk" in one go?

i've kind of been delving into '80s anime without fight scenes (and i guess "anime without fight scenes" meets the criterion of "anime for people who hate anime" right there), and i find myself wondering about this series called "high school! kimengumi". just because none of it has ever even been fan-translated and it was hugely popular, it had, like, seven different OPs. there weren't many anime that seem to have achieved that level of popularity around then... it seems to have been popular on the level of something like "touch" or "maison ikkoku", both of which are watchable (and beloved) in english. also, all the descriptions of the show i can find talk about it as being about a group of 5 male high school students... but looking at the openings of the manga the focus seems to be totally on the character of yui kawa. i mean maybe it is about these 5 high school boys, but they're not the ones in the opening credits, is all i'm saying. (i mean i haven't seen the full OPs, admittedly, but there are _seven_ OPs...)

there does seem to be a fansub of the film from 1986 called "High School! Funny-face Club", and they definitely do have funny faces!

https://i.imgur.com/PPyIYyn.png

yeah, i might wanna check out the film

so here's what i'm pissed about right now... i'm _really_ into weird psychedelic animation, and the '73 cutie honey seems like it has tons of that, alongside some peak '70s funk. i would be so into those bits... _except_ that go nagai is a fucking creep and the '73 cutie honey is full of fucking creepy shit.

anyway here's ilx faves perfume covering the cutie honey theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3DheLP03vY

and here's somebody who _isn't_ into go nagai's creepy misogyny shit talking about early magical girls, this is cool. unfortunately they seem to have ended the series but there is some pretty cool stuff here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUt6PperTKI

ok so i'm reading this book that's from 2015 called the Anime Encyclopedia and i'm enjoying it immensely. i'm the sort of girl who reads encyclopedias cover-to-cover, though in this case i'm only in the "b"s. what i like about this is that it's by some crusty old british grognards who did anime dubbing and importing back in the '90s, i think

they're not shy at expressing their opinions and my feeling is that if you ask them about MAL they'll respond with something like "Mal? That's french for 'bad', isn't it?"

so it's a lot of fun because they'll complain that saying, say, "mangaka" instead of "manga author" is "obstructively arcane" or how the invention of the term "light novel" was unnecessary and duplicative. i have a certain fondness for linguistic prescriptivism. at the same time i never knew what the origin of "yaoi" and "yuri" actually were, or that in Japan they used to refer to TV as a "Braun tube". I also had never heard of "Chokyo".

Which is another little oddity of their encyclopedia - it covers hentai right alongside kids' anime, so that "Anal Vampire" (described in the text as "a demon who sucks ass rather than blood") is covered shortly before Animal Yokocho, which is, in fact, the anime I want to gush about here.

It's pretty unknown among the MAL crowd, who might not be entirely on board with an anime about a cute five-year-old girl who and her three utterly adorable animal friends who try to help her do things like... bake a cake! And do her homework! This is a show that a five-year-old could watch and enjoy lots. It's also just the most _delightful_ thing.

Ami-chan: "What are you doing?"
Iyo the rabbit: "Researching rabbits."
Ami-chan: "You don't have to research it..."
Iyo: "Ami-chan, the most difficult thing in this world... is to understand yourself."

It reminds me a _lot_ of Animaniacs, honestly.

Earlier this week I wrote (and apparently didn't post) a whole long gush about how episode 77 of "Mahoutsukai Sally" absolutely punched above its level in terms of telling a great story (I guess I didn't mention that here? The upshot is that I found it to be a creative, entertaining, and _coherent_ story, which is something that's _extremely_ rare in '60s and '70s anime. To accomplish like that with no budget and no time, in a 60s cartoon for young girls... that's exceptional. Oh, did I mention that the episode hasn't been subbed or dubbed, and that I don't understand Japanese?)

...anyway, Animal Yokocho maybe punches even more above its respective level. It's these shows that fans ignore, maybe because they don't have gratuitous violence or "fanservice"...

One of the other things I like about the Anime Encyclopedia is that, despite gladly reviewing the entirety of the Pink Pineapple catalog, they don't look any more fondly on "fanservice" than I do. Reading their review on Bakemonogatari they'll tell you "Fan service, questionable behavior verging on molestation, and brief, intensely bloody action scenes are part of the mix." I'd rather hear that than ten thousand reviews gushing about how well the story is contructed.

It's a real problem for me watching anime... MAL tends to not level with one about this sorts of stuff. I tried watching an anime about girls making a videogame! One of the programmers was up so late she slept on the floor! Without pants! And didn't put on pants even when a new employee walked through the door and introduced herself!

It's less that it's creepy - though it is creepy - and more that its devotion to being creepy requires them to make all of the characters behave in nonsensical and uninteresting ways. It's the "uninteresting" part that kills this stuff for me. Issa the panda, Kenta the bear, and Iyo the rabbit all behave in nonsensical ways, but their antics are _entertaining_ to watch. "Fanservice" just _isn't_ entertaining most of the time. (Keijo!!!!!!!! is a notable exception.)

I just know I'm going to spend my twilight years doing a marathon of every episode of Sazae-san, in order.

so it's been a while and i've been continuing my anime deep dive. i guess i am kinda talking to myself here. there are spaces where people talk really in-depth about anime and i'm not wanting to get involved in those spaces right now... internet social spaces are a little iffy for me

anyway i'm starting to learn more about my most niche anime interest, which is '70s anime

this month i got to know the name of osamu dezaki. this guy had a very distinct style, and i like it a lot. when i started watching "ashita no joe" it struck me immediately, how different it was from what the anime i was familiar with looked like. like most anime of the time, "ashita no joe" doesn't have fluid or sophisticated animation. what it does have is shit-tons of style. almost like what gets called a "motion comic" sometimes - taking one pretty detailed drawing and panning across it. often in a triple-take, three times in a row... i've heard that this is a cost-saving technique, but mostly i see it used for dynamic impact... the triple takes are really quick, and don't take up that much screen time.

the show i've been really digging into is "aim for the ace!", which is a really well-loved sports anime - i also learned that hideki anno's early anime "gunbuster", which i haven't seen, was an outer space riff on "aim for the ace". anyway, aim for the ace is just a show i love a lot, visually. the character designs are just really different from what i usually think of as character designs. harsh. angular. even the character who's supposed to be the "pretty" one is about a million miles away from the "moe" stereotype.

honestly i just have a hard time finding moe characters super relatable. i just heard about a "girls love" show called "lesbian bear storm". on paper a show called "lesbian bear storm" is right up my alley. in practice, anime seems to have a real problem with the idea that there's anybody in the world older than 15. also, i think this is ... i mean you see fat-shaming everywhere, but it's particularly prevalent in japan. for me as a lesbian, this is a problem. part of what i struggle with in anime particularly is characters who pander to the male gaze, and when i see character designs like the ones in "lesbian bear storm", that's kind of the feeling i get. to me, part of having good representation is being able to see fat dykes! and not just because that's also my aesthetic preference. :)

when it comes for aim for the ace... it's not a queer show. that said, a lot of the emotional drama of this show is driven by the main character, hiromi, wanting to be _really good friends_ with the star player, madame butterfly. this kind of stuff in the modern day sometimes gets dismissed as "yuri bait", teasing lesbianism for the male gaze.

i do wonder how much of it is inherent to the "shoujo" genre. it wasn't until the '60s that women started becoming the major creators of anime for girls. the manga of "aim for the ace" was one of the first of those works. i didn't grow up with shoujo, but i did grow up with the children's book series "something queer is going on". i grew up in an era where you _couldn't_ be out as queer if you were making creative work for an audience that includes children. there's a pretty negative narrative around queer people who do that. it's still stigmatized, but there seem to be exceptions now at least, with non-binary people like rebecca sugar and n.d. stephenson both creating really great work in that medium.

i don't think it really matters whether someone like elizabeth levy, who wrote the "something queer is going on" books, is herself queer. she created a work that allowed me to understand queerness in women and my relationship to that queerness. as an adult, i get the same kind of feeling from the parts of "aim for the ace". from the beginning there _is_ a guy who hiromi's interested in, todo, but this doesn't diminish my ability to read hiromi as queer. there's an episode where the lead character hiromi's best friend teases her about not paying any attention to todo's tennis playing. she _is_ interested in todo! she's just _more_ interested in madame butterfly. this is kind of why there's such a thing as "late bloomer lesbians" - comphet, compulsory heterosexuality. it's not that she's _not_ interested in guys like todo. he's attractive. someone like madame butterfly, though, is just so much more _exciting_! she just wants to be around madame butterfly all the time and wants madame butterfly to like her the way she likes madame butterfly. as a _really good friend_.

the thing that i love most about dezaki's work here is the way he uses his art to portray hiromi's heightened internal emotional states in a dramatic and compelling way. the sound effects... i'm ok with them. i saw a video from a guy complaining about the way japanese television relies on constant sound effects, which does trace back at least as far as this anime. i don't think the use of sound effects _enhances_ the emotional impact of the show. they're a little more obtrusive than the "stingers" used in the west, but no more heavy handed than, say, murray gold's scores for "doctor who".

i've started to come around to gold's work, incidentally. yes, his work is _extremely_ heavy-handed and didactic, basically yelling very loudly at the viewer about how they are supposed to feel. the upside is that by carrying the didactic load of the show, the rest of it is freed to be nuanced and subtle. plus, his music is better than albert glasser's. worst comes to worst i can do like all the millennials do and just read the subtitles... the stereo sound mixing of everything is dogshit. maybe it sounds better in 5.1. i don't know anybody who watches tv in 5.1.

in "aim for the ace", the plots are melodramatic, the music is melodramatic. dezaki's art, though? the best way i can describe it is "surreal". the mean girls mock her and all of a sudden the art starts looking like the spider-man episode "revolt in the fifth dimension". the colors of the backgrounds, too, are not at all remotely naturalistic. it's actually interesting how many of the color schemes in these '70s anime resemble various queer flags. honestly, i just think it's because the flags in question are color-coordinated. if you're doing a background based around two colors, orange and purple are good colors for that, particularly if the sun is setting. it's not intentionally lesbian. i've just gotten really really used to getting my queer content from subtext.

dezaki also has a tendency to use more dutch angles than _battlefield earth_. he uses them better than that film does. also, it's better than the constant low angles anime today _habitually_ uses when showing female characters from behind. every single shot of female characters in anime feels like it's about a three degree angle away from being a creepshot. well, no, there are also shots which are actual creepshots, or as they say in japan, "fan service". because that's certainly what _i_ want as a fan. not a compelling story or characters or art, no, i only watch anime because i want to see drawings of a 12 year old character flashing her underwear. (because i don't usually use sarcasm, i will be super-obvious and say that the preceding is, in fact, sarcasm.)

it's not that i'm a prude. i find the constant jiggle shots in "keijo!!!!!!!" delightful, though not actually tittilating, because they're genuinely plot-relevant. i feel the same way about magical girl transformation sequences. i mean if somebody really gets their rocks off by looking at animation of a naked girl without nipples superimposed on a sea of stars, i personally don't feel exploited as a woman. i just think those sequences look cool.

lol, i had so much more i wanted to talk about here too, but i've already spent an hour gushing about the two episodes of aim for the ace i've seen, so i guess i'll cut it for now. this boring work meeting is almost over.

by the way one of the video essays i watched was by someone who watched every episode of "lupin iii" and said that was a bad idea. which is enough to convince me to _not_ do a marathon of every episode of sazae-san. i did learn that "angel's egg" was originally supposed to be a lupin iii film. after "castle of cagliostro" miyazaki said "hey you know who you should get to make a lupin film, mamoru oshii". and oshii was like ok so i got an idea, a mad scientist builds a new tower of babel in the middle of tokyo and then jumps off it, in the process he discovers a fossilized angel which lupin then becomes interested, by the end of the movie lupin has stolen reality itself

the people making the film said "my friend we got enough shit for 'mystery of mamo', how about no"

in my headcanon, however, there is a prototype cabinet of "cliff hanger ii" wherein one replays the plot of "angel's egg" by entering perfectly timed button presses

(y'all know the story of "cliff hanger"? the first time any of miyazaki's work was seen in the us, if i have my facts right)

when it comes for aim for the ace... it's not a queer show.

it's just, you know. a sports show. about women who play tennis. like, you know, billie jean king. who is namechecked in the show as one of the inspirations for the players. (in fairness, the other tennis player they namecheck, margaret court, is virulently homophobic. also, i was very relieved when reading about billie jean king that, unlike a lot of other women's tennis players of her generation, she does _not_ seem to have been openly transphobic. in 1977, she played in a women's tournament which included renee richards, a trans woman, as a competitor, and she got a lot of shit from players like chris evert and martina navratilova, who are both transphobic to this day, for it.)

frieren is really good

ok so this is the exact opposite of anime for people who hate anime but god damn i can see "gushing over magical girls" becoming my favorite dark magical girl anime of all time

yall utena is just a REALLY REALLY BIG FAN OF MAGICAL GIRLS!!!!!!!!

an anime dub but it's just a dub remix of the original episode soundtrack

preferably "cowboy bebop", i wanna hear the mad professor or someone remix yoko kanno and the seatbelts

but i guess like flcl or something would work

that sounds amazing tbh

sometimes i don't get People Who Like Anime

in the sense meant by the thread title, not just people who like anime. i mean i like anime. i don't _get_ me, but like

i go on MyAnimeList and the most popular anime of the summer behind the new season of oshi no ko (which i never saw past the intro movie but yeah i loved that intro movie) is "Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian". Which Geoff Thew swears up and down is great and funny and OK yeah it's a foot fetish anime but it's REALLY GOOD and not at all something for the "hot trash" video.

i also found out from his video that People Who Like Anime freaking _hate_ "Senpai is an Otokonoko". "Otokonoko" is a complicated Japanese concept that's difficult to precisely translate to English, which didn't stop People Who Like Anime from coming up with a very specific, not very accurate slur as their translation. Real Anime Fans apparently _really_ hate this anime, claiming that it's "gay". Well, bisexual, technically, but sure. Nnnnnnnnnnnnnot sure why they would have a problem with that? I guess they hate BL (Boys' Love) anime too. IDK. I don't follow that genre so much. Apparently there was an omegaverse (if you don't know, don't ask, you don't want to know) BL anime last season that people were into. I'm sure it was great. I mean I know this has been said a million times, but if an anime doesn't interest me I just, like... don't watch it? I'm not gonna get on some, like, big crusade to rid the world of the scourge of yaoi holes.

Not that I'm against crusades necessarily! Apparently some Japanese publishing company was going to translate and print Abigail Shrier's "Irreversible Damage" in Japanese and a whole bunch of Japanese people (because basically nobody in the West had any idea this was happening) were like, wow, no, don't publish this, this is anti-trans hate speech. And the publishing company was "OK, we won't publish it! Sorry. Jeez."

Anyway, I'm not super informed on otokonoko issues specifically, and it's not an anime that's on my to-watch list. The general impression I get is that it's cute, light-hearted, affirming. It's a boy-otokonoko-girl love triangle. What I can say is that the handling of the otokonoko character is way more affirming than the portrayal of, say, Vivian in the original Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (TTYD). In the original TTYD, Vivian was portrayed as someone who identified as a girl but was "really" a boy. From what I've seen, the remake actually doesn't ever use the words "transgender" (which exists in Japanese as a loanword) or "otokonoko" for Vivian, as far as I can tell. In the west, the word we'd use for her is "transgender". Apparently, I found this out yesterday, there _was_ one translation of TTYD that was specifically gender-affirming - the Italian translation! I'm really into the whole Sapir-Whorf thing, and I'm really interested in... to what extent is the evolving Japanese understanding of trans issues a different, more affirming take on "otokonoko", and to what extent is it an adoption of the Western concept of "transgender"? I find the former possibility way more interesting.

Apparently there was a "magical gender transformation" anime last year that was huge in Japan and did nothing in the US. That said, the Rumiko Takahashi revival has gotten as far as Ranma 1/2, _the_ biggest "magical gender transformation" anime of all time in the West at least - that's starting in October. The original Ranma had a big influence on a lot of trans folks I know (I studiously avoided it, personally).

As far as Summer '24 anime, the one that grabbed my interest the most was "My Deer Friend Nokotan". This looks delightfully shitposty. Thew made fun of the idea that the only thing people found weird about deer girl is that it's only boy deer have antlers, like "Who even knows that?" I fucking know that. People creating deer characters don't always, mind you. But us, when we read stories about a doe who has antlers, we look at and go "Oh, she's trans." I frankly don't really _want_ Nokotan to engage with gender issues, because who fucking cares. That's not what the show is about, as far as I can tell.

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for anyone who's interested in the GOATs, it seems to be pretty widely recognized that Dungeon Meshi ("Delicious in Dungeon") is one of the GOATs. I haven't seen it yet. wasn't on my to watch list but people love it so fucking much that I'll give.

watched Deer Friend and it had absurd moments but frankly it was just not funny enough. people were hyping it up as the next Nichijou (where's my City anime btw) but it's nowhere near as absurdist and lacks the amazing production values that had.

Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction seems to be going under the radar a bit as it launched mid last season but is well worth catching up on, it's not the shonen slop the title suggests, but a story from the Goodnight Punpun author about a group of girls just trying to live their teenage life as the world collapses around them. latest episode had a pretty good bit about a trans kid too Kate!

Dungeon Meshi is indeed one of the GOATs. Sort of a D&D/Wizardry style world, where a party of adventurers goes dungeon crawling to rescue one of their own. They have no money for supplies, so they're forced to hunt and cook monsters. They meet a weird but avuncular dwarf guy who lives in the dungeon and knows all these amazing ways to prepare monster dishes, so it becomes a sort of action/adventure/comedy/cooking hybrid anime where all these different genres are executed extremely well and form a synthesis that's greater than the sum of its parts.

Also the worldbuilding is EXTREMELY cool, lot of attention on fantastic/whimsical ecologies.

i'm gonna have to check out dead dead demons! "trying to live my life as the world collapses around me" is... relatable!

I am the most surface-level anime novice imaginable but I am currently halfway through Mobile Suit Gundam (like the first series, from 1979) and I'm just constantly like...is it possible for this to just continue becoming more awesome as it progresses? Because it's really, really awesome. I haven't gotten that far into Evangelion (although I will take the full plunge in time) but this definitely feels like an ur text.

it really is an ur text! I worked my way thru Zeta & Double Zeta earlier this year and although they expand a lot on the things I like in Gundam (the politicking, the shades of grey that characters work in, the fatalism) I think I still like the original MSG more. fav is still Turn A out of the ones I've watched tho.

watched the most recent "dededede" episode (episode 8). idk i got a weird relationship about apocalypse-based media, like... i would put it in the category of a lot of "iyashikei". i haven't read a lot of manga (oyasumi punpun is on my to-read list), but a lot of iyashikei has those apocalypse vibes. just... trying to survive in apocalyptic times. that kinda fatalism goes back to the earliest modern anime i've seen. people who survived world war ii. particularly as a left-wing perspective, which "dededede" definitely has from the episode i saw. there are very few creators left who lived through the war, but there's an artistic heritage, i guess, a through-line. and the kind of horror of seeing the rise of something to which... the survivors of world war ii, they're unlikely to live to see the end of it.

so makoto is really relatable to me. someone growing up queer surrounded by small-town fascists. someone who says they "know they can never really be a girl" but like looking cute.

and on that topic i _love_ the character design, the way it's deliberately not "moe". they're as cute as anybody else in the anime! i love that makoto's obvious wig _looks_ like an obvious wig. the design isn't remotely "realistic", but it's nothing like "Alya Deliberately Hides Her Feelings in Russian" haha.

and yeah it looks like nobody's fuckin' watched, definitely one of those "hidden gems" i love so much.

anyway it is kind of... it's like the characters, they're just trying not to think about what's happening. which is different i guess from iyashikei like "yokohama kaidashi kikou", where the apocalypse has already happened and people are just... kinda "september song"-ing it.

i'm not sure this world has a future. i mean it probably does. there's some big climate spaceship over it and it's dangerous because of what the people in power have done to it. and maybe we all die as a result of that but i don't want to _believe_ that. i don't get any benefit out of believing that. so i just try to live the best life i can. but of course the looming apocalypse affects me, just like coming from a place that... wouldn't have been ok with me affects me.

is there any other apocalypse stuff you recommend? i've heard of "bucket list of the dead" but again i haven't watched it. or in particular, what i'm interested in _is_ hidden gems (from any era), stuff that doesn't get hyped up on MAL or by geoff thew (because he's big enough, at this point, that nothing he recommends can really be considered a "hidden gem"). "dededede" seems like one of those.

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i can't catch up on the anime that catches my interest most, so i kinda... have said i'm not even gonna try with the mech series (excepting, like, EVA, i also wanna watch the early Patlabor stuff). i got a friend who has a t-shirt that says "i'm only a mech pilot because dehumanized hyperstimulated force-feminized lobotomite isn't a job title". pretty sure she made it herself. my roots are more in matsumoto than in tomino, so i head more for the space opera stuff.

I love YKK! that kind of "happy" dystopia feels very distinct to Japan - the sky is blue, the sun is out, and oh yeh humanity is dying out. I don't know why but I find it very appealing, from YKK and Aria to Nausicaa and even some Zelda games.
some underrated anime I like that not many people seem to talk about: Fuujin Monogatari (Windy Tales), Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined), So Ra No Wo To (Sound of the Sky), Dennou Coil, Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru (And Yet the Town Moves) etc etc. also feel like not many people watched Heike Monogatari (The Heike Story) and it's a masterpiece of storytelling & direction imo.

super cool! windy tales and heike monogatari are already on my to-watch list... i'll have to check the others out :) anyway yeah ykk had me hooked when the two android ladies kissed. i am sad at the lack of diversity in portrayals of sapphic relationships in japanese media, but maybe since it's not the centerpiece it works. idk. kind of a shame YKK only had those two OVAs though. gorgeous OVAs mind. well, at least the manga is finally getting an official english publication! waiting for that last volume to come out.

i read the first.. 8? volumes of Dedede, loved it, sadly my library stopped picking it up. might have to give it and buy it someday. awesome that it has an anime now

here's an AMV made up from scenes from the cult late '90s Gainax romance show "His and Her Circumstances" set to the Tim Buckley song "Strange Feelin'". (I tried looking for AMVs set to Arthur Russell yesterday but I couldn't find any. :( )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMDsdaKfrOY

The uploader also has a video of scenes from the 1987 "Tale of Genji" film set music from _Spirit of Eden_, FWIW.

thank you for this rusho. his and her circumstances is a deeply important anime for your girl. it is so heterosexual yet so trans to me

thank you for this rusho. his and her circumstances is a deeply important anime for your girl. it is so heterosexual yet so trans to me

― ivy.

i understand that... back in the day there just wasn't any overt trans representation, so a lot of the stuff that clicks with me isn't overtly trans in any way. i don't watch a lot of anime, but i happened to watch the first ep last week. the way yukino feels like she needs to put up a front in public, to conceal the person she really is, yeah i find that deeply relatable. anyway i got no idea how the rest of the show develops, though apparently they ran out of budget towards the end and the last couple episodes are deeply disappointing to fans of the anime. which is weird because it's not something gainax or hideki anno ever had to deal with at any other time!

lol. i always wanted to see His and Her Circumstances

i rewatched it recently! yes it does go off the rails at around episode 19. anno apparently left the show due to creative differences of the mangaka, idk, never really read a clear account of this. even considering that, it’s my favorite gainax show. it is sooo beautiful. makes an amazing aesthetic choice every few minutes

creative differences with*

Estab-Life: Great Escape:

In line with my ethos of "only watching shows nobody has heard about", I went looking on MAL for the least-watched original anime of each season in 2022. I figure that when you have 150 or more anime shows _in a season_ a lot is gonna be missed. I started with spring 2022, and dug up a series called Estab-Life: Great Escape. Spy x Family has 1.7 million viewers on MAL. Cult lesbian mafia golf anime Birdie Wing has 69K viewers. Estab-Life has 12K viewers and a mediocre rating of 6.47. Turns out it's based on some mobile game, which is probably why nobody's seen it. Also, it's not a very visually impressive show. It's not pure jank, but this is not a show that's gonna make a lot of sakuga reels.

Apparently Estab-Life is a light-hearted action comedy about human smuggling. See, the human smugglers are also schoolgirls. Except for the furry. And the smiling robot from that one Doctor Who episode. Also the youngest girl is also completely made out of slime so can survive having her head blown off.

The story takes place in this dystopian world where Japan is hyper-divided between districts, with intense security keeping people from moving freely. The smugglers - "extractors" - help out people who, due to the circumstances of their birth, are trapped in lives that are slowly killing their soul, and who want an opportunity to make a better life for themselves.

If you, like me, were wondering how long it takes for that premise to get extremely gay: Episode 2. If you're not counting the extremely lesbian vibes between Equa, the show's chief protag, and Feles, the gyaru team leader. I'd like it if anime had less queer-baiting, but then again, considering nobody in anime seems to be over about 15 years old, it's probably better off that nothing is explicit. Anyway, their client in episode 2 is a yakuza boss who wants to become a magical girl. That kind of premise could be done extremely badly, and to my mind, it's not. The show treats the yakuza boss with respect while at the same time ridiculing masculinist yakuza ideas of "virtue". I don't know that it could've been done better without openly addressing the obvious queerness of the whole thing, which... probably wasn't feasible for a mobile game tie-in anime.

The soundtrack is weird jazz fusion. The school uniforms they wear are straight fire - they kind of remind me of the CLAMP-designed uniforms for the show Angelic Layer. In Episode 3 their clients are 18 penguins trying to get through Checkpoint Charlie. I genuinely _wasn't_ expecting the lead penguin to _also_ be queer-coded. He was. None of this is especially novel - off the top of my head, other queer yakuza stories include an episode of Dirty Pair, _The Clan's Heir is a Trans Woman_, and of course Stop!! Hibari-Kun!, and episode 3 is reminiscent of 1985's "Penguin's Memory" (I should finish watching Hazel's video on that one) - but it's a lot of fun to watch.

This show is insane and you should watch it.

i didn't watch that one but i remember the name. i think Gorou Taniguchi was involved? Back Arrow was also a really fun show by him that no one watched.

see, i don't know those names, that's kinda where my interest lies, weird obscure anime shows that nobody watches but are a lot of fun

and then i fret about not having shared interests with other people, lol

in general the MAL stats way undersell the genres whose heyday was before the late 00s when that site opened. mecha, magical girl, girl action, any tokusatsu-adjacent stuff is always way down the page unless it manages to go viral. also just daytime anime/kids anime in general since crunchyroll et al don't pick most of those up for streaming

in general the MAL stats way undersell the genres whose heyday was before the late 00s when that site opened. mecha, magical girl, girl action, any tokusatsu-adjacent stuff is always way down the page unless it manages to go viral. also just daytime anime/kids anime in general since crunchyroll et al don't pick most of those up for streaming

― ciderpress

yeah i've found that to be true about older anime in general... there's definitely a pretty huge recency bias to their stats. if i look at the number of viewers on that site for "candy candy", it's, like, 33K. and i mean yeah i don't think it ever got an official english dub, which is another historical bias of MAL, but like this is not an obscure anime by any means. MAL was pretty useful for me, as someone who didn't really know anything about anime, to get myself grounded in "the canon" and... i don't think "the canon" is a bad thing. i mean the whole idea of "anime for people who hate anime" - the stuff that this thread has recommended has a lot of overlap with "the canon".

the funny thing is that i _wouldn't_ call estab-life an anime show for people who hate anime. it's not one of the GOATs. it leans heavily on some of the common anime tropes that are...

like there's a whole episode set in the hot springs region of japan where everyone is forbidden to wear underpants. do i find that whole obsession in anime culture weird and uncomfortable? absolutely. if someone hears that description and is like "god, i'm not gonna watch any show that would do that", i think that's legit. i personally am not going to watch any of the -monogatari series of anime, i saw that first shot in bakemonogatari and i was like "nope, i'm out". there are a number of excellent shows that don't have premises revolving around underpants. (blurb of the week right there.) does the fact that the show is sending up that obsession make it any _less_ weird and uncomfortable? for me, no, not really. the reason i'm ok with the episode is because the episode doesn't really have "fanservice" as such. i mean unless you get off on spoiler seeing the statue of liberty's panties. no judgement if you do, but as for me, i'm with justice potter stewart's definition of fanservice - i know it when i see it, and this is not it.

incidentally if you are ok with spoilers, the (minor) spoilered bit does convey very well the flavor of the show.

ok i finished watching this show and it's actually fucking brilliant. i don't know if i'm that easy a mark or if it's really just that fucking good, but i loved it completely and thoroughly. i mean i can see why nobody's seen it because it's in no way visually impressive until the last episode, and even that has obvious budgetary limitations, and also the show _builds_ rather than coming on strong out of the gate, but i think i am now quite possibly the anglosphere's number one Estab-Life fangirl

turns out the mobile game never even came out. there's a movie based on the same nonexistent game that came out last year, but i don't think there's an english subtitled version. i could be wrong on that. anyway there's no cast in common with the series and i'm not sure it's in any meaningful way similar to the series.

I've decided that I'm finally going to watch Evangelion. I haven't watched that much anime honestly, but I'm basically familiar with what different animes from different eras look and act like. Evangelion, tho, I really only know it from the memes. Shinji needs to get in the robot, the OP is a banger, all of the money for the ending went to insider trading or some shit.

I heard somewhere that whatshisname, I know his name I can't remember, was trying to start from a standard anime mecha premise but that most people found it really dark. I can see both points of view. I watched the dub because I don't know, honestly. I don't know which dub. It sounds very "90s anime dub". Anyway it's already pretty obviously weird. I didn't realize that the epilepsycore credits were actually indicative of the series itself. People wouldn't make it like that today, so I guess it's unique for that alone.

The setup makes some attempt at looking conventional - here's the protag, we find out the plot at the same time he does. It's all sped-up and accelerated, though, like you'd see in a recap movie. It's the distant future of 2015 and humanity is doomed, and if whatshisface wasn't going all-in on the bleak from the beginning...

I mean when I get this depressed I just lie in bed catatonic. Not really sure how he managed to function.

OK, episode 2, I have to give up on the dub. I can't take them seriously. The accents and diction in the control room lit by a game of SIMON are too silly. It's not the fault of the dub - the Japanese language track is just as silly, but it's a kind of silly I'm used to.

I genuinely don't think I've ever seen an anime this weird. And my taste skews towards the weird.

Does this dude just happen to share the elevator thing with metal gear guy, or is there something else going on?

I mean there's French New Wave shot framing, you see a lot of that in anime, but this shot framing is just weird. It's not there to look like art. It's not there to look beautiful. It's there to look unnerving.

It definitely reminds me of Akira with the whole child abuse. And Shinji listening to a Walkman in 2015.

Delaying the actual fight until the end of the episode by showing things out of order is maybe the most conventional narrative choice here.

OH MY GOD I KNOW THAT WAS NOT INTENTIONALLY A GOATSE SHOT BUT IT WAS TOTALLY A GOATSE SHOT.

The cross imagery is a little heavy-handed.

So is the vagina imagery. Also! The visual gag when Misato takes away the beer can is funny. The visual gag making suggesting Shinji has a small penis isn't. I think here, Anno is letting being "clever" get in the way of the story, and, well, it's not appropriate. The joke isn't Misato inappropriately sexualizing Shinji - it's the story itself.

At least I'm taking better car of myself than Misato is.

I'm just going to assume Misato is praising him at the end for taking a bath. Self-care is HARD.

Oh boy. The trailer promises fanservice next week. You know what, I'm good with Anno (I remember his name now) being an asshole to people who want "fanservice". I hope it's like the "fanservice" in the last episode of School Days.

Thematically I guess it works, since once of the main themes of the anime so far is violating the consent of children!

-

Episode 3! I'm just into this. Anything that makes our world look good by comparison, I'm into.

Shinji not using a cell phone is probably the smartest thing he's done so far haha

This is kinda the most obvious episode in the show so far... lots of exposition about Shinji's emotional state. Lots of exposition about lots of things. Also - I'm back to the English dub - Toji expressing that much emotion... I don't think that's a realistic depiction of war. I mean he is a kid I guess, but talking about his sister seems more like the kind of thing that I more often hear in a flat tone, no emotion at all.

Actually the sound design reminds me of that Boku no Natsuyami or whatever video.

OK, what's with Misato's pointlessly gendered comment when the Fourth Angel shows up?

There's a bit in the second half where the subtitles give Shinji some lines, but the sub just has the shot silent. It's a blessed release from the nonstop exposition fest so far.

I've been waiting for the guy with the camera to get killed since he first showed up. Oh, Kensuke was born the day after 9/11, lol!

The whole countdown sequence is pretty boring. Numbers going down is not a substitute for drama. As far as Shinji's actions, he just seems like a normal kid. He's a 15 year old with minimal combat training being put into a combat situation. No shit he's not gonna be able to exercise military discipline.

Who's the voice doing the "next episode" voiceovers? She sounds like Asuka. Asuka hasn't actually shown up in the show yet. That surprises me. I guess the show's pulling a Goemon with her or something.

Anyway. I thought this episode was boring.

-

Episode 4... I guess this show changes up its credits over time, huh? Asuka's in the credits, but just barely.

The NERV branded alarm clock is cute.

Wait. They left him on his own in his room for five days without checking on him? Like, one of the only kids who can stop armageddon? Who also happens to be an extremely high suicide risk? Damn, NERV are dumb.

Oh it's a DAT walkman, I guess that's... I mean it's still wrong. But they tried. The show's less disorienting now. I'm more used to it. Nothing is happening, but not in an "exposition" way, in a very deliberate way. OK "Sunflowers" is one of the only paintings I know. Anno is being clever again.

Is the "fanservice" of Rei? I can see that.

The English voice actor for Shinji mixes up the way he says "yes" more than the Japanese voice actor does. I don't like that.

The silent commercial break slides are standing out to me this time.

Kensuke is acting like a prepper again. I can't wait for this kid to get killed. ...no, wait. Goddamit this show gave me some sympathy for him. I mean he's still gonna get killed.

Misato's anger at Shinji is interesting. Like, they're mad that he won't take agency in his own life. IDK. I'm kinda down with Shinji as someone who's dissociated, just doing whatever he's told. I also can see where the "shinji=egg" reading I've heard from some transfems comes from. I don't see him that way. He's just omeone who lets others tell him who he is and what he should be doing.

Episode 4 is interesting. I'm getting used to the cicadas.

rei is much more of a trans woman than shinji. but i did identify with shinji heavily in high school so

misato does all the next episode previews

i also find the dubs all pretty unwatchable so good luck (most ppl are not bothered by them. for me it’s important that shinji’s voice actress is a woman who can scream)

Some more thoughts on Evangelion through episode 4, from the perspective of an extremely clinically depressed woman living in a dystopia.

Today I'm appreciating that when Shinji gets in the robot they immerse him in amniotic fluid. It does a good job of communicating the absurdity of the situation. It's like trying to make a fetus drive a tank. There's this short poem I read in high school by Randall Jarrell called "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" that's really stuck with me.

From my mother's sleep I feel into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

I think Shinji is positioned in the "head" of the EVA rather than its belly, but the way he behaves, the way the EVA behaves, doesn't suggest that he's controlling the EVA. He's not behaving consciously. He's not listening to what NERV are telling him, even though outside of the robot he does everything anyone tells him to do. I don't know whether the robot is behaving based on his subconscious, or whether it's taking an autonomous role to protect him, but the result is the same: Shinji blacks out and the robot destroys the angel.

And then - this is the funny bit - Misato says "This seems like it's really hurting you. You don't have to do this. You can leave." Sure. As long as he's willing to accept the consequences, he can walk away. He can go back "home". Where? To who? To his mom? Fuck knows. I don't think his mom's been mentioned yet in the show. To let the angels destroy Tokyo? Then what? The angels going to walk away, they're not going to come for him, wherever he is? I mean, NERV can always put Rei in the robot, right? She's technically not dead yet, right?

No, everybody's clear that they don't blame him for walking away, that getting in the robot is hard and it hurts him and he doesn't _have_ to do it. Hell, his bully even comes up to Shinji and tells Shinji to hit him. Hit him hard, hit him for real. Stupid. Meaningless. Sacher-Masoch was no less an abuser than Sade was. Shinji hits him, of course. He does everything anyone tells him to do.

At some point in high school, I realized my bully actually cared about me. Bullies don't do what they do because they're confident, strong, self-assured. Bullies pick on people weaker than them to convince themselves that they're not the weak ones. Shinji's bully doesn't really enjoy bullying Shinji. It's more a social obligation than anything. My sister was hurt because of you, so I have to beat you up. Those are the rules.

If you obey society's rules
You will be society's tools
And you'll obey and then disobey
You'll disobey but then you'll obey

- DEVO, "Social Fools"

I think I recall someone at NERV questioning whether Shinji is a tool or whether he has autonomy. They say they want him to have autonomy, but that's not how they treat him. I can't imagine enjoying bullying Shinji. I can imagine enjoying bullying someone. I'm not averse to a little consensual bullying. Shinji's stone, though. A stone bottom. He doesn't react to stimuli. That was what it was like for a while, bullying me. Eventually my bully, I think, caught on to why I had stopped reacting to his bullying. Or maybe he realized why he was doing the things he did. I don't know. He was an interesting guy. He treated me better than a lot of people who said they cared about me did. He genuinely encouraged me, a lot of times. The only reason I didn't listen is because he was my bully. I was stone to praise as well.

At the end of episode 4, after the train has left, Shinji is still standing there. We never actually see him decide to leave. He never actually decides to stay. He just lets the train go on without him. He runs away and hangs out in Van Gogh paintings for a while. It's not real. They're not real sunflowers. Van Gogh painted them and then he killed himself. When he says that NERV is home, that the people there are family... Misato's not family. His dad isn't family. Nah, his family is the robot.

https://www.anime-planet.com/images/anime/screenshots/lupin-the-3rd-the-woman-called-fujiko-mine-4905-1.jpg

watching the Lupin the Third miniseries from 2012 "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" and I'm really enjoying the dynamic ink-drawing style and amazing visuals. The music director of Cowboy Bebop (Shinichiro Watanabe) handled the music for this and it works wonderfully.

also finished the 3rd part of Mob Psycho and just... wow. Into my top 5 that goes.

"the woman called fujiko mine" is 13 episodes! is 13 episodes a miniseries these days?

have i mentioned "vatican miracle examiners" on ilx? the last thing i saw was the first arc of "vatican miracle examiners". geoff thew made a video about it but he had to take it down because it was entitled "Impregnated with Hitler's WHAT?!?!" and if you say "Hitler" you get demonetized. It's like we used to say in the '90s: If you can't say "fuck", you can't say "fuck the government", and if you can't say "Hitler", you can't say "Impregnated with Hitler's WHAT?!?!" I'm genuinely, truly, incredibly fucking mad about this. OK I understand that a lot of the stuff I said in my shitposting days was Problematic, but this thing where you get Demonetized if you talk about anything at all controversial... like we're not all fucking fascist edgelords! Some of us just want to talk about shitty bishounen anime!

If "Vatican Miracle Examiners" is controversial, well, I don't see why it should be any more controversial than the Roman Catholic Church. I'm just going to give away the plot of the first arc here because no matter how incoherent and slapdash I am when talking about it, it's not going to come off any more nonsensical or random than the show itself. So there are, in fact, real Vatican Miracle Examiners, I'm told. I don't know anything more about it than that. I'm not sure this anime is an accurate representation of the profession. For one, I'm not sure actual Vatican Medical Examiners are cute bishounen. (For anyone who doesn't know what "bishounen" are, they're cute young androgynous boys beloved by many, many, girls and women. Not just girls and women, but a lot of them.) Bishounen stuff can get kind of weird at some point, but we're not even in yaoi territory here. These are PRIESTS for God's sake. They're not going to go around doing sexy things with each other. Except in the doujin.

OK I need to stop using anime jargon here. The point is these two priests are summoned to the Vatican office of their head and are told "So a young Sister in South America wrote us a letter saying she's pregnant with Jesus and she's totally a virgin." To which the priests say, "Wait, isn't that fundamentally opposed to basic Roman Catholic theology?" And their boss says "Kind of, yeah, but I mean, she is a sister and all, that's why we want you to investigate it."

Also they have half of a tally counter which says "RICH". Many Bothans died to obtain that half of the tally counter. The bishounen with the monocle immediately concludes that the other half must say "GLORY" and that's a phrase commonly used in pacts with the devil. I mean it's not something I've ever heard about, but I admit to not being as much of an expert in making pacts with the devil as I'd like to be.

So they fly down to South America. Actually it looks more like Mexico City, but whatever. It's not a terribly accurate map.

Anyway they make it to this church and things are a little bit weird. Their cab driver says "Yeah, my crazy grandpa, he says that when he was a kid there was a UFO landing around here. That would be sometime around the spring of 1945." Also it turns out this Church they're going to, the Church of San Rosario, was founded in 1945. Everybody involved goes on to pretend like this information is in no way relevant for the next three episodes.

Anyway it turns out they also run an orphange populated mostly by bishounen. I mean there are girls there too but they don't get any lines or character names or anything like that. This is a pretty faithful representation of Catholicism so I give them authenticity points for that one. I don't think actual orphanages let their male wards grow their hair that long, though.

So anyway they meet the people running the clergy and they're like, yeah, we kinda didn't want to tell you since saying you're pregnant with Jesus is kind of heretical, but since you're here, you might as well talk to you. They do a little hymenvestigating, and are like, yep, that's a hymen, and it's definitely not a reconstructed hymen, she was born with that. I mean she could have been artificially inseminated, but look, she seems basically honest, we're gonna trust her on this one. They don't mention it specifically, but it _would_ be against the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, and she _is_ a member of the clergy. Which is kind of one of the weirder parts of Catholic ethics for me, they're in favor of being fruitful and multiply but IVF causes eggs to die, which is sinful. Basically I have a personal axe to grind on this. I'm infertile because my Catholic health insurance wouldn't pay to have my sperm cryopreserved, and it pisses me off.

Anyway, as far as the investigation goes... it feels like they want to get it over with and move on to more interesting miracles. Oh also the Sister in question has stigmata. So they take a blood test. See, she's got AB- blood, and they figure if the blood from the stigmata is also AB-, it's hers. Because that's how genetics works. Anyway they're like, yeah, it's AB-, it's definitely hers, but that doesn't mean anything. People spontaneously develop stigmata all the time. I mean it could be selection bias. I bet if you're a Vatican Miracle Examiner you run into a lot of people with stigmata. Also one of them asks his secret hacker friend Lauren to investigate the church's finances, you know, just in case there are any financial irregularities about this vast opulent church with a fully staffed hospital but no patients.

Oh, also, they run across a creepy lady swaddling a baby with four eyes. That's probably nothing, though. Looks like they can wrap this case...

Wait it looks like somebody just got murdered in some kind of Satanic ritual. And now the stupid Vatican wants them to investigate _that_ for some reason. This is totally unfair! Whatever an occult ritual murder may be, it's certainly not a miracle. Couldn't they just, like, call the cops, or something?

No. No cops. The Vatican takes care of its own.

Unfortunately I find this decision to also be pretty consistent with the way the Catholic Church does things. Anyway, these two bishounen are stuck with this murder investigation, so they talk to the security guard who found the body. He says it's probably those stupid orphans, always going around with their occult rituals!

Anyway the next morning they go to morning Mass and the statue of the Virgin Mary starts weeping. Sigh. OK. At least this resembles a miracle if you look closely enough at it.

I mean it's not. They do a chemical analysis on it and it's not human tears at all! It's just holy water! There's nothing miraculous at all about a statue of the Virgin Mary crying holy water. What? Wait, hold on, there's more. OK, OK, here's the deal. What happened was the guy who was ritually murdered in the Church, whoever did it bludgeoned them over the head with the 30 foot statue of the Virgin Mary. Then, to cover up their tracks, they put a big rock by the body, and then they dragged the statue out to the fountain of holy water outside, meticulously washed the entire statue, and then dragged it back into the church. See, they fucked up though, because what they didn't realize was that even though the statue LOOKED dry, it actually wasn't, and when they lit the candles for Mass the water came out of the statue and it looked like tears! All of which is completely and totally scientifically plausible. Anyway it turns out that the statue is also totally riddled with blood still, because you can't just beat someone bloody with a statue and wash out all the blood with water, not even holy water. But other than that it was a perfect plan and totally would have convinced the investigators that the priest with a suspiciously German name was killed in an occult ritual using a rock, rather than using a giant 30 foot statue of the Virgin Mary, as _actually_ happened. See, this is smart, because if the miracle examiners had believed the priest was killed with a rock, they... uh... um...

Oh, wait, a couple more people have been murdered. The sexy nun and the priest who was pretty clearly shtupping her were _also_ murdered in occult rituals. At this point they decide to actually call the police - so much for realism - but damn the luck, there's inclement weather keeping the police from coming to investigate. Oh also one of the particularly pretty orphans has started manifesting stigmata and started making messianic claims. These poor investigators are dealing with a really unreasonable workload here. It's not even the first time it's happened. Turns out it happened before. The guard and one of the priests saw the whole thing. Mario was levitating in mid-air and bleeding from the palms. Sigh. OK, the stigmata clearly aren't an actual miracle. We've already established that people develop stigmata all the fucking time. Levitating, on the other hand, isn't a routine event. They try to ask the orphan what was up with the whole levitation thing, but he's just like, sorry bros, I was in an ecstatic religious trance, can't remember a thing.

Oh, also, the first time he levitated, there was a runic cross written in blood behind the altar. At this point the investigators are like, wait, why didn't you tell us one of your students started developing stigmata while levitating and a runic cross written in blood behind him? And the priest is like, I mean, we didn't want to bother you with it. It's not like he was pregnant with the son of God or anything. Probably it would be considered a miracle if he was. I don't think this story is set in the Omegaverse. Anyway, they were like, look, you told us that if we have problems that aren't related to put in separate tickets. We just hadn't gotten around to putting in the Jira ticket on the levitating student yet.

And they're like, look, there have been three ritual murders here in the last 24 hours. Also, security guard guy, wait, didn't you say something about the students conducting occult rituals? Sorry, that didn't seem like it would possibly be related to an occult ritual murder back when we first talked, but now that we think about it, maybe that's worth following up on. But the head priest is like, look, we're sorry, we hired a Protestant as security guard as an act of charity, please don't take him seriously. Yes, the students are conducting occult rituals, it's a phase they're going through. Boys will be boys. Again, this is kind of truth in television. Catholics just aren't as concerned about demon-summoning rituals as American Evangelicals are. This is another one of those instances where I'm on Team RC. Just because you and your friends are trying to use a Walouija board as an ad hoc career guidance counselor doesn't mean you're suddenly going to start committing Satanic ritual murders.

Anyway the investigators use the Magic Lemon Juice to reveal the blood runes and the footprints on the floor, which belong to an adult and a student. No other footprints. Nobody else has walked around in that church. But oh, wait! There are other footprints, right by where the German priest was ritually murdered! And they're the SAME SHOE SIZE as the adult footprints by the blood runes! That can only mean one thing: The adult who painted blood runes on the church wall is the same person who murdered Father Klaus (strikethrough)Barbie(/strikethrough)!

There's only one thing for it: To have their intrepid hacker look into the medical history of the security guard. They feel like there's something funny about him. It's probably just that he's a Protestant, but they want to be totally sure. Oh, somebody else gets killed! And right before he dies, he says "The beast 666 has awakened", and invokes the name of the founder of the Church of San Rosario!

Anyway it turns out that the Church keeps the office of their founder locked and inaccessible and nobody, not even Vatican Miracle Examiners, are allowed to go in. The Vatican Miracle Examiners, of course, are undeterred by this, and pick the lock with a coathanger. No, I'm not going to make any tasteless jokes about that. The results of patriarchal oppression are fucking horrific and I don't really feel like making some "edgy" quip. Anyway they break in and it's fine, turns out it's just got the founder's mummified corpse in there. I mean it's a holy relic! Of course they're going to preserve it and venerate it. You know, maybe the founder's remains will do something miraculous or something and then they could call in some Vatican Miracle Examiners.

Oh also the Spear of Destiny, which has been stolen from the British Museum, seems to be in the founder's office. Huh. That's weird. Stil, I mean, it's not like the British have a greater claim to it than the One True Catholic and Apostolic Church. Oh, hold on, wait, there's also a copy of the Devil's Bible sitting around! Apparently there's such a thing as a "Devil's Bible", which is "a bible not written by man, but by the Devil". Saying that the Bible was written by "man" is kinda shaky theology there, but you know what, we'll go with it. It's written in Enochian script. The ink smells good. I'm just literally typing the subtitles at you here, this is all the context we get. Also "Enochian script" is apparently a Norse rune cipher? Or something? Oh and they found the other half of the tally counter, and it says not "GLORY" but "HEIN". THAT'S IT! Whoever created the tally counter was French, and the original message was "Huh, rich!" They must be talking about French cooking!

...or it just could be a German name. Time to check with Lauren, who pops up on video chat, and it turns out he's a guy! I, um. Kind of missed this reveal because he's an androgynous long-haired bishounen, like basically every other character here. I mean it's a shocking reveal for sure, I never would've guessed that a leet computer hacker might actually be a _guy_. There's no reason for this conversation to happen over video chat, just like there's no reason Lauren's gender makes the slightest bit of difference. Admittedly there's not much in the way of reason for anything that happens in this arc, but at this point things are starting to get particularly random.

In the meantime one of the other orphans has been possessed by a demon! OK, great, it's not enough for these two to be miracle investigators, they also have to investigate occult murders and I guess they exorcising demons now. The power of Christ compels you, the power of Christ compels you, oh fuck it let's just hit him over the head with a bible. Looks like the orphan wasn't possessed by a demon after all! He was just administered an overdose of crystal meth. By Father Klaus who was, well, CW doing exactly the sort of thing you would expect a Catholic priest to be doing to a young boy and keeping him addicted to drugs so he wouldn't tell anybody. Well, shit, I guess it wasn't unfair of the Vatican to ask them to investigate the ritual murder of Father Klaus as a miracle after all. I mean, of course they're not actually going to _tell_ the Vatican that one of their priests was perpetrating CSA. They're like, hey, why don't we just tell them that the kid was possessed by a demon and we exorcised him? We don't need to tell them about all that other awful stuff.

The good news is that this is the most depressingly realistic thing that happens in this whole arc and the rest of the arc is wall-to-wall batshit crazy. First off, it turns out the security guard wasn't just Protestant, he had a severe head injury which meant that he couldn't see people unless they were moving. Mario wasn't _actually_ levitating, the security guard just _thought_ he was. Mario was actually being strangled! And that's why the stigmata happened, he was just scared because he was being strangled to death. It turns out it's a really common medical condition, at least according to these Vatican Miracle Examiners. I didn't know there were so many different possible causes of stigmata before watching this show. It's been really educational.

Anyway, obviously whoever was strangling him was standing stock still, which is why the security guard couldn't see him. I mean yeah the head of San Rosario said he was levitating too and he didn't have any kind of head injury, so he was obviously just fuckin' lying. Which makes perfect sense. I mean, you know, if you're involved in a drug smuggling ring sending slush funds to the Vatican, the perfect way to cover it up is to tell the Vatican Miracle Examiners that any unusual events that might be happening in your church are actually miracles. They'll definitely accept what you're saying unconditionally and not, like, examine any miraculous claims you might make.

Here's another hot tip: If you happen to be running an underground Nazi experiment to clone Hitler, you should definitely let the women who was impregnated with Hitler's sperm, who has gone crazy from the experience and who also happens to be the daughter of the church's founder, wander around the church grounds at will carrying a rag doll two-headed baby around with her. That's not going to arouse any suspicions whatsoever. Certainly the Vatican Miracle Examiners who have come to investigate reports of a miraculous pregnancy aren't going to find her of any interest whatever. There's no way they would want to talk to her and hear their story at any point. Besides, even on the off chance she did tell them about what they did, you can always tell them she's crazy. I mean, she's a woman! What self-respecting member of the Catholic clergy would listen to a _woman_?

OK that's depressingly realistic again, but not _as_ depressingly realistic as the last thing.

Anyway it turns out, turns out "Heinrich" actually refers to Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, whose body was never found after World War II. There's not really anybody else it could be, just like there's only one person in the world with a blood type of AB-. See, funny thing, it turns out there's a secret drug smuggling operation going on at the Church of San Rosario. They're selling meth and funneling the money through an elaborate insider trading scheme to the Vatican using a secret cover organization cunningly named "The Heinrich Foundation". This is because Heinrich Mueller is the true founder of the Church, smuggled on an enormous Nazi blimp called the Rusberg (because if you're going to smuggle Nazis into South America, obviously the most discreet way to do it is on a GIANT FUCKING NAZI BLIMP) along with Hitler's corpse, as part of a secret occult plan to create a clone of Hitler, along with an entire community full of Hitler Youth, indoctrinated with drugs and mind control to worship Hitler as their new God. They did this by using the Devil's Bible, which is written in a runic cypher which, when deciphered, provides detailed instructions for the revival of the Nazi Master Race. See, it turns out the key to the cypher in the Devil's Bible is in the runic Ouija board the orphans keep playing around with, because if you want to keep something a secret, just give it to some kids and tell them to do some occult rituals or something with it. The Vatican Miracle Examiners will never connect it to the actual occult ritual murders going on.

And I mean, there's not any reason to think there would be a problem. Their first attempt at cloning Hitler _seemed_ to be doing fine at first. It turned out, though, that the clone of Hitler wasn't, well, he wasn't being very Hitler-y, no matter how much they drugged and brainwashed him. So they decided to try again with the Sister who first reported the that she was pregnant with God's love child to the Vatican Miracle Hotline. Except that when they did that, the first clone of Hitler got super jealous and was like "What, am I not Hitler enough?" and started murdering the other priests and writing runic Nazi crosses (not swastikas, regular crosses just with runes with cryptoquotes from Mein Kampf) in blood behind the altar.

Which, you know, put a certain amount of pressure on the masterminds of the drug trafficking mind control Hitler clone plan. Like, on one hand, they look at him and are like "That's our Hitler!" On the other hand, they didn't think that a brainwashed megalomaniacal would-be world conqueror would want to, like, kill them, or anything.

Well, it looks bad for our miracle examiners, because once they find the clone of Hitler he wants to kill them with an axe and either has miraculous Nazi powers or just fights like an anime character. The brainwashed army of Hitler youth are also following his commands to destroy them. There's only one thing for the Miracle Examiners: To throw holy water at clone-Hitler. Clone-Hitler of course laughs at this. "Holy water cannot hurt YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHH MY EYES THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING" and he gets so enraged he blows up the flask of holy water with his axe and sets him on fire and then the Nazi blimp with all the drugs on it blows up and the cult programming over the orphans is broken.

So there you are! Miracle, right? WRONG! See, haha, it turns out miracle examiners were pulling the ol' "sulfuric acid in place of holy water" switcheroo! Ha ha, that one's a classic. As for the blimp, ok yes blimps are notoriously flammable but in this case it didn't have anything to do with the sulfuric acid or the well-documented vulnerability of blimps to flame. See, remember the sexy nun and the guy who was having sex with her who got ritually murdered right after the pedophile priest? It turns out they weren't shtupping at all! They were undercover spies for a secret Zionist organization hunting down ex-Nazis. We find this out because being immolated by sulfuric acid didn't actually kill clone-Hitler and he comes back like Crocomire in Super Metroid but fortunately one of the other priests is a secret Zionist agent and saves them. On consideration I'm also not going to make a glib quip about Zionism, because you know what? It's just not that fucking funny.

Anyway everything turns out OK in the end. Well, hold on, wait, that Sister who made the original report is still pregnant with Hitler's clone-baby. Except, they conclude, this isn't actually a problem? I mean, it's not like evil is genetically inherited. Like Jesus pretty much says as much in at least one of the Gospels. Even if it was, which it isn't, I mean, just fuckin' baptize the kid. If it gets rid of original sin it oughta get rid of any sin that might be accrued as a result of being the clone of Hitler. As long as they don't, like, drug and brainwash the kid into thinking he's going to be the Dark Messiah who will bring on the Thousand-Year-Reich, he'll probably be fine. Again, this is actually a Good Take, something that's totally consistent with Catholic theology and something I personally believe as well.

So yeah. No problems. Our bishounen Miracle Examiners return to the Vatican and tell them, well, some things. Like, "Hey, so, uh, we found out that all of the Church's funds come from a Nazi front organization and are the profits of drug smuggling and insider trading." Oh, cool, their boss says, we totally definitely will do a full investigation. And the archbishop in charge? We are _not_ going to promote him to Cardinal until we're done with that investigation. Then one of the investigators says "Archbishop, have you ever run into something that made you... like... question your faith?" And their boss the Archbishop is like "Oh yeah, definitely, it's totally normal to question your faith when you find out that the entire church you've devoted yourself to was funded by a Nazi pedophile drug smuggling cult dedicated to reincarnating Hitler. It's in dark times like these that I hear the small still voice of God the most keenly. I will pray for you." And the Vatican Miracle Examiners say to each other, gee, the Archbishop is right. Faith is not an easy road to follow. Let's be strong and devoted in our faith!

OK I guess there's one last "depressingly accurate" bit. Sorry 'bout that.

Anyway I'm OK with the depressing bits because I was raised Catholic and even though I'm not a practicing Catholic right now I am still deeply committed to being miserable. Hopefully I didn't bum any of the rest of you out.

guess I don't need to watch that one then lol

if i've never seen a gundam series what is a good one to start with?

I liked the recent "Witch from Mercury" Gundam series, though it's a bit rushed toward the end--felt like another batch of episodes was planned and cancelled. It seemed designed for drawing in new fans to a degree: I had no prior knowledge of the franchise other than knowing "giant robots", and didn't find it difficult to follow.

downloading it now, thanks!

if you want to see how it began & get a handle on the main timeline watch the 3 compilation movies based on the original series Mobile Suit Gundam
if you can't handle the OG animation watch Gundam Seed, it's roughly the same but made 25 years later
if you want modern Gundam the recent series Witch From Mercury or Iron Blood Orphans are both good
if you want ridiculous melodrama nothing beats Gundam Wing
and if you want a show where Gundam designs based on ludicrous national sterotypes beat the crap out of each other there is G Gundam. the Netherlands one has a windmill on it!

https://i.imgur.com/PORcssR.jpeg

loool not the tequila gundam

thanks for the recs i'll check those out. i actually remember gundam seed way back in the day but i wasn't into anime yet apart from dumb dragonball z dub

everyone says "witch from mercury"
or "war in the pocket", sometimes people say that

ok they were def out of ideas for that jester gundam, could've at least given him a moustache

the Netherlands one has a windmill on it

omg take my money

Turn A Gundam is my favorite gundam series (and favorite mecha anime in general)

the original 1979 series is still a good watch too though! it holds up

gundam nerds will tell you to watch Turn A last because it represents a conclusion to the entire franchise, the trouble with that is you might never get to it and it's the best one

yeah that's what i've read in various places online (re: original series), it all sounds good which makes it harder to know which one to start with. i only get a short amount of time at the end of the day to watch this stuff, wish i had hours and hours to binge watch.

never even heard of Turn A, i'll see if nyaa has it!

Turn A is my fav too, but definitely not a starter one. don't leave it to the end tho!

the original 1979 series is still a good watch too though! it holds up

― ciderpress

the drama around tomino and the original ep 15 is kinda insane though

story i heard is that tomino when asked said it wasn't the off-model animation but he had an issue with someone who worked on the episode - he wouldn't say who, he just said "they know what they did"

ok mom

Some basic bitch choices from myself:

Frieren, mentioned somewhere above - Really loving this. The set up - Big Bad has been defeated, the villagers have celebrated the party, now what? - is such an obvious thing to do that I'm flabbergasted ithasn't been done before. It probably has! But this is a good take on it. Love Frieren's temporal disconnect with the humans, the party talking about how these past ten years shaped their lives and her basically just going "what? it was only ten years, what do you guys mean?". Also love the part where the cleric admits he has no idea if God exists or not, but that he believes there's a heaven because "it's just more conveninent if it exists". A little disappointed at the turn towards high fantasy because I had expected it to just continue in its meditative, peaceful way for the whole show but otoh it's pretty exciting stuff.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX movie - I've only seen the original series, and that cut to fit into movies, so was a little worried I wouldn't "get it", but actually the first 40 minutes of it were so much based on the stuff that I HAVE seen that I had no trouble following. I was getting a bit bored, though, despite the beautiful animation and vintage soundtrack, so it was a nice surprise when it switched gears to a cyberpunkish thing about undocumented migrants and underground gundam fighting rings. The Gundam fanboys behind me were not pleased. Online discourse seems to revolve mostly around arguing about the extent of Anno's involvement, which is a shame.

Frieren is indeed brilliant, though personally I wasn't crazy about the exam storyline in the last third or so. It felt kind of side-questy. I've heard the story gets back on track from manga readers, so looking forward to season two.

xp Anno's part is that first 40 minutes, the rest + the upcoming tv series version is directed by Tsurumaki (FLCL, Diebuster)

Yes that's the basics, but then the discourse goes into "Anno himself says this is mostly Tsurumaki's baby, doesn't make sense to view it as an Anno thing" vs "look he wrote the first 40 minutes, it's totally legitimate to see it as an Anno piece" and etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymwj0zcqnDw

fantastic AMV! particularly since cowboy bebop is so associated with Yoko Kanno for me. a lot of AMVs, it's very hard for me because i just don't relate to the music they're using at all.

hell we could do a whole thread of "AMVs for people who hate AMVs" probably :)

After playing this a few times I have discovered there are several different AMVs with it for different shows, seems to have been a Brazilian trend.

I never took a full dive into anime until the pandemic started. Before then I was big fan of cartoons and comic strips. I probably watched more animation TV shows than non-animated shows. I watched most of the Miyazaki movies and explored Lupin III a bit.

Pandemic hit and I watched the entire One Piece series (skipping the movies). Then I found my true love in cute girl anime comedies and binged watched mostly non-action anime ever since. Slice of life is great on its own but when I begin writing my manga I think I will try to have something for people that need drama and overarching plot to stay interested. Frankly, I want to put most of story building into the characters and not the plot.

But like any nerd I would love to share recommendations here.

never thought i would watch an AMV with Cartola, good job

Flopsy I would like to read your cute anime girl comedy recommendations

I kinda mixed two genres I like: Cute Girls Doing Cute Things and Comedy. Probably because when I think of writing manga that is what I will go for. Azumanga Daioh most perfectly fits the bill and is one of my top 5 animes for sure. The other 4 are Non-Non Biyori, K-On!, Yuru Camp (Laid Back Camp) and Hidamari Sketch. They have varying degrees of comedy. I probably could switch some out of my all-time Top 5 anime shows list but even if some other shows have been equally as good, they don't really fit together quite as nicely. After all, I had to branch out on shows to watch since *only* cute girls isn't exactly a huge genre and the bottom ranked shows are just as bad as any other.

For cute girl adventure/slice of life I recommend Girl's Last Tour and the lesser known So Ra No Wo To (Sound of the Sky).

Anime has quite a few good adventure and fantasy shows with or without cute girls. For example Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon) is excellent.

Frieren wasn't quite as good as Delicious. Like Duane said a few posts back - the exam storyline wasn't so great. For me, I didn't like how they had to have so much explanation because tons of new stuff was shoved in all at once. That one short guy had to talk a lot to keep up with the pace... But what really started to lower my enjoyment for an otherwise great show was when the two main teens seemed to stop showing anything else that would make them more interesting.

I know and love all these shows haha, especially Sora no Woto which is so underrated and the pop art explosion of Hidamari (I really want to rewatch this now!)
must admit I couldn't get past the cooking aspect in Dungeon Meshi which sent me to sleep, should try again.
I recommend back Windy Tales which is slice of life about girls in a photography club with a really out there art style, and Yuyushiki which really captures the daft funny conversations you used to have with friends after school.

i watched Galaxy Angel for the first time last year and it turns out that's still an all-timer comedy despite its cultural footprint vanishing after the 00s

Yuyushiki is definitely one of the top shows of that genre. I'll watch Windy Tales next. I love when a show has a unique art style that isn't just a one off experiment in an episode.

deeper down the mpb amv rabbit hole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqVwdOF9Vwo

omg

well, I guess this is the same feeling a 40-year old would have 20 years ago with those FLCL amvs with Speed King

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tHAtz0g4mE

last anime i watched was the 1997 OVA Eternal Family, which I knew nothing about and which apparently is by the guy behind Noiseman Sound Insect, which I guess makes sense. It's one of those things I watch and just say "Um, OK." That's a lot of what I watch. Somebody said I should watch "Too Many Losing Heroines!" so I put it on my to-watch list. Didn't actually watch it, but it's on my to-watch list.

All the Winter 2025 anime looked shitty so I didn't watch any of them. OK, Zenshuu looks OK. Apothecary Diaries Season 2, 100 Girlfriends Season 2. Then we're down to stuff like "knockoff Birdie Wing"... No, I'm not going to watch "Solo Leveling", my backlog is about a billion episodes long without my adding isekai to it unless it has something going for it other than sakuga.

Look at me, using anime nerd words, almost like I know what they mean.

only winter shows I watched were Apothecary Diaries S2 (excellent) and a couple episodes of Ameku MD (basically anime House MD)
Too Many Losing Heroines was surprisingly quite charming, worth a couple of episodes to see if you vibe with it
Spring watch - more Apothecary, really anticipating S2 of Shoshimin as I was kinda gobsmacked with the last couple episodes of S1, Lazarus could be mediocre but it's Watanabe directing with a soundtrack by Kawasi Washington & Floating Points so I have to watch, and I love the Kowloon Generic Romance manga (well, the first few volumes) but a bit worried how the anime will turn out. four shows, that's more than usual!

I continually enjoy Apothecary as a chill, thoughtful, beautiful and unique show. Dandadan was quite fun. Toilet-bound Hanako-kun S2 kept my interests up most of the time and I like the art style.

The shows with romance were less worth watching: Too Many Losing Heroines, Blue Box, Gigi Harem and Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian.

I feel like a degenerate after watching a few episodes of an echhi.

Ecchi

which ecchi? they can be so different. i finally watched food wars after hearing all the time about how great it was, even though the premise sounded pretty ick to me, and it's... surprisingly wholesome?

so ok i don't super get the stuff that goes viral

this week it's a pseudo-anime show called "PUNCH PUNCH FOREVER"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ndBoc6R8_A

and it just looks like early studio trigger? like "space patrol luluco" or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKbPXBfvbZY

am i missing something?

dialogue excerpts from Lupin III Part II, Episode 114, "The Secret of the First Supper" (first broadcast December 17, 1979):

FUJIKO: Do you remember ten years ago when that prominent supernatural researcher, Dr. Nesser, went missing?
JIGEN: Wasn't he the guy who figured out how to produce X-ray vision in people? Wait, so you mean..?
FUJIKO: Nesser spent the last ten years developing those eye drops Zenigata is using. That woman's name is Nova, and she's Nesser's sponsor.
LUPIN: Nova, huh? She's so hot.
FUJIKO: By the way, does this painting look familiar?
LUPIN: Yeah, Jesus's masterpiece. Grandpa left it behind.
FUJIKO: Right. Jesus made that 2,000 years ago. He painted it over a parchment that had the location of an inheritance he got from the Virgin Mary. When Judas, Christ's disciple, found out about it, he wanted he treasure for himself, so he stole the painting. Then, he sold out Jesus to the Roman authorities for 30 silver coins. But since Judas was never able to solve the secret, the painting went to his descendants, and eventually passed into myth. Then, at the start of the 19th century, after learning of the legend, a famous thief stole the painting from the home of Judas's descendant.
LUPIN: That was my grandpa, Lupin the First.
FUJIKO: After a scuffle between the two, the painting was torn in half. Ever since, Judas's descendant has had one half, and the other half has been here, in Lupin the First's hideout.
GOEMON: So that woman is Judas's descendant, after the other half of the painting?
FUJIKO: Yes. All of this was in an old diary I found in a study on the second floor.
JIGEN: Now that we know this, Lupin... We should steal the other half of the map from that woman and take Jesus's stuff for ourselves!

LATER:

LUPIN: So Jesus buried his inheritance under the stable where he was born. Hey, got anything?
GOEMON: A vase. Perhaps the inheritance is within?
LUPIN: What the?
FUJIKO: It's a baby bottle the Virgin Mary used to feed baby Jesus.
JIGEN: Friggin' crap. The inheritance is just this thing? A baby bottle?
FUJIKO: I guess for Jesus, this might be more valuable than any gemstone, seeing as it's the bottle used to raise him from a child.
LUPIN: I prefer Fujiko's mommy milkers to Jesus's baby bottle any day.

END EPISODE

lol, love the irreverence japanese media has for western religions (see also Shin Megami Tensei)
how about that fifth episode of CITY tho, hoo boy Kyoani still got it

city is amazing, i've watched most of kyoani's stuff so i know how high a level they're working on and yet i can still hardly believe something that looks like this exists as a real full-length tv anime and not, like, a short film. nichijou was already an all-timer and i think this one's outright better so far.

lol, love the irreverence japanese media has for western religions (see also Shin Megami Tensei)

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi)

i take it less as "irreverence" and more as "um, that's.. an interesting understanding you have"

i did actually have to do some reading on the history of breastfeeding. why would jesus need a baby bottle? even if jesus was a virgin birth, mary should theoretically still have been able to breastfeed him, no? it turns out though that there are documented baby bottles going back to 2000 years BCE, typically for, like, formula and stuff. i can't see why jesus would have needed one.

nah i'm more like... wait. so they know exactly where the stable jesus was born is located. and nobody really gives a shit, it's just, like, an empty stable that a gang of international thieves can waltz into and start digging in. i mean it's not like it's an ancient archaeological site. it's not like the _literal baby bottle used to feed the infant christ_ would have any value whatsoever. a painting _made by jesus christ_, similarly, no value, the only thing it's good for is you can use it to find some diamonds or something.

i mean maybe this made sense to people before indiana jones and the last crusade came out. idk.

i can't keep up with anime, or much of anything really. city sounds cool, tho!

btw did you know that Jesus is buried in Japan? https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/528/

i believe it

Those pilgrims going to Fatima or Lourdes every year lack ambition!

A bartender I know recommended the “Bartender: glass of god” series. Anyone seen it?