[Abyss]

 Darkwatch, on 22 December 2010 - 08:43 PM, said:

 Tapper, on 22 December 2010 - 11:15 AM, said:

* waits for Darkwatch to go on a crusade *

I hope the wait hasn't been too long.

Now. I assume you all know my position and so to save us all a whole bunch of grief, just imagine that I've gone off an a rant and I'll imagine that you've all gone and ignored it.

So here are some pictures.

That was totally worth the wait.

[stone monkey]

I'm quite fond of Yukikaze. So much so that I've read one of the original novels it's based on (by Chohei Kambayashi; it's also very good)

Gurren Lagaan and Neon Genesis Evangelion are series I've promised myself to get around to watching one day, whether I will or not is another thing though :S

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 22 December 2010 - 09:06 PM

[Adjutant Stormy~]

 QuickTidal, on 22 December 2010 - 11:30 AM, said:

SUMMER WARS....by the folks that brought you THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME.....just awesome.

The girl who leapt through time was fucking amazing!

[Illuyankas]

Quote

K-On!

 1277073721029.jpg (140.93K)
Number of downloads: 0

[Baco Xpuch]

My favorites are, in descending order:
Full Metal Alchemist (yeah, it has it's childish parts but it's also pretty great in the long run). I loved the homunculi and the fantasy aspects of the alchemy.
Ergo Proxy - it's like Blade Runner meets (damn I can't figure out how to hide a spoiler).
Cowboy Bebop - just damn good stuff
Ghost in the Shell
Gundam Wing
Samurai Champloo
Death Note
Neon Genisis Evangelion
Big O
Gun X Sword
Code Geass
Elfen Lied
Outlaw Star

Movies:
Full Metal Alchemist
Cowboy Bebop
Akira
Karas
Ghost in the Shell

However, my favorite animated show period is Venture Brothers.

I know I'm forgetting some but that's the gist of it. Actually, I'm dying for some more good anime; I'll have to check out that Summer Wars, the Girl who Lept through Time, Buccano!, Monster, and the rest. Can I find these on Hulu or somewhere else online?

[pathos]

FLCL Is pretty cool..... good luck knowing WTF is going on.


Darker than black was one of my favs cause it is short (season 1) and very entertaining....Naruto and bleach are cool if you can skip the filler i suppose.


Also heard good things about full metal alchemist brotherhood.

Dont know what it was called but the first 2 arcs of an anime about a samurai who was a killer but swears off killing and uses a reverse sword was also very enjoyable... Y something or other

[amphibian]

 Pathos, on 23 December 2010 - 06:22 AM, said:

Naruto and bleach are cool if you can skip the filler i suppose.

The Naruto filler is complete and utter horseshit.

The Bleach filler is 99.9% pretty good actually. The Bount arc was amazing. Some real emotion, good arc and great fights. I didn't think the Zanpakuto arc was as good, but it was still entertaining.

[pathos]

. The Bount arc was? seen it all up till just after the Zanpakuto arc...



Not bad but waiting very week for something that does not add to the main plot sucks

[Bulwyf]

Off the top of my head, I think my favorite anime movie is currently "Sword of the Stranger."
Princess Mononoke is a classic goody I recently rewatched.

Haven't seen it in a long time, but Berserk (series) was awesome (someone already mentioned it).

I just saw the first 11 or so episodes of Highschool of the Dead, and I liked it. Heh, it kind of goes overboard with fanfare thou ^^ (Zombie-Apocalypse story)

The first Street Fighter anime was very decent compared to any other video game to anime adaptation, I'd probably still have liked it if I hadn't been a fan of the game first.

Gantz was a pretty good series, different and wierd but good.

[QuickTidal]

 Bulwyf, on 28 December 2010 - 04:42 PM, said:

The first Street Fighter anime was very decent compared to any other video game to anime adaptation, I'd probably still have liked it if I hadn't been a fan of the game first.

That fantastic opening sequence with Ryu fighting Sagat on a windblown plain of grass will always stick with me as one of my fave anime scenes ever.

This one:

[D'rek]

Read or Die - It's your basic pseudo-amateur-super-hero premise, but with some really strange themes. The main characters of each series are bibliophiles with the weird super-power of being able to manipulate paper telekinetically. There's very few other characters with other powers, so it's more like Kick-Ass than X-men. There's two separate series in this - the Read or Die OVA (Original Video Animation), which is like a movie, though it divides into 3 half-hour episodes. Then there's the 26-episode R.O.D. the TV series, which has different main characters, with cameos from OVA characters. The tv series is something of a sequel to the OVA, so you should watch the OVA, and if you like it then go and get the tv series (if you don't, well you only lost an hour and a half of your life).

Ergo Proxy - Unlike everyone who mentioned it above, I don't recommend this show. Or, watch the first few episodes and then stop. As soon as the antagonist leaves the city the show follows him instead of the original protaganist and the tone changes completely, imo becoming much boringer. Nothing is explained in the actual episodes, so instead there's little explanation episodes that are completely disjoint from the rest of the show (one of which is the characters randomly appearing on a game show to test their knowledge of their own show, explaining everything they didn't explain in the actual episodes here, etc.)

FLCL (aka Fuli Culi) - Agree with those who mentioned it above, it is a great little 6-episode show. After half a dozen viewings you will still not understand it completely, but there is still something there to be understood rather than just being completely random. For the most part though you just want to sit back and have fun watching the craziness of it, though.

Reboot - agree with all above, absolutely excellent show and when it came out the CG was incredible. Not so much now, but still intensely enjoyable. Plus the computer lingo has actually become fairly well-known so you'll get a lot of the puns, as opposed to when it came out in the mid-90s and nobody knew that "dot matrix" was a computer term, let alone what it means. (That being said, this isn't anime, so why are we talking about it?)

Other recommendations from above that I agree with:

Full Metal Alchemist
Neon Genesis Evangelion

Other shows I'd recommend:

Wolf's Reign - it's about sentient wolves disguised as people in a pseudo-dystopian future. Not shapeshifters, they just appear as wolves to people, so they have a hard time blending in.

Baccano! - as one reviewer put it: "Nothing makes the Great Depression sexier than alchemy battles and good-looking mafia hitmen"

Haibane Renmei - a bit of a weird but thinkymeatz one, it's about angels that hatch from eggs and live in a walled, isolated town.

Mushi-shi - a very zen-like show, it's episodic and usually pretty laid back in pace, taking time for more philosophical musings than a Malazan soldier.

Azumanga Daioh - Unlike most of these series, which go for epic futuristic plots and events, this is more of a sitcom. It's about a bunch of high school girls, but they're all quirky or eccentric in their own way and the humour is just the right amount of random. The subtitles of the opening sequence contains the phrase "everyday the fluffy temptation of wheat", though I have no idea how accurate of a translation that is.

[amphibian]

Muay Thai always gives Karate a problem. It's just a bad, bad stylistic match-up for the karateka. Machida-Shogun I and II conclusively proved this.

Good opening scene that though. Sagat has been my favorite Street Fighter character since always.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 28 December 2010 - 06:51 PM

[Bulwyf]

Has no one else seen Sword of the Stranger?

It's bad ass samurai fighting like Ninja Scroll without any of the freak-a-deak awkward bisexual and nudity poisons type scenes.
I don't think there're any of the odd culture differences in it actually. You could watch it with someone not used to anime and not be embarrassed

[Dag]

 Bulwyf, on 28 December 2010 - 04:42 PM, said:

Off the top of my head, I think my favorite anime movie is currently "Sword of the Stranger."

"Sword of the Stranger", while I wouldn't count it to my favouritest favourite anime, is very good - visually beautiful and with stunningly well done fighting scenes. The story is a bit of a mess, but I guess they did their best to cut the plot (which has a potential to be much richer and more complex) down to size of a two-hour movie.

Quote

Princess Mononoke is a classic goody I recently rewatched.

Yes, "Princess Mononoke" is IMO probably Miyazaki's best. Very depressing, though - I think I will wait a bit until I get that one for my nephews...

But now that you've mentioned it, the name reminded me of a very cool (and little known) series called "Mononoke", a story-wise pretty unconventional anime done in a visually impressive Jugendstil-meets-ukiyo-e style. It's a spin-off of "Ayakashi", which I also enjoyed very much, but I prefered "Mononoke" - much weirder, much more abstract and much more fun.

This post has been edited by Dag: 02 January 2011 - 02:25 PM

[Darkwatch]

 Abyss, on 22 December 2010 - 08:58 PM, said:

 Darkwatch, on 22 December 2010 - 08:43 PM, said:

 Tapper, on 22 December 2010 - 11:15 AM, said:

* waits for Darkwatch to go on a crusade *

I hope the wait hasn't been too long.

Now. I assume you all know my position and so to save us all a whole bunch of grief, just imagine that I've gone off an a rant and I'll imagine that you've all gone and ignored it.

So here are some pictures.

That was totally worth the wait.

Why I do not like anime/manga.

1. The quality.

The main problem I have with these things is the overall quality in art and in story.
I understand where the art quality discrepency comes from. Manga/Anime artists do not have guilds/unions, so they're like entry level service industry employees. Interchangeable with no forms of stable job security.
The deadlines are incredibly short for books that need to be about nearly 100 pages long. So artists found ways to simplify their art so they could go faster, and also to use abstractions instead of details (hence why half the panels in a manga are lines). For Anime the problem is similar. They recycle scenes or set up a shot in which nothing happens to avoid animating anything.
Dragonball is the most known offender of recycling scenes and having episodes where there's about 30 seconds of animation, mostly just a character's mouth. All to save time and money.
Even higher end productions do not escpae this. Ghost in a Shell has a quite a few moments where you could see budget concerns shine through. Akira as such avoids this the most of all the animes I've seen.
The problem is only compounded by the fact that most companies recruit in Shin-doji now. Shin-doji are conventions, fan conventions. So most of the artists and writers are fan artists and writers which explains the derivative nature of a lot of the stuff that is produced.

Story wise well... There's the sheer lack of any form of subtely. I remember seeing some Anime in which there was a sphere that was a sentient Platonic Cave flying around. Really? It's as if the story writers skimmed over an introduction to whatever subject matter they wanted to include in a children's book. While it usually is imaginative in most cases it's very poorly focused and rarely coherent.
Everything is woven in so badly it's like some one tried to sew together a suit with a sledgehammer. The exposition scene in Ghost in a Shell comes to mind. Or the bloodline revelation in Evangelion also returns to memory. The lack of coherence is they explain the two aforementioned examples (which are self evident) as if they were talking to children and yet make no attempt to explain any of their internal logic of universal continuity for other things (Evangelion specifically, GiS not so much) which are far far more convoluted and downright silly.
The writers rarely grasp what they're doing. I find it shows, but in some cases someone can look deep even if they don't know what they're talking about by dropping the right words (buzz words) or mundane symbolism.

So few have a really good story, most of the eleged depth is just vague references that are open to wide interpretation which lets obessed otaku create their own depth. Kind of like astrology, or abstract art. Oh look symbolic imagery! We're deep now! No, no you are not.
Also I do not understand how fans of any Anime with big robots running into each other with a terrible story can hate Micheal Bay's Transformers. And no Shia LeBoeuf does not count as a legit reason since most Anime characters are so stereotypical and unlikeable as to be worse.
They're also regularly repetitive in nature (yes western stuff is bad to but no one seems to mind when Anime does it, double standard).


Manga/Anime archtypes:
a) The Cloud Strife - I'm sad. I could beat every one but I'm sad. Oh no the bad guy made me cry and took my *insert relation here*. Whine. Overcome moodiness, beat bad guy, go back to brooding. Body of a 13 year old girl.
b ) The 8 year old psychopathic school girl
c) The innocent and helpless school girl
d) The older physically bigger more stable male character, who actually tries to do something but isn't up to the BBG, must wait for the Cloud Strife to stop crying.
e) The older dangerous/Spaced out woman - See Ninja Scrolls (the scene where she gets "controlled" is just retarded) or Yuffie.
f) The Vincent Valentine / (possibly) Compotent Male lead - See Ninja Scrolls.
g) The sage / pseudo-deep thinker of either sex and of any age.

There, play mix and match and you've got a good deal of most animes and mangas today. Again, western stuff is bad to, still why no complaints for anime/manga?

2. The cultural gap

I was going to name this point either: "Weird Japanese Narratives" or "Poor respect".
It would be massively unfair to say that though since there is a culture gap I cannot for the life of me bridge when it comes to pop-Japan. My own failing really. For the second the lack of any respect when they set up re-imaginings is well on par with western developpers so I can't fault them there either.
In this case it's not so much the anime/manga itself but the culture surrounding it. Otaku take it to extremes that would put most Trekkies to shame. One of my friends threw a fit when they changed the colour of Hermoines dress from blue to pink in the Goblet of Fire but found it awesome that Arthur was now a girl in Fate/Stay Night. Somehow one is worse than the other. Changing the colour of the dress is inconsequential since it had no importance in the story. Arthur's gender is crucial to the Arthurian cycle. Turning him into a woman and getting rid of Guinevere and Lancelot breaks the Drama. It breaks the character. I won't even get into what they did with other legendary figures.
Otaku don't care they run on double stantards. The massive amount of stuff Anime writers have taken bad lisence with is equal to the American tendency to ruin cultural identity. Though Otaku rage only against things like the Dragonball Evolution movie (which I considered Karmic) while non-otaku go on indiscriminate nerdrage.
Then we can get into all the weird hentai and loli, but that's easy. More disturbing is the 2D love phenomenon which actually exists and is probably why you heard of Japanese Love pillows including the XXX ones made by private companies like "Furnace of Child Love" which is the actual English translation...
Cosplay... Animegao
Seriously there are bloody limits. For every awesome cosplay there are tens of thousands of outright disturbing ones. I can understand it to a degree but not to the point it's taken. Yes I know western cons started this, but they not take it so far. It is not an afterschool activity, it should not encourage the Animegao stuff. Any of us would laugh at the nutjobs who go out and get their ears surgically changed to look like elves of vulcans. I know this isn't surgery but it occurs far more often (every day!) and some how it's less insane?


That's it for now.


Also ReBoot is not an Anime. It was made in Canada in direct lineage to western animation in 3D.

[amphibian]

 Darkwatch, on 31 December 2010 - 05:18 AM, said:

They recycle scenes or set up a shot in which nothing happens to avoid animating anything.

[...]

Story wise well... There's the sheer lack of any form of subtlety.

Everything is woven in so badly it's like some one tried to sew together a suit with a sledgehammer. [...] The writers rarely grasp what they're doing. I find it shows, but in some cases someone can look deep even if they don't know what they're talking about by dropping the right words (buzz words) or mundane symbolism.

I don't know if you've watched it already, but One Piece is the sole Japanese show that I have ever watched that avoids both of these problems. The story avoids any pretensions of earth-shatteringly deepness and focuses upon delivering a really fun saga with plenty of inventive ass-kicking. One of the few hallmarks of an excellent show is that a sophisticated audience member should not be able to predict everything that will happen next.

One Piece consistently surprises, both in narrative arc, in character development and in the fights themselves. Everything fits, yet very little of the big pieces can be anticipated ahead of time - just like most of The Wire. It's a tight ship they run and the more I watch it, the more I realize that this series is the result of a creative team (mostly the originator of the comic) that is truly aware of what works, why it works and how to get characters from Point A to wherever they need to go in a way that makes sense.

Just about everything else in Japanese and Western animation suffers from narrative problems. Except Adventure Time. That short burst of insanity is near perfect on a regular basis.

Quote

So few have a really good story, most of the alleged depth is just vague references that are open to wide interpretation which lets obessed otaku create their own depth. Kind of like astrology, or abstract art. Oh look symbolic imagery! We're deep now! No, no you are not.

Also part of the reason why I could never get into Evangelion.

[Shinrei]

Studio Ghibli, just about anything is good.

Rurouni Kenshin
Cowboy Bebop (just the soundtrak alone is unbelievable)
Death Note

are probably my favorites.

Didnt like the original evangelion, BUT, have like the re-released movies enough to buy them (waiting impatiently for 3 and 4).

I need a new manga recommendation for japanese reading practice. Anyone?
Previous favorite mangas include:
Hana no Keiji
GTO
Rurouni Kenshin

I`ve just started watching Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star). Totally violent and very simplistic, but I no longer need to take steroids just by the act of watching it.

[worry]

Berserk is indeed awesome, and should appeal to Malazan fans, but it's only got one season and ends with a brutal, totally blue-balling cliffhanger of the highest proportions. I'd still recommend it though.

Azumanga Daioh is cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute to the nth degree, but also takes cute schoolgirly anime to some of its most bizarre extremes. It is often hilarious and occasionally quite touching along the way.

[Soulessdreamer]

Paranora Agent was a bit WTF

Helsing is a series I reccommend

Mad Bull 34 is a cool cop movie

TTFN

[Chance]

 worrywort, on 02 January 2011 - 07:02 AM, said:

Berserk is indeed awesome, and should appeal to Malazan fans, but it's only got one season and ends with a brutal, totally blue-balling cliffhanger of the highest proportions. I'd still recommend it though.

One should however recommend the manga instead of the anime when it comes to Berserker, or read the manga after seeing the anime.

The manga is gorgeous, is indeed somewhat malazanish, does not end with a cliffhanger (it does not end). Only downside is the very irregular publishing of new episodes.

/Chance