I look special.

hylian_elf wrote:

Bollockoff wrote:

Totoro is kind of dull and boring tbh.

Dieeeeeee!!!!!!

It's OK I might like Pom Poko.

Am I the only one who thinks Totoro is a really sad tale of 2 girls escaping reality to get through the fact their mother is incredibly sick?

Likewise.

It's more like reality/nature bends itself to help them imo.

I really enjoyed Pom Poko despite/because of it's messiness and hyperactivity. Takahata has a veerrrry different style to Zaki and I prefer the former's take on lamenting the development of Japanese countryside over Totoro's.

Kiki's D Service - Fun low-stakes witchery with cool Stockholm inspired buildings and a FUCKING EXCITING FINAL 5 MINUTES

Whisper of the Heart - Weirdly unsatisfying ending. Nice singing. Lots of quality bants between friends winding each other up. Easy to tell it isn't a Miyazaki film because it's generally cheerier. Introduced me to Naohisa Inoue.

This piece is fun. Lain is a pretty decent cartoon if you haven't seen it.

Lain's great, though I burned myself by choosing as part of my dissertation topic. His read's good. I think you can go deeper, but my favourite part of the show is still how the nascent-internet like thing they called the wired is depicted as omnipresent in the shadows and electricity wires that cover the world.

Been struggling to focus as of late so anime and mange are my go to comfort blanket media.

Steins;Gate - pretty good anime based of a visual novel. Manages to re-arrange elements of said VN into a decent timeline of events that makes for a pretty compelling time travel tragedy narrative. English dub isn't entirely rotten, so I sailed through this pretty quickly without much of a care. It has its dodgy elements, mostly from its VN roots, but the end is a quite effective story that subverts a few of its tropes quite handily.

Devilman Crybaby - Lewd and crude anime based on an old 70s manga. The art style is really loose and colourful, and the titillation and gore are cranked up to 11. The central premises keeps twisting, and it goes quite far in its handful of episodes, and it feels like Parasyte at times, one of its stable mates. I guess there was market for that stuff then, but I think Parasyte worked well whereas Crybaby does not. Maybe the original Manga holds up better.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica - Gen Urobuchi's famous magical girl anime that you should absolutely watch if you like getting fucked up. The premise is simple, witches invade real space and kill people, forming strange lairs that look like a cross between a Fine Art collage and a Klimt painting. A strange white cat creature offers girls the chance to make a wish and become a magical girl to save the world from the witches. But, it has a price.

Made in Abyss - A giant abyss styled after Dante's Inferno has become the centre of a thriving spelunking culture in a city filled with orphans. One day a young girl meets a strange robot boy and soon after recovers a letter from her mother, and decides to head off into the very depths of the abyss to find out what happened at the terminal layer. Going down is fraught with danger, but coming up generally means certain death. It starts off looking like the cutest adventure anime in the world, and ends up being something massively different. The manga pushes some boundaries that I didn't think I had. It's not finished yet, but worth tracking down.

Yeah it was waaaay too horny. General problem with a lot of anime though. Made in Abyss is great fun but Tsukushi's art coupled with the subject matter sometimes goes from juxtaposition to troubling. Kemonozume sounds a bunch like Parasyte, even the art is similar (regular boi with One Big Hand) but that's probably due to the latter being a homage to the former. It probably happens a bunch more than I am equipped to deal with, like even Puella heavily riffs on Bokurano, which is something I only have cursory knowledge of. It was seeing lots of weird chairs that set me off on the hunt.

What put you off?

Oh, it gets much worse than that.

Hmmm, so it looks incredible, but hearing about the differences between the manga and the anime, I think I’ll watch the anime.

There’s some stuff with the characters, in the manga specifically it seems, that I just can’t get past. I know it’s ‘a cultural thing’, but I think it’s a really shitty and indefensible cultural thing.

Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about this btw. Just what I’ve read about it.

Rattled through a few more

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

This is the one that generally sits comfortably atop the best of lists, seemingly indestructible. Hiromu Arakawa's defining work, a shounen written by (gasp!) a woman, that manages to sidestep a bunch of the inevitable crassness of most shounen, and is also fairly condensed and well paced to boot. Brotherhood is a direct adaptation of the manga, as opposed to the original 2003 FMA, which goes really bizarre after the first third and does its own thing. There are pros and cons to this - Brotherhood is definitely well thought through from beginning to end, but the pacing means that the earlier stuff isn't given time to properly settle and it can feel a bit breakneck. What I really liked about this, beyond the smart use of setting and theme to reinforce its messages, are how it refused to just be about the to central characters. By the end its about a lot of different people, a real ensemble cast of good folk, villains, people caught in between with their own issues and feelings. It feels like a great companion piece to Avatar/Korra, not just in the elemental magic, but in the way it neatly deals with some adult ideas and serious themes without ever becoming too grim or nasty. It's not the best thing I've ever watched, but I happily chewed through all 60 odd episodes without ever feeling bored.

Dennou Coil - Now this is a good one. An anime i'd recommend to anyone, which is high praise. Directed and written by Mitsuo Iso, who has had a long, long career in animation, it's a blindingly well made program that spends a long time setting up the rules and laws of its world, to deliver a really neat and well packaged story that touches on some interesting and culturally relevant themes. Essentially a mystery story following a bunch of kids as they live their life in a city that has fully given itself over to AR technology. Everyone wears glasses and people own AR pets. The world is made to look better by the inclusion of AR assets in real life, and the line between reality and technology is blurred. It feels in many ways like a more straightforward and less meditative follow up to Serial Experiments Lain. That may sell the ruminations it has on modern technology short, but it always feels very accessible. Aired on NHK in a traditional children's programming slot, it builds a complex world and reinforces its ideas quite a lot, but it definitely isn't just for children. Unlike a lot of anime the quality of animation is incredible from start to finish. It looks and feels like a Ghibli film, but is 26 episodes long. It also has a wonderful standout episode called "Daichi's Hair Begins to Grow" which may just be one of the best episodes of an anime I can care to name.

The Tatami Galaxy - an adaptation of a campus novel by Masaaki Yuasa, the director behind the brilliant Mind Games (and Ping-Pong, which I haven't seen) The Tatami Galaxy follows the trials and tribulations of a freshman student as they try to navigate the social milieu of University life, and figure out their social standing amongst a weird group of individuals. It's really refreshingly animated and oscillates between heartfelt and hilarious without skipping a beat. There's a very obvious twist to the story in episode one that sets up the subsequent story quite nicely, but its resolution is even better, and the penultimate episode is a fantastic mixed media exploration of animation which is so nice to see in Anime which can often seem quite generic and static.

Thumbs up for all.