What ANIMATION are you VIEWING?

Finished Girls Last Tour recently. It's a slow-burn anime that follows two girls as they travel through a giant dead city in a tank-cycle thing and ponder some mild philosophy while scavenging for food and fuel. I really enjoyed it despite its kind of sad premise that almost everyone on Earth died long before they were born. The animation was really good and it was hard not to just always watch the next episode.




Edit: Oops! Duplicate thread: therewillbe.games/forum/35-mos-eisley-ca...ime-are-you-watching

I'm watching a show on Amazon Prime called Babylon about a fictional city in Japan that rivals Tokyo. The newly elected Mayor passes a law promoting suicide, and suddenly a lot of people start offing themselves. There is a mysterious woman involved, who has the power to basically bend people to her will.

I have enjoyed the episodes I have seen and will likely watch all of it.

update: 6 eps in, and DAMN this show got dark

I’ve been watching Evangelion, it’s been 20+ years since I’ve seen it. It’s a bummer because the show is simultaneously incredible and insufferable. It has some the best mecha stuff ever in it. It goes deep and gets really weird. But it is also full of vile, skeevy sex stuff that makes it embarrassing to watch. It’s one thing to have the fan service, it’s another when you’ve got a male character dropping his pants in front of females or a character selling secret photos of a 15 year old classmate. It’s seriously some pervy shit and not in a healthy way especially when you remember that these shows were made mostly by men for teenage boys. I had thought that maybe I’d watch it with the kids remembering it more as a PH kind of thing but it is pretty gross. I could live forever and not ever see the anime trope of the big breasts in the foreground and the shocked/blushing/nose bleeding teen boy freaking out in the background.

It all really undermines the solid, sophisticated science fiction that is here. It’s thoughtful and challenging. It completely revises the “super robot” concept, it recasts everything from Mazinger to Gundam to Macross in an entirely differently light. What if it were HORRIBLE to pilot a giant robot?

Those are some interesting series, I've never heard of them! Perhaps I should check them out.

Michael Barnes wrote: I’ve been watching Evangelion, it’s been 20+ years since I’ve seen it. It’s a bummer because the show is simultaneously incredible and insufferable. It has some the best mecha stuff ever in it. It goes deep and gets really weird. But it is also full of vile, skeevy sex stuff that makes it embarrassing to watch.

That's the worst part of anime. Like you say, it's not simply a sexy character, it's a very creepy kind of stuff that is wrong on a deeper level. It's pandering to creepy weirdos with awful tastes and very questionable morals.

The best anime I've seen lately is Kaguya-sama: Love is War. It's probably the best romantic comedy I've seen. It's funny, has actual character progression, every scene has some fun animation or editing trick that makes it fun to watch and the characters have actual depth. Most importantly it dodges (or mocks) every single tired cliché. Despite the high school setting, it was actually published in a seinen (adult) magazine and treats itself accordingly.

The premise is simple: Love is War and whoever confesses first, loses. Hence, no matter how much our protagonists love each other, they won't bulge and try to make the other confess first. It's fun, it's touching and has none of the creepy stuff found in other anime or romatic comedies in general. Can't recommend it enough.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Evangelion, and I recall some uncomfortable interactions that were designed to be uncomfortable and not sexy, really.

Not to discount any of what you may perceive or feel, but that show isn’t meant for children and it is a show about emotional, physical and social discomfort (inspired by the life experiences of the creator). From strained parent-child relationships to adults that live with insecurities and personal demons, everything about that show is people struggling to stop (or partake in) the coming Christian apocalypse while also struggling internally.

Its primary protagonist is an awkward and whiny teenager that can really grate on the show’s audience as well as his fellow characters.

The philosophical presentation is dense and the show doesn’t explain anything to you.
There’s a lot to admire and appreciate but it’s absolutely not something that everyone is going to even want to bother with.

There are shows I’ve seen that I feel are just awful in the ways you mention, like Elfen Lied.

Being an old guy now, I still really love Robotech. I struggle to understand why Harmony Gold decided to include needless nudity of teen girls from the original Japanese shows for what is a series that is really only watched by middle aged fans driven by nostalgia, who’d want to share the show with their families but will hesitate to now.

It's been a little while since I've watched a new episode, but I've been plugging away through My Hero Academia and Hunter x Hunter, both of which are on Netflix in the Philippines. My Hero Academia was the early favorite after a season or two, and it's one of the most popular shows here, so it offers me some cultural fluency. But I think that Hunter x Hunter might win the war, because its characters feel more varied to me and because I just like its tone a lot more.

When quarantine started I went through both Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (pretty good, but frustratingly vague when I wanted specifics) and also Evangelion. I liked both, but as someone who has a huge tolerance for weirdly inconclusive and somewhat masturbatory finales, Evangelion was still a bit of a stretch for me.

My girlfriend is really into anime, but I'm a lot pickier about it and rarely watch any. But I have heard the name Demon City Shinjuku ring out a number of times over the years, and a bit of it showed up in my recent viewing of Johnny Mnemonic. So I figured if characters in Johnny Mnemonic were watching Demon City Shinjuku in 2021, maybe I could watch it in 2021.

Well, I could, thanks to Amazon Prime, and yet I couldn't. I got about 15 minutes in, and it just felt slow and full of lifeless cliches. I bailed and deleted it from my queue, because it was worse than almost everything else that I have seen in recent months.

I have seen that film! Although I don't remember anything that happens in it. I have a fondness for that era of anime, and tend to watch whatever I can find. Something about the gritty style that was common then. Ironically, I would never watch live action shitty movies, but if it is anime, sign me up.

If you enjoyed Attack On Titan, then the same studio (Wit Studio) did a similar series in 2016 called Kabaneri Of The Iron Fortress. It's a post-apocalyptic zombie series where humanity is forced to retreat into large armored stations connected by rail lines. Two main characters (aka Kabaneri) who end up becoming hybrid bio-weapon good-guys travel aboard a steam train traveling between stations to defeat the rapidly overrunning zombie (aka Kabane) menace. Requires very little thinking & possesses next-to-no pseudo-philosophical pondering that can make anime so insufferable.

Currently available on Amazon Prime.

Oh certainly Evangelion isn’t intended for kids...but I remembered it as being more “PG”...I’m pretty liberal about what I let them watch, if it’s artful and culturally significant I’m more open to the PG and even R level stuff as long as it’s not gratuitously violent or sexualized in a negative way. For example, I’m OK with them watching Akira. But the skeevy pedo stuff- definitely a hard stop.

There are definitely a lot of intentionally awkward and in fact awful interactions between characters...and these would be compelling and complex if not for the *boing sound* boob shots. Any attempt at getting into these complicated dynamics is undermined by the lame fan service.

It’s like watching 2001: A Space Oddysey and suddenly there’s a teenage girl in hot pants bending over and wiggling her ass and we cut to Dave with a comically distorted face, sweating.

I’m in a bit of an anime stretch right now, but that usually means “time to rewatch Cowboy Bebop”. I may finally do the rest of JoJo because that show is absolutely amazing. Really want to go back and watch Crusher Joe, Megazone 23, and Space Cobra again too, the 80s stuff never disappoints.

Robotech is almost as important to me as Star Wars. I think I’ve memorized almost every episode except Southern Cross. I practically worshipped that show when it was on. I think Miriya Sterling was probably my first crush, when she beats Max at the Veritech arcade game I was the one with the comically distorted face and sweating. Everyone likes the Macross part the best and it is the best, but the whole Invid/Genesis Climber Mospeada series was almost as good.

I don’t know about that new Ghibli movie...I mean, you put rock n’ roll witches in something and I could not possibly be more here for it but the CGI looks oddly cheap and dated.

Ha! I literally finished a re-watch of Cowboy Bebop yesterday. Spoiler alert... it holds up.

I do think some Black characters are done in a bit of a racist style. That is the only knock against it.

I watched one of the special features, and there was an interview with Shinichiro Watanabe (the director). He said he wanted to do something completely different, not just remixing what had come previously. He sure crushed that goal.

Same with Miriya.

I always liked Mospeada the best. Something so sad and melancholy about it. The episode (Edit: "Ghost Town") where the three crazy old soldiers go out in a blaze of glory always gets me in the feels every time.

I finally decided to try anime in the early '90s, and unfortunately, my first random selection at the video store was the first two movies in the Overfiend series. The first one was the first anime to ever get slapped with an NC-17 rating, but my video store just put it in with the rest of the anime. The second is apparently infamous for the Nazi Death-Rape Machine. It was a few years before I tried anime again, but fortunately it was Ghost in the Shell.

Cowboy Bebop has a fantastic theme song, and it was clearly the inspiration for Firefly. I love Firefly but I dislike Cowboy Bebop because I dislike all the Cowboy Bebop characters. I disliked Ed the most, because she was such an annoying excuse for comic relief. And yet oddly enough, the only episode that I really liked was the episode that focused on Ed.

Shellhead wrote: I disliked Ed the most, because she was such an annoying excuse for comic relief. And yet oddly enough, the only episode that I really liked was the episode that focused on Ed.

"HOT DOG BUN, NOT TOO YOUNG!"

Which is a really sleazy sexual remark if you think about it, especially for such an innocently portrayed character as Ed.
But if you took all of the borderline pedo stuff out of anime, you would have... a lot less anime.

Pacific Rim: The Black - I'm a fan of the first movie but disliked most of the second one. The anime takes place after land portals crack open in Australia and the Kaiju have completely taken over that continent. It's a pretty average anime boosted by the movie franchise filling in all the background on the setting. The main characters are a teenage brother and sister who come out of hiding after finding an old training Yeager. I must say though that if enjoying giant robots fighting giant monsters is wrong then I don't want to be right. It's 7 episodes and I'll definitely be in for another season if Netflix gives it one.