I love Champloo, but it has a different melody than Bebop, even if the rhythm is somewhat familiar. It’s not better than Bebop, but its best episodes are better than some of Bebop’s average eps.
The only other thing that I unconditionally love is Giant Robo. It’s a love letter to the golden age of anime, but the idea of having a finale’ for a series that never was is absolutely brilliant, and if you can get into the “serious wacky” vibe of the show it never stops paying off. You won’t get the bittersweet joy of having the episodes come out at random times over the course of six years, but it ends well. Yes it does.
Other than that… yeah. Not much that gets it all right like that.
Fullmetal was pretty great, but it took me at least eight or nine episodes before I felt that I “got” the show, and it was probably somewhere in the late teens when I realized that I was totally hooked.
I used to be a big Gundam fan, but having gone through that arc so many times now I just find the whole thing a bit dull. It’s like listening to remixes of a great song over and over. Although if you’ve never seen Stardust Memory, and you have any interest in the series, I’d give it a go. It’s probably the best Gundam thing ever.
Oh, wow. I use to run around saying Giant Robo was my favorite anime but stopped when doing so lead to having explain what it was about 75% of the time.
My interest in Giant Robo has made me an avid follower of the up-and-down career of its director, Yasuhiro Imagawa, who is somehow or another responsible for a lot of the best mecha shows ever made. Must-watches for a fan of Giant Robo would include Imagawa’s really interesting 2004 remake of Tetsujin 28, which lets him revisit a few of the characters he repurposed for Giant Robo, and the currently airing Shin Mazinger Impact!
While most fans are dogging Shin Mazinger for being really confusing, it’s really just the Giant Robo approach applied to the Mazinger mythology (as opposed to the mythology of Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s creations). There’s also some great subversions of storytelling structure used in a bit more radical fashion than he could get away with in Giant Robo.
A Giant Robo fan won’t catch just how many of Shin Mazinger Impact scenes are direct references to famous scenes from the old Go Nagai manga or anime, but the old manic energy that made his Giant Robo and (to a lesser extent) G Gundam so great is there.
I’ll definitely check that out. I liked Shin Getter Robo, although I gather that Imagawa was thrown off the series after the first few episodes. If nothing else, it was worth it just for the “realistic” portrayal of the old-school transformations.
I felt like they tried for some of that same wild energy in Tengen Toppen, but it never had that ensemble feel or that same level of emotion. Still, it’s worth watching if you’re a Giant Robo fan.
The usual rule of thumb is that he only worked on the first three episodes, which all had an extremely troubled production cycle. I’ve heard Imagawa fought a bit with the financial backers of the project but I’ve never quite pinned down exactly what happened there.
I regard Shin Getter Robo one of his poorest works, so if you liked that then you’ll probably be into his later stuff quite well. As for Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, it’s on my list of things to watch but I still haven’t gotten around to it… mainly the show’s female characters are pretty off-putting to me. I can forgive that in my shounen mecha goonery but I’m going to give priority to something like Eureka 7 first.
That’s a mistake, I think.
It’s probably my favorite series of the last six or seven years.
You’re missing a big smoochy love letter to the side of anime that Evangelion essentially killed, made by the creators of Evangelion.
I wouldn’t let the fan service put you off either. Yoko may be sexy, but she isn’t a bimbo. If you’ve seen Mahoromatic then you know what they can pull off when they try.
Evangelion didn’t even remotely kill off any type of mecha show and I really wish I had some understanding of where this misconception came from. Is it because the first post-Evangelion Gundam series got itself canceled?
I mean, there were a bunch of Super Robotty love letters produced in the post-Evangelion years, especially around 99-03: GaoGaiGar, GEAR Fighter Dendoh, Machine Robo Rescue, Mazinkaiser, just off the top of my head. I’m expecting Gurren-Lagann to be in the same vein, probably written more powerfully and probably top-notch visuals.
I wouldn’t let the fan service put you off either. Yoko may be sexy, but she isn’t a bimbo. If you’ve seen Mahoromatic then you know what they can pull off when they try.
It’s not an allergy to fanservice. Gunbuster was so laden with fanservice that it pretty much gave us the term “Gainax bounce,” but it’s a great series I’ve seen multiple times. No, it’s more that Gurren-Lagann is clearly a show where Yoko and Nia are not actors of import so much as accessories to male actors of import. This is one of the few mecha show tropes that really frustrates me in otherwise-good series that use it. So, I tend to let these shows sit for awhile and watch them when I’m feeling indulgent.
Now, I recall reading somewhere that Gurren-Lagann’s creators consider the weakness of the female cast a flaw in the TV series version of the story and are doing things to address it in the movie versions that are currently under production. So I had also been thinking of waiting for the movies to be complete and well-translated so I could watch them back-to-back with the series. Seems like it would be an interesting way to approach the material.
Ghost in the Shell movie was on last night on Ovation, watched that.
Just finished Code Geass’s first season, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Going to have to find someone who has a copy of the second season.
LOL WUT? I love Black Lagoon, but it’s “just” a crazy balls-to-the-walls action series. It lacks the gravitas of Bebop.
It’s not [i]just[/i] crazy action, though. Black Lagoon has had its serious and sentimental moments, especially in the second season, though nothing in it is ever plausible. For some reason the Japanese seem to like that kind of mix, which I find sometimes refreshing and sometimes confusing.
Consider for example the several Slayers TV series – which are on average about as wacky as anything I can imagine. Many utterly silly episodes, and the average episode is just crazy action, but the overall arc always builds towards a fairly serious conclusion that can actually have some real drama by the climax.
Or for something different that nevertheless combines extreme contrasts from episode to episode, how about Revolutionary Girl Utena. Lots of absurdity, lots of surrealism, lots of broad humor and laughs, but still considered as a whole, the whole thing is fairly serious.
It started out somewhat interesting in the first season, then devolved into nonsense in the second.
Both seasons had their share of ridiculous episodes - s1 had the Roberta arc, and the neo-Nazis weren’t that much more plausible.
I also love BL, and I agree it’s 95% crazy action (which, for my money, it does better than any other anime out there). However, as Miramon pointed out, it’s more than that, and it does just touch on the theme of how one descends into darkness, with the twins, Yukio, the hints of Revy’s backstory, and Rock himself. My main complaint with BL is that many of the action sequences are too one-sided – there’s only so many times I can see Revy god-moding her way through a dozen mooks. Now, the boss battles are another story…
C’mon, the Roberta arc was hilarious. Who doesn’t like a nun who somehow drops 30 grenades from under her skirt?
And the vampire twins was my favorite arc.
And my votes for winners of the season btw are:
Guin Saga - Finally some decent hard fantasy and a really likeable main character to boot.
Phantom - Requiem for the Phantom - Perhaps the best application of neo-noir to anime I’ve ever seen. It takes a couple episodes to kick into gear but I practically slobber over waiting for the next ep to be released. Probably also has the best score of any anime to come out this season.
Eden of the East - It’s hard to describe this, but I’d consider it a thriller/mystery, and extremely well-executed. It’s too bad we’re at ep7 already and only 11 episodes have been planned. Noblesse oblige, please continue to be a savior.
I think the Roberta arc was my least favorite out of both seasons. I just really didn’t care for Roberta or her charge (forgot his name). Which makes me a little worried about the third season since it’s probably going to be Roberta centric the whole way through considering the manga’s current storyline.
However, I loved Rhoanapur Freakshow Circus so I’m definitely not opposed to BL being over the top.
I didn’t care for the story itself either (or the characters it revolved around), I just thought it was completely ridiculous to the point of hilarity. I think they must have watched Terminator 2 just before writing it and thought, hey, let’s make a nun into a T-1000.
The only thing I liked about Roberta was the way all the main characters apparently instinctively recognized her mythic status. It’s like there are maybe 6 or 7 level 10 characters in Roanapur, a city of level 2 thugs and level 1 civilians, and when another level 10 shows up, they know it. But as a story those episodes were pretty lame. I liked the sentimental Yakuza story in the second season. The vampire kids were just creepy, but I did like the way the Russians dealt with them without much compunction.
But when you have episodes like that, with some little kid wielding a LMG without any recoil, or when a PT boat is actually launched in the air to hit a helicopter with a torpedo, it does sort of devalue the drama; you just don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t any more. Even Slayers was pretty consistent about Lina’s powers from episode to episode; in fact I think they had a more consistent magic system than pretty much any other fantasy series or movie I’ve ever seen. But in some BL episodes, a one on one confrontation with a pistol is a big deal, and other times it seems like you’d need to nuke Revy from orbit if you really wanted to be sure.
Correction: Roberta’s a maid with `nades up her skirt and a shotgun in her umbrella. Eda and the Church of Violence are the nuns with guns.
Did I mention I love this series?
And the vampire twins was my favorite arc.
I actually thought it was one of the weakest, largely because - even by BL standards - there’s no plausible reason why those kids are such badass killers. [Completely fucked-up I could buy, but killing machines? Not so much.] Plus child-abuse stories make me cringe. OTOH, it did give Balalaika one of her most stone-cold awesome scenes, so it wasn’t all bad.
Overall I agree with Miramon: while I loved the over-the-top violence, it made it hard to take BL’s more dramatic moments seriously. It just felt a lot more superficial than, say, Bebop.
Exactly. I didn’t mind the neo-nazis because you had the scenes in the sub to balance it.
The Vampire kids just pushed me out of any ability to engage with the series on an genuine emotional level because it was, I felt, implausible nonsense—even within the context of the show.
Most real-life serial killers, as it turns out, were severely abused as children. The vampire twins were extremely psychotic, twisted killing machines, an insanity born from that abuse. I found that part the most plausible aspect of their story.
That’s a tad more “realism” than I want in my guilty-pleasure action shows.
