What is surprising is that this sub-genre didn’t branch out like others. In general you see things being tried in different ways, so it is surprising that there aren’t more experiments like Garo.
You must remember that dozens and dozens of anime are produced in a year, and hundreds of manga, but the average year sees about four tokusatsu series produced at best. (I don’t know why, but my guess is that tokusatsu is either more expensive to produce or harder to market.)
One of those at-most shows will always be the year’s Super Sentai entry and chances are the other two will be Kamen Rider and Ultraman. These are all traditionally shows kids watch, either alone or with their parents. So you don’t see stuff like GARO branching off whole new genres because even the really good indy shows tend to get lost in the shuffle of long-running established brands.
Now, a lot more tokusatsu movies are produced in a given year than TV series, and some of those get considerably more creative than the TV material since budget issues seem to be a bit easier to work out. That may be something to look into if you decide the TV stuff is on the whole too puerile for you.
I also got movies like Kamen Rider ZO, J and even the RX series. Well, these look absolutely great. They are old and yet far more realistic.
ZO is a very great-looking movie-- it’s directed by Kieta Amemiya, who’s not exactly a realistic director but very talented when it comes to telling a story. GARO is more or less his baby which is why it got made. There’s also an older indy project of his called Mikazuki that’s really interesting if you can ever track it down and he’s done some good films.
I’m sort of baffled by RX and J being described as realistic when J features a magic talking grasshopper sidekick and RX has the power to use his own feelings of sadness to turn into a robot. This may be a use of realistic to just mean “good-looking” that’s confounding my over-literal brain.
Skimming through the new series the main turn off is the poor use of CG.
Yeah, this is just something a modern toku fan has to deal with and it is justifiably a dealbreaker for some. Tokusatsu is produced on much lower budgets than US material and so use of CG is pretty primitive to what our own effects houses produce for a given year.
There seems to be this odd Japanese idea in play that CG used on TV only needs to look slightly better than what’s in current video games, which is… I dunno, it doesn’t work for me for me at all.
