The New Adventures of ILXor: The Animated Series Poll voting and campaigning thread

Oh no, where are Alvin and the Chipmunks? That show basically formed my impressions of life and culture between the ages of 3 and 8. I will write it in my ballot for sure.

Very glad someone nominated Serial Experiments Lain! That show captures the thrill and mystique of early internet communication so well and it looks extremely cool.

A Place Further Than the Universe looks great - will definitely try to watch that. Any other recommendations for anime of a sort of strange or magical bent?

Watch Mission Hill!
Iirc all the episodes are on YouTube.

anyone interested in the non-action side of anime should try A Place Further than the Universe it's real good and only 13 eps long

just watched the first ep so cute!!!

xp Land of the Lustrous is a neat fantasy anime with some pretty unique visuals and worldbuilding

Infinity Train was great

will give it a shot

can we talk about how people are planning on balancing their ballots btwn stuff they suspect just wouldn't hold up today but is v important part of their youth w/ stuff they think is still fantastic? kill yr darlings? so hard to do.

Did anyone but me say they'd do this? Anyway I'm less inclined the more I go over this. I'm going to stuff a few old H-B or whatever ones right at the bottom.

Speaking of killing darlings though: giving Ren and Stimpy close to top billing, vs "John K turned out to be a bit of a pedo lech" :(

Yeah that’s a tough one. Would welcome discussion of Art vs artist thoughts as pertains explicitly to the poll and how that might change ur voting.

I have to disclaim I was quite small and forbidden to watch Ren and Stimpy while it aired and I’m not positive I’ve ever seen more than five minutes of it so that being said I would be pleasantly surprised if the work of the guy who serially groomed minors for sex turned out to be heavily discounted at this remove.

On the other hand most animation is a collective work with no single author.

Up to y’all.

i will not be voting for ren and stimpy, ymmv

I just feel like it was pretty groundbreaking at the time - first of the widely popular "adult" cartoons (Simpsons aside).

i think it's a very important show and my expectation was that it would do well in this poll but it wasn't going to be on my ballot just bc there are things i find kinda sleazy + gross in an unpleasant way about the work that made it difficult for me to enjoy as a kid and not eager to review as an adult - i do understand the appeal of dissonant animation (or at the very least dissonance in other areas of art) but there's so much competing for space on my ballot i have the luxury of not voting for something i see as an extremely important + distinctive entry in the genre but just isn't beloved by me in that way.

going to check later if there’s a good public link to a bill oakley interview where he talks about mission hill a fair bit

it’s aged ok, feel like the character bits hit well but I’m not sure if more episodes would have been good or had to go in a different way because they mined the territory

xp at silby, I wasn’t allowed to watch the simpsons (!) for years and catching up was a joy around 1996 or so

my mom misremembered this recently as not letting me watch south park. which, outside of the definite distance, is funny because I had to explain that not only did they not have cable tv until I was in college, comedy central might not have been carried locally then

my parents didn't like the simpsons but thankfully they didn't stop me from watching it

they definitely did not allow me to watch beavis and butthead or mtv at all for several years, which was stupid of them imo

by the time south park came out i was in third grade and watching mtv religiously and not giving a goddamn shit and all bets were off

this is so foreign to me!

xp - I nominated Ren and Stimpy, and will be voting for it, but completely understand why others won't.

Finding out years down the track that the guy responsible for the cartoon I obsessed over as a pre/early-teen got up to some awful shit was disappointing, to say the least. In these last few years, learning of and observing the behaviour of creators and fandom in the entertainment I enjoy (music, movies, tv, comic books, video games, genre fiction, you name it) has been disheartening. I can't change what I liked back then, but I can make better-informed decisions now.

For me, voting for R&S is acknowledging it's impact on me, and not necessarily as a recommendation for others to check it out. ymmv.

And now for something completely different, here's the greatest cartoon theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpxUZEetLg

LOL I was singing that just last night (prob thanks to this thread) and my other half looked at me like I was nuts.

I wasn’t allowed to watch South Park, but my brother was always out when it was on and I would sneak into his room and watch it on this old black and white dial TV where you could only half get Channel 4. I didn’t watch South Park in colour until way later.

My grandparents didn’t let us watch the Simpsons at their house because it was ‘too American’.

IT'S ME NO-NO SMALL ROBOT YOU KNOW

Great spaceship design in Ulysses 31.

mission hill was not for us. was amused to learn it was not only a contemporary but initially a near-namesake of downtown, which i love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fI7zm7RXHs

This will be a top three on my best theme songs ever, love it to bits.

^^^massively otm

We watched Over The Garden Wall, and while it's not perfect, it looks amazing (as tt said, Ghibli-tastic), has a really cute and tasteful aesthetic (of a sort a Gen Y permachild like me wouldn't roll their eyes at - cues from Neutral Milk Hotel and Grim Fandango rather than anything more brash) and its world-building works pretty well - it all comes together sweetly. And that moment in the frogs episode is transcendent

Didn't remember the Jamie and the Magic Torch song being quite so minor key (after the Pete Townshend chords that kick it off):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeMMow_Itqw&t=33

oh well skip the first 33 seconds yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeMMow_Itqw

Any other recommendations for anime of a sort of strange or magical bent?

i completely agree with all the recommendations for A Place Further than the Universe - "a group of high school girls go to antarctica!" might sound like a terrible comedy or something but it's a surprisingly moving drama with plenty of great comedy too, and gorgeous animation. only 13 episodes too!

it's hard to think of what western series i still care about at all though - probably throwing Pingu a vote out of childhood nostalgia, and certainly Avatar & Korra are quite good, and SGCTC of course but that's about it. it's hard to feel much nostalgia for any of the 00s/90s stuff around when i was a child except for Avatar which stands out as by far the best from then. maybe Ed, Edd & Eddy, it was endearingly weird at times but that's about it as far as the children's cartoon sitcoms go.

i was always most into the more plot/adventure oriented anime (or the western attempts at imitation) like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh (DBZ was always too confusing for me though, always just endless fights so I never knew what was happening when I did see it) but i wouldn't hold those up as at all worthwhile though Yu-Gi-Oh occasionally did take its already goofy premise to some seriously weird places. the original dub of One Piece that i grew up with was not good at all in its very strange attempt to turn it from a show for teens to a show for kids but it did get me interested enough to eventually get into the manga which is still one of the best comics there is - hopefully it will finish within the next decade.

Thank you! Already completely sold on the basis of "a group of high school girls go to antarctica!", but I'll try the others too.

I *love* that Fullmetal Alchemist theme posted upthread. This will make it onto both of my ballots for sure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzV9ug9BQds

bouncing back to Ren and Stimpy: that show was immensely influential on me when i started watching it in high school. I can still recite the "oh my beloved ice cream bar" routine from memory. The Mad Magazine style chicken fat, the Bill Wray backgrounds, the twisted relationships and absorption in the ugly and subversive all remain a powerful lure but John K's real life ugliness certainly complicates matters. I'm intending to vote, with some misgivings, for R&S in this poll with the understanding that while the work not only retains but is founded on some of that taint, it is the product of many voices and remains among my favorite cartoons.
fuck the Spike TV revival though, that shit was vile.

a few more '10s anime i really like and will be voting for:

Non Non Biyori - slice-of-life comedy in a rural farming village, with lots of blissed out pastoral still shots. probably my favorite anime. you'll know whether you're on board or bored from the first episode.

Hyouka - mystery/character drama series about a high school club solving small-stakes mysteries. this is the best looking show in KyoAni's already impressive catalog imo, it's really expressive.

Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun - girl approaches guy she likes only to find out that he's secretly a shoujo (girls') manga artist and accidentally ends up as his manga assistant instead of girlfriend. fun romcom that's much more on the comedy than romance end of the spectrum.

apparently i have some googling to do re: John K/Ren and Stimpy. was def planning on having it on my ballot, but far down enough that nothing is set in stone.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/arianelange/john-kricfalusi-ren-stimpy-underage-sexual-abuse

the pilot for Mission Hill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ZMw4y9rV0

i love the colour palette they use so much.

monthly girls' nozaki-kun is indeed very funny though idk how well how much it parodies shoujo manga tropes would work for someone who isn't familiar with those at all. probably not too hard to understand

Acting like those first couple seasons of R&S are not hugely influential and also really funny seems off, to me.

I’m sure all those anime guys are squeaky clean lol

Well I mean the creator of Ruruoni Kenshin got a slap on the wrist for possessing child porn last year but I’m fping you for “anime guys”

First ballot is submitted, btw!

Not mine!

Reminder that if you are submitting a theme nomination for an anime that ran multiple seasons please check if it had more than one OP during its run and make sure you identify the one you mean; American airings for some shows stuck to a single OP as opposed to using all the originals. As with all ambiguities, I'll do my best but reserve the right to give up.

i am prob not voting in the theme song poll but every single gundam wing title song was a bop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYe_-oFkMaI

though my favorite ("white reflection") is from the movie endless waltz so i don't think it counts for this poll

Yeah themes should be from works that otherwise meet the main poll criteria.

i dunno what john k has been up to lately outside of finally releasing this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10533350/?ref_=tt_urv

He put a lengthy and deeply cringeworthy response on Facebook which is captured here:
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ren-stimpy-creator-john-kricfalusis-apology-triggers-backlash-from-victims-158358.html

Are there a lot of women w lead roles in the creation of anime? Serious question.

Xp

Are end title themes allowed? Especially since some series have no opening theme or perfunctory 5 second opening sequences.

Like it'd be a shame for FLCL not to qualify.

omfg what is this Chapi Chapo stuff, and what is the comedown like :D

amazing