Anime for people who hate anime

that part was gross but my bf and i watched the first two seasons and found it mostly really endearing and entertaining! you really start to love the chars once you get to know them all.

honestly that peanut butter squid thing is the worst the show gets afaicr

I've said it upthread somewhere but Redline is fun.

Foodwars continues to be massively sexist and objectifying.

Yeah it’s not great. I’ve talked with my kids about it. They immediately jump to its defense with all kinds of cockamamie reasons why actually it’s not sexist etc

Cue Miyazaki "Anime was a mistake" gif!

I'm very conflicted because the bits that aren't massively sexist and objectifying are quite good. It's also from this decade, not the 80s which has me RMDE at both Japan and Netflix. I should just pay for Paravi and watch the 3 seasons of Wakakozake I haven't yet watched.

Anyone seen the Ulysses 31 series? It was a french-japanese co-production.

I used to get some interesting anime recommendations on youtube but never see them anymore. It was the type of stuff that sold all over the world before anime had a real global audience. It tended to be fairy tales and I remember one of the earliest things I ever saw that didn't seem to be an american/japanese cartoon like GI Joe or X-Men or any number of saturday morning toy line stuff was Wizard Of Oz (there's different versions). I often wonder how much the fairy tales, X-Men, Thundercats etc got people ready for fully japanese cartoons.

watched Ulysses 31 as a kid as it was broadcast on UK TV, completely forgot about it until now and yet can immediately sing the whole theme tune. brains r weird.

there was another japanese-french one from the 80s that my kids have seen, the mysterious cities of gold. they loved it.

I need another pile of unread food manga like I need aa hole in the head, however a magazine just turned up with a list of the best food manga series and this one (Osen) looks so cool

http://goinjapanesque.com/ja/14343/

https://blog.alltheanime.com/podcast67/
Mentioned the podcast earlier when I was talking about Jonathan Clements but now I've listened to it. A lot of talk of of the original version of Gunbuster being difficult (or did they say impossible?) to find.
Funny story about pseudonyms; Tezuka being a dick to a musician.
Brilliant stuff about which animes succeed better abroad and then they're compelled to make more many years later (Trigun), or pretend they have more episodes than they do, so they can make them later. I'm kind of delighted that Urotsukidoji was a possibly bigger in the UK than anywhere else BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA! And he does talk about the irony of how it was portrayed as being what those sickos in japan watch, but actually Britain likes it more.

xps my first encounters with Anime was French kids TV in the eighties. They were showing Dragonball on Saturday mornings way before it hit the UK. Lots of other shows too - yes Ulysses, Cities of Gold (which were shown in the UK at the time), but also Olive et Tom, Ecole Des Champions, Nicky Larsson and many other French/Japanese productions. Anime was standard French kids' TV back then. Not sure what inspired it though

anime seems to have been more successful in most places than it was in the uk. there was a lot of anime on the tv in Chile when I used to visit in the 90s as a kid

Boogiepop Phantom and Serial Expeeiments: Alain are highly recommended, especially for us who have become shut-ins or already were pre-pandemic.

I haven’t seen it yet, but Dennou Coil (Den-Noh Coil) has gotten rapturous reviews

Serial Experiments: LAIN, not Alain, lol

It's interesting that anime never got much of a foothold in the UK, or Ireland. The only time it really had mainstream visibility here was during the late 90s/early 00s Pokemon craze, with a few other shows with names ending in "mon" and a heavily butchered dub of Card Captor Sakura. There have been a few attempts at anime-focused satellite channels over the years, and they all disappeared in a matter of weeks.

It seems like France and Italy are the big European anime/manga markets, both countries have a long history of anime shows on television (going back to the 70s at least).

Germany is quite into manga, i remember a few years ago looking up books on amazon and getting frustated cos a few books I wanted to buy were only translated into German. iirc when Tokyopop collapsed in the late 00s the only bit that survived was Tokyopop Gmbh cos it was profitable, and is still going today.

It's interesting that it has caught on in Africa so much too; how about south asia and middle east?

Another thing in that podcast above (which is quite well known to be fair) is about how much Chinese authorities view japanese cartoons as a threat, they were appalled when they found out that the majority of popular cartoons were japanese and I think they banned a bunch of stuff.

I heard a good theory that manga and anime have been so accessible is because the faces of the characters are mostly very simplified and almost like emoticons. That's disconcerting for me because that's the thing I most dislike about it. It's quite hard to find artists who draw faces like Dave Cooper (when he's not in his old timey cartoons mode) but I've found a few I can't remember the names of.

I’m enjoying Carol and Tuesday on Netflix right now about two teenagers who set out to conquer the Martian music business. 11 episodes in the fact that they live on mars seems entirely incidental to the plot, especially as the bit of mars they live in looks like Brooklyn. Nevertheless there are lots of robots and AI’s, they hire a small drunken arsehole of a robot to direct a recreation of the thriller video in episode 4.

The whole arc is about the battle between Carol and Tuesday’s homespun, handmade, honest to goodness sparkly pop sounds and Angela, former model, who is working with the mysterious Tao and his AI to manufacture the ultimate pop career.

i think its on mars because its by the cowboy bebop guy and 'genre setting + music focus' is his entire thing

omfg I’m finishing up my second viewing of Kill la Kill which much to my delight my bf is LOVING, I wish this didn’t have so much gross sexual shit (incest, sexualized children, etc), it’s hard to like wholeheartedly recommended, but what a trip. Should I watch Gurren Lagaan next?

kill la kill is the weakest of the big gainax/trigger shows imo, the second half is kind of a drag.

gurren lagann is better though still very much the work of the same director & writer so a lot of the beats are similar. same with promare though its a movie so its a nice concise take on the formula

Isn't Gainax and Trigger anime for people who love anime?

for sure, but this thread was originally spun off of eva discussion which is also gainax...

I feel like Kill la Kill is at once perfect for ppl who both love and don’t love anime

also i mostly think of this thread more as 'anime with crossover appeal outside of anime fandom' which trigger stuff definitely is. imaishi's even making the cyberpunk 2077 tie-in netflix series lol

I've been working my way through the original Patlabor OVA and it's interesting, it's slower in pace that what I would have expected from a mecha anime, like more of a drama with robots than an ACTION!!! series. The characters are well developed and it also has a timelessness about it, like it doesn't really lean into pop culture or era-specific tropes too much? I like it! It doesn't feel groundbreaking or mind-blowing but it's sturdy and pleasant. I'm almost done and then I'm going to watch the first 2 movies.

the 1st movie is my fav anime movie

I decided to watch some anime again this year after a long time of not watching it. I don't hate anime but I often feel underwhelmed. But figured there must be something worth watching from the past fifteen years

Mob Psycho 100 is funny and enjoyable and visually interesting for such a well-trodden genre. Several friends also recommended Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which was not bad but felt very standard for its genre (never saw the original series). I know there are much longer series but it still felt overly long. At least the ending was sufficiently epic

oh shit i should watch patlabor

Yes do it, it’s only 7 eps and then 2 movies! Somehow I only just the other day realized it was Mamoru Oahii

my bf and i have been going through jojo's bizarre adventure: stardust crusaders and have been loving it

second patlabor movie is my fav oshii but I haven't seen the first one for at least a decade

kenji kawai score is excellent too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dmlwhaEEgE

it's probably been even longer for the OVAs, but if memory serves, oshii directs some of the moodier ones there too

first movie is more like the ovas, 2nd is off doing its own thing

That's a beautiful piece of music.

As a young anime watcher the Patlabor movie totally confounded me with how little action there was. But then Wings Of Honneamise was similarly uncommercial for such a big production.
Then I remember even the Fist Of The North Star feature length turned all the outrageous fantasy violence into a horrible disempowering downer of an ending and the very commercial seeming Street Fighter Alpha mortified me by having my favorite characters brutalized in such a depressing fashion by some schmuck who isn't even in the games.

It's weird looking back on all that and I wonder if anime is still doing this to kids these days.

I was 9 or 10 years old when the school janitor loaned me Akira and it made me feel really sick but I mostly liked it.

the body horror stuff in akira still ooks me out

can't remember if i said this here but my kids' mother-in-law bought them the entire series of tokyo ghoul

they are 11 and 9 years old

i think it's....... a bit fucking much

yeahhhhhhh probably not age-appropriate

i was still watching pokemon when i was 12. it was brand new at the time though and thus probably cooler than it is to tweens now

my 9-y-o is dunzo with pokemon

they are HUGE fans of carole and tuesday. need 200 more episodes ASAP to wash the taste of tokyo ghoul out of my mouth

11-y-o is also starting to read assassination classroom, which i feel like would probably be actually illegal in the united states

i would say the age i saw akira at, 13, is the perfect age to see akira

pokemon/sailor moon/dragon ball z were my world at ages 11-12 but they were all airing "new" episodes at that time. evangelion broke open the rest of the anime world for me but i didn't see it in full until i was 14. i definitely watched ninja scroll not long after akira and i liked it but i was def 1) too young to be watching it 2) ninja scroll is the fucking worst trash. i think if my parents were at all interested in what i was watching they would've probably have not let me see a lot of these, but they had checked out of controlling the media i consumed by the time i was 7 or so? i grew up watching robocop and schwarzenegger and james bond movies, ultraviolence was my bag until psychologically and metaphysically deep art were my bag lol

in fact, anime basically conducted that transition

mtv and the simpsons were the last battles my parents waged and they lost both

my dad shunned the simpsons ever since they went up against the cosby show. 'i don't watch cartoons' was his line.

my mom was really strict about that stuff until i hit high school and then she went back to work and stopped caring much. so i basically went straight from pokemon to cowboy bebop

though bebop wasn't nearly as violent as i remembered on a rewatch, it probably just seemed that way at the time due to that jump lol

xps Ass Class is actually pretty wholesome for the most part (except for the sexy honeypot teacher)

ultraviolence was my bag until psychologically and metaphysically deep art were my bag

"evangelion was my bag but then evangelion was my bag"