anime

[Gormongous]

http://www.crunchyroll.com/tonari-no-seki-kun-the-master-of-killing-time

This is silly and fantastic. Episodes are seven minutes long, so I'll just let it speak for itself.

 

You're the second person this week to recommend this. I don't know what's wrong with me, I always resist picking up short-form comedy shows, even though I love every one I watch. Teekyuu is one of the best anime of the past few years and it's three minutes long including opening and ending credits.

[Codicier]

Just watched a episode of Knights of Sidonia, when will people realise that no matter how well it may for for mechs, 3D cg really doesn't work even vaguely well for any sort of human being.

It's also terrible in several other ways but weirdly even the pointless fan service doesn't irk me as much as it normally would when put up against a cast of walking mannequins

[Twig]

I was pretty excited about the Knights of Sidonia (I like the manga) until I saw it was 3D and bailed out before I even got in the boat.

[Codicier]

I was pretty excited about the Knights of Sidonia (I like the manga) until I saw it was 3D and bailed out before I even got in the boat.

 

Good choice, I unfortunately did not fully research the boat before stepping aboard. 

Also watched a couple of episodes of  "Chaika –The Coffin Princess" mainly on the strength of having the director of Scrapped Princess. Sadly so far it's really not doing to well reaching for the great big book of anime characters tropes way to often. However it will serve as good fantasty filler. Side note: Where/when did anime start using the word Dragoon? was it just a bit on badly pronounced english that became cannon or was there ever a deliberate choice behind it.

 

Still can't complain to much in a season where we get Ping Pong & Mushishi. 

[Twig]

Mushishi is so fucking great. I finally finished rewatching the first series and it was just as good, and this new stuff is just as good oh maaaaaaaaaaaaan. It's basically one step away from weird fiction, which is something I have a great love for but didn't have a name for the first time I watched it. Slight undertones of horror with a bunch of weird unexplainable events. The one step away would be the part where things are explained by the Mushi.

I also started Nanana's Buried Treasure and it is not what I expected... It got weird fast and I'm enjoying it. Has a decent amount of fanservice, unfortunately, but Japan.

[Twig]

My friend recommended I watch No Game No Life. I haven't, yet. I'm trying to remember who watched it and told me NOT to watch it. I don't particularly trust my friend's judgment. He's got... different tastes than me. HAS ANYONE HERE SEEN IT AND WHAT DO THEY THINK OF IT?

[N1njaSquirrel]

Funny. I watched the first episode of this very anime the other day.

 

Pros:

• It's done by madhouse, so very pretty and well animated.
• It's not actually about a guy who get's sucked into a video game, just a guy who gets sucked into a world where games are played to decide anything.
• World is fairly interesting. 
• It's not about him wanting to return to earth.

Cons:

• Main guy has creepy lolicon affection for his much younger sister.
• Is a harem anime.
• Tropes-ahoy
• ecchi level: 4/10 pantsu

All in all, for a first episode, it's not bad. It treads the same neet-in-room to fantasy world that you've seen a million times before, slaps you with some lore then he potters about with his sister and meets some main characters, all of which are girls. I am willing to watch another episode, as it has potential, but I'm sceptical of that potential.

 

It's better than SAO (which is shit anyways), much better than Ixion Saga (which is so much worse than SAO), but not as good as the Greed Island arc in Hunter x Hunter.

 

Edit: Whoo 200 posts! The most posts I've ever done in a forum :3

[Codicier]

Edit: Whoo 200 posts! The most posts I've ever done in a forum :3

 

Unless they've changed something the forums don't actually track Idle banter posts. So you actually dinged 200 elsewhere (still /gz!)

[Ucantalas]

So earlier today I finished watching Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It was so good. One of the best anime I've seen.

Also some very moving stuff.... Hughes' death had me in tears.

[Codicier]

If you haven't killed off you main character a few episodes in, people start to think just ain't trying these days.

 

What you have there is a real proto trope.

 

Spoilers for FMA & Transmetropolitan & Attack on Titan

 

Ok so stay with me here:

 

In Transmet we discover the series main antagonist "the Smiler" killed a puppy to get himself out of a mess early in his political career.

It worked so well that killing someone close to him becomes his go to method when he needs sympathy. 

In the end that instinct distorts his judgement so much he still does it even though he know's he's likely to get caught, he almost doesn't care about the long term consequences he just wants that emotional high.

 

Basically since FMA anime has been on a similar arc.

 

Major Hughes was that first puppy, the stunt that worked so well they just had to try it again.

Although certainly not unique it did seem fresh at the time (especially to a young western audience), and it even worked well a few times more (Gurren Laggan being probably the most prominent example) but slowly but surely shows keep upping the stakes, and forgetting why that original trick worked.

 

Until we arrive at Attack on Titan a show that is probably the end of this particular evolutionary branch of storytelling, a series so obsessed with character deaths that it forgets to give them any sort of life.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ucantalas]

Attack on Titan seemed like it was really trying to kill people just for the sake of killing them. And then they kill off the main character, and I thought, "Oh, wow, that's pretty intense, I wonder where it goes from there!" only to have him come back a little bit later like nothing ever happened. It annoyed to a great degree because it just made the entire thing seem like a cheap trick.

[tegan]

I just think it's interesting that Ucantalas was affected so much by the Brotherhood version when everything up to and including that moment is incredibly rushed since it was all covered in the original anime.

[BobbyBesar]

From the perspective of character deaths, Attack on Titan does earn them with their setting. The initial attack kills of something like 50% of the residents of that region? And the scouting corps has like a 95% casualty rate in 5 years or something? Having the show be about desperation almond the cannon fodder would have been interesting.

Instead, we get Eva with naked people.

[Twig]

I'm still watching The World Is Still Beautiful, and it's fine. I hate the boy-and-woman thing, though. It's weird. The age gap is too big. Why is this something Japan seems to love so much? It's such a common trope in anime. Though usually no more than a jokey characteristic of a character, not the core romantic relationship. Mmmh.

Though I suppose it could also just be that they're only a few years apart but Japan loves to draw young teenage girls that looks like they're adults.

[SecretAsianMan]

I just think it's interesting that Ucantalas was affected so much by the Brotherhood version when everything up to and including that moment is incredibly rushed since it was all covered in the original anime.

 

What is the difference between Brotherhood and the first series?  I saw FMA but haven't seen Brotherhood because it looked like the same thing maybe?

[Twig]

The original FMA anime diverged from the manga's storyline when it caught up to and surpassed the manga. I don't remember the exact point at which the stories begin to differ, but a quick Google suggests it's around the time Greed shows up.

Brotherhood, on the other hand, follows the manga's storyline. It also sorta rushes everything that the original had already done up until that divergence.

 

Brotherhood is, IMO, better, but not significantly so, and also probably not actually worth watching unless you really loved FMA.

They then later went back and made ANOTHER sequel movie to the original series (i.e., a sequel to Conqueror of Shamballa) which is fucking weird but hey whatever. Some day I'm going to watch that.

[Codicier]

I'm still watching The World Is Still Beautiful, and it's fine. I hate the boy-and-woman thing, though. It's weird. The age gap is too big. Why is this something Japan seems to love so much? It's such a common trope in anime. Though usually no more than a jokey characteristic of a character, not the core romantic relationship. Mmmh.

Though I suppose it could also just be that they're only a few years apart but Japan loves to draw young teenage girls that looks like they're adults.

I'm also to my surprise still enjoying this.

I guess the best way to try and sell it to anyone would be a less original fantasy version of Ouran with a Haruhi & Honey lead couple. That might sound as if I'm damning it with faint praise, and I probably am.

Yet here I am still watching it despite all the problems you mentioned, some very contrived plots, and not a particularly strong supporting cast. I guess in the end it's probably being carried by it's very hard to dislike female lead .

[Twig]

Yeah I do quite like Nike, I can't lie.

[Codicier]

It's hardly news that a Mushishi episode is good but the new one was a classic.

I feel throughout its history it's those episodes which behind the wonder have a undercurrent of menace, that demonstrate the show at its best.

[syntheticgerbil]

So I watched Short Peace in theatres. Man was that disappointing. Because it's a Katsuhiro Otomo thing, I was hoping for the brilliance of old anime anthologies like Robot Carnival, Neo-Tokyo, or his Memories project. Besides the brilliant opening by Koji Morimoto (which only lasts a few minutes unfortunately), the only traditionally animated short was directed by Otomo. However I found it to be kind of boring with a non-ending. Very unsatisfying.

 

The rest were all pretty stale because all of the characters were 3D models with cel shading, desperately trying to look traditional amongst the painted backgrounds. They all animated so plain and were uninteresting to look at because of it. I never recommend 3D models of characters try to emulate that of traditional pen and ink drawings, as I have never once seen good results in terms of movement. That was just my feeling through most of short piece: boredom. I'll give the first short a pass because it was interesting enough in terms of story and it was pretty, but it would have been so much more successful had they just drawn the main character and used the 3D technique on the complicated dragon.

 

The last short, Farewell to Weapons, is interesting because all of the characters are traditionally animated but they all enter identical 3D bodysuits and spend 90% of the short in them fighting another 3D robot. I have the awesome Otomo comic strip this was based on and it is kind of perfect for a short, but the only faithfully adapted parts were parts of the beginning and the ending. The rest was just padded out with tons of uninteresting and rigidly animated action sequences that were not anywhere as long in the original comic. It was like I was watching some obnoxious space marine video game being played for 15 minutes.

 

The awful and disgusting polar bear short I could have done without seeing.

 

Weird thing is that every review I've read for Short Peace seems overall positive and gives it a lot of praise. I don't feel like it's anywhere in the top tier of anime anthologies and it's a shame the most recent prominent ones Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond, will never been seen by a wide audience since only a company in Australia was interested in releasing an English version. It's a shame Sony and the like don't put their money behind releasing stuff like that anymore in the United States (or U.K.) unless it's relating to the Matrix or Halo.

 

Also what's really bizarre is that Short Peace's blu-ray release is in the form of a PS3 game. The shorts are all there, but the "fifth short" is actually a video game written (and directed?) by Suda 51 called Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day. Apparently this game is awful according to the existing reviews. These days with Suda 51, I'm really not surprised.

[Gormongous]

So I watched Short Peace in theatres. Man was that disappointing.

 

The anime community still doesn't have the critical chops to speak authoritatively on Otomo's career, and I don't think the film community at large has the familiarity to know that he's tapped out. That's the only reason I can explain the warm reception to Short Peace, which is really uninspired. Also, it feels like the past ten years have been studio after studio trying to make 3D cel shading work, assuming that other companies just hadn't tried hard enough, and all of them making the same mistakes and the same ugly movies. I really can't believe that anyone can look at the Berserk movies, which have all the money and the love in the world behind them, and think that it's a viable technology to replace traditional animation, now if ever.

[syntheticgerbil]

I mean it's weird, you can rig 3D characters to get that extra nuance and flexibility and perhaps they already do and just don't utilize it, but I suppose it lends itself to working better with cartoony stuff like Pixar and the like. I think the thing is the usual movement style in for most Japanese animation is very restrained and they are animating the 3D characters that way as well. But I guess maybe the people using this method don't understand that you do get some kind of nuance even when a person is drawing such restrained animations by hand. Oh well.

 

I don't know what to think of Otomo, I've been following his work for a while now, but it's like he decided to not really work on anything outside of a hand full of projects in the last decade. Steamboy didn't really have anything interesting going on with it although pretty and his Mushishi live action movie was terrible. I really love the Metropolis movie but he only wrote the script. Seems like the last thing I fully like by him was his short on Memories. Everything before I think is good, even that bizarre live action World Apartment Horror movie.

 

I wish his earliest stuff would just get translated for completionist sake. He has two early live action films (one being an erotic movie I think) that I don't know a thing about. He also has over a decade worth of comics work not even anything like Akira. Yet the only English releases in the United States are continuous reprintings of the Akira book and one time Dark Horse decided to release Domu because it was sort of like Akira. In the UK his anthology Memories was published in English with a lot of great work with a significant amount of range and I there's a minor amount of scanlation work out there. I also like the warmth of his drawings which is partly what the Farewell to Arms short killed compared to the comic version.

[Merus]

I don't feel like it's anywhere in the top tier of anime anthologies and it's a shame the most recent prominent ones Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond, will never been seen by a wide audience since only a company in Australia was interested in releasing an English version. 

 

mmmmmmMMMMMMMMMM?

 

I don't get a lot of opportunities to get cool shit the US can't get so whenever those opportunities come along, I pounce. I have still never played the English re-release of Flower, Sun and Rain but you can bet I grabbed it.

[Gormongous]

mmmmmmMMMMMMMMMM?

 

I don't get a lot of opportunities to get cool shit the US can't get so whenever those opportunities come along, I pounce. I have still never played the English re-release of Flower, Sun and Rain but you can bet I grabbed it.

 

Really, I think Madman is an awesome anime distributor in general and I'm jealous that I have to deal with FUNi and Sentai and goddamn Aniplex instead of them.

[N1njaSquirrel]

mmmmmmMMMMMMMMMM?

 

I don't get a lot of opportunities to get cool shit the US can't get so whenever those opportunities come along, I pounce. I have still never played the English re-release of Flower, Sun and Rain but you can bet I grabbed it.

 

You also got Wario Ware: Twisted, as the mercury in the cartridge was considered too dangerous for the U.K. I picked it up when I went to Australia. They eventually released it over here, but they didn't use mercury, so you didn't get that satisfying click when you tilted.

 

Also with Mushishi, do you need to watch the whole of the first season before this season? I've watched like half of it.

 

Man the latest Ping Pong episode was a blast. The winter montage was fantastic, and it really highlighted how much characters have changed over the last 6 episodes.

Kong's transformation was really sweet, and certainly the most noticeable. when his mother came over it was adorable.

 

Also my missus told me that the reason why everyone is bald in that school is to show their true devotion to the sport. Apparantly it's a very old tradition to shave their heads to show their devotion. You might already know this, but I thought it was interesting.