Recommended Anime/Manga?

[Steamflogger Boss]

The soundtrack rules.

This song is City Hunter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIGjb18q2Ts When it hit at the end of SPE I was very pleased.

Anyway, news dropping for US anime fans today. Anime Lockdown which is a "digital anime convention". Discotek is announcing 6 new license acquisitions. Some are "long, long awaited" so I have hopes for a couple things.

[GaijinPunch]

Aight it's on the list now. Hard to say w/o sounding like a bit of a pig, but I kinda miss those days w/ a masculine protagonist just being a tough guy. Formulaic for sure, but there's not a lot of stuff from the decade we watch that isn't.... I guess. Seems for Japanese pop culture those days are gone.

[Randorama]

Aight it's on the list now. Hard to say w/o sounding like a bit of a pig, but I kinda miss those days w/ a masculine protagonist just being a tough guy. Formulaic for sure, but there's not a lot of stuff from the decade we watch that isn't.... I guess. Seems for Japanese pop culture those days are gone.

Anime, for sure.

There are cases of statistically non-significant, graveyard shift series (1 to 5 a.m.) with adult protagonists and more intelligent, cultured, mature writing.

I say "statistically non-significant" because there are something like 1k+ new anime per year (300+ per cours/quarter), and there can be one, maybe two series targeted at adults. Numbers really tell us that thinking adults are an irrelevant TV demographic segment, in Japan. Please note that I am not restricting myself to anime.

Manga, it is a quite more complicated scenario. There are seinen manga with proper manly men (or womanly women...y'know, adults) as protagonists. There are Josei ("adult women" segment) manga that feature genuine protagonists and stories: for instance, Showa Rakugo etc. . Some "adult" stuff is glorified porn for Uni students, but some series deliver properly written content.

The key point is that Japan has a quite a big market for adult-themed manga, and in many cases this entails that it is not hard to find protagonists that act like (ideal) adults: though when required, kind when possible, screwing up but owning up for their mistakes.

Many writers in their '60s (Buronson, Tsukasa Hojo, Leiji Matsumoto, Moto Hagio perhaps?) still write great series in this vein, on dedicated magazines even. Then again, those guys and gals belonged to a tougher, more motivated generation of Japanese, and their works often literally "exhude" this attitude.

Mind you, I agree that reading manga during meals to unwind is a bit...asocial. Luckily you could simply go through all the classic (=not just '80s, but properly written) series and spend years to watch them all, one episode per meal. If your partner complains, slap her ass while wearing a tank top and a mullet (!).

[BryanM]

Ergo Proxy was a crazy anomaly typical of early developing markets - basically they were like "we need something to fill this cable slot, do whatever the fuck you want" and doing whatever the fuck they want, is exactly what they did. It wasn't constrained by the current incentive model (which is selling twelve 17 minute long cartoon episodes for $400 a piece). What kind of person is willing to spend $400 for 3 and a half hours of entertainment? Obviously someone with either an extreme amount of wealth, and/or in need of extreme escapism they can't find anywhere else. An arms race that led to all frosting, no cake.

This reminded me that sports series are a bit more down to earth (the ping-pong one was popular here, I remember) and that I liked that episode of the board game anime where they actually play board games I saw months ago; I had forgotten it existed.

(The world of webnovels is still far more free, especially the english market where the most profit incentive you have is selling a couple things on Amazon or getting sponsors off patreon. I remember seeing this guy start an Initial D style driving isekai and I was like "Initial D Isekai! This could be cool! I'm going to give this guy a chance!" And then months later there's nothing more than the 15 initial pages. An instant hiatus. This is an experience you'll never get to feel if you stick to commerical animation or picture books!)

[BrianC]

I found the Yugioh manga where Dark Yuugi challenged people to various different puzzles/games with fatal results more interesting than the card game anime/manga.

[GaijinPunch]

. Numbers really tell us that thinking adults are an irrelevant TV demographic segment, in Japan. Please note that I am not restricting myself to anime.

Thinking and television don't really go together in Japan. Sadly anime aimed at adolescents probably require more intelligence than all the other bullshit shows.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Speak of the devil, I've been watching isekai trash lately.

[kitten]

re: isekai trash, i have enjoyed uhhh.... the 2006 utawarerumono (kind of a tenchi muyo vibe to this one - "wholesome" harem anime with a blend of sci-fi and fantasy) and that recent one about being turned into a slime.

- -

watched yurikuma and eizouken recently, both fantastic. yurikuma feels almost like it was made out of contempt for people who didn't actually 'get' utena (i feel ikuhara has a similar resentment for utena fans that anno feels for evangelion fans) and though it retreads many of the same points, it feels like it adds some new and salient ones and is great in its own right. eizouken feels like the emotional texture of what i wanted star trek: picard to be - that may sound a little screwy, but its very much filled with yuasa's belief in the human spirit and has what feels like a genuinely 'earned' optimism in the face of many forces working against that.

[Steamflogger Boss]

re: isekai trash, i have enjoyed uhhh.... the 2006 utawarerumono (kind of a tenchi muyo vibe to this one - "wholesome" harem anime with a blend of sci-fi and fantasy) and that recent one about being turned into a slime.

- -

watched yurikuma and eizouken recently, both fantastic. yurikuma feels almost like it was made out of contempt for people who didn't actually 'get' utena (i feel ikuhara has a similar resentment for utena fans that anno feels for evangelion fans) and though it retreads many of the same points, it feels like it adds some new and salient ones and is great in its own right. eizouken feels like the emotional texture of what i wanted star trek: picard to be - that may sound a little screwy, but its very much filled with yuasa's belief in the human spirit and has what feels like a genuinely 'earned' optimism in the face of many forces working against that.

Seeing conflicting stuff on Yurikuma. Someone wrote a negative novel about it on MAL and I am not big on anime that try to be smarter than they are and fall flat which it sounds might be the case here. I'll at least give it a shot to see what I think about it.

Eizouken looks good subject wise but will be tough for me to get through due to the bad animation.

[kitten]

Seeing conflicting stuff on Yurikuma. Someone wrote a negative novel about it on MAL and I am not big on anime that try to be smarter than they are and fall flat which it sounds might be the case here. I'll at least give it a shot to see what I think about it.

i think ikuhara is a pretty smart guy - his mixture of high & low concept stuff is fantastic and i think people just get their biscuits burned wanting to accuse him of being pretentious for not immediately understanding what frankly isn't that hard to understand. the ecchi exterior is something i largely found unappealing, at first, but he uses it in such a sincere way that by the end of it i was even enjoying the opening. there's a lot of kernels of pure earnesty in its core message of never reneging on true love that are expressed in a way that really hit me hard. ikuhara's messages are more simple than people think (modern society & mob mentality = bad; identity & love = good), it's just that they get wrapped up in the complex language. the second you make someone watching anime actually think, they often either take personal offense to it or dig their heels into why the language is actually a sign of Utter Genius only the most ardent of examiners (which just happens to be them) can possibly decipher.

it's modern enough to have some pretty brutal takedown of social media, too! which is really cool, imho (opposite gachaman crowd's optimism for the potential of social media, i guess? maybe gachaman crowds is actually Next Level cynical abt it and i'm just misreading, though). ikuhara has always had such utter contempt for groupthink and kangaroo court and i think that kind of contempt is only more and more necessary, these days.

Eizouken looks good subject wise but will be tough for me to get through due to the bad animation.

wwwwhat?

[Steamflogger Boss]

It looks awful to me. I watched some briefly and really don't like the look.

Appreciate the breakdown like I said I do plan to give it a go, just seeing conflicting reviews very hard in each direction.

[M.Knight]

Ah, so it's the art style you didn't like? The character design maybe? It looks a little bit different from the current norm. Not to crazy amounts but possibly enough to be a turn-off for some.

I am going to be a bit pedantic but "Animation" refers to the sense of motion for the elements in the scene that is provided by the successive frames displayed on the screen. Way too often you can see "animation" incorrectly used by fans in reviews or comments when they mention it to actually refer to the general visual style, art direction, or even worse, to criticize one cherry-picked in-between frame whose static nature in the context of said comment/review makes it the complete opposite of what "animation" is. (since it's not aniamted at all anymore by being isolated! )

Stilted movements, unconvincing build-ups/releases in specific motions, confusing action, lack of weight in the objects or characters' movement, now all those could be considered actual "bad animation".

[Steamflogger Boss]

Yeah I use animation interchangeably with art style. Seems to be commonly accepted so I've never made an effort to distinguish but to confirm I meant visual style here. There are some modern shows where I like the content but the bad looking cg (not really the case with this one) has me watch slower than I otherwise would. I've definitely just dropped shows due to visual style as well. I maybe watch a few new shows a year tops so I can't even say I know what normal looks like these days I just know what I do and don't like.

[BryanM]

I've been wary of Ikuhara's writing since Penguin Drum was the first thing of his I've seen completely. It had some good ideas, some messed up characters, but completely dissolved into an absolute trainwreck as it went into the final half. I've never seen so many flashbacks in a single episode, and I'm familiar with quite a bit of Bleach! Ikuhara was literally filling each consecutive episode with more flashback exposition fodder than the last - if he only had six episodes of story he should have just made it six episodes grumble grumble.

As for Isekai and tonal clash... as you all know, I love cute stupid shit combined with horror. Images like this are catnip to me. The Cautious Hero isekai looked like one of those one-joke stories, but at least has the decency to make the demons an actual threat in the narrative instead of a cartoon EXP crates. While this particular effort does not do a good job of meshing the two diametrically opposing tropes together, I do feel like the genre as a whole could do with quite a bit more grimdark, at least the ones that focus a lot of their screentime on violence.

It feels like more of a reconstruction of how these games wanted to present themselves when they weren't being fluffy: you're in the middle of a war, and extinction is a real possibility.

[BIL]

Project Utopia (176 chapters, translated to 106) Korean webcomic hentai, I mean ADULT THRILLER. Purports itself to be a XXX-rated Battle Royale, pitting kidnapped victims on a lawless island against one another in sadistic contests. Better described as a cheerfully brazen Carry On with the decidedly un-cheerful addition of nonstop rape and murder.

Despite the avowedly slumming tone, it's not without some awareness of its well-worn genre. Unlike Battle Royale's terrifying "Game," bloodshed is strictly elective. Unlike Lord of the Flies, all needs are catered for. Everyone could, in theory, enjoy ten months in pampered paradise, taking home 500 grand apiece. However, Creepy Boss Dude splits the victims up into smaller teams, promising MO MONEH to the ones with the most survivors, or sometimes, for getting the island's total population below a certain quota! Also, murder someone and their 500k is yours! RUH-ROH

A serious work might've done something interesting with this laissez-faire, but our scholarly ass man (he really can draw a fine ass) has no time for that gay shit, and so savagery explodes with numbing regularity. Timid college kids, civil servants and retirees turn into slavering Go Nagai beasts and Hokuto no Ken despots at the slightest whiff of sex or cash, with violent criminals already occupying a chunk of roster. Horror Movie Retardation™ ensures even our embattled protagonists (Nice Guy, Bad Boy and Tough Girl) are hard to root for, given scant prudence in the service of contrived peril.

Much like action stars taking brain-shattering blows, only to awaken mildly groggy at CRIME BOSS HOUSE an hour later, nobody seems particularly scarred for being cruelly violated. Bleakly pragmatic survival adaptation, or crummy writing? I think it's 20/80. A passable if farcically contrived Hobbesian nightmare, AND Clark's win quote from KOF '98. Burly McWrasslinman might've dehumanised you utterly, but you'll be glad for his patronage when Violence Jack bandits (AKA Jim, Patrick and Kenny from accounting) roll up, because "Losers have no rights. That's what history is all about."

Transparent soapy junk. 176 chapters, fucking hell. Woulda read the whole thing tbh, I have to know if Massive Thug and Creepy Loner's uneasy alliance holds, and if Bad Boy and the long-suffering Tough Girl will someday confess their feelings! She thinks he's being stolen away by the flirtatious New Girl, but little does she know - he has murderous suspicions of her and Nice Guy slamming behind his back, and even split a young motherfucker's wig with the omnipresent Convenient Rock, just for groping her while she slept! (in this universe, groping an unconscious girl is the equivalent of a shy glance at fifty paces)

Perhaps Convenient Rock is Bad Boy's Stand? Oh shit - you could call it Lovers Rock. Or Significant Others Stone in the English version.

[Ji-L87]

I just finished Martian Successor Nadesico and honestly not quite sure what to make of it. I still have the movie to go, which I maybe will get to later today.

It's kind of impressive how disjointed an experience it can be sometimes. As far as comedy goes it's mildly amusing at best and infuriating at worst, the romance is just kinda there and it's sorta meh as an sci-fi action anime. Some of the silliness is quite fun however, like how the computer interfaces have all kinds of goofy messages, really cute stuff. There are a handful of good characters in there also but mostly they're either pushed aside for plot reasons or just serve as side characters in general.

Is this one of those shows that gets famous because it's the first to combine genres and stuff in a certain way?

The character designs are quite nice except the actual character art is probably never once on-model (they just keep melting all the time) but the general a e s t h e t i c is a pleasant 90s fare with detailed backgrounds. Most impressive is perhaps the fictional old school anime that weirdly turns out to be important to the narrative - it's not at all my scene, but it's surprisingly well done and to me captures the look and feel very well.

I watched the blu-ray put out by Nozomi and I can't comment too much on the technical side of things except there was a surprising amount of noise in the image when I got close to the TV, but I didn't really notice it from a normal viewing distance.

Edit:
Three things.
1) I want to clarify that I didn't dislike Nadesico, just that I found the experience as a whole a bit jarring.
2) The movie was really quite enjoyable, despite being a darker tale (but the best characters returned, yay). The visuals were great and Keiji Gotoh's quite particular drawing style works a lot better when it's allowed to be polished in a movie like this (or OVA, like Tenamonya Voyagers).
3) I love Ruri's deadpan commentary and so did probably a whole bunch of people back in the 90s.

[gbaplayer]

Has anybody ever seen the Kaiji Anime? I´m at Season 2 now and holy f*** is this series intense.

[BIL]

Is that the gambling one? Heard many great things about it - alas, so easy to procrastinate!

[Udderdude]

Well, about 1/3 of the shows I was watching this season got stomped on due to a certian virus, however it doesn't seem that they were cancelled. Some of them are planning to come back. Hopefully the next season will be just fine .. right?

[Steamflogger Boss]

Recent views

Crusher Joe The Movie (amazing animation that doesn't let up over a 2 hour action movie, the cars crumpling at the beginning whew)
Lupin III: The Last Job
Lupin III: Goodbye Partner

Both of the Lupin movies were standard tv special fair. Being more recent there is some pretty rough CG animation but I hadn't seen these and they were fun light watches.

[Randorama]

Is that the gambling one? Heard many great things about it - alas, so easy to procrastinate!

Enough is enough! GO WATCH KAIJI NOW AND GROW A SECOND PENIS WTF NINJA GAIDEN IS FOR KIDS ROFL

...and now for something different (cue "John-Cleese-on-the-beach-deadpan-face").

Fukumoto's drawing style is ugly as sin and the anime adaptations do not try to embellish it, but his writing is just plain superb, in terms of characterisation, pathos and intensity of the themes (his manga tend to revolve around the dregs of Japanese society trying to "live", rather than "exist"). The Anime adapts parts 1 and 2, but personally I found parts 4 and 5 of the manga out of this world.

Him and Buronson are possibly some of the most mature seinen writers (still) around. The OST is also superb, in the anime.

[BIL]

I did hear it was some high-octane, ultra-testosterone, backs to the wall shit. Would watching parts 1 and 2 animated, then following on with the manga suffice? That's what I typically do, with stuff like Shingeki no Kyojin and Kengan Ashura.

(Ninja Gaiden? Merely the entry requirement for men of hardcore action. Saigo no Nindou, now there is a game for desperate men to bet their lives on no-missing. HEADPHONES WARNING: ABAREEE!)

[Steamflogger Boss]

Added to my list.

[Randorama]

Anime-->Manga: Yes, but I warmly suggest to buy bigger trousers for the growing third leg after finishing Part 2.

Part 3, I find it weak (but Fukumoto must shoehorn Mahjong in each of his manga). Parts 4 and 5 are sublime as far as I am concerned, but they do feature an abuse of decompression (too lazy: please google it up).

Gin to Kin and other Non-Mahjong series by Fukumoto are also great, whereas the Mahjong ones are an acquired taste (For Akagi: watch anime-->skip to issue 240 or so of the manga-->endure the total abuse of decompression-->victory!).

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Stumbled across this retrospective over the weekend which led me to revisit my childhood favourite: the Genocyber series. I dipped back through the thread and can see that opinions on this are pretty low, but it was perfect entertainment for 14-year-old edgelord me, especially when the old Manga Entertainment trailer sold it so well.

Pre-internet, one of my main hobbies was drawing my own comic strips with my friends and I have to say that Genocyber inspired literally every piece of art I ever created. I must've worn those original 3 VHSs out rewatching this, completely unaware of the unreleased 4th and 5th part which after a 25 year gap I finally watched.

Some random thoughts:

-Took a few watches to fathom what is going on right before Genocyber's first transformation - the 'merging' of the two sisters. A few rewatches to notice - hey wait a minute, Elaine has Diana's cyborg body now.

-The brain-breaking mechanical transformations. Never seen such a casual disregard for spacial and structural logic before this or again. I guess that's the power of animation but how am I expected to believe that those hulking robots can compress down and fold away neatly inside a human-sized frame? Unless they're made of crumply tin-foil. Things like this look awesome on screen but annoyingly take you out of the story. The assassin-bots from the manga are more believable, having only concealed sawblades in their hands and faces and drills coming out of their eyes. Wakayama's design in the anime is reminiscent of the manga assassin-bots.

-Long info-dump scenes where the dialogue/narration doesn't actually match whats happening on screen; Kenneth explaining (twice) that Elaine couldnt go back to Tokyo because she was dead to the two people who just watched her die only moments before. Meanwhile, unrelated images of the gestating twin are shown. I'm more familiar with the dub but this makes me wonder if the original has a better script that actually explains whats going on.

-And as for Elaine's death - instead of looking shocked or hurt by being impaled, she seems to give her friend this embarrassed smile who in turn seems to look relieved as memories of their friendship flash across screen. What were they going for with this scene? Can anyone explain this to me??

I'd describe this as a cyber-punk body-horror ghost-story mashup, more Roger Corman than David Cronenberg. If you want to check it out, the whole uncensored thing is easily findable on Youtube. Feel free to stop at the end of episode 3. 4 and 5 add nothing (although it was nice seeing Diana again after 25 years) and the final scene of episode 3 is just so good.

[BIL]

Besides its caustic malevolence and state of the art body-horror, what sticks with me from Genocyber these days is Fairy Dreamin'. A sweet early-90s J-rock treat, also the analgesic chaser to a burning gorenographic barrage of unspeakable bio-fuckery. Like getting brained with a box-fresh chromed frying pan at the conclusion of a guided abattoir visit - suddenly, everything was beautiful and nothing else hurt

Look, here's a cute girl singing it live! ;3 I bet she's nice and soft and warm, just like those childraSDASADFGASDFASDF▓▓▓▓▓█▓▓█▓█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░ ░ ░ ░

[drauch]

Look, here's a cute girl singing it live! ;3 I bet she's nice and soft and warm, just like those childraSDASADFGASDFASDF▓▓▓▓▓█▓▓█▓█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░ ░ ░ ░

Man, that is siiiiiick. And RIP those kidz

[BIL]

Yeah, that little foot, JESUS CHRIST WTF I DONT LIKE HEAVY ASSAULT CHOPPERS ANYMORE

Highest tribute I can pay to part 1 is legit having to rewind the VHS and rewatch a scene, because I couldn't believe a man had gone from healthy and hale to

Spoiler

a screaming head atop a bloody web of exposed sinew and blood vessels

in a single cut. Yo that evil doctor is a genius

[FinalBaton]

Need to watch GenoCyber, that poop was all over MangaCorp trailers (along with the much maligned M.D.Geist). Anything bio-mechanical-monster piques my interest

Man, those trailers and the ADV ones are so damn dope, I got a box full of animu VHS here that I haven't watched half of yet, got some decent stuff left to watch for sure

[GaijinPunch]

Besides its caustic malevolence and state of the art body-horror, what sticks with me from Genocyber these days is Fairy Dreamin'.[

The track isn't my bag, but the most upvoted comment is:
"The grand days of hard hitting anime and thumping OSTs before the avalanche of kawai and harem bullshit ruined the game for everybody... "