Recommended Anime/Manga?

[Raytrace]

no disco strings unfortunately.

no worries looks great anywayz

[Raytrace]

Wow, when anime girls were GALS!

So much awesome in those gifs.

yeah t he art and especially the motion in Crusher Joe is beautiful.

way more Crusher Joe GIFs here:

http://r4ytrace.tumblr.com/tagged/crusherjoe

[Raytrace]

Have you seen Crusher Joe ?

Watched it recently... well, a year ago? 80's goodness.

yeah it's a pity there's so little of it, even if Dirty Pair does have the same feel, it is still fairly different.

[MX7]

I guess I have to watch Crusher Joe now

So there's a film and two OVAs? Sounds nice and manageable!

[Raytrace]

I guess I have to watch Crusher Joe now

So there's a film and two OVAs? Sounds nice and manageable!

yep they are great - first appearance of the Lovely Angels is in it too

[ChainsawGuitarSP]

So besides being gay, what's your excuse for not watching Senran Kagura?

[Raytrace]

So besides being gay, what's your excuse for not watching Senran Kagura?

IF (SCI-FI AND/OR CAN HAS ROBOTZ) = WILL WATCH

there are of course some rare exceptions

[Raytrace]

Waifu watching period drama on TV = me: 'Ah ffs get this shit off!'

Me watching Rose Of Versailles = 'This is amazing'

[GaijinPunch]

Wow, when anime girls were GALS!

And anime guys were not girls!

I guess I have to watch Crusher Joe now

Yes, you do. 1 rather lengthy film, and 2 OVA's which are substantially more glossy but still nothing compared to today's crap. I need to watch the OVAs. Meant to a year ago and it slipped my mind. I've never watched Dirty Pair (a single episode) so might as well do that at some point.

[Raytrace]

just finished Vol 09 of Char's Deleted Affair manga, really do like the main storyline but the Char-Haman romance stuff is a bit much o_O

I also read Gundam Sousei manga, absolutely brilliant and extremely interesting if you love MSG 0079, which I do.

[KAI]

Just watched a couple of excellent pieces of animation:

Kyousogiga (ONA) - very Gainaxesque, for a moment I thought I was watching something directed by Anno. Confusing as fuck, but I really enjoyed it.

Momo e no Tegami/A Letter to Momo (Movie) - Pseudo lip-sync and Rotoscope animation with a nice story. Hiroyuki Okiura has so much talent, I hope to see more of him in the future.

[Skykid]

Wow, when anime girls were GALS!

And anime guys were not girls!

Maybe Japan got so bad at real-life heterosexual relations, the guys just blurred the lines between the sexes so they could consider screwing each other. The death knell of Anime role models.

[xbl0x180]

Versailles No Bara is MANLY ANIME! Anything directed by Dezaki Osamu is automatically made of win and God

[Raytrace]

Versailles No Bara is MANLY ANIME! Anything directed by Dezaki Osamu is automatically made of win and God

it is absolutely brilliant, I still think in terms of classicness script, I still just about prefer LOTGH, but only just...

[Raytrace]

Versailles No Bara is MANLY ANIME! Anything directed by Dezaki Osamu is automatically made of win and God

OK I really have to watch Ashita No Joe - is Dororo good?

[drauch]

Yeah, Dezaki is the man. Also be sure and check out Aim for the Ace! Regardless if you like tennis or not it gets pretty intense. Lots of stark lighting, melodrama and groovy camera shots. Couldn't remember, but did you check out Space Adventure Cobra yet? The movie is fantastic, but in my opinion it's the series that really shines. The Professional: Golgo 13 is probably my favorite movie of his. It just oozes style and stoicism!

Haven't had a chance to check out his Dororo adaptation yet. I don't think it's translated at all, but I could be wrong. Can't go wrong with two Osamus!

[Raytrace]

Yeah, Dezaki is the man. Also be sure and check out Aim for the Ace! Regardless if you like tennis or not it gets pretty intense. Lots of stark lighting, melodrama and groovy camera shots. Couldn't remember, but did you check out Space Adventure Cobra yet? The movie is fantastic, but in my opinion it's the series that really shines. The Professional: Golgo 13 is probably my favorite movie of his. It just oozes style and stoicism!

Haven't had a chance to check out his Dororo adaptation yet. I don't think it's translated at all, but I could be wrong. Can't go wrong with two Osamus!

yeah well I'm not into tennis really at all, however, even just for Gunbuster reasons I shall definitely eventually check out Aim For The Ace!.

Yeah all I've seen of Cobra is the movie, which I thought was amazing, the series is definitely on my list too.Golgo 13 seems cool - Imma check it out.

[MX7]

Regarding the whole 'manime' debate, we have to remember that Japanese popular culture is essentially a sponge that absorbs (ie pilfers) various tropes and then amplifies them to a ridicous degree. Japanese noise music is a more extreme (sonically) version of late 70s/early 80s British noise bands like Con-Dom, Ramleh and Whitehouse. Late 80s Japanese idol pop is a ridiculously saccharine reaction to Western pop acts like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. The mid to late 80s proliferation of huge muscles and ultra violence is a response to the hypermasculinty inherent to American pop cinema from Top Gun to The Terminator. If anime seems a little tame now, it's simply because this predilection towards hypermasculine characters in Western media has waned. Our 80s action heroes have been replaced with angsty teenagers, and Japanese animation seems to have followed suit.

Another key factor in this new tendancy of Japanese animation is a marked preference for self reflexivity. Ie anime that refers to other anime. This has been going on for years, of course. Urusei Yatsura makes copious references to Gundam et al, Gunbuster pays more than sly homage to Ace Wonrae. I guess the animation that really pushed this wilful postmodernism over the edge was Evangelion. When Eva references everything under the sun it seems fresh and exciting. Now when Japanese cartoons do it, it just seems lazy and uninspired. There are exceptions. Ouran Kou Kou was delightfully postmodern in the way that it constantly drew attention to hackneyed anime generic paradigms.

tl;dr: instead of copying western action movies, anime is now copying anime, with predictable diminishing returns.

ANYWAY

I love Bubblegum Crisis, but I want to love it more than anything I've ever seen. It has a cool girl crime fighting team, cyborgs, incredible animation and the best music I've heard in an anime. It also has amazingly inventive scenarios, but the actual narrative is lousy. There's invariably some sludge of exposition early on in an episode, followed by a lot of wasted time, followed by a narrative pay-off where I don't care about any of the characters beyond an absolutely superficial level. By way of example (and there are SPOILERS here if you haven't watched OVA 5) Priss is involved in a completely unconvincing psuedo-romance with a female sexeroid boomer. Their relationship is never adequately explained. Priss disappears until the last 6 minutes or so of the episode, save for a brief scene where the two women go for a bike ride at the beach. The final climatic scene with Priss having to kill said sexeroid is therefore completely rendered meaningless. The rest of the episode, which is pretty imaginative, has no emotional pay-off. The only reason I'm so bothered is that I love the show so much aside from this...

[GaijinPunch]

I've never watched any Evangelion if you can believe that, but leading up to it, Top wo Nerae! (Gunbuster) was the king of Parody.

You can claim Japan has followed suit b/c America has waned (slightly) from musclebound heroes, but the fact is in reality, emasculated men are the more prevelant here in pop culture.

[MX7]

Do you mean emasculated as in having some notion of masculinity actively removed, or simply waif-like/effeminate? Emasculation seemed to be quite a big theme in Japanese post-war cinema, and I don't see too much of it in modern Japanese cinema. I guess you have all those effeminate Japanese boy bands, but I guess that's more of a move towards androgeny than some active removal of masculinity per se.

It would be interesting to see what you thought of Evangelion. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that the series undertakes a pretty radical paradigm shift, and somehow switches from a generic boy-with-a-huge-robot story to something ridiculously iconoclastic. In terms of sheer scope, the only TV program I can think of with a similar (grand) narrative scope is The Wire, and they're hardly comparable...

[Raytrace]

2 things I've learned from anime:

* If someone is talking to you about something, no matter how friendly they seem, if after you stop talking to them a lens-flare/sparkle thing appears in their eye, GET AWAY FROM THEM, DON'T TRUST THEM, THEY'RE GOING TO DO SOMETHING BAD TO YOU!!!!!

* If something is even relatively in the distance, it will literally just be a lens-flare sparkle, that's it.

[Skykid]

Regarding the whole 'manime' debate, we have to remember that Japanese popular culture is essentially a sponge that absorbs (ie pilfers) various tropes and then amplifies them to a ridicous degree. Japanese noise music is a more extreme (sonically) version of late 70s/early 80s British noise bands like Con-Dom, Ramleh and Whitehouse. Late 80s Japanese idol pop is a ridiculously saccharine reaction to Western pop acts like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna. The mid to late 80s proliferation of huge muscles and ultra violence is a response to the hypermasculinty inherent to American pop cinema from Top Gun to The Terminator. If anime seems a little tame now, it's simply because this predilection towards hypermasculine characters in Western media has waned. Our 80s action heroes have been replaced with angsty teenagers, and Japanese animation seems to have followed suit.

Another key factor in this new tendancy of Japanese animation is a marked preference for self reflexivity. Ie anime that refers to other anime. This has been going on for years, of course. Urusei Yatsura makes copious references to Gundam et al, Gunbuster pays more than sly homage to Ace Wonrae. I guess the animation that really pushed this wilful postmodernism over the edge was Evangelion. When Eva references everything under the sun it seems fresh and exciting. Now when Japanese cartoons do it, it just seems lazy and uninspired. There are exceptions. Ouran Kou Kou was delightfully postmodern in the way that it constantly drew attention to hackneyed anime generic paradigms.

tl;dr: instead of copying western action movies, anime is now copying anime, with predictable diminishing returns.

This is true, although I would argue (lightly) that the absorption of western themes and tropes has become less prevalent in today's anime, while anime copying anime has become drastically more pronounced (and as a result, thin, pointless and with barely any justification for its existence.)

The reason there's less in the way of western theme regurgitation is because Japan as a people have become gradually less infatuated with foreign (and especially American) culture. In-turn, westerners, who now have little in the way of masculine role-models in their own media, have latched onto and thrived on the characteristics of Japanese androgyny, social insecurity, weakness, and effeminate males. This has created an unusual fissure nary seen in the anime world, where western audiences require anime to be distinctly Japanese and not very good, and they're responding as fast as Flash will allow: producing derivatives of derivatives until they've just about boiled the formula down to a fine, humourless, passionless, and slightly homoerotic salt.

[KAI]

Talking about humor series, most of the best comedies I've seen so far were made in the last decade, not in the 90', not in the 80'. Absurd humor and otaku culture references are so hilarious.

Watching Dezaki's last work, Genji Monogatari Sennenki, so far, so good.

[GaijinPunch]

Do you mean emasculated as in having some notion of masculinity actively removed, or simply waif-like/effeminate? Emasculation seemed to be quite a big theme in Japanese post-war cinema, and I don't see too much of it in modern Japanese cinema. I guess you have all those effeminate Japanese boy bands, but I guess that's more of a move towards androgeny than some active removal of masculinity per se.

You can call it androgeny, sure, but I think that's neither here nor there. Tomato/Tomato type of thing. The boy bands are the easiest to point the finger at, b/c they're in the spot light, but if you hang out on gaijin forums (fuckedgaijin.com is a good one) you'll note quickly that the girly Japanese "men" are the butt of many a joke. Japanese fashion in general is pretty out-of-sync with western, and generally has been for at least as long as I can remember. I guess hipsters are hipsters, but for physique in general, you don't see J-guys bulking up and showing muscle. It is just not fashionable, except to body builders for the most part.

I think it's the chicken an the egg scenario, but Japan's numbers for people getting laid (especially post marriage) are among the lowest in the free world. It is quite staggering how many single men actively try to not get their dick wet. It really is sad, not only b/c the same stats read that those people are generally "not happy", but also leads to Japan's biggest problem: the demographic crisis.

There really is a good senior thesis (or documentary film) surrounding young Japan today, and there are stats all over the internet to prove it. Despite 2 decades of recession, and pretty much higher standard of living than the west across the board, Japan is one of the most unhappy countries. Why? Who knows. My personal opinion is that Japan's highly affectionate affair with technology (something post-war Japan has always had) has pushed it (further) into seclusion now that the technology is there to somewhat negate the necessity of human interaction. Why have a "real" girlfriend when you can walk down to Don Quixote and buy any number of Tenga products and fap to your virtual anime girlfriend on your phone?

It would be interesting to see what you thought of Evangelion. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that the series undertakes a pretty radical paradigm shift, and somehow switches from a generic boy-with-a-huge-robot story to something ridiculously iconoclastic. In terms of sheer scope, the only TV program I can think of with a similar (grand) narrative scope is The Wire, and they're hardly comparable...

[mesh control]

I started an episode of Dirty Pair Flash last night and once Kei and Yuri characters were revealed I shut it off immediately.

0_0

[DaneSaga]

I started an episode of Dirty Pair Flash last night and once Kei and Yuri characters were revealed I shut it off immediately.

0_0

is it that bad?
I love and have seen everything Dirty Pair related (I quite literally screamed like a prepubescent girl when I spotted their cameo in Patlabor TV lol), with the one sole exception of Flash . But Those chara designs and the time gap between their 80's and 90's outings scare me from even thinking about watching a minute of it.

[mesh control]

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 ... rflash.jpg

Not really bad, but not the flavor I was looking for.
(I went into the series blind)

[drauch]

Yeah, I'm a bit afraid to watch it as well. It's really the only Dirty Pair thing I haven't set foot in. I'm certainly not counting that shit American comic. The intro is pretty smooth, and I feel like I'll give it a shot someday, but for now it just sort of lingers.

Manly men are dead. Bring back muscles and beards!

[GaijinPunch]

Manly men are dead. Bring back muscles and beards!

I actually found myself with a mate in bar in Shinjuku 2-chome on New Year's Evening... our other friend who is of that persuasion was finally done working and we went to enjoy a refreshing beverage. As we were both using the toilet, he says "don't look up". The ceiling was plastered with a manga of a muscle-bound guy (complete w/ porn mustache) banging the crap out of other dude's asses. Ironic that the gay manga has the mainly men, and everything else has the girly men.

[drauch]

An enigma, indeed. Maybe we're all gay?