I'm making a list for you. It's also useful in that its allowing me to list out what I have seen, am waiting to see, and need to see.
Escaflowne is a sort of mech show right? Probably not right, but I've heard of it, never watched.
Escaflowne is kind of unique-- it's a mech show set in a fuedal fantasy world. Or a feudal fantasy show with mechs in it. Sounds incredibly eye-roll-worthy, but trust me it's probably one of the top 5 anime series of the 90s, in terms of quality. (trivia: Yoko Kanno, the composer who did all the music in CB, did the score.)
Evangelion has mechs too. Evangelion is... both very good and very bad and sometimes in the middle. It's psychological and disturbing and interesting, but overall its monster-of-the-week formula gets tired, and by the end of the series it collapses under its own Freudian pop psychology. But it can be engrossing and it still wins for one of the most disturbing anime scenes I've watched: a scene were one mech violently attacks another, with music and with context and... guh. I can't explain it outside of context but trust me it was very disturbing in its violence. Not blood quanity, just violence level. Definitely watch Evangelion from the beginning if it starts up on AS, but don't spend a lot of money on it-- there's better anime out there for $25 a DVD.
Lupin III is from the 70s, actually. I love Lupin, though it took me a few eps to get into it. After watching Lupin III I could tell that some of the charm in the dynamic of CB was reminiscent of the character dynamics of Lupin III. One group catches criminals and one group committs crime, but they're remarkably similar and the shows often have the same caper feel.
As far as fansubbed episodes go, I don't do that so much. I'd like to watch some of the Naruto eps since some of the actions sequences don't play out so well in manga. Mostly I don't since I'm short on space, and high in crappy computer.
Most of what I recommend will be anime, though I can think of a few manga titles you might get into. There are some solutions: a lot of anime episodes are posted on youtube.com these days (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Blood+, Sailor Moon), though sometimes they're split into two or three segments of 9-10 minutes. You can also burn stuff to DVDs; I've done that a lot to free up space.
I'll talk about a few titles right here:
Samurai Champloo is fun and I recommend it as an action, cute way to kill time. It's visually lush and its humor is inspired, but it suffers from lack of direction, lack of overall plot, and lack of raison d'etre. Still, if you give up on any expectation of plotlines, it's very amusing fun and the three main characters are loveable.
Ranma 1/2 is a manga and a five-season anime, all out on DVD and in english bookshelves. Ranma 1/2 is what Naoko Takeuchi did before she did InuYasha, and I will always love Ranma 1/2 more than IY. Where IY has pretense of drama, Ranma 1/2 is pure martial arts action / romantic comedy. It basically created the martial arts comedy romance genre, or at least was the most defined title representing it. Ranma 1/2 is addictive candy-coated silly fun. It's often repetitive, but unlike IY, it has no pretenses toward a destination, so you never get impatient with it. Basically its about a boy who falls into a cursed wellspring and from that point on every time he's hit with cold water he turns into a female version of himself. Hot water turns him back. His absent-minded father gets him betrothed to the daughter of a dojo owner (who has two other daughters), and the show starts with Ranma meeting the Tendo family and then attending high school with his new fiance. After that comes five seasons and 32 volumes of crazy characters and loveable mishaps. Some of them might remind you of IY--- characters like Koga the wolf-demon, Myouga the flea, and Sango are lifted almost verbatim from Ranma 1/2 characters (Ryouga, Happosai, and Ukyo, respectively). But where IY does it decent, Ranma 1/2 does it great. Go to your local library and pick up the first three volumes of the manga. You'll love it. It's also a classic anime title. Lots of in-jokes.
*Ranma 1/2 is also one of those shows that a lot of other anime series tried to copy after it was popular. For instance, in the first episode of Bleach the main orange-haired kid's father randomly attacks him over breakfast and engages him in a martial arts fight. That father/son relationship was totally stolen from Ranma 1/2. Ranma was such a major manga/anime title in the 90s; for a long time Naoko Takeuchi was the best-selling manga artist/writer in Japan, having major hits with Maison Ikkoku (I'm told that's very good), Ranma 1/2, and then Inuyasha. I've seen a lot of stuff in anime that references or borrows from Ranma.
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Date: 2006-07-02 04:11 am (UTC)Escaflowne is a sort of mech show right? Probably not right, but I've heard of it, never watched.
Escaflowne is kind of unique-- it's a mech show set in a fuedal fantasy world. Or a feudal fantasy show with mechs in it. Sounds incredibly eye-roll-worthy, but trust me it's probably one of the top 5 anime series of the 90s, in terms of quality. (trivia: Yoko Kanno, the composer who did all the music in CB, did the score.)
Evangelion has mechs too. Evangelion is... both very good and very bad and sometimes in the middle. It's psychological and disturbing and interesting, but overall its monster-of-the-week formula gets tired, and by the end of the series it collapses under its own Freudian pop psychology. But it can be engrossing and it still wins for one of the most disturbing anime scenes I've watched: a scene were one mech violently attacks another, with music and with context and... guh. I can't explain it outside of context but trust me it was very disturbing in its violence. Not blood quanity, just violence level. Definitely watch Evangelion from the beginning if it starts up on AS, but don't spend a lot of money on it-- there's better anime out there for $25 a DVD.
Lupin III is from the 70s, actually. I love Lupin, though it took me a few eps to get into it. After watching Lupin III I could tell that some of the charm in the dynamic of CB was reminiscent of the character dynamics of Lupin III. One group catches criminals and one group committs crime, but they're remarkably similar and the shows often have the same caper feel.
As far as fansubbed episodes go, I don't do that so much. I'd like to watch some of the Naruto eps since some of the actions sequences don't play out so well in manga. Mostly I don't since I'm short on space, and high in crappy computer.
Most of what I recommend will be anime, though I can think of a few manga titles you might get into. There are some solutions: a lot of anime episodes are posted on youtube.com these days (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Blood+, Sailor Moon), though sometimes they're split into two or three segments of 9-10 minutes. You can also burn stuff to DVDs; I've done that a lot to free up space.
I'll talk about a few titles right here:
Samurai Champloo is fun and I recommend it as an action, cute way to kill time. It's visually lush and its humor is inspired, but it suffers from lack of direction, lack of overall plot, and lack of raison d'etre. Still, if you give up on any expectation of plotlines, it's very amusing fun and the three main characters are loveable.
Ranma 1/2 is a manga and a five-season anime, all out on DVD and in english bookshelves. Ranma 1/2 is what Naoko Takeuchi did before she did InuYasha, and I will always love Ranma 1/2 more than IY. Where IY has pretense of drama, Ranma 1/2 is pure martial arts action / romantic comedy. It basically created the martial arts comedy romance genre, or at least was the most defined title representing it. Ranma 1/2 is addictive candy-coated silly fun. It's often repetitive, but unlike IY, it has no pretenses toward a destination, so you never get impatient with it. Basically its about a boy who falls into a cursed wellspring and from that point on every time he's hit with cold water he turns into a female version of himself. Hot water turns him back. His absent-minded father gets him betrothed to the daughter of a dojo owner (who has two other daughters), and the show starts with Ranma meeting the Tendo family and then attending high school with his new fiance. After that comes five seasons and 32 volumes of crazy characters and loveable mishaps. Some of them might remind you of IY--- characters like Koga the wolf-demon, Myouga the flea, and Sango are lifted almost verbatim from Ranma 1/2 characters (Ryouga, Happosai, and Ukyo, respectively). But where IY does it decent, Ranma 1/2 does it great. Go to your local library and pick up the first three volumes of the manga. You'll love it. It's also a classic anime title. Lots of in-jokes.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-02 04:56 am (UTC)