Forum - View topicWhat are you watching right now? Why? (please read 1st post)
|
Goto page Previous Next |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
kilaria
 Posts: 135 Location: Dallas, TX |
|
|||
|
After getting all caught up on Bodacious Space Pirates, I started watching Usagi Drop. 3 episodes in, and every moment has tugged and pulled at my heart strings in the best ways. I love the interaction between Daikichi and Rin. Why couldn't all men be like him??? And Rin... she is just cute as can be.
Despite my failure of watching all the new anime that I own at home, I ended up buying 4 more box sets over the last couple weeks. I should put the breaks on for a while until I catch up. It doesn't help that I end up watching anime on netflix or crunchroll instead. It's my entertainment during lunchtime at work, and I continue on once I get home because I'm interested in what I've started watching. The only physical DVD i've started is Kaleido Star second season. For some reason, I'm not as interested as I was in the first season. Maybe I'm just not in the mood for it. |
||||
|
||||
pandora_warhol
 Posts: 5 Location: Croatia |
|
|||
I just finished my Death Note marathon and I agree. spoiler[When L died everything went down hill but for me introducing Mello and Near was a great idea.] There were some nail-biting episodes with them. Although, towards the end that excitement kinda vanished. Nevertheless, Death Note is most certainly on my top 5 of favourite anime. Completely worth watching. |
||||
|
||||
ailblentyn
 Posts: 1688 Location: body in Ohio, heart in Sydney |
|
|||
And isn't the music terrible? "Tattoo Kiss" gets skipped every time here. It's not as if the music of the first series was really that great (though I had a fondness for the first closer), but in retrospect... |
||||
|
||||
Surrender Artist
 Posts: 3264 Location: Pennsylvania, USA |
|
|||
|
I recently watched Speed Grapher in English, on Hulu. Oh, what a mess!
Gonzo evidently wanted to make a show for grown-ups when they produced Speed Grapher, unfortunately the seem to have done so with the mentality of a hormonally unbalanced fourteen year old as the series is not mature, but, “not for kids,” even though they’re the only ones who would be impressed with this stuff. So much of it is gratuitous, monomaniacally exaggerated and apparently conceived to be watched while snickering about what a big boy you are for being to stay awake long enough to sneak down to the television after your parents have gone to bed. If taken seriously, it’s a deplorable irritant, but with sincere derision, it has some garbage dump charm. The adolescent attitudes manifest not just in events, but in the story. It wants to be a righteous indictment of inequality, but it’s all so sophomoric. It has nothing interesting, let alone smart, to say about the subject, instead it just assumes all the clichés of adolescents raging against the system from bedrooms in McMansions with their own televisions. “Bad people and greed aren’t good,” is not a moral or theme, it’s a waste of time. It tags American imperialism onto the end, with a then-timely caricature of George W. Bush, which offended me because of the lame WE’RE GREEDY’N’EVIL villainy it imposed upon them. I hope that whoever concocted all of it didn’t take it to seriously and if he does, I hope that he doesn’t vote. Many of the characters in Speed Grapher are such horrible people that they aren’t terrible at all, but hilarious. They are mean and depraved and cruel at the drop of the hat to the greatest extent achievable under the circumstances whether anything like that has been built up to, established or otherwise earned by the story. It’s the only note that their personalities can play! It’s like everybody is Tommy Udo! It’s ineffective at face value as shocking, but very funny in the way that only earnestly trying too hard and getting it very wrong can be. The chief antagonist, Mr. Suitengu, is one of anime’s superabundant mean nihilists, given a suitably mean and nihilistic voice by Greg Ayres, who time reveals has some reasons and motivations, but they aren’t woven into the story or revealed judiciously, but dumped out near the end without much strong suggestion because the writers seemingly only then realized that they hadn’t bothered to tell the audience. Then we have Captain Ginza, a vicious policewoman given a fittingly low growl by Clarine Harp who has a strange, angrily possessive and obsessive relationship with the lead that’s not really satisfactorily explored. She’s every loose-cannon cop turned up to eleven, not averse to hauling the object of her lust around in her trunk, then doing the sex to his unconscious body. She has a gimmick about claiming self-defense and I’ll grant that threatening to self-defense somebody is funny once, but she repeats it so many times that it completes the cycle of joke, not funny anymore, hilarious because it keeps happening and finally just being a tiresome confession that they didn’t think of anything else for her character. The protagonist, Tatsumi Saiga and his eventual companion Kagura Tennōzu are the nearest thing to stable, balanced characters. Of course stable and balanced are very relative terms for a principal character who acquires the power to make things get blowed up real good by snapping pictures of them with his camera. Saiga is meant to be disillusioned and world-weary, a tone that Christoper R. Sabat gamely tries to infuse into his voice, but we don’t spend much time with his downtrodden side, so he becomes a bit indistinct. Kagura is portrayed with less pathos than somebody who suffers through her experience might and has a blank timidity to her that limits her appeal and interest as a character. Of course, I could be missing something because, frankly, anything close to a reasonable character doesn’t stand out well in a show that has old men smacking ill-clad young women with riding crops while they monotonously moan and grind against them. The incidental cast is dafter, having to compress their vicious sleaze into one or two episodes. In keeping with Gonzo tradition, they have created an ostensibly serious, interesting story and filled it with preposterous nonsense. Among the enemies that our hero faces are an evil dentist (no, not that one) with spidery limbs that have vicious tooth-mauling implements attached them coming out of his back and an megalomaniacal priest with lightning powers (Sadly, not the Electric Messiah from The Ruling Class), who somehow ends up preaching at la Sagrada Familia, which has presumably been moved from Barcelona to Tokyo, or duplicated there. Lamentably, somewhere in the second half of the series, it tries to calm down and be less preposterous. Silly spectacles like hiding out at a drag club owned by the ‘sister’ of a camp gay masseuse, spontaneous biting off of fingers and totally doing the nasty simmer down so the story can go on. This is a lamentable turn, because after accustoming one to laughing at its excess without needing to worry much about what was happening, taking that away makes what’s left seem bland and unimportant. Speed Grapher could have succeeded as a thirteen episode inadvertent exploitation film parody. It would have been far more ‘awesome’ than good, but that’s better by half than dull. The second half of the story asks you to take it seriously; to worry about what will happen to the characters and to feel for them, but the first half didn’t prepare you for that, so you can’t really feel obliged to play along. Only one or two emotional notes at the end sound right. Captain Ginza gets a late-series epiphany that’s almost convincing, somehow because its handled with all the subtlety of whacking some poor idiot with those Bandai Entertainment Patlabor movie limited edition boxes. To its shame, the art of Speed Grapher mostly matches the unimpressive dullness of the second half more than the amusing excess of the first. Few of the character designs are especially good. Captain Ginza is striking in the way that a dark-skinned woman with white hair wearing trumped-up lingerie can be, but this series mostly keeps to the standard anime playbook. Politicians et al are pudgy, round-faced nobodies, the mean nihilist is a long, lean angular vision in white and the world-weary lead is scruffy. It has a little fun dressing Kagura up in a few different outfits, but that’s about it. It also fails to present a convincing image of a failed society. Past the first episode, we see little of the hard-bitten streets of a catastrophically unequal society. Some of the crazy monsters are a little entertaining to the eye, but err equally into being silly. It looks neither distinctive nor impressively committed to convention. The staff did not stretch very far here. They also didn’t try very hard with the animation, which is often sort of lousy. People seem to move by half-walking, half magically gliding over ground, many are animated stiffly while their subjects respond in unconvincing kind. Speed Grapher could have been spectacular trash, it is a mess, but some of it just isn’t enough of a mess. It feels like a lot of other Gonzo series. It has ambitions, but too discipline or care. They had an idea and some cool things that could happen, but somehow weren’t able to put it together well, instead just jerry-rigging them into a series that shakes around with pieces falling off a lot at first, then just rattles and gasps along. Despite being distinguished by how nasty and dirty it tries to be, it feels a lot like other things they’ve done. They really needed to buy some better parts and retrain their mechanics. Inane Pedantry Corner: As with some other FUNImation English dubs, they either tried to impose American political terms onto Japan for the convenience of American audiences or didn’t know the correct ones. They get ‘Representative’ right for members of the lower house, but Parliament should have been The Diet, Senator should have been Councillor and a reference to federal control should be something like national control as Japan is a unitary state. This is rank pedantry and didn’t bear at all upon my opinion of the series, but I can’t resist mentioning it. |
||||
|
||||
dirkusbirkus
 Posts: 699 Location: Manchester, UK |
|
|||
Can you imagine the confusion trying to explain that one to a western audience? I know you're being pedantic but that example in particular made me chuckle. I do enjoy how comprehensive your reviews are. |
||||
|
||||
Gewürtztraminer
 Posts: 1028 Location: Texas - Its like whole other country. |
|
|||
Excellent, it is fast approaching in my pile of the great unwatched (Infinite Ryvius is ahead of it), I will see how my views compare to yours. |
||||
|
||||
Botan24
 Posts: 684 Location: Northern Michigan |
|
|||
^Yes, so glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about this stupid show. I give you credit for making it all the way through. Personally, I gave up at episode 12. By half way point I'd had enough! The only, only, thing I like about this show is the opening music. Which as I understand it is not the original opener.
As long as we're being pedantry...actually, its brother Chris Ayres that does Suitengu's voice. Greg plays the character with the super sense of smell, Tsujido. |
||||
|
||||
|
Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6528 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
|
|||
|
Thanks, Surrender Artist. Speed Grapher was on my undecided as yet list of anime to watch. You have pushed it into the don't bother list.
|
||||
|
||||
Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23786 |
|
|||
|
I cannot, in good conscience, claim that Speed Grapher is a fine show. It is not. However, they did have me from the scene where poor Kagura stumbles in to see spoiler[her female teacher, an erstwhile ally, orally pleasuring her bitch-on-wheels mom.]
|
||||
|
||||
|
EinSpiegel
Posts: 9 |
|
|||
|
For my adolescent years I had been into Naruto. I had known for a long time that there was "Shippuden" forming the characters in greater detail. And the production value greatly increased. I recently have been catching up on the remaining episodes and have been in awe the entire time. Hopefully the series will continue to hold up to my expectations.
Also I have been researching directors that I like from previous films. And I found a new series that resembles the art design of "Tekkonkinkreet" which is one of my favorite movies. http://youtu.be/NlTHPfhmn9g |
||||
|
||||
|
dirkusbirkus
Posts: 699 Location: Manchester, UK |
|
|||
|
If you liked Tekkon Kinkreet, you'd possibly enjoy Kemonozume, Kaiba, Mind Game (that's another movie) and The Tatami Galaxy. Any production where Yuasa Masaaki has had a hand in the art direction will evoke a similar feel to Tekkon Kinkreet, at least in terms of visuals. I particularly recommend Kemonozume, which has a wonderfully dysfunctional love story between a human and a monster at its core. Don't hear too much about it, more to the pity.
|
||||
|
||||
|
EinSpiegel
Posts: 9 |
|
|||
|
awesome. definitely what i need to delve into. Do you see anything similar in the link i posted above? it's a series called PES peace.eco.smile. and i thought it was from the same creator as Tekkonkinkreet at first. maybe it was good that i was fooled. because i'm kinda excited about seeing if this show is anything like what im used to.
|
||||
|
||||
Tris8
 Posts: 2114 Location: Where the rain is. |
|
|||
|
Yesterday I got my wisdom teeth removed, and since the world spins when I stand up all I've been doing for the past 2 days is watching anime
I finished Level E a while after I got back from the surgery (I started it the day before), and let me tell you this is not a series to watch while your brain is muddled by opiates. I'm going to have to watch this series again. I learned my lesson from that and for my next series picked one that would be much easier to follow, Koi Kaze. That was just what the doctor ordered. The pacing was on the slow side and the story was simple, yet captivating. I can see why this is in the First Ep tournament. The second day I was doing better but still hazy, but many scenes had such an impact they grabbed all my attention and snapped me out of a stupor. Good series that makes you think. Now I'm starting La Corda d'Oro. I really don't know anything about this series, but it's on crunchyroll and looks interesting so I'm off to watch the first ep. |
||||
|
||||
|
EinSpiegel
Posts: 9 |
|
|||
|
oh. I actually just found out that Studio 4°C also animated Tekkonkinkreet. sweet.
|
||||
|
||||
Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
|
|||
|
Tokyo Underground because I want to check out a series involving some comedy and action
|
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group