Forum - View topicWhat are you watching right now? Why? (please read 1st post)
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Finished Sora no Manimani, rated it as Very Good.
What really sold me on this series was not the comedy, which was entertaining, or the frequent bouts of introspection, which I found interesting. Nor was it the characters, although don't get me wrong, I'm not bagging them. They were a likeable bunch, well written and devoid of the usual pitfalls that characters often fall into. The lead male was not a milquetoast loser and, in addition to being fairly intelligent, actually looked and acted normally. The genki girl (played by Kanae Ito) was actually tolerable and kind of lovable. The bitchy student council president was instead a nice and caring (if a tad straight-laced) person. And the catty love rival was entirely sympathetic and had a good heart. This Anime could technically be considered a Harem show, but it is done so much better than most Harems I found myself pleasantly surprised. But all that said, what really bumped the grade up from a Good to a Very Good was the enthusiasm. You could tell the staff and Seiyuu really enjoyed working on this Anime, and the script treated astronomy as almost its own character rather than just something to set the plot in motion, as a lesser series would have done. There was real respect and love for the stars and constellations on show, and that's what sold me. Fanservice was light, apart from episodes five and twelve there was only some pretty funny innuendo. On the show's one real downside, I wish there had been more of a resolution to the romance side of things (although it was implied one couple did hook up), but it was never a big deal, and I do not consider it important enough to drag the grade down. I really enjoyed Sora no Manimani, I'm glad it was recommended to me. Let me take the opportunity to recommend it to you. |
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Errinundra
Moderator
 Posts: 6528 Location: Melbourne, Oz |
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Mobile Suit Gundam - The Movie Trilogy
Thanks to Sunrise making all three films available on YouTube - see ANN news article here - I got my first opportunity to watch these compilations of the venerable original series. I've never before had a proper opportunity to see Gundam in any form other than the 3 minute Mission to the Rise from Katsuhiro Otomo. Anyway, I watched these films because I could and because of their historical place in anime. I have to say I was surprised how entertaining they were, how sophisticated, and how they were playing to a broader audience than what I had presumed was pre-adolescent school boys. The compressed plot wasn't a problem at all. Perhaps the original series had lots of filler. Yoshiuki Tomino's effort in compiling Space Runaway Ideon into the movie Ideon: A Contact made it pretty well incomprehensible. He fares much better here. I suppose it helps that he's compressing 43 episode into just under 7 hours, which is a bit easier than squeezing 39 episodes of Ideon into 85 minutes. Only in the third movie were there scene jumps that suggested missing material. In any case, the basic plot of MSG is much more entertaining than Ideon. Even though giant robots don't normally appeal to me, I enjoyed the antics of Amuro Ray and his mechanical suit. I liked the way the individual battles were brief, if spectacular, and how it avoided that curse of later anime melees - the extended exposition and posturing in the middle of the fights. The viewer can hear the characters' thoughts while in battle but it rarely interferes with the action. I finally got to meet the famous Char Aznable - he's quite the villain. I've never seen a bad guy retreat so many times and still maintain the respect of his superiors. He was quite a likeable fellow, though, and I was gratified to see his silhouette through the window of a spaceship at the end of the movie. The influence this series had on anime of the 80s and 90s is quite apparent. From Nausicaa to Evangelion I can see the spirit of Gundam at work. Rating: good. Note: the movies are still viewable even though the week mentioned in the ANN article is long past. Battle Angel Encouragement to watch this came out of the blue thanks to Ikillchicken and others in the recent thread dedicated to older series that deserved a reboot. He and a number of others suggested Battle Angel could do with a more thorough treatment than the two episode OAV. I can see where people are coming from. After 70 minutes I was wanting more. Why were Ida and Chiren banished from Zalem? What is Zalem? Would any of the characters ever get there? What happened in Gally's/Alita's past? Why was she scrapped and dumped from Zalem into the world below? Gally is a great character, combining innocence with deadly fighting skills and some flowing moves. Sometimes she comes across as altogether too goofy sweet but that's easily forgivable. Ida, her rescuer and rebuilder, didn't have enough time to convince me that his various character aspects made sense as a whole. Gally's love interest, Yugo, seemed a nice enough kid until he assaulted someone in order to steal their spine. That's a pretty evil thing for a nice young lad to do. (As someone in the OAV declares: "If you're not careful, people will steal the back from under your shirt".) I doubt this will get a reboot, simply because cyberpunk and cyborgs were very much a 1990s thing. They are no longer fashionable in today's anime environment. It's a shame because there's heaps of interesting ideas in Battle Angel. The character designs could certainly do with some updating but the futuristic delapidated look could look great with today's CGI technology. Rating: good. Kikumana I recently ordered and received the BD version of Time of Eve from Amazon Japan. Yes, it remains one of my all time top ten anime, but the BD case must have just about the ugliest cover art I've ever seen. The BD itself has a choice of eight different insert designs, all of which are far superior to the crap on the box. Nevermind. I now have a licensed disk copy of each of my top ten anime. I also recently discovered a short film that I'd never heard of by Yasuhiro Yoshiura - the directer of Time of Eve. You won't find Kikumana in the ANN encyclopaedia but you can look it up on Yoshiura's Studio Rikka website - a google translated version of the page is here. You can watch it by searching the obvious place. Predating Aquatic Language by a year it consists of a sequence of images of a young woman, the titular Kikumana, in a room full of books. She may be dreaming or perhaps her imagination is let loose. She is connected to the world but connected to no one; experiencing all sorts of the things, while experiencing nothing. It seems to me to be a surreal commentary on our lives in the digital age. In tone it has an affinity with Pale Cocoon, although the artwork (in grey tones) is nowhere near as sophisticated. As with Makoto Shinkai, a director whose career Yasuhiro Yoshiura parallels, it's fascinating to see his craft develop. Yoshiura's early stuff isn't as accessible but it's more interesting than Shinkai's. Time of Eve was an enormous leap forward for him, the way it presents his complex ideas while being simultaneously immensely entertaining. I think he has entirely leapfrogged Shinkai. Kikumana rating: somewhere around decent or so-so. He would have been about 21 years old when he made it. |
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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Ah, well I'm glad you enjoyed it. |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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Koihime Musou, Shin Koihime Musou, Shin Koihime Musou - Otome Tairan (Marathon)
Imagine my surprise as I'm looking for figures of this series to discover all three seasons are on DVD. What. The. Hell. This makes the third time in less than 2 months a series I enjoyed on CR was on DVD and I had no clue. I'm thankful Sentai Filmworks picked up this series because I absolutely love it. However, most of you will not. Let's get one thing straight out of the way: it features loli, pantsu, ecchi, yuri, and ridiculous plot elements. It's a series in no way shape or form to be taken seriously, and if you're looking for another Light vs. L battle of wits here, you'd be wasting your time. Now that I've just cleared the room of 98% of anime fans: This series is campy and it's why I love it. 36 episodes of great fun, ridiculous plot elements (such as using magic on crystals to turn 3 girls into pop idols), and vibrant colors (I like colors) and found myself realizing how fast a good time can really go. Surprisingly, the story does try to throw some drama into the mix and it pulls it off rather well. Set in the old days of Japan, the three leads are basically mercenaries to find themselves helping out whenever they can. Along the way, they meet the voluptuous clan heads and quickly form new friendships. Since it is on CR, go ahead and watch the first, Koihime Musou, to see if it's something you'd enjoy. You may have to wait until episode 4 to get the "introductions" out of the way to see the series get going, so that's a little over an hour's time. Note, though: the full-screen mode delivers quite a bit of visual noise because this is a cheaply-made series. I'm giving this series an A-, but remember this is heavily biased on my love of campy. If a series can be so enjoyable as to warrant a purchase at regular price, well, that's a grade I feel it deserves. For the rest, most likely a C-. *** Rideback (episode 2) Yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and finish this one up today. I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. More to come later. *** Alien vs. Ninja (live action) ROFFLE!!!!!!!!!! Seriously, just watch it. Don't be surprised if it ends up as a Disney classic one day. 
Happy Halloween, children. |
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Dorcas_Aurelia
 Posts: 5344 Location: Philly |
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I bought Koihime Musou when it came out. I should probably get the sequels some time soon.
I KNOW RIGHT! spoiler[And then the alien turns out to be a ninja alien! And the little boy is actually a psycho and saved one of the baby aliens and hid it from the surviving ninja!] I don't even normally like campy slasher-horror, but this was glorious! |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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After finally finishing original Japanese Macross, I decided to check out Macross: Do You Remember Love?.
Ok, first thoughts on Macross since I am a pretty big Robotech fan. I bought the AnimEigo set at the beginning of summer, dammit! Took me long enough to finish, right? But I'd already seen Robotech (like 3 times), and I happen to just know that I usually burn out in the last like 8 eps or so so I was kinda delaying it. Either Macross had a more interesting last 8 episodes (and based on the baby tossing, that's my guess), or the last 8 eps aren't as bad as I remember, they're just not as interesting as the first like 26 eps (recap ep aside obviously) and having a break makes them actually seem interesting in its own right. This makes the second Robotech series that I've seen in original (the first one I saw in original was Southern Cross/Masters because I heard it changed the most). I did vastly prefer Southern Cross to the original in all areas except music where Robotech was almost certainly better if you ask me. Like, the first 8 or 9 eps between them were pretty much identical in SC (not counting the first ep that Robotech fudged to recap part of Macross and make Dana Max and Miriya's child), but man did the rest of the series change quite a bit. I still like Robotech a lot anyway. So Macross didn't change quite as much, but it did seem a bit more adult than Robotech to me, and Robotech never insulted or pandered to its intended American audience to begin with. Even I can't say which one I really preferred, I loved Robotech's dub (though Minmay in sub was way better), but I also like how Macross doesn't need to pretend to connect to anything and have random shots of the Masters in it. It lets it be its own story a lot more. In the end, I really love them both but might like Macross a tiny bit more for not having to edit out anything for any reason nor connect to anything and the definition of "Protoculture" makes a heck of a lot more sense, but either way I know I'll rewatch both it and Robotech in the future again and again. Actually I seemed to autotranslate the Japanese names into the Robotech names so Robotech definitely still influenced me. For me, it was just another way to enjoy the same story. And I'm too young to have seen Robotech on TV, I just genuinely love the show for non-nostalgic reasons (didn't even have cable when Toonami aired it) and Macross was my favorite saga by far! Everyone needs to see this show or at least Robotech's Macross saga (though I checked out ADV's redo dub for Macross, I gotta say, the Robotech voices just fit better if you ask me, I didn't like ADV's dub even though I like all the VAs in their dub, just didn't work for me). It's still a 9 out of 10 series for me. But now I've suddenly decided that I should look into all the spin off stuff from Macross, now that I've actually seen the original. I've already seen most of the Robotech spinoff stuff (Robotech II: Sentinels was the bonus disc I have and I saw Shadow Chronicles. Long story short, they both kinda suck). I plan to check out Frontier soon enough and hope that it has better writing than another certain Frontier which I like for nostalgic reasons. So I thought the most logical place to start was the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie since I'm not really sure where everything else fits in but this one was kind of a retelling. So, TVTropes said that this movie was retconned to be an in-universe fictional film released in Macross universe theaters. Of course it was retconned to be such because studios generally don't make in-universe shows (maybe just an OP or something). And frankly, I feel like this is the best way to go into the movie. I tend to avoid retelling movies because they'll just mess it up anyway and waste my time, so the idea that this is a fictional movie actually makes it better I think. From a visual and audio standpoint, I can hardly believe this was made by the people who made Macross, a show that went off model like every other scene and had at least two major instances of hilarious QUALITY animation because every shot in this was nothing short of the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen come out of the 80s. Somehow we manage to hear every one of Minmay's songs in this movie, it kinda reminded me of Jem where random songs would pop up for absolutely no reason that does nothing for the story, but while all the songs I've ever heard in Jem are ear bleeding, these are alright if not slightly J-pop addictive. But then we come to the characters and story and let's face it, a movie is not going to live up to a series that had 36 episodes to develop its characters. And the characters were magnificently developed in the series, but then again, you can tell that the makers of this could bank on the fact that you've seen the series because that's where all the development is. Seriously, we know that Roy is more than just a drunk, but he seems to be drunk in every scene we see him in (or getting drunk). Not only that, but I felt like chunks of story was missing. Ok, example, Max and Milia. We know spoiler[they fight each other and fall in love] but then they suddenly appear elsewhere of where we last left them with absolutely no explanation for how they got there. Then there's Minmay and Kaifun, we last see them spoiler[getting taken away by the Zentradi then the next time we see them they're getting along with Breetai's crew and they're returned to the Macross with peace talks] but we don't see any of that huge interim which might've been interesting or since it's a movie, at least a tiny scene, y'know? And that's why I think it works best as a fictional in-universe movie because I'd presume it to be based on some of their historical facts that they already knew so it'd be like making a movie out of a fairy tale that the audience already knows for us. On it's own, the characters are just lacking, but I'll still give it a 7 out of 10 for two reasons: 1) it's just so damn pretty and 2) for Macross fans, it's kinda a massive fanservice/nerdgasm movie. And I am a Macross fan. But it's still got nothing on the series. |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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I'm back. Hey, you were warned. Just look above.
I finished up Rideback yesterday and I have to say I'm impressed, even if parts of the story wrote themselves (I'm betting no one bitches over the "forced" drama with this one... takers?) to make it pretty predictable. If you didn't see the ending coming, you should be ashamed of yourself. Despite this, the series was pretty refreshing. It's enjoyable when we see a new concept of a story come out against all the harem-tropes out there and this one is definitely worth your time if you like to see a blend of old-school character design and CGI using motorcycles that are also robots (and are called Ridebacks). No hoopla today, just the grade: B+. Stream it, if that's your thing. I can easily say this one can go into one's collection too, with little regret. |
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TheTheory
 Posts: 1029 Location: Central PA |
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Just finished:
YuYu Hakusho Even while embracing certain aggravating shonen tropes, YuYu just does it better than most other shonen series. And best of all, it does it while sticking to a manageable series length--none of this on-going, never-ending crap that has polluted Naruto and Bleach, et al. Perhaps even better, the last season of YuYu is just fantastic and goes a direction I never would have guessed. Not the sort of show to change the minds of anyone who already hates the gerne, but highly recommended for those who don't. |
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Dorcas_Aurelia
Posts: 5344 Location: Philly |
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Watched the first Macross Frontier movie last night, and just finished the second one minutes ago. While I have to give the movies credit for being genuinely original rather than a recap of the series, I wish I had never seen them. Not because they're bad, but because the way the changed the story is so different from how the series went. I've got major problems with the whole spy plot thread, particularly how it spoiler[turns Sheryl into a willing accomplice to Grace's plans. Except now Grace is a glorified puppet, too. I guess it's nice that it gives an explanation for that scene where Grace was conversing with other people in her mind, but those people are still essentially faceless villains.]
Also, there's greater depiction of civilian casualties, making the movie a bit darker and grittier... but it also shows Captain Wilder surfing the Macross Quarter into the atmosphere of the Vajra home planet. In what is one of the intended highlights of the final battle. He surfs through reentry using a giant space battleship mecha. And then there's the ending. spoiler[So, Alto does his fighter-jet kabuki dance while Sheryl and Ranka are singing to help free the Vajra Queen from the unnamed villains, and Brera manages to break in and blow them up... right after the entire NUNS fleet of Macrosses open fire with their Macross cannons. Fortunately the beams travel slowly enough that Alto can reject Ranka and start addressing Sheryl, but not before the Vajra Queen (who is holding Alto) starts to fold out to avoid the beams, so no one hears what he says to Sheryl. And then Sheryl goes into a coma because they never cured her Type-V infection. The End.] ARRRGGGH! I mean, at least at the end of the TV series spoiler[they establish that they're at peace with the Vajra and can co-exist. In the movie, it's more like: we think we got through to them.] And together, the movies are like 3 hours and 50 minutes. |
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dragon master
 Posts: 7 Location: Philadelphia |
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Right now in my Anime club where watching final fantasy 7. Its a very good movie so far I really enjoy the 3D computer graphics. but it doesn't really explain the whole incident with sephiroth and Jenova. so far Cloud has fought a gang of solders that where injected with Jenova's cells and become crazy. They are tying to bring Jenova back and destroy the planet.
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lilredphoenix
Posts: 156 Location: Honolulu, Hawaii |
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Just completed watching the second season of Black Butler including all the OVA's this past weekend how fitting it was because of Halloween. Just love all the British finery and the drinking of tea. Makes me want to have a scone or crumpet with a pot of tea right now.
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m0x
 Posts: 37 |
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[EDIT: Please put reasons why you're watching and/or why you like said titles. Thanks. -TK]
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saman
 Posts: 1 |
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Vampire Hunter D. Bloodlust
The attention to detail is just simply amazing. now that im in the mood for slick animation, im thinking Akira next. |
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thecougar08
Posts: 2 |
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I am watching:
Touka Gettan- because it was in suggestions on YouTube when I was watching Kashimashi ~Girl meets Girl~. Devil May Cry- Because the video games are awesome. And I starting today Strawberry Panic and Burst Angel. Strawberry panic because it has great reviews and Burst Angel because it was in the suggestions on YouTube when I watching Touka Gettan. |
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nerriesantra
 Posts: 19 |
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since I am busy in work I just downloaded anime full series and I watched it during my rest da, for now I’ve been watching Magic Knight Rayearth Ova
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