- A Bravenet.com Forum

General Forum

Author

Comment

Apr 19, 2003 - 8:02AM

Just finished Excel also

The last few eps were great. I just can't beleive Excel is that damn loyal to Ippulazzo after all that happened.

Looks like you've been watchingh alot of cool shows, I hafta watch whatever the BX gets in, so my veiwing habits aren't all that sophisticated.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

Hrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ...

Let's see ...

Wolf's Rain, which is on in Japan right now and is an extremely solid dramatic action-adventure series with one of those lush yet vague futuristic "everyone lives in domes and the world's gone to hell" settings. The heroes are a rag-tag pack of wolves who have powers to fool the human around them into thinking that they're human as well in order to stay alive as they search for Paradise. Excellent character design, excellent animation, and perfect score by Yoko Kanno, collaborating with most of her co-conspirators from the Bebop soundtrack.

Heatguy J just ended in Japan a few weeks back; I've watched about 8 episodes of it, and then found out it's been licensed to start coming out over here around July. It's another futuristic action series, this one about a skilled but lazy young hero and his burly android partner investigating a twisted organized crime outfit in a vaguely futuristic world. Doesn't sound that enthralling, but the mechanical design is neat and the characters are handled by Nobuteru Yuuki using his overly elegant Escaflowne style, which makes it a friggin' treat to watch.

Just finished watching Excel Saga myself. MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! AAAAAAARGGHHHHHH!!!

I continue to watch the Mobile Police Patlabor TV series off and on. Solid classic stuff, always good for a chuckle or two. Take the biggest batch of mismatched misfits that Tokyo's Finest has to offer, give them a couple of big robots, and watch them save the day ... err, more or less. (Not to be confused with the series of movies, the latest of which--WXIII--just came out from Pioneer. More or less the same cast [except in WXIII, which mostly focuses on story-specific characters], totally different and very dark tone.)

A friend and I have been wading through an even older robot show, Armored Trooper Votoms. Halfway through, and haven't gotten much further, but when you consider we're dealing with a 52-episode show here, that's a lot of show to make it through. The series is about tiny robots, pain, suffering, and hell. One of my faves.

Speaking of pain, on the recommendation of the same friend I dragged into the brutal world of Votoms, I'm watching the much more recent Argento Soma, which is a cross between the obscurity of Eva, the pain and suffering of an '80s Sunrise robot show, and different bits and pieces of the movie version of Frankenstein. Very dark, very good, and it actually has a hell of an English dub. Only problem with the show is that the characters come in only two varieties: unlikable and obscure. If you can't deal with that, it just might not work for you.

And speaking of things obscure, a show I'm just about to finish is Betterman, a bizarre, oftentimes comical show about a team of wacky and weird characters investigating a mysterious series of deaths at the hands of an entity called Algernon. There are robot and monster fights aplenty, and lots of sneaking about in dark places and having horrible things jumping out and making creepy noises and crap, and the plot is so utterly convoluted and rooted in either science or psuedoscience (I can't tell which) as to be impenetrable. I think it's a pacing problem; they take plenty of time for the horror aspects of the show and the neat robot vs. monster or monster vs. monster fight sequences, but then they have to cram all the plot into about three minutes of straight exposition at the beginning of the next episode. Ah well, it's a heck of a ride, if you can get past the overly slick sometimes comical character design. (Personally I think it's a merit to the show, but then again I haven't liked over half of the character designs to come out of Japan in the past few years ... too generically marketable for my tastes.)

Easily the most fun show I've watched in a bit is the Zone of the Enders TV series that ADV's putting out. A middle-aged space trucker is hired to haul a dangerous shipment which turns out to be a giant robot that his supposedly dead ex-wife was working on. The robot has the personality of a ditzy teenager and calls itself Dolores. A covert organization of some sort tries to make off with Dolores, and when that doesn't work, frames the trucker for the murders of everyone they killed in pursuit of their prize. So he escapes to Earth and enlists the aid of his estranged children to clear his name and get Dolores into the right hands, while hopefully finding out what actually happened to his ex-wife in the process. It's a rather unexpectedly funny show, and the character dynamics are great. It's a little cheesy at times, and the character designs have a level of sheen I've rarely seen outside of hentai box art, but overall it's a much better show than nearly any game-to-anime production I've seen in an age.

The one recent anime "love comedy" I'll recommend is a little show that comes out in a month or so called Please Teacher, where a girl comes down from space to survey the planet Earth and is spotted by your standard-issue geeky high school student while he's walking about in the woods. The next day he finds out, hey! they've got a new teacher in class and (go figure) it's the alien girl. Complications ensue, and he winds up married to her in order to preserve her secret and her job. The hijinks aren't quite so contrived, the characters don't make utterly stupid moves, and even the stupid jerks in the series are kinda likable. Plus the dub is solid as a rock. Well worth watching, especially for something lurking in as typically shameless and useless a genre as the so-called "shonen love comedy" (or as I like to call it "porn for 'sensitive' guys who don't want to be caught watching porn").

Finally, the one series I can't get enough of right now is Lupin III. Sex, violence, and wacky hijinks with the greatest cast of lovable scoundrels ever. Gotta love it.

That's what I've been watching, more or less. Your mileage with any of the above shows, of course, may (and probably WILL) vary.

--JLS

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

Just looking for any recommendations. Myself I've been watching

Excel Saga, the funniest thing I've ever seen

Love Hina, a sterotypical love comedy, but very funny

Chobits, starts off as a typical robot girl anime, but eventually breaks the mold

RaXepheon, was very popular in Japan and looks promising

.Hack, I'm just totally into the entire universe of .Hack right now, playing the games and watching the animes trying to figure things out.

So, what about you guys?

Khyron

Apr 27, 2003 - 12:08PM

Re: What other anime have y'all been watching? (ot)

I am still watching Excel Saga, and still loving it.

I also picked up the first DVD of NOIR. It's pretty cool. I love she-assasin/spy stories drenched in mystery and sprinkled with corpses. It's surprisingly clean, almost no blood, and no 'fan-service'(a good thing?...I think so, in this case...) to speak of.

I'll probably be too poor to get into any other animes this summer , but I'd like to check out Love Hina and Chobits. Fortunately I have a friend who like both of those series so I'll borrow his copies.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

Ian

Apr 28, 2003 - 12:14AM

Re: What other anime have y'all been watching? (ot)

Berserk, great and violent, X, depressing and violent, Excel Saga, funny and violent, GTO, mostly funny occasionally violent.

Ian.

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Replying to:

Apr 28th, 2003 - 12:14 AM

Free Forum powered by Bravenet