Ah, yes, my fellow intrepid spacefaring followers. Today's quest sees us exploring anime from my perspective. This could get quite long-winded and convoluted, so consider yourself forewarned.
Anime and myself go back about 10 years. Maybe a bit further back than that if you want to know when I first saw such a thing. My brother was in high school at the time, so it couldn't have been any later than 1995. It was Akira, that much ballyhooed anime of its time, being considered futuristically plotted, beautifully drawn, and amazingly satisfactory. It was also made out to be some animated equivilant of Blade Runner, but that's for another day. I was completely mesmerized! Biker gangs dueling it out on super-highways opened the story before the actual story happened (essentially: pissant biker runs into pyschokinetically altered boy who spreads his powers to pissant who goes on a rampage to be the baddest ass to ever live just to be shot by his best friend with a laser bazooka) and military destruction glossed over to look like a social commentary about the evils of scientific progress and communistic thinking. Or maybe not, but the slow parts are confusing.
Anyway, the anime bug laid dormant for 5 years before coming out to play again when I got to college, where I made friends with some guys who were very much into the anime scene. Thus I was launched a little further into the madness, where I would borrow DVDs from one of them. It wasn't until after I graduated that I started my own anime collection. At the moment, it's not some huge monstrous collection (mostly for lack of money and the proper amount of time it takes to watch it), but I would consider it well managed with very few duds. I like to do plenty of research, i.e. reading reviews, watching youtube trailers, maybe catching an episode online, in preparation for purchasing anime, so that explains the relative lack of duds.
That out of the way, anime is an interesting audiovisual genre. Yeah, there are a lot of different topics and stories told through it - it's not all ninja robots with superpowers ogling their female counterparts with utterly unrealistic expressions. Granted, those themes do make up the bulk of existing anime.
I'll tell you what I like, and then next time, I'll tell you what I don't like. See, I'm preparing you for my whiny self in advance. Aren't you happy now? So. What I like. I'll list a few series / films that I have with brief explanations:
1) Sword of the Stranger - a stand-alone film that is beautifully designed and with a pretty good, if simple, story. Nothing revolutionary story-wise, but the use of both Chinese and Japanese language instead of one language to represent two national mindsets was quite refreshing, and it's great for the action buff with all the samurai action going on with the requisite amount of blood being spilled (or at times, sprayed) to fulfill the anime equivilant of wanting to watch Die Hard.
2) Planetes - a single season series (26 episodes) about the story of garbage men in space. It's the future, and space-tourism has taken off with undesirable side-effect of cluttering Earth's orbit with deadly debris that threaten tourism and space-based industry. A very good interweaving of character, personal histories make the very centralized storyline in the second half of the season a very riveting watch.
3) Eureka Seven - a two-season mech series about a boy with a destiny (as most mech series are about, anyway), a girl with a mysterious and not-quite-human origin (another staple of mech series), and a militaristic system of government that attempts to harness the oft-misunderstood powers that govern the girl's existence and the boy's destiny (yep, another staple of mech series). So I like something that's bland? Well, no. It's actually quite good with very dynamic central characters (characters that stay flat throughout 20+ episodes should be in a zombie series... as zombies!) and some pretty good visuals and with a bit of a fairy-tale ending - but you want it to happen!
4) Princess Nausicaa - of course I must include on this briefest of brief lists a work of Hayao Miyazaki, and what better than the epic quest of a tree-hugging princess who seeks to stop the greedy imperial princess and her pet crawling world killer from destroying yet more pristine sunset settlement estate. Okay, so that was an extremely cynical and skeptical summary that I do not resonate with at all - I was just being snarky (surprise! no, no surprise?) The story of Nausicaa isn't the most brilliantly drawn, but it is 26 years old. What it does have is surprisingly realistic emotions and reactions to events that are, most unfortunately, exceedingly rare in anime. I will just go on and risk a blow to my manhood by saying all (except for Porco Rosso) of Miyazaki's films have made me cry.
I think that's enough for today. And next time, I will go into detail about the animes that have made me want to cry for the opposite reasons.
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