Anime!

[munkybitch]

Guin Saga

Epic fantasy epic. A very old story and an old manga. Conan the barbarian meets Thundercats meets Lord of the Rings. Really enjoying it at the moment.




Noein

Sci Fi otherwordly broody anime which seems to building up to something very special (only up to Episode 4)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaQIedxf4ZE

[Baxter]

NEXT UP: Parody-heavy, symbolic meta-humour and loli vampires? In my anime folder? It's more likely than you thinking:

What a horrible image.

[Pedro_Bear]

See...



...the problem is...



... every time I do a Danbooru sweep for images these days...



... I get distracted...



... and it kind of makes concentrating difficult, I forget what I was searching for.

Black Rock Shooter better not turn out to be another Miku music promo, that would be a tragic waste of hair, awesome outfit and improbably huge weapon.


2009 has been great for decent anime choices. I'll bang on about Bakemonogatai a bit later, and we've had K-ON!, S2 Haruhi, the resoultion of ToraDora!, Canaan looks good, too.

I've been studiously avoiding the crap ero-animes, has any of it been unintentionally entertaining? I couldn't make it past the opening credits of Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! I couldn't work out if I was laughing or crying at how crass it was, accurate oppai physics and all. I appreciate that without these abominations we wouldn't have the gems like Haruhi mocking them, but even so, ffs.

[Talulah, really!]

Just to say...

Pedro, your posts in this thread are absolutely fantastic. There's nothing better than enthusiasm and insight, so thanks. You've convinced me to give these programmes a go.

[Consignia]

I've been studiously avoiding the crap ero-animes, has any of it been unintentionally entertaining? I couldn't make it past the opening credits of Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! I couldn't work out if I was laughing or crying at how crass it was, accurate oppai physics and all. I appreciate that without these abominations we wouldn't have the gems like Haruhi mocking them, but even so, ffs.

I quite like Juuden-chan, because it is so unforgivingly crass. The main characters will wet themselves at the drop of a hat. It's so silly that I can't help but enjoy it. It's quite unlike the sexually-repressed moe droves we get quite a lot of at the moment. It doesn't pretend it's fooling anyone.

[Pedro_Bear]

^^Fair enough, I suppose you couldn't accuse it of being troubled by alternative interpretations, you get what's spreadeagled on the box. It is hentai though, there's no other way to view it, despite it going out on shōnen primetime over there. I dunno, I'm the wrong person to guage these things anyway, the whole world chooses Mio as their waifu when Ricchan is right there next to her. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

You've convinced me to give these programmes a go.

FLEE YOU FOOL! It's an addiction!








How classy is this next one, eh?

[The Boston Crab]

Let's be frank: ALL of us would love that for a wanking den -  spunk-catcher rug and all.

[Pedro_Bear]

I especially like the way it's clearly full daylight outside, with those blackout drapes firmly holding it back. That may be a ronrey single chair, but it's an awesome ronrey single chair.

I dunno, Otaku terrify me, but at the same time there's a certain admirable "fuck you all" about them, you know? They are certainly themselves, whatever that translates to when you surrender your existence on Earth to a consumer obsession. Sports followers who go to a similar length I have less grudging admiration for, they've translated the beauty of a game into something purchasable instead of playable, it's like they've missed the point.

These anime nutters have all but stepped through the screen though, it's no wonder they reacted like the world was ending when Haruhi bullied them into switching off, because for some of them, it was.

This is fun, it's a rip-off poster for getting feckless teens to sign up for the Taiwanese army:




"Still looking for a job? Want to have a stable income, learn some useful skills or get some qualifications? Join us and let your dreams soar!"

If Haruhi S3 really was revealled to be propaganda for the war against terror getting kids to sign up to get killed overseas, it would probably push me right over the edge. So in some ways, I already have a foot on the path towards purchasing a "jumbo sized" cushion of Yui, 50cm x 150cm, ¥15,000, pre-orders shipped to Japan only, cushion filling not included.

[Consignia]

FLEE YOU FOOL! It's an addiction!

Indeed,








N.B. These are all mine not some straw nerds'.

[Baxter]

You sicken me.

Is it so fucking hard to buy spacers!?
Even something as simple as some empty DVD cases!

Urgh!

[Pedro_Bear]

This thread's going really well: from gently persuading people to suspend their understandable prejudice towards watching anime, to demonstrating why they shouldn't.

Let's squabble about waifus next, and then we need a heated argument defending guro and lolicon as artforms, with illustrations.

And someone has to reveiw Boku no Pico before we get locked out.

[Baxter]

Pedro, which subs of Bakemonogatari are you watching? it's already full enough of wordplay, double meaning and homophones without bad translation on top of all that.

[Pedro_Bear]

gg and AniKat turn out subs very quickly, but as E7 demonstrates, it's worth waiting for the really slow Frostii ones when it's a (particularly) dialogue-heavy episode. Like you say, Bakemonogatari is heavily nuanced following it as a native Japanese speaker, and SHAFT animes are apparently notoriously difficult to sub in the first place.

I personally like gg, they did a beautiful job with Endless Eight in the face of wankers quitting. I select two quick subs per episode from nyaatorrents.org, it's beautiful enough to want to watch through at least twice anyway, and then bite the bullet and watch it raw. In much the same way you pick up the subtle visual jokes in K-ON! using this method, the show really comes alive this way. But Frostii is the five-person translation team to go for if you want to get as much nuance as possible in a single sitting. They'll certainly be the ones to aim for as a complete collection. The cutting board style is best suited to 720p as you've demonstrated already, it's one of the few animes I wouldn't watch reduced. I'll not demonstrate this by posting another piece of fanart:



This is set to be the anime of 2009, in the face of extraordinary competition this year. There are tl;drs to be endured about the tl;drs.

[Consignia]

This thread's going really well: from gently persuading people to suspend their understandable prejudice towards watching anime, to demonstrating why they shouldn't.

To be fair, most of that stuff is due to the fact I actually buy the stuff I watch, and most of the merch are freebies with DVDs and jazz. Nothing wrong with paying for your entertainment, right?

[Pedro_Bear]

I'm kidding, I'm impressed. Needs more sinister ero-cushions though.

[Pedro_Bear]

'sup?



You're welcome.

I humbly and unreservedly apologise and withdraw anything that I have typed that might have hinted at the fact that Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! is anything but The Greatest Anime of 2009. That'll learn me for judging a series by it's opening credits, when really the series is better summed up in this case by it's end credits.

Admit it, you didn't play that clip only once.

Basic Overview:



Any questions?



Pan-dimensional Charger Girls fly around boosting depressed people happy with huge shocks of electricity. Yep. The show's slovenly heroine Plug is a clumsy, lazy ditz, who is instantly adorable the second we meet her... and exposed in the buttock region not too soon after.



Oh goddess, don't make me analyse this masterpiece for common strands, the magic will be diminishe-OMFG WHY IS HE HITTING HER WITH A BASEBALL BAT?! Hey, that's witty, it's got an anime series within the series that's even wors-OMFG, "BITCH-KUN"?! I wonder if Plug pisses herself every episode? How long, exactly, does a character have to stand there with their mouth open before moe transforms into gormless? Turns out exactly 3.6s too long.

Very rarely do you get something so artfully self-aware as a series that feels it's own shit. None of this Haruhi, clever-arsed, fucking about with meta-humour. Juuden-chan is going to take the joke of s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g it out right over the fucking edge and back. You like slapstick? Yeah sure we do, it's a comed-OMFG WHY IS HE HITTING HER WITH AN ELECTRIC GUITAR?!



The show melodramatically over-dramatises the pathos sections in much the same wtf way, and you can't help but love Plug, she's so likable. She wants to help depressed people, but she's a bit lazy, that's all, and put upon. And someone keeps hitting her with a fucking baseball bat. Arresta Blanket is the best name for the snotty, stuck-up character she gets partnered with that is, in fact, conceivable.

The plot, such that it is, allows the characters to rip the piss out of the show you are watching in increasingly inventive ways. I fully endorse and applaud this approach to entertainment.



And it really is entertaining from start to finish, you don't even notice the time go by, or the fact that you're watching this trash until she's suddenly yawning on that treadmill once again.



Oh, and it's porn, obviously, a bit of rubber suitted yuri and ecchi before teatime. It really isn't trying to conceal it's appeal, especially not in the mandatory fanservice beach episode, which has to be seen to be fully appreciated, given the amount of oppai in a regular episode.



I don't even feel oblidged to point out that this show is in and of itself a depression cure. You'll soon work out that the surface level stuff is a vector for what is possibly the most cheerful anime this year, it's great stuff. This sort of positivity is what moe should be concealling more often, instead of paedophilia.



TL;DR? This is anime: Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! is like eating sweets for dinner.





Yeah, yeah, yeh... Bakemonogatari...

[Consignia]

when really the series is better summed up in this case by it's end credits.

Admit it, you didn't play that clip only once.

That ending is quite popular over on Nico Nico Douga, and there's loads of MADs of it. My favourite is the one with Yoko from Gurren Lagann, not only because it's well done, but because of who catches her at the end. I won't spoil the surprise for anyone but it's here if you want to see it Here. Totally from nowhere.

[vrailaine]

I'm about to download a good few of these and was just wondering whether I should bother getting them in Japanese or not, meaning how terrible are the translations for the dubbed versions?

[Pedro_Bear]

The only one to be picky about is Bakemonogatari, the continuing lack of review here possibly an indication of how cunningly linguistic it is. That and E9 now has me having to justify stripping lolis as satire. For most of the others, you'll get the gist from a cheap'n'cheerful fansub.

That ending is quite popular over on Nico Nico Douga, and there's loads of MADs of it. My favourite is the one with Yoko from Gurren Lagann, not only because it's well done, but because of who catches her at the end. I won't spoil the surprise for anyone but it's here if you want to see it Here. Totally from nowhere.

Oh dear. I was about to link to a Hettalia one, and they have all been removed so I will from YouTube, along with the Juuden-chan episodes, which is a shame, and this sentence no longer makes sense, does it? I guess the jokey copyrong warning at the start of each episode ain't so jokey after all?

[Consignia]

I'm about to download a good few of these and was just wondering whether I should bother getting them in Japanese or not, meaning how terrible are the translations for the dubbed versions?

You'd be lucky to find any recent stuff dubbed anymore. The companies who distribute them in English can no longer afford to dub things for various reasons.

I'm not going to argue a pro-dub stance anymore than this paragraph (not least because it would be hypocritical of me since I largely don't listen to them anymore), but you're not really losing out if listen to dubs. If you don't speak Japanese then, the translations are just as much removed in subtitles as the average dub. In fact, the Lucky Star dub (which incidentally was quite popular with the Japanese themselves) is actually more literal than the subtitles. It's similar with performances, although there are some real stinkers in the English dub archive which sully the record.

[Pedro_Bear]

THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST Lucky★Star fandub in existence. I would pay to hear them do the whole series this way.

[Baxter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Bakemonogatari...

Well since Pedro is too busy humping her Yui pillow while mashing the 'back 500ms' key to keep the screen centred over the sweet-spot of Plug's mons veneris, it looks like I'm going to have to do the real work.






_{Typical fucking mod behaviour.}

(CLCIKY CLICKY PICTURES!)

Bakemonogatari!





Ok lets get this straight, the Japanese hate you and all of your culture, they hate your pale smooth skin, they hate the fact that for you squinting is a choice and they hate your ability to drink a glass of kirin without your skin changing to colour of a beetroot. They have so very few outlets for this hatred other than purposefully mis-translating electronics specification sheets that when they find something to frustrate the white man with they go at it full force.



Thankfully the evil yellow bastards are also idiots because in this attempt to frustrate you they have created Bakemonogatari a series which is:

• A beautiful fusion of CG and storyboard styles.
• Obsessed with wordplay and punnage.
• Oh my god so fucking beautiful in HD.
• Not without frequent touches of surreality.
• Dead-Pan.
• Arcs? Plot? Mini-arcs? Self-reference and self-consistency?

Downside to all this is that you can't watch an episode once and understand it, you can't even watch an episode concentrating totally on the dialogue and understand the dialogue, give it a few passes it's rather important.



So 'what's it about' is probably a good place to start,

well it's monster-story a week,

or rather supernatural story a week,


or supernatural surreal-allegory for the irreducible parallax of human experience a week,


or lesbian-daemon-monkey-werewolf successfully integrating romantic loss a week,


or snake sacrifice as some kind of fucked up symbol for genital mutilation and loss of innocence a week.

Psychodrama via the medium of supernatural entities a week!
Damn that's probably not such a good way to explain.

Staplers?

[Pedro_Bear]

JUST AS PLANNED! Some fool went and posted first, now I can just react and it'll appear like I'm making coherent points about this wonderfully, wilfully incoherent anime.

*AHEM* Your synopsis is missing a little something very important to the enjoyment of the show, Smarties Baxter:





Bakemonogatari has a LOLI VAMPIRE in it. Not only that, but she's "voiced" by the biggest and bestest seiyū on Earth... and she never utters so much as a sound. She has renounced her murderous ways, and laid down her sword. Her kanji name is therefore given as Shinobu (忍), having "heart" (心) under "blade" (刃), geddit? NO, you don't get it, you don't get anything from Bakemonogatari (GHOSTORY); you have to do all the work yourself.

There is a basic conversation in each episode, mostly a dialogue, mostly witty, and almost always suggestive. At heart, Bakemonogatari is an audio drama about men and women communicating. This, in and of itself, is utterly awesome.

Layered over the top of this character-driven script are the visuals. The eyemaze is obfuscating, disturbing, prophetic, yet utterly beautiful, effortlessly invoking a sense of supernatural awe. In its head, Bakemonogatari is a horror story about coping with traumatic personal transformation through symbolism. Again, utterly awesome.

And if it wasn't enough to send us into a trance already, the elusive, ambient music playing throughout achieves much the same sort of misdirection as the visuals. Bakemonogatari will not only show us in advance how a plot arc will unfold, it'll tell us too, and we still won't get it until we watch all the episodes over again. It's a horrible, horrible cartoon, I've never felt so simultaneously clever for getting an in-joke and so utterly thick as to what the fuck was supposed to be going on. But it will reward you in the end, the new joy then becomes going back and spotting the resolution in all the clever stuff.

And, yeah, it's full of in-jokes, from voice talent taking the piss out of their other characters, to insane wordplay and OTT visuals, and just generally laying into anime. The series starts with a deliberately gratitous slow-motion 10 second pantsu shot, timed out on screen. And yet the situation reveals itself to be charming, innocent almost, the Male Gaze denied. What follows is an awesome montage that has nothing directly to do with the series at all, it is, in fact, the back-story to the male protagonist, who hasn't even been established yet. Did I mention this series has a LOLI VAMPIRE?



See... like Smarties Baxter cunningly worked out,  there is no fucking way to describe this show without actually transcribing it, which is totally redundant, so you pick out an element of humour that hopefully translates into forum spam without detering as many people as you are intriguing.



If Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! is like eating sweets for dinner, and it is, then I guess Bakemonogatari is like cooking your ex- for dinner on the first date with your new extra special friend. There is a certain sense of knowing satisfaction and confidence in your own cleverness, especially when you find your new extra special friend is up for it anyway.

TL;DR?

There is no fucking way we can describe this show to you. It is wilfully indescribable. It is set vaguely in a school, it is very clever indeed and we feel clever for getting even the stuff that it spoonfeeds us. It is symbolic up the arse and then some, and everything you like about anime it likes too, but will probably punish you for at some point. Each plot arc revolves around a new character who needs her trauma resolved, how and why sometimes isn't even the issue. It has beautiful voice acting, if you can moonspeak, shit must be so cash. It's a fan of itself on-line, it understands our disease, and works its razors into fandom with the same sense of assumed self-empowerment it cuts up the cast. Joy of joys Bakemonogatari is a gateway anime, you can watch it with people who hate anime and they'll be impressed despite themselves. And it has a LOLI VAMPIRE in it...



... she's on-screen, at most, for what? Three seconds, maybe?

[Pedro_Bear]

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT BUMP EXTREMELY RELEVANT TO INTERESTS OMFG

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Making up in part for other awesome anime series drawing to a close, e.g.



Guess who did the voice of the evil little girl? There's got to be a second series of Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! now. They're even bothering to list the rest of the cast on anime sites, which also bodes well. There might be a wikipedo entry soon if this well-deserved recognition carries on. And Slowpoke here didn't even recognise that Plug was voiced by Tsukasa from Lucky Star, essentially meaning I've been masturbating over the same themes all week thanks to this crossover Bakemonogatari fanart.

I also want to see a full episode of the spoof anime the Charger Girls watch, I'm quietly hoping this will be the bonus episode, if there is one. "You're watching Magical Girl Sweetie Millie AND YOU SUCK!" I just really want to know what Tuxedo Whore's special attack is like, to be honest.

Oh, and 30 September 2009 is the release date for this:



... whatever "this" turns out to contain...

short 90 seconds footage together with new songs for Black Rock Shooter

...sounds shit, to be honest. Looks like they've fucked all that awesome design up after all, hey ho.

I suppose we should talk about Canaan at some point, really, shouldn't we? Yes.

[Pedro_Bear]

JEWTUBE DID WHHAAAAAAT??!?!



OH WHAT THE FUCK? Fuck me, that was quick with the "Japan-only" spike. That also means that they know exactly what buttons they are pressing with a tag search of "loli+vampire". See if this one stays up a little longer, or if more drastic editting measures are required:

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Do they not understand about viral marketing? You would have thought KyoAni would have learned all of 'em by now.

[madhair60]

I've been ignoring all the excellent recommendations in this thread thus far and am watching Negima!?, which is really rather enjoyable in a s*****c, perverse way.  Art looks far nicer than a show this vacuous really needs to.

[Pedro_Bear]

This is bullshit, how are they picking it up so quickly? It must have some sort of header file, but I resampled the clip? Hmm... okay, so if it's scanning for the start of a clip, then all I need to do is... actually fuck that, let's see if the official cut will embed:

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Ahh hah fuck your age warning category. Go on then, take your own copy down you copywrong idiots. OUR PLAGEVEIWS OUR PLECIOUS YOUTUBE PLAGEVEIWS.

Idiots in the promotions department aside, this looks velly good indeed. A loli vampire taking out a military detachment clad only in pantsu and cape is top shelf entertainment.

[candlelightoptometrist]

IGNORE

[candlelightoptometrist]

^ Vampire bund? Hm, I remember that manga. i stalled on reading it due to getting some dodgy looks on the tube. The anime looks interesting enough though, in a way.
Not having seen it on those "chartfag" charts for this season (plus I cannot see Youtubes atm), suppose it's of next year's crop.

[]Fight! Ippatsu! Juuden-chan! turned out to be somewhat watchable in its own way, the token ippatsu onsen OVA is bound to be lame, though.[/]

[Pedro_Bear]

^^only if they lose their sense of humour over themselves.



There isn't going to be another series by the looks of it, the knowing way they gave all the hitherto nameless characters names in deliberately gratuitous, line-em-up and shout-'em-out fashion was as much a joke as it was fondness for the series everyone involved seemed to like making. The final charge for the viewers was very endearing, and the all-too-quick resolution of Haruhi's discharger girl's arc was, in retrospect, obvious, but well within keeping with the rest of the show.

And so from the ridiculous to the sublime, or something like that, anyway:



This is Studio Ghibli's Disney's Ghibli's, no, wait, OMFG it's BOTH, THE TRUTH AT LONG LAST AHAHAHAHA *cough* *cough*, latest overrated travesty thing... Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.

Because, you know, disabling embedding really fucking helps everyone concerned DOESN'T IT?

Actually, although it kills me to type it on so many levels, this is a fucking good film, and it's as much because of the Mauswitch cross-pollination, no less because the dub is gorgeous, Matt Damon and all. It is win-win with Ponyo: folks will queue up to see the Tokyo phone book animated by Ghibli, and Disney ensures a wide distribution and fully comprehensive synergy marketing assault. Kid's anime with a world-class budget destroys the competition, and exposes it for the cgi, off-screen joke punched-up, rent-a-celeb, tedium-by-numbers that animation in Hollywood has become.

Oh, and you can collapse /a/'s everywhere in on themselves by pointing out that the English theme song is The Shit compared to the original moonspeak:

USA USA!
Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas - Ponyo English Theme Song

Oops...

/sing along with your favourite fish/

... sounds like...

/sing along with your plate of fish/

Jap whimsy
Ponyo theme song- English subtitles

Yeah, yeah, yeah... OKAY... I do totally respect Hayao Miyazaki as an artist, and I fully appreciate that without his genius vision anime as a genre would suuuuuuuuuck. But COME ONNNNNNNN, he's the jap version of George Lucas ffs: off-the-scale ideas and creative vision, a dynamic, hands-on producer who is motivated by storytelling first and foremost... but needs to step the fuck out of the way and let someone else direct because he's too focused on his own mythologies, and should never, EVER EVAR be given final edit.

That having been typed, Ponyo is the least frustrating Ghibli film since Totoro, and well worth seeing on the big screen if you can. It raises the bar for mainstream Western cinema animation, which is no bad thing at all.