Let your fellow Dopers find an anime for you!

Cafe Society
1

There’s a lot of people here in CS that say they don’t like anime - however, the problem with that is they only know the mainstream series.

Over in the fan following thread, Gil-Martin posts:

B-grade horror isn’t one of my pet genres, but I know there’s enough anime watching dopers out there that can think of a couple series Gil-Martin might like.

Anyway, I think it might be cool for people to come in and say ‘I like this, this and this’ and get recs to show how varied a medium anime is.

Skins, Pretty Little Liars and other young adult dramas your guilty pleasure? Try Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss and Nana. Someone will probably come along and school us on josei. :smiley: Actually, hell, I might even recommend Paradise Kiss to those who watch Project Runway - Ai Yazawa knows her fashion. This ain’t your nephew’s Pokemon.

Red-blooded American sick of this ‘footy’ junk in the way of your pigskin football? Eyeshield 21 is, from what I hear, a pretty good American football series.

Personally, I’m a fantasy geek, which also has quite an overlap in fans, so I don’t expect I’ll be able to give any in-depth recs, but I do have a lot of ‘someone I know says this series was good’ recs.

2

OK, firstly three that don’t belong to any of the genres usually associated with anime:

REC, a series of nine twelve-minute episodes (which by itself breaks anime conventions) about the relationship between a young marketing guy and an aspiring voice actress. Very sweet, and not too unrealistic.

Tokyo Godfathers, a full-length movie about three homeless people in Tokyo. Combines the gritty side of the Tokyo underworld with the romance of everything coming together happily in the end, just because it’s Christmas in Japan.

Zipang, made in the conventional 26 25-minute episodes, is a sort of alternate history, with a 21st-century Japanese Self-Defence Force warship sent back to the Battle of Midway, where it tries to get through the Second World War without taking sides, because it doesn’t want to disturb history. In spite of the fantasy premise, it’s a very realistic story about life on a modern warship, and about naval warfare in the Pacific in WW2.

3

Secondly, I like series with a strong parody element. Two that greatly appeal to me, both set in high schools, but very different in tone, are The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Both need to be seen to be appreciated: but you do need to be warned that Episode 00 of Haruhi Suzumiya is out of chronological order and different in style from the rest of the series. The title characters are, respectively, a schoolgirl who (without knowing it) controls the universe and therefore needs various extraterrestrials to watch over her (though she doesn’t recognise them as extraterrestrials), and a high-school teacher who is so depressed that he regularly tries to kill himself – fortunately, most of Zetsubou-sensei’s class are impervious to his depression, but they all have problems of their own.

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I will follow this thread with interest and try to keep an open mind. :slight_smile:

5

I’d actually reccommend Paprika if you are going with Satoshi Kon.

Paprika makes Inception look like an unimaginative movie, folks. It’s that good.

6

I prefer Millennium Actress: I found Paprika hard to follow, but perhaps I should give Paprika another try.

7

The only anime I’ve ever liked was a film called Sword of the Stranger.

Good luck!

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Any more great parody titles out there like Haruhi or Zetsubou-sensei? Particularly parody titles that comment on Japanese society or current events.

One title I always recommend is a funny slice-of-life show about six high school girls called Azumanga Daioh. It just shows them going about their daily lives, but in a highly funny, creative, and kinda trippy-sometimes way.

9

I watched and enjoyed Death Note; is there anything else out there that approaches that level of cleverness and (within its fantasy premise) levelheadedness?

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‘Levelheadedness’ is probably the last word I would have thought of to describe Death Note. It’s the poster child for ‘over the freakin’ top’. (Literally, sort of! TV Tropes uses a panel from the manga to illustrate the ‘What Do You Mean It Isn’t Awesome?’ page.)

11

Adding to the Satoshi Kon love (though I’m disappointed to hear that Paprika is apparently more clever than Inception, because I haven’t seen the latter and I thought I’d be more impressed with it.)

Cowboy Bebop is always good for a watch. Mixes blues and jazz with sci-fi, and I think it’s a very interesting combination. Watch it in English, though, not the original Japanese. I very rarely advocate this (because I tend to prefer watching anime in Japanese), but the English version really is superior.

Monster, a psychological thriller. In a very, very broad nutshell, it’s about a surgeon who is chasing after a serial killer. That description does not NEARLY give it justice, but to explain it would take too long. It is creepy and intelligent and complex–it’s 74 episodes long, so it’s a bit of a commitment, but not a single one is wasted. Just about everything you could possibly hate in an anime (weird body proportions; purple, impossibly styled hair; super deformations for comedic effect, etc.) is absent. Completely. In fact, the only indication that it’s an anime at all is that it’s animated and a Japanese name is attached to it.

One Piece. This one is looooooooong (the manga is over 500 chapters with no signs of slowing down, with god-only-knows how many anime episodes), but still very good–and, surprisingly, gets better as the series progresses (which isn’t always true of other 100+ episode shows). It’s a fun show about pirates, and while it is a shounen (that is, aimed at teenage boys) it’s smart and very well-written. There are episodes where I nearly fell off my chair laughing, and episodes where I cried buckets. It’s zany and weird, and it isn’t for everyone, but if you like that sort of thing, you’ll enjoy it. One thing, though: I highly recommend watching it in Japanese, but if you must get an English dub, go for the newer, Funimation dub. Stay far, far away from the older 4Kids dub, because it really is as horrible as fans say. I’ve known folks who started watching this dub, thought the show was mediocre, then gave the original Japanese a chance and ended up LOVING it.

12

I’m a big fan of Trigun. I don’t know if it can really be considered esoteric, but it is different from most anime. The biggest thing is that it has such Christian overtones, rather than Japanese/Shinto ones or even the Westernized bastardization of such.

It starts out a comedy, but gets serious half way through. It’s got a badass gunweilding priest and a pacifist who truly has to take the consequences of his pacifism. And it’s set on a planet that is kinda a Sci-fi old west.

If you want more, here’s my favorite anime reviewer on the subject: (video). The review itself starts 30 seconds in. And she’s also started an in depth review of the show that covers the entire plot (although she’s just through the comedic half of the series.)

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When I was searching for the URL to JesuOtaku’s review, I stumbed on someone who compared the show to Firefly. I’ve not seen Firefly (sacrilege, I know) but I thought I’d throw that out there since it’s so popular here.

But the main reason I brought up Trigun is that JO says it’s good for non-anime fans, so I figured people who don’t like anime might like it.

14

The series Cowboy Bebop is extremely similar to Firefly, as is Outlaw Star but with more fantastical elements to it. Both Outlaw Star and Firefly reference the "Girl in a Box"trope with one of the female characters being delivered on board in some sort of suitcase.

15

Heh, I meant more in terms of taking its fantastic premise seriously, with all its consequences, rather than having magical powers of the week and then forgetting about it.

16

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion has similarities to Death Note – I didn’t like it near as much as Death Note, but I did like it nonetheless.

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Don’t get me wrong. Inception is quite good, possibly the best movie of 2010. However, Paprika, being animated, was able to go anywhere and do anything. It was amazing.

Probably the best animated movie since Spirited Away, in my opinion.

18

Hoookay…well, you asked.

I admit I’m totally ignorant of anime and don’t even know the mainstream series, or anything mentioned above. The impression I’ve gotten of it is from snippets I’ve seen from the idiot box, and well, I can’t get past the gawdawful animation and ridiculous facial caricatures (bigeyes, etc.) I’m somewhat aware this is a tradition of sorts within anime and (I think) it pays homage to one original Japanese animator - but it doesn’t make me want to watch it.

So, the anime enthusiast will say to me, you’re outdated, there’s so much more to it than that, etc. – and I’ll say back – you’re right. Point me to something with flowing, beautiful animation, a story that makes sense, reasonably-drawn characters, and I’ll give it a try if it’s accessible. One dinner-plate sized eye or mouth and I’m gone, though. It’s distracting. I like fantasy (maybe more Western-oriented), sex is fine (het), other than that I’ll leave it up to others to take up the challenge. Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t anime by definition!

Great thread idea BTW.

19

Hmmm. Leiji Matsumoto’s art definitely doesn’t feel like the typical anime fare - if you’ve heard of Daft Punk’s Interstella 555, he was behind that. Youtube link.

This may be too close to the big eyes stereotype, but I can’t make a fantasy rec without Record of Lodoss War. It’s from the early 90s and is basically a D&D campaign made into an anime, without the sheer corniness that comes with a lot of the live-action D&D movies we get in America. Here’s a poster.

I’m also fond of Berserk, which is standard sword-and-sorcery, except very gory. It’s very adult, I mean, it doesn’t pull any punches. Rape and pillage and politically motivated marriages and OSHIT DID HE JUST CHOP OFF THAT GUY’S ARM.

Gankutsuou is an…odd…adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo. People tend to love it or hate it right off the bat because of its animation style. It does really look a bit weird at first, but you get accustomed to the style.

I want to recommend Reign: The Conquerer because of its more Western-style art, but from what I’ve heard, it isn’t particularly good. It’s supposed to be a retelling of Alexander the Great, but it isn’t like any Alexander the Great I know. :stuck_out_tongue:

This question has stumped me in a lot of ways, because I don’t look at the animation when I think about new series to watch. I watch anime because it touches on a lot of subject matter that American companies wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. From seeing you around the boards I’d love to recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena to you, but the art style would put you off. Then there’s Angel Sanctuary, which is actually just a manga, but I love to point it out to people who think anime is all Pokemon. Kaori Yuki’s art just gobsmacks me every time I see it.

20

Try Millennium Actress – the faces are pretty realistic, but the animation is beautiful. It’s a complex story, full of flashbacks to episodes in the life of Chiyoko Fujiwara (the “millennium actress”), and the core of it is her doomed love for someone who presumably died in Manchuria during the war there some 60 years earlier. It has some fantasy elements too, because it keeps on mixing up what happened to Chiyoko in real life and what she acted on screen.