What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

[Blockio]

Corrected a blind spot that has been bothering me for a while now and gave Genesis of Aquarion a watch over the past couple of days; good show. I didn't 100% feel every idea it explored, but it does some really interesting things in doing so and it actually managed to catch me offguard a couple of times, I respect that.
Gonna be giving Evol a watch before too too long

[The Killer of Heroes]

I haven't gotten into Aquarion stuff yet myself, but I seem to remember people having mixed feelings about Evol.

Lain rules btw.

[Mr. Tines]

In the end, Shadows House S2 recovered well from the first season's uncertain adaptation, and reached a logical pausing point without rushing matters. Verdict: Good, recommended.

The split-cour Case Study of Vanitas was, let's say, interesting, though the mood whiplash from drama to slapstick and back got a little tiring after a while; but it's always interesting to see an anime take on places I've actually visited. Verdict: mostly harmless. Watch Brotherhood of the Wolf for a take on the same material as inspired the second cour that doesn't suffer from out of place levity.

[Blockio]

I haven't gotten into Aquarion stuff yet myself, but I seem to remember people having mixed feelings about Evol.

Lain rules btw.

The thing I've been told is that Evol is great until the last four episodes very much aren't

[The Killer of Heroes]

I started watching Overman King Gainer, the last of these mecha series from Tomino I have left to see. So far these early episodes have been fairly hectic in pacing as expected, though its kind of interesting to see such a snowy setting in a mecha series (Only other one that even comes to mind is VOTOMS Pailsen Files, which was made several years after this anyways). Apparently this is loosely inspired by some absurdly long French sci-fi novel series and uh wow. I thought LNs got up there in numbers of volumes but geeze.

The other main thing to note I think is that the protagonist of OMK is some kind of professional gamer of all things, which is somewhat forward thinking for a show from 2002 (If this were made today he'd clearly be some streamer or speedrunner or whatever). Maybe a gamer protag is not too surprising considering this is the same period of time that stuff like the .hack franchise was first taking off, but I'm willing to give Tomino some credit here.

I finished Overman King Gainer finally (Got distracted for a while by Birdie Wing which I quite liked), and well OMK is probably the weirdest Tomino show to evaluate. On paper I shouldn't like this show as much as I do because the narrative is a mess. The whole idea of the heroes going on their "Exodus" is really vaguely defined by the series itself (And it doesn't even seem to be concluded by time the show ends), and its not clear to me why the SIberian guys are trying so hard to stop them. Similarly a lot of character arcs are really vaguely defined- like its not entirely clear to me why Gainer's parents in the backstory are murdered by the leader of the Exodus who is a ninja for some reason for opposing the Exodus (Weird echoes of a similar flaw from Xabungle here), why exactly Gainer is still kinda fine with the Exodus people despite, what exactly Gain's whole deal is, like everything to do with Cynthia, or why Addette fell in love at the end, anything to do with the Overdevil stuff etc. Like even in the finale of the show when Gainer is possessed by the Overdevil (I think?), and the "evil" Gainer starts ranting about the ninja being a murderer, Gain and Sara being manipulative etc., nothing he's saying even seems wrong to me. But these points are raised without answers.

Still I did find the characters themselves generally fun to watch, which I chock to Tomino's direction being weirdly effective for once. The characters themselves may not be fully realized but it was fun seeing Gainer go on his "date", or Sara spin around because she missed that punch on him, or see most anything Addette did. This show may also fall into monster of the week formula like most everything else Tomino did, but the sheer variety of weird powers and such really made this probably the most effective version of that he did in terms of just battle scenes and such. My favorite was early on where the bad guys figure out how to stop time in a localized area where most of the good guys are camped out, but there's some creative ones all throughout the show. The way some of the mechs like Cynthia's just oozed through the air in weird contortions was fun to watch to. On top of that, in terms of just animation and visuals this is one of the best looking shows from the early digital era from 2000 to 2003ish, which means it holds up really well on that front with minimal bad looking bits (That even a much better show than this like Haibane Renmei from this same period occasionally suffers from at times).

I think OMK is a good show that could have been a great one had its cast been pared down a bit (Did the pompadour dude that looked like he walked off the set of L-Gaim need to be here?) and some of the character and story stuff been more clearly defined. Still I have to say I am somewhat joyed that my final Tomino mecha series ends on unexpected positive note from me.

It's been almost 11 years now since I saw my first Tomino work in the first Gundam compilation movie. That's taken me through the following:

-Brave Raideen
-Zambot 3
-Daitarn 3
-Mobile Suit Gundam
-Gundam Compilation Movies
-Space Runaway Ideon
-Ideon movies
-Xabungle
-Xabungle Graffiti
-Aura Battler Dunbine
-Heavy Metal L-Gaim
-L-Gaim OVAs (Actually I'm not sure how involved Tomino was with these but eh whatever)
-Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam
-Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ
-Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack
-Mobile Suit Gundam F91
-Mobile Suit Victory Gundam
-Garzey's Wing
-Brain Powerd
-Turn A Gundam
-Overman King Gainer
-Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation movies
-The Wings of Rean
-Ring of Gundam
-Gundam Reconguista in G

I'm not entirely sure anymore why I kept up with this over all these years. It started out wanting to see the shows that influenced Evangelion and other shows I actually do like (Escaflowne, Macross, VOTOMs, Gurren Lagann etc.), but while I did enjoy these shows for the most part at first the more I watched the more contempt and bitterness I found for their bald, bespectacled creator. But I couldn't say why I just didn't drop him altogether- it got to the point where Tomino is probably the director I've watched the most footage from. That's not without competition either, because I've seen every feature from Kurosawa, Scorsese, Hitchock (Bar his missing film), and I'm only missing two or three things I know about her feature films from Godard at this point. Perhaps this kind of completionism is a form of mental illness or Stockholm syndrome of some kind, I dunno. But that's countless battles sat through, countless wanderings, countless bits of non-sequitur dialogue etc. Countless LOLTOMINOisms that were varied from being funny in their WTFery and randomness to wondering why Tomino was still relying on such tricks and shticks in his later life that didn't even seem that great to begin with. And I couldn't tell you why I subjected myself to all that anymore.

Still its not that I completely lack positive feelings for all of his work. I do genuinely like First Gundam (Both series and movies), Zambot 3, the Ideon movies, and now Gainer (And I'd say the English dub elevates Garzey's Wing to camp). And there is something to be said for having a such lengthy body of work that it takes you through so many different decades of anime. But for better or worse Tomino's voice is so definitively his and resistant to general trends and changes that it doesn't really feel representative of those decades to me either.

I dunno. I still have the Turn A movies and G-Reco movies to watch now, which I think I'll do over the next week or so. Maybe those will give me the last bit of closure for this guy's career. Its high time for this to finally end once and for all.

[Blockio]

I keep hearing a lot of good things about the Ideon movies; I'm about as fond of Tomino's style as you appear to be (or probably less, apart from the absolutely excellent Turn A); you're the first person I talk to who has seen those and is not super into Tomino stuff, you reckon I'd have... not necessarily a good time with them, but at least a tolerable one?

[The Killer of Heroes]

I think "tolerable" at the very least yeah. Like the characters still aren't like greatly written in the Ideon movies but Be Invoked is still a grim spectacle that is almost certainly the model Anno used for End of Evangelion (And far better than the Ideon TV ending), and A Contact is a more coherent compilation film than like the Xabungle movie or the later Zeta Gundam trilogy and works as a setup for Be Invoked. That does mean they get graded on a curve from me since I have comparison points of not only much worse compilation films but also the Ideon tv series which is waaaaaay too dragged out IMO. Ideon TV is like 39 episodes long- the A Contact movie covers like 30 of those episodes in like 85 minutes without losing TOO much (Lot of filler fights of the week and such in the show). Be Invoked covers the last few episodes and really redoes the ending in glorious fashion.

I think at very least that watching the movies gives you general feeling of what Ideon is like if you're not able to commit to the TV series too.

[Blockio]

Noted. but yeah, some friends of mine did a TV Ideon watchalong some months back and while they loved it, it sounded positively mindnumbing to me

[C.T.1290]

I’m currently on my second viewing of Spy x Family on Hulu since I just got the first volume of the manga.

I remember how the internet exploded with all those memes, mainly the ones Anya and her dramatic and hilarious expressions, as she is famous for.

[Blockio]

The thing I've been told is that Evol is great until the last four episodes very much aren't

Update on that: Halfway through the show, was going really great until it pulled two of the worst episodes of anime that I have seen in a good while for 14 and 15. What the fuck went wrong, it was going so well
EDIT: Four episodes from the end, actually regretting having started this, I could have spent those 20 episodes doing something much better. And the worst, or so I'm told, is yet to come. Fucks sake.

[Blockio]

In spite of better Judgement, I finished Evol.
I could go into depth here about what I thought of the show, but I'm just going to let my live reactions to the last four episodes speak for themselves

SPOILER: Show

....barely two minutes in and Evol has already lost the plot again

I've never seen a show try this hard to dismantle the entire franchise it takes place in
I'm just cackling at this point
Kawamori, put down the modelling cement while writing please
The gas leaks are enough, you don't need to make it worse
This reads like an AI generated plot or shitpost made on two edibles too many
The lore they're spewing doesn't even make sense within one show
Much less two

Dude for a second I thought they were gonna say Apollo was reborn as the planet
Would not have put it past this show

[tagging a mutual] you were off by one episode
This is the point at which Evol broke me
I'm sitting here like the fucking Joker in a straightjacket cackling to himself about things that aren't even funny
This is a strong contender for being the singular worst episode of any anime I have ever consumed, and I'm having a far better time with it than I had with most of the rest of Evol
Fucking F91 has more coherent dialogue than whatever this is

It's not even a car crash that I'm watching at this point, this is more the equivalent of an aircraft carrier tipping over into a steel refinery

At some point around 2010, Kawamori has just unlearned how to write a plot
Only explanation I can come up with

[in response to another mutual] 6 is lowballing the amount of character assassinations

Neither of these stupid assholes deserve a robot with a design this good

At this point I'm honestly glad that Rena goes unmentioned because I do not want a single thing that Evol would have done to her

Kawamori you failure of a writer, this stupid retcon you shoved in here is literally not possible by your own rules

The man has broken Tomino's record of the amount of shows it took for me to grow so tired of his bullshit that I'm taking his name as a warning label

Cannot say that I had gattai rape on my bingo card starting this
And here I was thinking that Evol had even a singular mark against Valvrave

I'm genuinely fucking starting to lean to motherfucking Pacific Rim Uprising being a better sequel than this travesty of a show

fuck off and die, Evol

Never thought I'd be saying this, but you're speaking my fucking heart, Mikage
[screenshot of the villain yelling "enough of this pathetic joke!"]

Statistically speaking, some porn doujin is gonna have been a better sequel to Aquarion than Evol was

It's not as bad as Victory Gundam or Valvrave
Although that is not precisely the bar you want to be measured against

[Blockio]

Knocked out the Patlabor OVA and movies over the past three days; good stuff!

[soul.assassin]

Suffice to say, Oshi no Ko is devastating in its frankness when it comes to showing all sides of showbiz, the emotions of its participants, and at the same time has its hilarious moments.

[Dr. Nick]

Galvion:

The unfinished swan song of the eighties C-list studio Kokusai Eigasha, Galvion is one of those also-ran products that look interesting on paper, being a real robot show that's all about fighting organized crime. Aliens also factor in, but, I shit you not, only as a worldbuilding detail that explains why motorways had to be widened. An all-female team of do-gooders named Circus, owned and operated by Rei Midoriyama, the daughter of a non-mob-aligned billionaire, recruits two guys from prison to pilot the group's robot-transforming super car. They do battle with Shadow, a criminal organization headed by a council of immoral industry leaders bent on world domination; however, their newest member, the ambitious automotive industry whiz kid Henry McMillan, soon starts assassinating the other bosses one by one to become capo dei capi. He was also supposed to research unearthed alien tech for further nefarious purposes, but the studio folded and the show stopped before that could happen.

It's an original setup for a real robot series, but only on an idea level, as the actual writing is rather trash. For example, Circus already exists before Rei's dad gets whacked in episode 2, and they stumble onto the whole Shadow conspiracy by accident. So I guess running an unauthorized vigilante outfit was originally just her hobby until she got personally motivated to go after the biggest of the bad guys, but the show doesn't leverage this fun underdog dynamic in any way. The bad writing is even reflected in the mecha designs. Since our heroes are nominally civilians, their titular robot isn't initially equipped with the genre-standard gun & shield, and instead it has to use martial arts against the armed mob bots... except that it does have shoulder-mounted multiple rocket pods that can instakill pretty much everything. There isn't even a meaningful rationale for why the Galvion needs two pilots. Muu, the hot-blooded one, is good at fighting, so he's the designated main pilot, but what Maya, the cool and tech-savvy one, is supposed to contribute beyond an undercooked buddy routine is unclear to me.

The entire presence of these two male characters is actually pretty superfluous, since they are just cheap prison labor (and perhaps eye candy) for Rei and her three mechanic/bridge bunny friends to exploit. From a writing perspective, Rei is clearly the main character who has personal stakes in the story and who unknowingly enters into a tragic relationship with Henry, the main villain. Muu and Maya are there basically just to generate action scenes, and even they start to get overshadowed in their prototype robot when Circus rolls out its second generation machine Xector, a leaner and meaner single-seater, piloted by the team tomboy and best girl Teri. And despite the obvious male wish-fulfillment angle of the setup, all of this plays out weirdly sexless. The fansubbed full series batch comes with an extra notepad file with translated info from an artbook and Japanese Wikipedia, outlining the original plans for Galvion's final stretch before the show's surprise cancellation, and it's a pretty funny read considering how it insists Galvion was going to go heavy on romance, pairing off all of its heroes. I wonder when they were supposed to start with that, because in the 22 episodes we got, there are only the barest hints of chemistry there beyond Rei x Henry.

So, the show isn't good, but in fairness' sake, in its final (completed) episodes it does find its footing somewhat, developing an agreeable, low-rent groove of its own. The art direction improves, better-looking mechs are introduced (the stand-outs being Xector and Excalibur) and side characters get utilized better, leading to more memorable episodic plots. Episode 22 involves the guys being catfished by a gang of car combat Amazons, and Maya gets a small bit of personality to him when it's implied he might be into older women. If you want to check out a single episode in isolation, I would recommend episode 20, as it features a lot of hilarious brutality and a British villain with a shark tank. The action scenes are still pretty pathetic (based on Braiger, this seems to be a studio trademark), and the character designs are extremely gremliny, which might make the show even more of a hard sell. Seriously, these people look like someone's been feeding J9 characters after midnight, and not surprisingly, their designer only has this one character design credit to his name.

In short, once you've watched Galvion, you've probably watched "enough" robot anime.

[Blockio]

Got pulled into watching Heavenly Delusion by a friend yesterday, caught up to the manga in between and finished the show today; excellent story, with one massive caveat that in the span of ten minutes knocks the whole show down substantially

SPOILER: Show

Within the span of a couple of minutes of screentime, the female lead pulls herself together from being raped by who she believed to be an old friend. The scene alone, while violently uncomfortable, is ultimately fine because it is very much on brand for the world and the story, but the resolution of it happens so quickly that the whiplash from it takes you out of things completely.
It sort of worked in the manga because of the more forgiving pacing of the medium (and the core idea that she'd compartmentalize the whole incident after the initial shock instead of dealing with it is also reasonable for the character to do in the circumstances she's in), but in the anime, the sheer whiplash from how sudden the plot gets canned for later is incredibly uncomfortable

[MsenjaKagami]

Got pulled into watching Heavenly Delusion by a friend yesterday, caught up to the manga in between and finished the show today; excellent story, with one massive caveat that in the span of ten minutes knocks the whole show down substantially

SPOILER: Show

Within the span of a couple of minutes of screentime, the female lead pulls herself together from being raped by who she believed to be an old friend. The scene alone, while violently uncomfortable, is ultimately fine because it is very much on brand for the world and the story, but the resolution of it happens so quickly that the whiplash from it takes you out of things completely.
It sort of worked in the manga because of the more forgiving pacing of the medium (and the core idea that she'd compartmentalize the whole incident after the initial shock instead of dealing with it is also reasonable for the character to do in the circumstances she's in), but in the anime, the sheer whiplash from how sudden the plot gets canned for later is incredibly uncomfortable

Yeah I watched Heavenly Delusion then caught up to the manga almost right after the last episode aired too. Good show and series for sure, but yeah I sure do wish that one part and subject matter was handled better because the way it goes, especially in the anime, was really not great

[Blockio]

I actually quite like the way the manga handles it; it's just that the anime decides to end on a slapstick gag right after

Unrelated to that; the first episode of Synduality Noir actually looks pretty good. The setup is nothing unheard of, but the attention to detail, the fact that those details matter to the plot and the overall fun of the episode does give me hope that this might actually be good unlike the last three attempts at making a Marketable New Robot Franchise

[MaxManga]

I hyped for the new animated movie on Netflix releasing august 18



What do you guys think ?

[Blockio]

After many years of not having gotten around to S2, I rewatched and then subsequently finished Spice and Wolf; lovely little show. I did not intend to bingewatch it, but just kind of ended up doing it anyway.

[Alaska Slim]

Rurouni Kenshin 2023

Wholly recommend heading for the high seas for this one. Because reasons.

After watching 5 episodes, I'll say the series is crisper, cleaner in animation. Far less reliance on action lines, or spinning camera moves than the 90's series to imply movement. It may be trying to be more graphic -- you see a decapitated head in one scene. I don't recall the old series ever doing that (Samurai X OVAs non-withstanding).

If you've ever watched Digimon Tri the animation style is very reminiscent. Thicker lines and more uniform, vibrant colors.

Some of the new character designs take getting used to -- Karou takes a consistent, jarring 1-2 seconds before it clicks for me who she is every time she's on screen.

SPOILER: Show

And everyone has new seiyuu. Kenshin is voiced by a guy now. Tae, the restaurant owner sounds a bit old, but it seems even she is not a return.

The biggest con to me thus far is that the show has a less distinct musical identity. Character leit motifs are harder to discern, and there's just less music overall. It's more competent in some ways -- there's no blaring 90s synthesizers here. The score consistently employs subdued orchestrated music that then gets louder as it transitions to accentuate action scene. But there's less of the feeling "oh, strap in, it's Sonosuke doing the Sonosuke thing" as you hear a heavy guitar rif cut in.

The OP and ED style clash with themes and tone of the show as I reckon them. But then again so did Freckles, so no change there really. Hope they get something comparable to Heart of Sword at some point.

Finally, the show is interesting if you've never read the Manga. The two little girls and old doctor are absent here as they were anime-only character. I can tell upon re-watch they were doing a lot in the old series to glue scenes together. But in this series, you get Karou reeling from animosity from someone she cared about. So, YMMV.

Will continue to watch.