Anime/Manga Journal

[Mickeymac92]

Just a quick update: GaoGaiGar Final has been great outside of the pacing. I really feel like they wanted this to be another full season or whatever, but instead made it an 8 episode OVA.

Naruto is good until volume 5 in manga and everything after that is honestly a waste of time. The series could have been better though, it had potential.

Yeah, it sure did. :( I remember the reason I always hated it was because it turned into basically a DBZ clone when it could've been so much more from the way it started. :sigh: oh well, at least One Piece hasn't fallen apart yet.

[Aeolus]

If I remember Naruto correctly, it jumped the shark shortly after the first time skip where Sasuke became a villain and Naruto became the "I know Shotting Gun!" guy while the rest became irrelevant. Also it's weird how the series started with a Harry Potter sort of dynamic between the principal trio (if Harry Potter focused on the misadventures of orphan Ron while Harry was a brooding, show stealing twat).

[Yggdrasil]

I remembered that there is a "Kakashi Gaiden story" in the manga. That was really good.

[Mickeymac92]

I remembered that there is a "Kakashi Gaiden story" in the manga. That was really good.

An entire story focused on Kakashi? That I gotta see!

[Yggdrasil]

Last night I read the first chapter of the Pokémon Réburst manga that debuted last year. I just have two things to say about this series:

1. It's fucking awesome.

2. I wish that the original Pokémon series would have started like Réburst does.

Even if you are not into Pokémens and all that, give this manga a chance.

[Mickeymac92]

The old Pokemon Manga was pretty good, too, actually. I used to read it as a kid. Liked it more than the show.

[Yggdrasil]

It has been a long time since I don't read a interview of Hideaki Anno (the director of Evangelion). I decided to do that today even though I really hate the series nowadays "but what the hell!" I said to myself, and with that I found this gem...

Hideaki Anno: "Let's Die Together", Atlantic Magazine, May 2007:

"Rei is someone who is aware of the fact that even if she dies, there'll be another to replace her, so she doesn't value her life very highly," Anno explains, slouching ever-deeper into the couch. "Her presence, her existence—ostensible existence—is ephemeral. She's a very sad girl. She only has the barest minimum of what she needs to have. She's damaged in some way; she hurts herself. She doesn't need friends."

Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan's defeat in the Second World War. "Japan lost the war to the Americans," he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. "Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there's no reasonable model of what an adult should be like." The theory that Japan's defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.

Anno pauses for a moment, and gives a dark-browed stare out the window. "I don't see any adults here in Japan," he says, with a shrug. "The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn't have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that's what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children."

Reading this suddenly makes me understand a bit why Japan is how it is today, but... this is Hideaki Anno. The same guy that has said before that Evangelion was made purely in how he felt at the moment (and it shows) and also said that he hate otakus, which is ironic because Evangelion has been like a religion since the late '90s.

The old Pokemon Manga was pretty good, too, actually. I used to read it as a kid. Liked it more than the show.

I tried to get into the manga with the newer chapters, but I can't. Maybe it has to do with my expectations of the series. I know what happens in Pokémon already, though, I've read a bunch of times that the manga shows things that you don't see in the anime like some Pokémon actually dying and characters growing up with each generation.

[Hathen]

Anno's sounding like an old man. Someone reading manga or pornography in a Subway in New York probably would get, at worst, a double take from the average person. The bit about the lasting impact from WW2 is kinda interesting though...though really, American fiction has plenty of things where the government has sinister intentions, though I think you find the "if that's what it takes" attitude far more prevalent even among the heroes.

[Raze]

Annnd the obligatory CS Lewis copy/pasta.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

[Dice]

I know we're not anime-crazy here, but I'm surprised no one [I've seen] mentioned KyoAni's latest: Hyouka.
It's slow, but the animation is better than some anime movies (nothing new for Kyo-Anime).  I like it because its a mystery series -- a dying or at least niche genre these days.  So I'm curious to follow it.  The lead chick annoys the fuck out of me though, she's epitome "moe", so sure she's darling, but useless thus far otherwise.

[Yggdrasil]

Does something happen in the series? I ask because KyoAni is known for making anime in where nothing happens. Like in K-On! that is all about drinking tea and eating cake.

[Dice]

Does something happen in the series? I ask because KyoAni is known for making anime in where nothing happens. Like in K-On! that is all about drinking tea and eating cake.

I thought K-On and Lucky Star were two of the most useless shows.  It disappoints me that KyoAni, despite quality, loves these high school settings so fucking much, I'd love to see them exapand and do more serious work.  I am happy to say Hyouka seems to be doing that, it's not the slice of life where nothing really happens besides cute girls being cute.
I'm enjoying it, but it still can be dropped if I feel it's not going anywhere or it just feels like "effort" to watch.  I do like mysteries though, so I do want to see it through.

I also watched the first episode of Sakimichi...err...No Appolo... Um.  Kids on the Slope.  Fucking hell, high school freshmen aren't buff, animators/artists.  Eugh.  Anyways.  I was stupid interested in this show after I heard it had jazz as a primary focus.  So far it looks like Nodame Cantible but not with classical music, but jazz (but our stick-in-his-ass main character started off in classical).  I adore the animation even if the style isn't my taste (I hate that bug-eyed shoujo look).  They clearly rotoscoped an impressively done drum solo, and by the look of it, is timed really well.  I'm happy to announce there is more black people in this than in 90% of the rest of animes (err, in the form of record covers for jazz albums).  Also refreshing and strange to see an anime that takes place in the 1960s!!  I heard the series becomes a big love-trapezoid or something, and all of a sudden, the creepy shoujo style makes sense, but I'll stick with this a bit, see how she goes.

[Mickeymac92]

Yeah, I was expecting a Scooby-Doo like series where it's mystery of the day. Not that that would be terrible, just...I kinda would rather watch Scooby-Doo. =P

I'm back to watching One Piece while I wait for Slayers. I almost forgot how funny that show was. It's been giving me my comedy kick while I wait.

[Yggdrasil]

Watching "The Ideon: A Contact".

I don't know what the fuck is happening in this movie, but a lot of characters are either dying, screaming or crying. Is not bad outside of how fast everything happens.

Does something happen in the series? I ask because KyoAni is known for making anime in where nothing happens. Like in K-On! that is all about drinking tea and eating cake.

I thought K-On and Lucky Star were two of the most useless shows.  It disappoints me that KyoAni, despite quality, loves these high school settings so fucking much, I'd love to see them exapand and do more serious work.  I am happy to say Hyouka seems to be doing that, it's not the slice of life where nothing really happens besides cute girls being cute.
I'm enjoying it, but it still can be dropped if I feel it's not going anywhere or it just feels like "effort" to watch.  I do like mysteries though, so I do want to see it through.

I see. I've been trying to get a little into anime again this year after not watching nothing for like 4 years so I might give Hyouka a try.

...a shame it doesn't have mechas though. :p

[Mickeymac92]

...a shame it doesn't have mechas though. :p

Hey, that's my line! ;P

And yeah...A Contact isn't the best way to experience Ideon, IMO. Guess it's worth it so you can skip right to Be Invoked. (and man, I was just thinking of those movies this morning. :O)