#I WANT MY SILLY SLICE OF LIFE SERIES THAT RANDOMLY CUTS TO HORROR

[bengallemon]

actually the beginning to smt v makes my brain go silly what do you MEAN that you just. get crushed in a tunnel and wake up in another world.

how do you go on after that. your last memory is filled with panic as the ceiling caves in on top of you and your last thought is somewhere on the lines of "I'm dead" and then???? you wake up in a ruined version of your city? filled with sand and monsters?

you can still feel yourself being crushed by tons of concrete and rebar and what have you and suddenly you're not?? your body still acts like it's alive even though your mind is certain you're dead and you don't even know if your pulse is real and you don't get the time to check or panic until you get back to your own world.

and you still don't know if you're dead or alive or somewhere in between because your body tries to say you're alive but everything in your mind screams that you're dead and you're just a walking corpse now.

and the other people who died with you don't seem to wonder if they're living or not anymore.

[sailor-arashi]

Anime suggestions?

Asking a 42 year old lifelong anime dork for anime suggestions!?

Sorry that it’s taken me a little bit to address this.  In the absence of specifics I decided to provide a recommendation of my old favorites as opposed to new releases.  Of course then I realized I could write entire essays on each of my old favorites as a recommendation and started thinking about how to make a post like that.  Then I decided to provide short recommendations for most of the old favorites and save the hard-sell for a single great freaking show.  This in turn led me to end up re-watching large parts of said show because it’s just that freaking great.   Also, if anyone reading this wants lengthy essays on why I love a certain series, ask away and I’ll write one up if I’m feeling productive one day!

Anyway!

If you’re looking for recently-aired stuff, you can go through my GIF tag to see what I’ve been watching for the past few seasons.  Chances are if I’m making GIFs of something I also recommend watching it.   The only recent show that I’d mention specifically as deserving more attention than it received is Made In Abyss.  It’s a great little show.  It’s also really dark, despite the cutesy character designs, so don’t be fooled.  Also, if body horror is a trigger, stay the fuck away.  The Abyss does bad bad things to people.   Anyway, on to the old stuff ;)

Macross SeriesMacross is my all-time favorite ongoing setting.  It’s one of the great pillars of the Real Robot genre.  It’s stands apart from its peers by focusing more on the human side of conflicts, having an actual nuanced take on the role of the military, and just being very hopeful in general.    There are several separate series that I recommend, thus I am grouping them together.

The Super-Dimension Fortress Macross (1982):  The original.  A true classic of anime.  The animation is terribly dated at this point, but the story still holds up.  Every time I remember that I first watched this within a year or two of it airing, I feel really old.

Do You Remember Love? (1984):  A stunningly-animated movie version of the TV series.  The story is slightly different, but close enough if you don’t want to put in the time to watch the TV series but want a better frame of reference on the sequels.  It’s also one of the most technically impressive hand-animated movies put to film, so it’s worth a look.

Macross Plus (1994):  Four episode OVA series set 30 years after the original.  The focus is on the reunion of three former friends rather than the overarching events of the setting, so it can easily be watched without knowing anything about Macross.  It’s also widely regarded as one of the best OVA series ever made.  It launched the career of Yoko Kanno, among others.

Macross Frontier (2007):  Takes place 47 years after the original on board one of Earth’s many outbound colony fleets.  Like Macross Plus, the cast is original to the series, and the first 8 or so episodes begin with summaries of the history of the Macross setting, so it can be watched without watching the others…though you’ll miss a lot of references and a bit of the story nuance, but not enough to be unenjoyable. 

Moving on from Macross!

Azumanga Daioh (2002):  The original slice-of-life show.   Cute girls doing cute things.  You will cry when they graduate.  Watch it.

Nadia of the Mysterious Seas (1990):  High adventure in the 1800s!  Very very loosely based on 2000 Leagues Under The Sea.  This is the series that put Gainax on the map.  It also has one of my favorite openings ever.

Aim For the Top!  Gunbuster! (1988):  While we’re talking about the glories of 80s-90s Gainax, let’s drop in on Gunbuster.  A surprisingly-deep take on the Super Robot genre, featuring the most hot-blooded female pilots you’ll find anywhere, which is a huge selling point.   If you ever wonder why Evangelion took off so quickly, it’s because it was sold to us as a TV series “by the people who did Gunbuster!”   

Marmalade Boy (1994):  For years this was my ‘warm blanket and dark chocolate’ anime.  Whenever I was feeling down for reasons hormonal or otherwise I’d just start watching randomly from one of the 76 episodes.  It’s just an animated soap opera.  The main character, Miki, is stunned when her parents come back from a vacation and announce that they’re swapping partners with a couple they met in Hawaii.  They all move into the same house together, and Miki meets the other couple’s son Yuu.  Hijinks ensue.  Nearly every episode ends on a cliffhanger or stunning revelation.  It oozes melodrama from every frame of animation.

EDIT:  I just walked out into the living room and told the wife what I was doing and mentioned that I recommended Marmalade Boy.  Her response:  “RUN MIKI!  RUN FROM YOUR PROBLEMS!” and now I can’t stop laughing, because that’s exactly Miki’s response to everything bad that happens to her.

(I appear to be drifting closer to writing essays for them all, I’ll just add a couple more and move on)

Yamato 2199 (2012):  A bit of a cheat, as this is fairly recent, but it’s a direct remake of the original 1970′s series that I watched as a kid…and it’s frankly better than the original.  

Please Save My Earth (1993):  Six-episode OVA series that covers the first half of the manga series by the same name.  A girl named Alice begins having dreams of living in a hidden base on the moon.  She encounters several other people who are dreaming the same thing.  I used to hate one of the characters for what he did.  Then I understood but still couldn’t forgive it.  Finally, now, I think I can forgive him.  It’s a series that makes you feel very strongly, but to explain is to spoil.  One of Yoko Kanno’s first series as a composer.

His and Her Circumstances (1998):   A romance buds between two people who hide their true selves behind a mask of normalcy.  Will they still like each other once those masks are stripped away?  A compelling romantic comedy from Gainax, and also one of the codifiers of the Gainax Ending, so the show kinda goes to shit in the second half, with three recap episodes and the animation devolving into stick figures, but the main plot is resolved long before then and despite all of this it remains a truly incredible series.

Okay, so, now we come to it.  The hard sell.

If there is anything at all in this post that you watch, you absolutely MUST WATCH

GIANT ROBO:  THE ANIMATIONThe Day The Earth Stood Still (1992)

I cannot possibly summarize the plot better than its own intro, so watch this:

The entire show is like that!  Breathless exposition!  Dashing heroics!  Fearful villainy!  And the entire thing done in a retro-60′s design aesthetic as an homage to the original creator of all the characters within, Mitsuteru Yokoyama.  Top it off with a literally operatic soundtrack and you have the recipe for…well…maybe that’s hard to say?  Why am I recommending a series about a kid who controls a giant robotic pharaoh? 

The show looks absolutely ludicrous, and in many ways it is.  The characters are over the top in a very old-school sort of way.  You’ve got your obvious good guys, literally called the EXPERTS OF JUSTICE.  You’ve got your obvious bad guys who constantly pledge themselves to the service of a guy named BIG FIRE.  The heroes protect the new utopia that the world has become with the invention of a perfect power source.  The bad guys seek to destroy that utopia and crush humanity beneath their heel.  It’s all so cut-and-dry.  Even the characterization of some of the villains as “noble monsters” and some of the heroes as “ends justifies the means” loose cannons doesn’t really give it much depth.

At first.

The show very quickly disabuses you of that notion as it delves into what it actually took to carve out a utopian existence from a humanity that is so frequently opposed to any such thing.  It examines the motivations of the villains and finds them valid.  It examines the motivations of the heroes and finds them wanting.  It provides two questions that drive the emotional arc of the story and demands that the characters, and you the viewer, answer them.

Can happiness be achieved without sacrifice?

Can a new era be reached without misfortune?

As the sins of the past rise up to destroy the hope of the future, somehow the giant robot pharaoh stops seeming so ridiculous.  The fact that everything looks like 1960′s guy-in-monster-suit action cinema only serves to contrast the actual depth of the characters and the series as a whole.  To say more is to spoil, so I’ll not go into detailed analysis.  Suffice it to say:  The show looks silly, yet is really quite serious.

It also has one of the best finales of all time.  I watched this series as it was released, and there was a three year wait between episode six and episode seven, and I can honestly say it was worth every second.  Re-watching it just a few hours ago, my cheeks were wet with tears and stretched in a big grin at the same time.  It’s probably the most satisfying end to a series I’ve seen. 

So, there you have it.  A whole bunch of old anime to watch.  (WATCH GIANT ROBO)

If anyone reading this actually watches something based on my recommendation and enjoys it, please let me know.  It’s always great to hear that a recommendation was well-received.