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Iaboo, Youaboo, Weallaboo for Anime!

Pajaro Pete

(He/Himbo)
oh yeah, i forgot why i came here: Netflix announced Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Eternal The Movie's release date is June 3rd with this... bizarre trailer, like what kind of 90s ADV preshow ad roll on your $25 VHS tape music is this
 
Red Garden (2006) was probably the last great Big Nose anime.
That show looks pretty great. Not quite sure it fits 100% though. Seems like this show takes place in the US? And all the characters are American. Most of these big noses looks like they're specifically coded to point out how foreign these characters are, IMO versus just being a house style, because there's a LOT of variety in the shapes here.

like what kind of 90s ADV preshow ad roll on your $25 VHS tape music is this
lol I'm tellin' you guys, whoever runs the anime initiative at Netflix is mentally stuck in 1994.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Finally caught up with Vivy and I got to sing its praises again. I mean, I feel like what they are setting up to be a twist is kind of obvious but I feel like the show might be banking on your expectations on that front. Regardless, its a great little sci-fi adventure drama. It looks very beautiful at moments (particularly in close ups of the lead character's eyes, which they lean into at times) and I like that it is definitely not drawing too much out. Heck, one of the biggest moments happens in the last part of episode two and then they need to move on quick and there's so much to unpack from that, the show will definitely need to circle back in some capacity, if not literally, than emotionally.

Odd Taxi is also still really good and needs to be watched. It feels like the show has a big plan for how all these different stories will cross paths (and have begun to) but even if it drops the ball there, I am really into the stories as they are.
 
I watched the first two episodes of Vivy. It's fun so far, but I have apprehensions about it that I can't really describe or articulate. Then I had someone point out to me that the head writer was also the same guy who created Re:Zero, and all I could do to respond to that was to laugh nervously.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I'm only vaguely aware of Re:Zero but I'm not clueing into any problematic elements so far 5 eps in. Hopefully this will be like watching Kado: The Right Answer, a weird wonky show I liked and not Babylon, a show that was from the same writer that turned out to be horribly misogynistic and grotesque 4 episodes in.

EDIT: Fixed
 
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JBear

Internet's foremost Bertolli cosplayer
(He/Him)
I'm only vaguely aware of Re:Zero but I'm clueing into any problematic elements so far 5 eps in.
I'm assuming you missed a "not" there. Vivy has been fine. Good, even. Couldn't be further from RE:Zero in pretty much every way. If the MC suddenly wakes up next to two fetish maids or it swerves into misery porn then I'll be very surprised.
 
You did this, Wisteria.
0zYguib.png
 
Vivy has been fine. Good, even. Couldn't be further from RE:Zero in pretty much every way.
Two episodes in, it's fine. I wouldn't say 'further from in pretty much every way' though. There's a lot of the same DNA coursing through it. It's already overly reliant on violent shock value and throwing big twists at the viewer. And episode 2 ends with a stinger of murdering a little girl that Vivy formed an emotional bond with the prior episode. I want the show to be good, but I have my guard up and won't be letting it down anytime soon. I'll also pay good money and give favorable odds to the fact that this will end with either Vivy performing a heroic sacrifice to save the world in very sad pls be sad dramatics, and/or a time loop re-engaging and Vivy having to start this all over again one more time. Also, only real complaint so far is this stupid bear: why does he even need Vivy to begin with? He can hack any computer it seems, and can control giant fuck-you-machinery. Just hijack an army of bots and do what you need it to do instead of asking Vivy and then beating her up when she doesn't comply.
You did this, Wisteria.
I did do this! Oh, you meant you did it too. You won't regret it! Probably.
 

Mr Bean

Chief Detective
Man, you guys are realling making me want to dig out my old 90's set of Escaflone DVDs (all 8? of them).
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Mars Red has a generic name and a generic premise (that doesn't match the name): Military creates a special team made only of vampires. Often I'm not into military-themed anime. Often, I'm not into vampire anime. But Mars Red is quite good. Its not quite the weird, mysterious tone the first episode had but it still feels a bit different than you might expect. There's a dry humour to it that I appreciate. There's a low key sadness that works better than the stereotypical mopey vampire fiction. The first two episodes "villains" are more sad than conventionally "mwa-ha-ha" evil (the first one isn't even really a "villain" as she escapes but doesn't actually bother to kill anyone and just shows up to die, leaving the protagonist more questions than answers. The show has recently set up two more conventional villains but despite this, it is a very interesting show with a cast I am into. There's only one "bad-ass" vampire in the crew and even he seems like a well-considered character. Its a show I'm very down with.

Shadows House is living up to the promise of the first episode. I think it could have easily been a show that romanticizes indentured servitude and that's not completely un-there but clearly there's something very wrong and scary in the title location that the main characters are told not to notice. I'm very interested into where the show is going from here.
 

clarice

bebadosamba
Recently i've watched Patlabor: New Files and the first two movies. New Files is great, the first movie is good, and the second... It is a weird choice to pick Patlabor to explore this subject matter, but it makes it even more effective for those who know the series before watching the movie, i think. It does not have the usual qualities of Patlabor, but it has the usual qualities of an Oshii film. Love the movie visually - it reflects the 'illusory peace' thing very well.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Read or Die! I think that might be post-bubble, but still, its very good.
For novelty, the Jojo OVA (and maybe Boah, if you want to be an Araki animation completist and see what his version of Guyver looks like, I think it actually came first)
I wouldn't call this a recommendation by any means but an acknowledgement of its existence, but they did do a Story of Ricky: Riki-Oh OVA.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
Grabbing a bunch of stuff lately but really gravitating to bubble-era OVAs; any recommendations?

Dirty Pair
Mermaid Forest
and Mermaid's Scar are both based on Takahashi's series, but they're from different animation studios. IIRC the former was licensed by Manga and the latter by Viz.
Speaking of Takahashi, Laughing Target.
Bubblegum Crisis
, maaaaaaybe Crash.
Gunbuster.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Seconding Read or Die, Dirty Pair, Bubblegum Crisis.

Also maybe Megazon 23. Or Vampire Princess Miyu? Otaku no Video?

And despite launching a million harem animes, the original OVAs of Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard are pretty nice to look at.
 

conchobhar

What's Shenmue?
Recently i've watched Patlabor: New Files and the first two movies. New Files is great, the first movie is good, and the second... It is a weird choice to pick Patlabor to explore this subject matter, but it makes it even more effective for those who know the series before watching the movie, i think. It does not have the usual qualities of Patlabor, but it has the usual qualities of an Oshii film. Love the movie visually - it reflects the 'illusory peace' thing very well.
The first movie is, in my opinion, the high-water mark of the franchise. I really like the way it raises the stakes— labors are going haywire! and it's jeopardizing the big development megaproject!— while still being incredibly mundane; even though it opens and closes on two big action scenes, the movie is mostly concerned with the investigation. And it's a very low-key one, even by series standards: there are no suspects and no real clues… it's just detectives following hunches and crunching numbers. And it still manages to make some incisive criticism about the whole bubble economy. It feels bigger than ever without ever losing sight of itself.

Patlabor 2 is a curious one. It's so far removed, tonally, from the rest of the franchise, which is both the best and worst thing about it. Best, because it subverts your expectations and comes out as this incredible tone poem with even more pointed criticism of the era, and even functions as melancholy send-off for the franchise as a whole. Worst, because all of that also makes it pretty disappointing as "a Patlabor story", especially how it's effectively a Gotoh solo outing. I'm never entirely sure exactly how I feel about it, but I do think it's a fascinating and excellent film in its own right.

Grabbing a bunch of stuff lately but really gravitating to bubble-era OVAs; any recommendations? Just got Dragon Half, looking forward to its mildly pornographic antics.
Hey, while I'm on the subject, check out Mobile Police Patlabor (sometimes known as Patlabor: The Early Days).
 
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Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
And despite launching a million harem animes, the original OVAs of Tenchi Muyo and El Hazard are pretty nice to look at.

Oh yeah, get the original El Hazard OAVs. But like Tenchi, skip the TV series.
 
The Patlabor movies are respectable, important, gorgeous films. There's a lot to like about the craft and the ways they tell their stories. People should definitely watch them. But I find them objectionable for the same reason I find the original GitS film objectionable: that they take this fun setting/source material that I love, and wring every ounce of fun and joy out of it. They are also regressive in that they take one of the best heroines in anime history and then sideline her in her own thing. Just very much, not a fan! But that's an obviously ymmv sentiment.

As long as we've got a free-for-all on recommending problematic bubble OVAs, don't sleep on:
Dominion Tank Police - gorgeous and fun, but also I imagine could be used as a poster for ACAB these days.
3x3 Eyes - One of my personal favorites, but there's also zero chance Yakumo's okama-bar is going to end up being remotely tasteful.
Robot Carnival - I basically remember nothing about this, but I can't imagine it not having a bunch of sleaze in it.

And for some (hopefully) less problematic recommendations:
Rumic World: Fire Tripper - which is like a rough draft for Inuyasha.
Jarinko Chie - a really weird but charming look at post-war life on the margins of Japanese society.
Lupin III: Plot of the Fuma Clan - just an all around solid Lupin III caper, and easily is the best animated Lupin thing, while being a mostly sleaze-free Miyazaki-style Lupin.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I recommend against Bubblegum Crisis; it's garbage. Look up the soundtracks instead, watch clips, maybe stare at the character designs some, but leave it at that.
  • Angel's Egg if you want an almost completely silent tonal piece free of a traditional spoken narrative and which only deals in pure symbolism.
  • Vampire Hunter D is the kind of pulp machismo and sexism that's difficult to withstand in larger doses, but for a film that's mostly concerned with a desolate atmosphere, weird critters skittering about on the periphery and Amano gorgeousmen squaring off, it's bearable enough.
  • Dirty Pair is a general recommendation... but the OVA series from '87 to '88 is among the few I haven't seen yet. The other two separate individual OVA entries are merely fine; you want the first TV series and The Movie if the franchise is totally fresh to you.
  • Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko is worth looking up for a formative work in the fantasy bikini warrior zeitgeist that sprung up around its time as part of contemporary trends. It's pretty dry as those things go, but the aesthetics take it far.
  • Black Magic M-66 is the best of the Masamune Shirow OVA adaptations and a big improvement from the source material, an odd curiosity from one of the more distinct creative voices out there in all its shaky juvenilia.
  • Aim for the Ace! had two episodic OVAs during the bubble, including the series climax Final Stage... but they are very much the culmination of a serialized story told in animated adaptations since 1973--if you want Hiromi's story, it's recommended to begin at the beginning.
  • Dragon's Heaven, part unparalleled style tribute to Moebius, part incredible synth soundtrack, part model-making indulgence and excess at its best.
  • Legend of the Galactic Heroes of course extends far into the '90s in its production history as it's so tremendously vast, but it began in '88 with a banger of a film and then immediately segued into the episodic OVA proper. If you like stoic men in uniforms politicking in space, you'll probably want this.
  • Mobile Police Patlabor the OVA goes seconded from me and is my favourite incarnation of the franchise.
  • Cipher the Video is the definitive artifact and record of the era and industry as it was then. Unmissable.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket is the most easily digestible part of the series that probably exists as it's a compact, small-scale story with a lot of interpersonal focus in its storytelling, eschewing the franchise's larger and sometimes more esoteric thematicism.
  • Record of Lodoss War, if you want fantasy so archetypical that it became practical scripture for the genre from then on, across mediums. For single-frame cel intricacy in animation, it's one of the top examples.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
Patlabor movies are good but they're a very different kind of good from Patlabor TV and OVA episodes, yeah.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
It is true that Bubblegum Crisis fridges women left and right. Its lasting contributions are all in atmosphere and design, not plot.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
I mean, it wouldn't be a Kenichi Sonoda production without both extreme skeeviness and being incredibly mean towards women.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I still like Bubblegum Crisis, warts and all. It's basically a given with 80s-90s anime (and honestly a lot of anime even today) that something racist and/or misogynist will happen; you have to learn to compartmentalize things. Are there anime that don't do this stuff? Of course. Are there some that lean way too heavily into it and completely irredeemable? Of course. Everyone's tolerances and where "the line" is drawn are gonna be different. But ultimately a bunch of cool ladies in bad ass looking robot suits fuck up anime Terminators while living in Blade Runner City™, and that hits a lot of buttons for me. It's...uh, not the MOST misogynist thing I've ever seen...? *sweats profusely*

Also yeah Lodoss War rules. They made it into a TV show later but it's mostly boring and looks impossibly shitty so stick to the OVA. If you REALLY wanna get wild, Legend of the Galactic Heroes has a 100+ episode OVA that is insanely good but also 100+ episodes and about politics and war so it's not for everyone. But it rules at doing that! The Patlabor OVAs and Gundam OVAs (War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory) are both good, with the former being top tier and the latter being incredibly stupid but maybe the most gorgeous looking thing Sunrise has ever done.

If you really wanna go for it, there's a bunch of City Hunter movies and specials from the 80s. It's a hard recommend, with the main character being a "cool guy" who, for comic relief, is basically a "womanizer" and a "creep" who runs around stealing panties and shit and then his female partner beats the shit out of him with a Looney Tunes-style gigantic hammer. It's meant to be a buddy cop/romance action-comedy thing, and I think it works, but the material is clearly extremely dated. The movies don't lean as heavily on that stuff (the 2nd one is basically what is Ryo did a Die Hard?), and most of the truly objectionable material is in the TV show (he very clearly tries to slip drugs into a woman's drink in one episode...or maybe that was one of the movies? I don't remember but the point is ughhhhhhghggggghhhh nooooooo barfffff), but yeah...lots of well drawn 80s animation, and sometimes it's actually funny, but you really have to be able to ignore one of the central premises of the concept and the main character to get into it and that's extremely hard to do.
 

Rosewood

The metal babble flees!
(she/her)
There are the Ranma 1/2 OAVs, which are basically fancy TV eps. Heroic Legend of Arslan, Tokyo Babylon, Please Save My Earth, Here is Greenwood are all much shorter versions of long, shoujo or shoujo adjacent stories. Nicely animated but might not make a lot of sense if one isn't familiar with the source material. (Less true of HiG. We watched them a little while ago and they were still great fun. I think they'd be pretty good even if the famous Cagliostro sequence weren't there.)

Potentially questionable, it's been close to 30 years since I saw it: Combustible Campus Guardress
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Oh yeah, it's been a while since I thought of it but Here is Greenwood is a delight. And yeah, can confirm those other things Rosewood mentions as very pretty but not so big on having follow-able plots on their own.
 
Oh yeah, also the 90s Birdy the Mighty OVAs. The OVAs are a little threadbare, but they look real good. And I just really like the idea of Birdy. It's like, what if Ranma was a Green Lantern.
 
I've been watching Godzilla S.P. - we're now at episode 8. It's still real good, and things just keep getting better. Don't want to spoil too much so I won't go into specifics but it's a very charming show and it really hits the core formula of a Godzilla media better than anything else I've seen in a long while. Just having such a technical script helps lend the scientific technobabble an air of authenticity to it. And it also helps that the human characters scrambling about and trying to react to these forces of nature are all pretty likable characters versus being the worst/most boring part of a lot of Kaiju films.

The reason I bring it back up is two bits of news. First, beginning this week with Episode 8, Netflix Japan is including English subtitles with every new episode, and retroactively added English subs to all the previous episodes. So if you want to watch this show in slightly less ethically dubious ways, and have access to a VPN, you can watch it right now with English subs. The subs themselves are very much standard Netflix fare. They get the job done, but they're kind of bad. They lack charm and eloquence, at times they take huge liberties in their translations and at other times they're bafflingly literal. It would feel like amateur hour, if it weren't for the fact that the fansubs are better written/translated and thus would be an insult to the amateurs. I'm also not convinced whoever is translating this actually understands all of the technical Japanese being used in the show, or is getting everything accurately translated, but that's just a hunch I have, and am not really equipped to make a full and accurate comparison.

The second bit of news is that the show will come to Netflix domestically on June 24th. Which is actually pretty quick compared to the usual several months plus that their shows are stuck in Netflix Jail, but still not close to ideal and should have been simulcasted weekly all along.
 
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