Pascoite gets bored and blogs about anime, vol. 1 · 8:17pm Feb 7th, 2021
About time I got off my ass and did a few things I've been meaning to for a while. One of those is promote some series I've been watching so I can spread the word about some things I think are worth watching.
Yeah, I'm one of those people who keeps an anime spreadsheet. It started just because I was juggling watching 3 or 4 series at once and I needed to keep track of which episode I was on for each show. Eventually, I decided to add anything I'd already seen just so I wouldn't accidentally start something I forgot I'd already seen and so I could record how well I liked each one for making recommendations to friends.
It gets a bit complicated, though. What qualifies as anime these days? There are a lot of things that are no doubt, but there are some things I'll call anime-adjacent that I did end up throwing in there, like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Then I toyed with including anything animated I'd watched, but then tracking down, much less remembering, anything I might have seen back through my childhood was way too daunting a task. So I had to draw the line in an arbitrary place, and it's inconsistent at times. I include some things in that "anime-adjacent" category like some Netflix shows that aren't anime per se (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Hilda, Glitch Techs) while not including any of the Disney stuff I've enjoyed (Gravity Falls, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, The Owl House), some older American stuff that was clearly anime inspired but aired on mainstream TV (Batman: The Animated Series), or series made by Cartoon Network (Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe), to name a few examples.
Yeah, except for stuff that's no doubt anime, that's a bit scattershot, but whaddyagonnado?
The list quickly also grew into a compilation of things I intend to watch, and I've slowly been making my way through a lot of those. When I finish something, it goes from the "to watch" tab to the "finished" tab along with a rating and maybe a clarifying comment. Those ratings are as follows:
Excellent: does great in every aspect (art, story, characters, plot, music), and an easy recommendation.
Very Good: does great in most aspects, but one or two of them might have been more average.
Good: I enjoyed the show, and it did keep my interest but it wasn't a standout.
Decent: Not bad to watch while doing something else, but generally didn't hold my interest, and I didn't look forward to watching it.
Meh: Just didn't find it interesting at all.
Yuck: Hated it.
Huh?: Only given out two of these, for shows I had no idea what it was even supposed to be doing, and I'm clearly not the intended audience.
When I get the itch, I'll pick out one or two series/movies I've rated either excellent or very good and discuss it a bit. I don't mind whatever discussion might take place in the comments, but I'm not looking to collect more things to add to my to-watch list, as it's plenty long enough already. Don't see one you liked here? Maybe I didn't like it, maybe I just haven't seen it. I'll eventually just dump a list of the ones I rated good, but I'm not going to comment on them.
So I didn't want to get all through that admin stuff and bury a discussion of a series down here. What I'm going to do for this first one is just list anything I've rated as excellent or very good that I consider universally known enough that I expect everyone's already either seen it or given it a look and decided they didn't want to. Even then, I'm guessing, but where I'm not sure, I'll err on the side of holding them for discussion later, and I'll tend this way for more recent series as well, since I don't have a good gauge on what gets lost in the shuffle or really catches on these days. I'm also covering only completed stuff, so a series I loved but still has new season(s) pending I'll skip for now.
Excellent
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
FLCL
Ghost in the Shell (the original movie, that is)
Howl's Moving Castle
Kiki's Delivery Service
One Punch Man (season 1, at least—season 2 was only good)
Outlaw Star (I hesitate to put a series this old here, as I'm not sure how many of you might have seen it, but it was well known in the day)
Spirited Away
Trigun
Very Good
FLCL: Alternative (I also hesitate to put this in, as I don't know how many people later watched these sequel series. The first one, FLCL: Progressive, I only rated good, because it tended toward the random and incomprehensible too much for me, while Alternative did a good job of finding the compelling character arcs of the original)
Fullmetal Alchemist
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (I know I'll probably get strong opinions about these FA series, but I didn't really prefer one over the other, and I haven't read the manga, so adherence to that doesn't affect my opinion.)
Mob Psycho 100 II (I rated the first series as just good, but the second picked up nicely.)
Sailor Moon (Shut up, it's a guilty pleasure.)
Sailor Moon Crystal (I like S1-2 of this a little better than the original. It cuts out a lot of the repetitive monster fights that permeate each episode and does a far better job of characterizing/giving a back story to the villains. However, that comes at the price of gutting the Sailor Scouts themselves of personality. S3 of the original is much better.)
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
The Big O
The Secret Life of Arietty
And given that I mentioned a few Miyazaki films there, which I consider the entire category to be in that "universal awareness" group, I'll go ahead and talk about those more a bit, since opinions can vary widely.
I actually preferred the Disney release of Kiki's Delivery Service just because I liked the closing credits music much better. In general (unpopular opinion ahead), I much prefer dubs to subs, even if it's not a very good dub, just because I'd rather be able to pay attention to the art and action than spend my time reading, but I'm biased against that anyway for two reasons. One, I'm not a very fast reader, so it diverts my attention longer than it would for the average person, and two, I'm the kind of person who reads every word of it rather than just skim and get the gist of it.
I know Howl's Moving Castle doesn't follow the book that well, but I haven't read the book. It can be inconsistent how much I care about that even if I have read the book, though. Like (unpopular opinion ahead) I actually enjoyed the live action Ghost in the Shell movie. Yeah, it deviates significantly from the original, though I don't mind it telling a different story. Not that it's flawless, but if it wants to take a different direction on the plot and it accomplishes that different direction, that's fine with me. I'm not going to hate it just because it doesn't follow the source material word for word. All that is to say I loved the atmosphere of Howl's Moving Castle and found it delightfully whimsical.
On the other side of that, I get the impression that Castle in the Sky is one of the more popular ones, but I found it dragged a lot, and I only rated it as decent. And one of the reasons I didn't like Tales of Earthsea that much is because it played too fast and loose with the source material. Go figure. I rated that decent as well.
Running down the other ones I've seen:
My Neighbor Totoro (good)
Ponyo (good)
Princess Mononoke (good)
There are a few other Ghibli movies I've seen that didn't involve Miyazaki, and maybe I've erred in including one or more in the ones I already listed, but the others will pop up eventually, as I did rate them all good enough to. The notable ones I haven't seen:
Grave of the Fireflies
Porco Rosso
The Wind Rises
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
I've only seen a handful of these, and most of those I haven't finished
What I have seen of Cowboy Bebop I would indeed call quite excellent, though. That one along with Gurren Lagann have what I consider some of the strongest character introductions I've seen, but Cowboy Bebop I felt did a much better job keeping that quality going.
FMA Brotherhood was a weird one for me. I found it very compelling early on, when it was more just Ed and Al doing stuff, but then the actual plot came along and it seemed a lot more of a generic "go beat up the bad guys" kinda deal and my interest fell off quite a bit. The magic system was very cool, though, and from what I have heard of what's to come I can easily see why people liked it so much.
Avatar and She-Ra, I'd have to rewatch to say very much. The climactic final battle of the former and the last season of the latter really didn't work very well for me, but I'd certainly found things to enjoy in the earlier sections of both so I'm unsure how it all balances out.
I feel it works especially well when presenting the horror of the Laputa weaponry, as well as the garden-like splendour of Laputa and its nature-tending robots. And of course those glorious aerial scenes, because Miyazaki knows how to make you love flying, even if vicariously.
Plus, it has the sky pirates in it. Instant win.
Howl's Moving Castle is a pretty good read if you get the chance.
The rear side windows of my SUV are rather rectangular and dark tinted, so I slapped on the 'see you space cowboy' on the bottom right.
Opportunity I couldn't pass up.
I've seen most of these and way more besides; we seem to have similar tastes. If you're bored and want recommendations by genre, don't hesitate to ask.
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My to-watch list is currently 91 items long, so no, I'm not looking for additional recommendations. (My finished tab has 276 items on it. Yikes, I didn't realize it had grown that much.) Boredom only has to do with finally sitting down and deciding to write up some recommendations. Future blogs will be shorter and talk about 1 or 2 things I enjoyed that aren't necessarily so well known that I could expect everyone to have heard of them already.
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. I've been watching anime for half my life, and have checked out all the older shows I had interest in, so I basically only watch a handful of new airings every season.
Wow that's a lot
Have you watched Korra?
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About FMA, I can see that. Certain genres and tropes interest and repel me as well. For instance, I find it annoying when an anime resorts to a tournament arc except when that's the whole purpose of the anime, in which I probably won't choose to watch it in the first place.
For She-Ra, the finale of season 4 suddenly escalated things to such a grander scale that I was afraid season 5 would feel hopelessly rushed, but I was actually impressed they still managed to pace it well. It did suffer somewhat from the villains seemingly failing to take threats against them seriously, and I didn't think some of the characters' motives and ultimate fates made sense, Shadow Weaver in particular. I still enjoyed it on the whole, though. In Avatar, I agree that the fight between Aang and the fire lord was a bit underwhelming. It was full of enough explosions and bombast, but it never really felt like there was a strategy to it or a back and forth. It reminded me of a car race, where yeah, they're moving fast, but a lot of it is still uneventful. What I found far more compelling was the fight between Zuko and Azula.
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It's hard for me to pinpoint why i found CitS that bland, as I do like good slice-of-life anime. It's probably that the plot isn't something that says slice of life to me, so I was expecting more than that. Calmer moments can exist fine in an action show (the legendary scene of Major Kusanagi just going through the city in Ghost in the Shell is a good example), but key to that is they don't last but so long. CitS seemed to drag all that out too long for me, and a lot of it got repetitive, too.
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I love a good reference like that. I think I've even seen a window sticker or two of that around here. I've seen a few other clever ones, but none of them are coming to me off the top of my head.
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I never did when it was coming out, and I don't even remember if Nickelodeon was airing it. If so, then I didn't find out until I was way behind on it.
Flash forward to the present, and my son saw a few episodes of Avatar and liked it. Wifey and I had watched it together when it originally aired and liked it. So for Christmas, we got a box set of Avatar and Korra for the family. We just finished Avatar a week ago, and we're about halfway through book 1 of Korra so far. I'm enjoying it. I've been warned book 2 isn't that good but that book 3 picks up again.
I found the Japanese "geek gets tossed into a fantasy world" nitche fairly fun. Working my way slowly through KonaSuba, and Estee got me watching Monster Musume. I had to watch all of The Gate (because explosions, duh), and I get an episode or two of Parasyte whenever I have free time more than a few hours before bedtime (it's not really a before-bed show). I'll never get tied up totally in an anime, but I've found even the not-so-good ones to be fascinating glimpses into a world I'll probably never get to visit.
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Oh absolutely. Book 2 isn't as terrible as a lot of people say it is, but it's definitely a low point compared to the fantastic 3 and 4.
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If it counts, back window has one of the animated faces that Ed uses when on her computer.
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That's not a genre I like much, but on a friend's recommendation, I did watch what's been made so far of The Rising of the Shield Hero, and it's not bad. Same guy recommended The Gate to me. If you're referring to Parasyte -the maxim- then I've seen it, but it didn't grab me. I only rated it as decent. Also agreed that animes that aren't that good are still often watchable to me, just because the art and world can have some interest. I don't rate many things below "decent."
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It does. At one point, a friend lent me the Cowboy Bebop manga, and there was an Ed moment in there that struck me as so perfectly her. Someone talking to one of the crew asks whether Ed is a girl or boy. Ed cuts in with: "Ed is Ed!"
Considering what website we're on I don't think you have to worry about being judged!
Also Nausicaa is my favorite Ghibli movie
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Haha, true, but I like Sailor Moon despite being well aware of its many faults. I'm not even sure about why it appeals to me so much. I do like setups where everyone on a team has unique abilities, so that on any given mission, any one of them might have the crucial skill, or that their skills are far more effective when used as a team than individually. And while that is one reason why, it's not always consistent, For instance, I like My Hero Academia, but while that aspect is there, it's not something that stands out as one of my favorite parts of the show. Maybe it's because MHA feels more like it's about a single character than Sailor Moon does? I don't know. Sailor Moon also brings in the trope of the hero having a past that's been lost to her, which also often interests me. Tragic sacrifice can be up my alley, too, which is probably why I like season 3 of it the best: it happens no less than three times there, and it could be argued there are five or six.
Hah, and to think I just watched The Cat Returns with my kids the other day.
The Secret Life of Arietty is one of those rare beasts where I found one moment in it so perfect that it's stuck with me longer than my impression of the rest of the movie.
In high school one of my acquaintances tried to start an anime club with mixed results. We watched the first episodes of a few different series, one of which I thought was interesting but have never been able to find the name of. Maybe it's an obscure or lousy one, but having only seen ~20 minutes I'm not sure I'll never know for sure…
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Drop any details you remember about it. It might be one I've seen.
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This'll be fun, or embarrassing if everybody else knows this one. I can't claim to be an anime aficionado by any stretch:
The episode centered around a space mercenary or pirate in a giant white ship that at the end of the episode charges a poor client almost nothing. A woman stumbles into their latest operation for reasons I can't remember, gets captured by the bad guys, winds up as a lot at an illegal auction, grumbles that at least she'll get sold for the highest price in the world, and gets angry when the auctioneer introduces her as a bargain and offers to include some weapons and stuff to sweeten the deal.
5450847
Hmm. Each aspect individually makes me think of a few possibilities, but not in the aggregate. About what year would this have been on?
5450855
2003 at the latest, but likely before then since this was either a download or a DVD
5450858
That may go a little before I started watching a larger number of things. Offhand, some elements of it make me think of a series I only saw a couple episodes of or maybe it was a two-part movie where I only saw the first one. In college, a friend of mine had a suite-mate who subscribed to an anime service. Each month, he'd get a tape full of assorted things that had come out recently. Mostly it'd be a couple episodes of several different shows. One was about a huge spaceship run by a fairly juvenile girl, and their mission was to capture large animals for the exotic pet trade. While doing so, they somehow got embroiled in an interstellar war and had to fight a bunch of official navy ships. Their ship was big enough to have an expansive hot spring bath inside. My friend told me it was called Pet Shop Hunter, but as I do a search now I don't see anything by that name. It would have been 1995, because I remember a few episodes from the first season of Slayers being on there too, but nothing made that year seems to correspond.
Wikipedia has category pages, and you can go to the individual movie, OVA, and series pages to see a list (here's the one for 1995) of what came out each year. I'd suggest editing that URL to 2003 and working your way backward to see if you can find it. Just hovering over the titles gets you the beginning of a description and sometimes the splash screen, so you don't have to click into every article. (I just tried this for 1994 and 1995, and while I recognize a number of things that were on those sampler tapes, I don't see the one I had in mind.)
I haven't seen most of these, but if you blog enough good things about a movie or short series, it'll probably inspire me to watch it. If you blog good things about any of those "hundreds of hours of content" animes, it will probably inspire me to say "oh, that sounds nice, I should probably watch it someday," and then never do that. What can I say, I'm easily intimidated by a large backlog of episodes.
Of the ones I have seen, I mostly agree with your quick-and-dirty rankings. The only one that really surprised me was Outlaw Star, which I remembered just loving when I saw it while I was in middle school, and then happened across again a year or two ago. When I sat down to rewatch it, I found it had aged really, really poorly (or, more likely, middle-school Chris had terrible taste). If you write that up, I'll be very interested to see why you rank it where you do!
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Hah, I just rewatched Outlaw Star last year and still liked it a lot. It does show its age, but the one thing I think may make it seem like it doesn't hold up well is that it was made back in the era where dubs usually weren't that good, so one that was stood out in comparison. These days, most dubs are pretty good, so it's not nearly as notable. Nowadays, Outlaw Star's dub seems about average, while back then, it was one of the better ones. Which all goes out the window if you watched the sub...
I also tend to shy away from longer series. I did watch all of Bleach, but i gave up on One Piece long ago (also because, well, I didn't like it). My neighbor loves Fairy Tail, so I looked into that, saw the number of eps, and noped hard. Most of the things I watch these days are 12-26 eps, so I can knock one out in a few days, though if it's one I really like, I try to ration it out so it'll last longer. I'll be putting out my first "real" one of these some time in the next few days, and I agree, length of the run would be a good thing to include. For most of them, I'll have to go back to check the actual number.
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I found it!
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Oh, ha, I've actually looked that one up before since it's a spinoff of Slayers.