Anime Recommendations

[ECSNorway]

Quick summary of Gasaraki: Tom Clancy's Neon Genesis Evangelion.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[VladimirTherin]

El Hazard, The Magnificent World.

Going to emphatically second this. It is one of my all time favorites.[/quote]

[paladindythe]

One of the recent compelling series has been Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It tells a rather dark story about Magical Girls. Most people who watch it are either compelled to watch to the end, or pass over it.
Unfortunately Aniplex thinks that $50/DVD (and 3 DVD's for the season) is a market price...

[robkelk]

Aniplex is repeating Bandai's mistake of believing the Japanese business model will work outside of Japan. And we all know how well that worked for Bandai...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Ross Van Loan]

I like the fluffy Super-Deformed Shirow world of Dominion Tank Police. (There are at least three variants, one of which is a stodgy C.G. curiosity.) It's Ghost in the Shell on laughing gas! The Puma Sisters warm the cockles of my...heart! Also, It has the second cutest mini-tank ever designed. Nothing, I repeat nothing, beats the Tachikoma swarm for pure, unadulterated, warmhearted 'aw-shucks' killer-kawaii! (Something has to be cute & humane within the Cyborg Century of GITS : why not let it be the A.I. spider-tank collective?)

[robkelk]

I suspect that Dave Baranyi won't mind me re-posting his Usenet post about a current anime title (Message-ID91C3167-C0FE-4268-87D6-47ABF22D5317%anthony.baranyi@bell.net) here...

Junrui wa Suitaishimashita - Final Thoughts

"Jinrui wa Suitaishimashita" was probably the highlight anime for me during the summer 2012 anime season. This social satire sci-fi story set in a future where humanity is dying out seemed to be a sly wink at the "Collapse" theory of Jared Diamond, with a fairly generous helping of the H.G. Wells novella "The Time Machine" thrown in.

In a distant future humanity is slowly losing its grasp on technology and on cultural memory while populations continue to decrease. The story is told as the nameless narrator (as in the Time Machine) writes down her memoirs and observations of her still relatively brief life. The narrator is cynical and sarcastic – she expects nothing from other humans and only reveals herself to the Fairies, the quasi-mythical tiny creatures who appear to embody Clarke's Law that "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic".

This is Juvenalian satire deliberately masquerading as Horatian satire. The narrator is cute, bright and outwardly friendly and harmless, but her assessment of the collapsing world around her is bitter and dark. She is fundamentally a sociopath who trusts no one but the Fairies, and yet still expects the worst from them too.

But in this future world where all of humanity is deliberately turning away from society, technology and history, everyone is a sociopath in the strictest sense. The Fairies build and mimic human societies from the past, not the slowly constricting contemporary human world. These ephemeral Fairy worlds mirror the strengths and weaknesses of humanity's past but they interest few contemporary humans except for the narrator, and she views them mostly as being personal entertainments at best and bothersome at worst.

All-in-all, the anime was brilliantly done, with surprises in every episode and a memorable, if ultimately unsympathetic protagonist. It's not a future in which I would like to live, but as a cautionary tale the series delivers its message very well.

Dave Baranyi

--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012