Welcome to the second ever general discussion thread for our burgeoning community! I have been incredibly pleased at the quick growth in the number of usernames I have seen engaging with the community as well as the number of submissions being made. Thank you everybody for contributing and making this community great!
Like always, this is the thread in which you can say what you want or ask about any anime-related topic you desire! Excited about the live-action adaptation of Yu Yu Hakusho? Interested in the teased anime series for Terminator and/or John Wick? Want to tell everybody about your theory explaining how Baccano! is actually a critique of capitalism? Well, this is the thread! Let it rip and have fun!
Just make sure to tag your spoilers! If you forget, then I will have to shout “It’s Moddin’ Time” and mod all over this thread.
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::: spoiler Spoilers Within
Place your spoilery text here.
:::
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I’ve been digging through my collection of old anime over the last few weeks – particularly looking for fun lines, screenshots, etc. to post over at !animepics (and sometimes !fangmoe or anime_irl@kbin.social) – and I’m paying a lot more attention to the actual art in anime as a result. I recently watched Ghost Stories (with it’s famously unfaithful dub), for example, and there’s a lot of just fun images if you’re paying attention to the artwork itself. I mean, that probably sounds like it should be obvious – it’s anime! it’s visual art, right?! – but before I started this I was usually watching shows and movies for the story and characters primarily and just taking in the art as an aid to enhance the storytelling rather than really paying attention to it in its own right. This slightly more active viewing approach has been a fun alternative to just riding along with the plot.
As part of that, I’ve just finished watching Wolf’s Rain a few hours ago. I’ve had the DVDs for years but never got around to watching it – so I finally did. I knew of it from an old friend I used to talk to on AIM (yes, from waaaaay back) who really liked the ED. I didn’t actually know much of anything about the show going into it besides that one song, so, that was interesting… The one sentence summary, if you haven’t heard of it, is basically: a group of wolves that can alternate between wolf and human appearance go on a journey in search of Paradise in a bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic dark fantasy-with-tech setting.
Does anyone know WTF happened during production? There were FOUR back-to-back recap episodes in the middle of it – plus four OVA episodes to make up for that, I guess.
I’ve got a few screenshots from the show that I’ll be posting in the coming days – as well as a composite of a panning shot of a character that I thought would be fun to try to edit back together. I ended up writing some custom software – and refreshed myself on a numerical technique I haven’t used in a long time – in addition to using my image editor to make it.
I have a soft spot for some vintage anime myself. I posted in the ml community previously about my experience going back and watching The Vision of Escaflowne from the latter half of the 90’s. One of the things I really liked about it was the animation itself. Something about actual drawn mecha anime just feels different in a good way.
I am actually going through a bit of a spell myself trying to watch anime differently. One of the things I really liked about the anime community on reddit were the random clips people posted. It was a nice, digestible chunk of animation that usually showed a series at its best. So, I have started to pick out 1-2 minute clips from old series that I like and am trying to figure out how to make a webm from them (once I wrestle ffmpeg into submission). However, the point is that going back and watching bits of shows I have seen with the context of wanting to pull out a clip has been interesting. You really do see things from a different perspective.
I am not familiar with Wolf’s Rain, but doing some quick reading on it. It seems as though your criticisms about the 4-episode recap stint are widely shared by others as well.
Ah, Escaflowne. I should probably rewatch that at some point. I’ve got both the movie and the series DVDs around, so it’s more a matter of when than if… I remember the movie being rather different from the series but it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen either that I don’t really remember the details.
Going back to different eras of anime can be neat. I’ve only got a couple shows and movies from the 80s and 90s though. The oldest I have access to right now is Lupin III (the first season from 1971, I think, plus the pilot from the late 60s) since it got a DVD release a few years ago. (I saw some reruns of Speed Racer and Hakushon Daimao on TV when I was kid but I don’t have a copy.) Maybe I should sort my shows by age and try looking at the progression of styles over time. Hmm…
This past week I have not had too much time to watch anime, but managed to keep up with a couple airing shows.
- Frieren once again outdid itself with what is my new favorite episode of its run. It was so good that I rewatched it and made a second top-level comment in the episode thread about it.
- Eminence in Shadow had an interesting episode this past week. As a source reader, my reaction seems to differ a lot from anime-only reactions that I have seen. There were some serious bits of the story left on the cutting room floor from Episode 6 that source readers haven’t been happy about. I just hope that they were cut in order to give us something special later in the season like they did at the end of season 1.
- Helck continues its backstory exposition dump. I like backstory as much as the next viewer, but you know what else I also like? Story. About a full third of the show’s runtime has been this single flashback sequence explaining Helck’s past. I really think that instead of a solid 5-6 episode flashback chunk, it could have been interspersed with the rest of the story (see Frieren for a good example of how to mix backstory and story).
Finally, speaking as a recently appointed moderator for the community, I just want to thank everybody that has been involved with this community since we essentially brought it off of life support. It’s growth has been great to see and I have been very happy to see the positive interactions here after the drama surrounding the defederation incidents in recent days. It would have been all too easy to start steering conversations in negative directions towards individuals involved, but I haven’t seen that at all in this community.
If you have any questions for me, either speaking as a moderator or just as a random internet person, I am happy to answer here.
