• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Spring 2011 Anime Thread PART TWO return of sex hair, ghosts, and ZAWA

Status
Not open for further replies.

Branduil

Member
cosmicblizzard said:
Why, it totally does. Mononoke is ugly.
2q8zeau.gif
 
The promo for Uta no Prince-sama— Maji Love 1000% looked pretty compelling, think I will watch it for next season, girl character designs looked kind of demonic and terrible, but the other characters, blue hair, wow.
 

iavi

Member
Valkyria Chronicles 14-16

Selveria continues to drool for his hotness. Zaka randomly disappears off of the face of the planet, leaving Rosie all alone. Faldio spits hot fire, forcing Alica & Welkin have an unfruitful fact to face. Eleanor ignores Largo like he's a random street-caller. And Ramal actually gets a date with Isara.

I will accept all of this nonsense, if
this adaptation keeps Isara alive.
It's a fair trade.
 

cj_iwakura

Member
UberTag said:
I'm so thrilled that with time and reflection people have rightfully recognized Sailor Moon S as the pinnacle of the anime. There was a brief time around the turn of the millennium where people were lavishing that praise upon the pacing disaster that was Sailor Stars. Praise that was indeed misplaced.

I love Stars. Love.


But S is great.
 
One Outs 8

Not a no-game, eh. Toua might be fucked with the contract negotiations unless the rain gets REALLY bad.

Gotta say, this is getting close to the "just one more episode" nature of Kaiji. Think I'm 100% going to start the manga when I finish the anime.
 

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Stars is good, but when you get past the fact it is far less available it isn't better than S.

However, its pacing was one of the things it had going for it. There are few episodes that don't move the plot forward in some way.
 
Just wanted to pop in and agree with S being my favorite of the bunch. I just finished watching Stars and it comes in second, but the margin is small. I really enjoyed what the Sailor Starlights brought to the table.
 

mAcOdIn

Member
Kagami said:
As I recall, he didn't choose her as a sandbag--the gun was strapped to her.
That would require an odd strap, she'd need enough slack in that sling that it'd be dragging at her feet for that to have been plausible.
Kagami said:
They wear pants. They're just really short pants.
As for the question, it's one of those youth fashion things. Witches got popular, trend started, you know how kids are.

I don't think this got shown in the TV series until the second season, but:

Yeah, this. They only need the witches on the large neuroi. The small ones can be handled by regular forces. In season one, unless I'm forgetting, they didn't actually send out the regular military on deliberate strikes against large neuroi--they just wound up under attack by large one(s) while in transit.

Yeah there were futile attempts on a large neuroi in season 2 by Romagna ships, which Mio commented on, saying they probably wanted to try to earn some credit for themselves.

This seemed to be the purpose for sending out aircraft during those times ships were under attack by large neuroi (e.g. season 1 first two eps, season 2 Yoshika/Lynne episode)
See!
tiff said:
Strike Witches sounds deep as hell.
It's deeper down the rabbit hole than any sane person should descend.
Jexhius said:
Madness. Pure madness!
So you think it was a good show? That it was well done? Either it was intentionally crap and changing directors wouldn't matter because they wanted it to be that way or it's shit anyways and no-one could make it shine.
Izayoi said:
I need to finish it!
No, no you don't.
 
One Outs 9

If baseball was like this in real life, I'd probably go to more games. Just stopping in the middle of a game to give a speech while playing mind games with the opposing team's manager is definitely something this sport needs more of.
 

Izayoi

Banned
icarus-daedelus said:
There's much painful imagery and bleeding invoked/caused by We Without Wings.
It's more than imagery. You will feel real, physical pain while subjecting yourself to that atrocity.
 

Branduil

Member
cosmicblizzard said:
One Outs 9

If baseball was like this in real life, I'd probably go to more games. Just stopping in the middle of a game to give a speech while playing mind games with the opposing team's manager is definitely something this sport needs more of.
It's like you go out of your way to be wrong. Now I know why sports anime sucks so much.
 

Jex

Member
cosmicblizzard said:
Why, it totally does. Mononoke is ugly.
I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I guess stuff like this still works for me!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
High school of the Dead
mAcOdIn said:
So you think it was a good show? That it was well done? Either it was intentionally crap and changing directors wouldn't matter because they wanted it to be that way or it's shit anyways and no-one could make it shine.
There's a difference between thinking "this show is good" and "changing the director would fundamentally change the show itself".

It takes a certain type of mind to see the original material, i.e. the manga, and then decide to make something more extreme and ridiculous. In other words, to extract what makes the original work unique (which isn't the same as saying what makes it 'good') and then play it up is part of what made it entertaining to those who liked it.

There's no guarantee that a difference director wouldn't have looked at the manga and tried to tone it down which would have just left the laughable 'plot' and 'characters' to hold it together.
 

Kagami

Member
Izayoi said:
Is the whole ear/tail thing ever explained in Strike Witches?
Not in any detail. They're "familiars," but how they get them hasn't been explained unless I missed something in some book (that's actually in the same canon as the TV series, anyway.)
There's something on the order of 800 pages of SW TV-series data books I haven't read yet though...

Izayoi said:
Woah, artstyle change for the OVA. That's always really jarring. Was this a pilot or something? I'm so confused.
Came out a year and a half before the TV series.
I'm not sure if it was a pilot exactly or just intended to be a one-off at the time.
It was only sold as part of a combo package, figure + book + dvd.
http://i55.tinypic.com/161aiiq.jpg
 

Jex

Member
Articalys said:
Out of curiosity, did they ever report how many people ended up voting in the contest?
Nope, sadly.
Instro said:
Meh, I lost interest after Big O was knocked out.
As awesome as the Big O is, I knew it wouldn't have the popularity to go the distance. Even if it's design is amazing.
 

Steroyd

Member
Sailormoon

Repeat after me.

The sailor costumes are not a disguise, the sailor costumes are not a disguise.
It's quite impressive that Rei could suss out Tuxedo Mask's identity who actually wears a mask but not Sailor V >_>
 

mAcOdIn

Member
Jexhius said:
High school of the Dead

There's a difference between thinking "this show is good" and "changing the director would fundamentally change the show itself".

It takes a certain type of mind to see the original material, i.e. the manga, and then decide to make something more extreme and ridiculous. In other words, to extract what makes the original work unique (which isn't the same as saying what makes it 'good') and then play it up is part of what made it entertaining to those who liked it.

There's no guarantee that a difference director wouldn't have looked at the manga and tried to tone it down which would have just left the laughable 'plot' and 'characters' to hold it together.
I think you're placing the director on too high a pedestal, I would claim that the overall direction to pander even more openly was made by someone in an even higher position than the director and that at best we would have gotten slightly better directed crap as opposed to the crap we got.
Izayoi said:
Too late!

Now for season 2.
I'm sorry I couldn't save you.
Cwarrior said:
Katanagatari ep1

aagggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh fucking troll

I came in expecting some sort of ninja/samurai action what I got was 58min of talking heads going on about how awesome there ninja skills are and any minute now they’re going to fight it out to the death. What I really got was just blue balls for action.
I told you!
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
Just heard about Tomoko Kawakami's death :(

Maybe I'll rewatch Hikaru no Go in her memory.
 

iavi

Member
Valkyria Chronicles 17-22

Zaka's returned from bad-writing hell, like a boss.
Isara died... but died smiling,
like a boss. Welkin froze up for a few eps, and then cried his heart out, like a boss. And Alicia just whipped that ass, like a boss.
 
mAcOdIn said:
But merely being a credible entry in the zombie genre's a pretty low bar, especially up at the time of the first Resident Evil movie's release date, the genre wasn't exactly know for great movies. But I can accept that a fan of that narrow genre of movies may feel that it was a strong entry but I think that by default acknowledges the fact that it's a pretty piss poor genre if the average joe doesn't also feel it was a good movie without being predisposed to liking zombie movies.

Like all horror genres, zombie movies generally appeal only to fans, with the possible exception of George A. Romero's original Dead Trilogy (Night of the Living, Dawn of the, Day of the) which were also bitter social commentaries. The average joe isn't interested in slasher flicks, or the latest torture porn horror films either. The ONLY time horror ever appeals to a general audience is when they actually take all the horror out of it entirely and water it down, for example Twilight which has vampires which don't have any actual properties exhibited by classic vampires. Even the vampire genre, a staple genre of horror films, is largely restricted to fans only when the vampire actually drink blood and get burned to death by the sun. So to hold Resident Evil up to some nonexistent bar of appealing to joe average is setting a goalpost up where no 99% of horror movies can ever score. Horror has always been a self-selecting genre of films, simply because of the subject matter.

Right, that's kinda what I mean, that cheese can work, so the latter Resident Evil movies may no longer be strong contenders for the zombie movie market as movies period I think they were all generally the same quality just not the latter ones are not aimed at the same market as the first.

Zombie movies are largely zombie movies. They always feature dead people eating the living. The big difference is that the first Resident Evil tried to appeal to people who liked zombie movies in general, after that the sequels seemed to aim directly only for fans of the games and everybody else could go take a hike.

There's two things here about realism.

There's realism for common, every day things and then there's situational realism, I expect the former but don't always expect the latter.

For instance zombies alone are unrealistic but I don't bitch about the Zombies. They're supernatural, fictional, whatever. Doesn't matter. They're not something I interact with since they're not real and I have no idea how a zombie would exist if it existed and how one would act in that situation. If you make a show in the future I don't bitch about the way FTL works or anything like because I don't know the science behind it, move on.

However there are common items. I would be angered if someone used a microwave to freeze popsicles. I know what a microwave does and know how it works, it doesn't freeze shit. I was pissed off in Kurozaka or whatever, that vampire anime, where in one of the final episodes they're driving a fan up a drawbridge or some shit, spin out and do a 180 and continue to drive backwards up the bridge, I know how a van works. And I know how guns work so I don't want to see people touching hot barrels or brass without showing or feeling pain, I don't want to see a frightened shaking girl used as a sandbag when it would be less steady than just fucking using your arm.

Now people also bitch about reloading or whatnot, yeah I get annoyed by that if it's an extended scene that follows the character the entire time but a lot of time the camera's moving and you don't always see the character, maybe he reloaded in that time? I don't know so I may find it amusing but I'm not going to totally get up in arms over it because, well, I don't know if he reloaded or not in that case. I don't know what a gunshot would do to a decayed zombie skull so I won't bitch about it, with only half the required knowledge I can't bitch.

So really, I expect people to know a little about what they write, just a little. If you're writing about a bunch of people with guns and it's set in the real world, then they should act as real guns and you should know how real guns work. I will give you the benefit of the doubt on ammo so long as you don't do something totally idiotic like tell the audience the character only has 2 rounds left and then show him clearly firing eight but so long as you're not that inept my brain can let it work because in any frames I don't see the character's hands and gun I can't deny the fact that perhaps he reloaded.

Again, it seems to me that you are intentionally overlooking things which should be glaringly unrealistic, such as women with gigantic boobs doing flips and fighting with swords. I don't know how you can claim to overlook the hilariously unrealistic torpedo tits and then whine about a single scene where a guy uses the said tits to brace a gun. It's as if you completely ignored that in Armageddon the Earth 65 million years ago had it's continents in it's present positions and whined that meteors don't make the whole world catch on fire.

It's a pretty blatant example of selective criticism and it invalidates entire arguments because you're just LOOKING for things to criticize and ignoring everything else. I realize that opinions are subjective but you are sabotaging your entire argument by finding one tiny thing to whine about while ignoring the overall point that the WHOLE SHOW is entirely unrealistic and never makes any pretenses about presenting it's material as anything other than a hilariously exaggerated parody/homage to the American zombie film genre. There isn't even an argument of what you call common every-day things because unless you live in Somalia, Libya, Afganistan, Iraq, Sudan, or some other war zone, real actual firearms aren't common every-day things. Yes, even in America, most people have only seen guns in movies or strapped to a police officer's belt. In that context, WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT RESTING A GUN ON A GIRL'S HUGE TITS TO BRACE IT WHILE YOU FIRE IT?!

mAcOdIn said:
I think you're placing the director on too high a pedestal, I would claim that the overall direction to pander even more openly was made by someone in an even higher position than the director and that at best we would have gotten slightly better directed crap as opposed to the crap we got.

Your claim is entirely wrong since the director actually said that he was the one who decided to make something that he would have made when he was in middle school and obsessed with girls and manga. His quote was curiously similar to something that Luc Besson said when he was making The Fifth Element, that it was something he would have made when he was in high school and obsessed with French comic books.
 

Averon

Member
trejo said:
Bad Aria 11 10

http://i.imgur.com/6wmdkl.jpg[IMG]

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/8bt91l.jpg[IMG]

My sides are in so much pain right now. So worth it.[/QUOTE]

Yeah. GG's troll subs are great when the anime they're trolling really is awful.
 

Steroyd

Member
GG's subs pissed me off too much when they did the yoda speak all the way through, it was funny at first, but then it just got tedious, because everyone was subbed in that manner.

Jexhius said:
Azazel-San 12

Holy shit. Holy-Shit!

Holy Shit!! T_T
 

trejo

Member
Azazel-san 12

Holy shit! ;_;

Steroyd said:
GG's subs pissed me off too much when they did the yoda speak all the way through, it was funny at first, but then it just got tedious, because everyone was subbed in that manner.
The haven't done Yoda speak anymore.
 

Jex

Member
Steins;Gate 12

Holy shit (it's getting old, I know), imagine what a talented staff could have done with this episode!
 

Dali

Member
Cwarrior said:
Katanagatari ep1

trollface.jpg


aagggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh fucking troll

I came in expecting some sort of ninja/samurai action what I got was 58min of talking heads going on about how awesome there ninja skills are and any minute now they’re going to fight it out to the death. What I really got was just blue balls for action.

:lol

I wish I could say it gets better, but if you are hoping for some awesome fighting anime, then this series is 97% cocktease (at least as far as I was able to make it). It's not a terrible series if you can keep in your head that all the challenges and chest-beating and build-up in every episode will more than likely not lead to an awesome choreographed battle, but rather a solution given in the form of some slice of life lesson that is stupid but made to look deep and introspective within the context of the show (but is still stupid). Someone will likely die at the end of every episode, but rest assured it'll be in an unceremonious fashion.
 

7Th

Member
Unknown Soldier said:
Meh.

I liked it more when they spun it off as a mecha series (Xenoglossia). Well, I liked it conceptually, I heard Xenoglossia wasn't very good.

It was by the director of Railgun, AnoHana and
Toradora
, of course it wasn't very good.
 

Jex

Member
Dali said:
It's not a terrible series if you can keep in your head that all the challenges and chest-beating and build-up in every episode will more than likely not lead to an awesome choreographed battle, but rather a solution given in the form of some slice of life lesson that is stupid but made to look deep and introspective within the context of the show (but is still stupid).
So it's a slice of life show?
 

cj_iwakura

Member
Hitokage said:
Stars is good, but when you get past the fact it is far less available it isn't better than S.

However, its pacing was one of the things it had going for it. There are few episodes that don't move the plot forward in some way.

The filler in Stars is so hilarious that it's hard to mind. Aside from the Super S epilogue, anyway.

Steroyd said:
Sailormoon

Repeat after me.

The sailor costumes are not a disguise, the sailor costumes are not a disguise.
It's quite impressive that Rei could suss out Tuxedo Mask's identity who actually wears a mask but not Sailor V >_>

The live action show actually address this by having their hair colors change for transformation.
 

Dali

Member
Jexhius said:
So it's a slice of life show?
A bad one that's in the guise of an action kung fu anime. Sure, why not.

Btw, usually sarcastic summaries are a clever interpretation of a post, not a selective bold that ignores the rest of the text completely.
 

Sage00

Once And Future Member
I don't see how Katanagatari is 'in the guise' of anything. One main character doesn't even have a weapon, a fact that the show goes out of its way to explain is symbolic, the other main character is a military strategist, and it was written by the same author and shares similar titling to Bakemonogatari. Criticising it for a lack of what would frankly be quite silly and forced action sequences is the last thing I'd do.
 

Jex

Member
Dali said:
A bad one that's in the guise of an action kung fu anime. Sure, why not.

Btw, usually sarcastic summaries are a clever interpretation of a post, not a selective bold that ignores the rest of the text completely.
It wasn't sarcasm, I was asking a question. I'm not sure what caused the confusion.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[C] 10

I actually kind of liked this episode. I know we've returned to the silly battle/inevitable climax arc but I don't think it was done especially poorly.

What I do find a tad strange is the length that the creators went to with the shows complicated and in-depth use of symbols and imagery. The world-building seems pointlessly detailed for a show that's basically coming down to a series of action set-pieces (backed by some stuff actually happening in the background, I'll admit).
 

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
Sage00 said:
I don't see how Katanagatari is 'in the guise' of anything. One main character doesn't even have a weapon, a fact that the show goes out of its way to explain is symbolic, and the other main character is a military strategist. Criticising it for a lack of what would frankly be quite silly and forced action sequences is the last thing I'd do.
Not surprising when you consider some of the media for this show.
 

JKTrix

Member
The stuff happening in the background directly affects the action in the next episode, so it's like a setup for the action too!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom