Anime

[colinr0380]

The only thing I would add onto feihong's great list of recommendations is to not be worried if Akira is overwhelming and feels rather difficult to follow on a first viewing - it was the big introduction to anime for many Western fans in the 1990s pre-Studio Ghibli becoming better available (not least through its Criterion Laserdisc release in the US) but it is a feature length condensing of a six volume manga into something drastically more streamlined for a feature film, which means that there are a lot of plot strands that it can only really allude to elliptically, as well as being in production whilst the manga was still ongoing, so the ending was created for the film and then expanded on for the final chapters of the manga. It is kind of the equivalent of the Lynch Dune film in that sense, or the Ralph Bakshi animated version of Lord of the Rings from the 1970s. Or anything that is trying to cram enough material for a trilogy into just one film. But in some ways that was what made the film so fascinating to me as my introduction to anime, because of how densely packed it was with tangents that could easily have made for entire films in themselves and made the world feel more vibrant and alive because of that, whilst the friendship-turned-rivalry relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo is a more than strong enough and straightforward central story thread to power through and act as a backbone for all of the other material spinning off from it.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Akira is how well even the condensed theatrical feature film deals with what seems to be the story's main theme of social hierarchies and seems to be bringing up implied equivalencies between rival gangs of teenage biker hooligans, activist/terrorist groups, all the way up to the highest echelons of political chicanery and skillfully suggesting that it may be just the dress codes and rituals of behaviour (and access to weapons or technology) that separate them, when in terms of violent coups and infighting all tiers of the society are pretty much performing the same actions. I particularly like that this story is about finding a role in the world for those who have seemingly been rejected from it, mostly in terms of kids without parental figures (or rather with only horrendously flawed examples of authority/parental substitute figures) whether medically experimented upon or just left in that orphanage to fend for themselves, with only their peers for companionship.

Similarly the Ghost In The Shell feature is an anime classic but is also quite complicated and heady philosophical stuff (and not only because of the dense Masamune Shirow source material but because it is just as much interweaving in themes that are key to Mamoru Oshii's other anime work, with the motifs of diving, reflection, the nature of the self, angels, even the talismanic Basset Hound! - that crop up in everything from Angel's Egg and Patlabor even to the live action Avalon), and if that seems a bit too intimidating I would recommend just as highly the two seasons of the Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series.
____
The big news of the upcoming year in terms of classic anime is that, after having released the feature films over the last year, and with an upcoming reboot series coming out, DIskotek Media in the US is apparently planning to start releasing the original 80s Urusei Yatsura television series on disc too. So I'm looking forward to that.

In terms of classic sci-fi anime, I would highly recommend the Wings of Honneamise film (with its score by Ryuichi Sakamoto). Whilst I am still looking for the opportunity to see the Legend of the Galactic Heroes series at some point, and have not explored any of the Gundam series at all as yet, Macross is a major touchstone series that I would point to (and was apparently a big entry point in the 1980s for many US fans when it got brutally mashed together with another unrelated series, completely re-dubbed into English and given an entirely new plot to mask over all the changes with the Robotech television series) but appears to have fallen off of the radar a little in recent years. The 1984 feature Macross: Do You Remember Love? is one of the best sci-fi films of the 80s (animated or live action!) which really needs to get a major re-release soon, but in the meantime it was great to hear that the just as good 90s series Macross: Plus (which features a particularly wonderful score) is apparently slated for a disc release next year in both its film and 4 episode OVA versions (the series is the best way to experience it for the first time, simply because you get to experience the cliffhangers! The one into the final episode is particularly good)

(And hopefully the proto-Neon Genesis Evangelion Gunbuster series should be coming soon too, so look out for that as well!)

Michael Kerpan: it is so frustrating that I cannot yet recommend something like Kimagure Orange Road to you, simply because of not knowing how anyone could be able to access it!

[therewillbeblus]

17) Patlabor:

The OVAs and the movies are on gorgeous blu ray sets, they look great.

Is this set the one to get, or is there a better option that incorporates the OVAs without the series?

I'll co-sign almost all of feihong's recs. Personally I started out with Akira, which was a bit overwhelming for me and put me off for a while (now really like it a lot, and I was quite young when I first watched it). Many years later, it was Monster that jumpstarted my reintegration into the medium. Monster is very front-heavy, with the first third being near-perfect, but the way the story unfolds with the doctor evolving into a sort-of Western/Wrong-Man hybrid going town to town and finding himself in some pretty memorable wild situations is great fun. Plus the villain's incarnation and overall effect is deeply unsettling and makes for some interesting moral engagement. Unfortunately I don't think the series is available on physical media in full, but you can find it online. Outside of the popular movie directors like Satoshi Kon, Miyazaki, et al., Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop and FLCL were series I got to about five years ago and made me crave more

[Boosmahn]

Many years later, it was Monster that jumpstarted my reintegration into the medium. Monster is very front-heavy, with the first third being near-perfect, but the way the story unfolds with the doctor evolving into a sort-of Western/Wrong-Man hybrid going town to town and finding himself in some pretty memorable wild situations is great fun. Plus the villain's incarnation and overall effect is deeply unsettling and makes for some interesting moral engagement. Unfortunately I don't think the series is available on physical media in full, but you can find it online.

Speaking of Monster, it appears that it will be coming to U.S. Netflix (not sure about other countries) on January 1st. I believe it was on the platform before, though I don't know when.

[jazzo]

The original manga Monster was based on is well worth your time, as is Naoki Urasawa’s other phenomenal run of series, 20th Century Boys, Pluto and Asadora!

[feihong]

The original manga Monster was based on is well worth your time, as is Naoki Urasawa’s other phenomenal run of series, 20th Century Boys, Pluto and Asadora!

I'm surprised there hasn't been more success in animating Urusawa's endlessly popular and appealing material. Another volume not published in Engish (but translated by fans, if you can find it) is Happy!, his story of a harried high-school-age girl struggling to become a pro tennis star in order to pay off her elder brother's debt to loan sharks. The queasy, incredible stakes are either she becomes a serious tennis pro, or the mob sends her to work as a prostitute in Soapland. Incredibly, the girl is the daughter of a famous tennis coach, who taught her all he knew before he died, and so her chances are...well...it's not impossible. I feel like this would have made a remarkable sports anime, and I'm surprised it never made it as a series or an OVA.

Anyway, co-signing your endorsement of Urusawa, whose work is endlessly fascinating. For fans of behind-the-scenes work, Urusawa also runs a Youtube channel called Manben (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=manben), where he does documentaries of his own approach to comics, as well as profiling, interviewing and documenting other artists style as well.

[feihong]

17) Patlabor:

The OVAs and the movies are on gorgeous blu ray sets, they look great.

Is this set the one to get, or is there a better option that incorporates the OVAs without the series?

That looks like the best price for all that stuff you could get. I bought the original series and the new files as separate sets, and I think they cost about $40 each. These look like a repackaging of the sets I've got, which are really high-quality.

[feihong]

Regarding Akira, a kind of fun intro to it might be the Cartoonist Kayfabe video that just came out, covering a volume of Otomo's drawings he saved from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSxNaNq ... istKayfabe

It doesn't give you an entree into the story, but it does give you a fascinating appreciation of the labor of Akira. I probably appreciated the labor that created it as much as the film itself––I actually prefer the manga, with its farther-reaching story. But the film is an edifice in anime that I don't think you can really avoid. I'm not sure it's really great as a story, but as a piece of animation it is still remarkable, with a level of detail that really set the bar incredibly high––and it serves as a great contrast between the different approaches to animation in the U.S. and in Japan, the way in a lot of Japanese animation, detail has primacy over smoothness (it's the opposite in the U.S., with the Disney model being to simplify the art in order to get smoother motion). Not that the animation in Japan is inferior, but the balance of what's important to the aesthetic tips the other way. Akira is the best demo of that.

Michael - you of course have a great point that the options are so varied that one has to express a preference to start with. As you may remember, like you I’m a huge fan of Naruse and Ozu and in general love any movie (live action or animation) that explores more the everyday side of life and veers to the more realistic. At the same time as a young adult I loved to read the comic strips of Moebius (Jean Giraud), so science fiction is a genre I have always been fond of. However, superheroes, horror and mindless blow em’ up action movies are not my cup of tea most of the time.
From feihong’s list Totoro, Your Name, Summer Wars and Liz and the Bluebird sounded immediately interesting and from your Anime Vote Princess Kaguya and The Girl Who Lept Through Time intrigued me.

With slice of life and realism in mind, the last decade of anime is really a treasure-trove for you. I'd second Kerpan's endorsement of The Vampire Cosmonaut, and add a few other suggestions.

A recent film, Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, is a modest, very pretty and rather earthy drama about a sweet, generous, plus-sized lady who comes to raise her former roommate's baby in her houseboat when the mother hightails it in the night. The relationship between the daughter as she grows up and her awkward, big-hearted, sometimes quite embarrassing not-exactly-mother Nikuko is the crux of the film––in that way, a lot like Mizoguchi's Woman of Rumor.

There are a lot of good slice-of-life series in recent years. I have to be honest here––I have chronic trouble finishing these series, even though I enjoy them a lot. So most of these are recommendations based on watching about 3/4 of the episodes––and then something upends my regular schedule and I just fall off the weekly schedule of these series. So they're recommendations with the caveat that I have't seen them all the way through yet.

Aquatope on White Sand is a recent series about a teenager who has been bounced from a popular idol group, roaming out to the coast and finding work in a run-down old aquarium. There she makes best friends with the granddaughter of the aquarium's owner, and learns the important things about the art and science of aquarium administration. The friendship between the girls drives the series, and the aquarium makes for a magical, atmospheric, but wholly real setting for very realistic, grounded interactions and encounters. There is no major melodrama, but there is a series of real-life complications and problems and wants and needs to overcome for the different characters. I'm currently about 8 episodes from the end of a 24-episode total.

The Heike Storyis a series with a poetic, quasi magical-realist history of the fall of the Heike dynasty, told largely from the eyes of a shaman-like little girl adopted into the upper echelons of the clan early in its collapse. The scenes are moody, with very controlled color and lighting, and a feel of building dread, and the way it works on ordinary people. I've only seen about half of it so far, but it's very impressive.

Reiko Yoshida, writer on The Heike Story, also contributed to K-On!, a quintessential slice-of-life series, where a group of teenage girls form a band for their school's light music club. They slack off a lot, sit around having tea, and they learn a good deal about one another's disparate personalities. That's...basically it? The show is divine, with a soft, unusually squishy animation style, a lot of atmosphere, and the band's funny, delightful music. There are two seasons of the show, if I remember right––a short first season and a quite mercifully long 2nd one––followed by a movie which doesn't really serve the concept as well as the series--whose ending is a bit of a letdown compared to the heartfelt ending of the show--but it offers a lot of the character work you like out of K-On!, so who cares. This season's somewhat similar Bocchi the Rock! follows a much more socially anxious girl in her valiant attempts to summon the courage to join a rock band. Both series are good––I would say K-On! is great. Dunno why I didn't include it in my big list before.

The writer Mari Okada is well-known for her unusual slice-of-life dramas––often told from a realistic women's point of view––which is still a little bit niche in anime. I'm a few episodes into A Lull in the Sea, and it's an unusual combination of slice-of-life storytelling in a magical setting. Gosick was a show of hers with a young girl version of Sherlock Holmes, which had a kind of Hawksian underplaying which I really appreciated. Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms is a very curious slice-of-life adventure, following an ageless girl from a hidden valley. Orphaned and isolated in her community, the girl, Maquia, gets separated from her tribe, and finds a human infant, rescuing it from a dead mother's arms (there is an extraordinary sequence where she has to break the fingers of the dead mother to wrest the child from her grasp). Maquia decides that it is her destiny to be a mother to this child, and then the film gets very strange, hopping rom decade to decade very quickly. Individual plotlines eddy and wither away. I had trouble following the narrative until I realized what we were getting was the life of the child, and the evolving relationship Maquia has to him as his ageless, childlike mother. The film is a bit frustrating because of this narrative conceit, but it's also very moving and unique. I'm transitioning here to shows and movies I've seen all the way through, with K-On!, Maquia, and Gosick being recommends for me, K-On! being the strongest recommend, Gosick being a little weaker, based on your film interests.

Another water-based slice-of-life show I enjoyed was Amanchu!, about a pair of teenaged girls, one of whom convinces the other to practice deep-sea diving with her. There is no more to the story than that, really––but it's very strong on atmosphere, and the tactile elements of deep-sea diving. A very likable series, and ultimately pretty moving, as well.

One I've enjoyed, but which I haven't seen in a long time, is Dominion: Tank Police––a short OVA series based on Masamune Shirow's gag comic about a cop with a tiny tank, chasing the same villains around a crowded future city, destroying everything in their wake. I remember this being essentially a comic slice-of-life show set in a dystopian future, full of lumpen antics that melt into a more serious sense of climate grief and nostalgia by the end. That's a little outside of your remit, but it might prove interesting in the context of the type of movie that interests you.

[jazzo]

The original manga Monster was based on is well worth your time, as is Naoki Urasawa’s other phenomenal run of series, 20th Century Boys, Pluto and Asadora!

I'm surprised there hasn't been more success in animating Urusawa's endlessly popular and appealing material. Another volume not published in Engish (but translated by fans, if you can find it) is Happy!, his story of a harried high-school-age girl struggling to become a pro tennis star in order to pay off her elder brother's debt to loan sharks. The queasy, incredible stakes are either she becomes a serious tennis pro, or the mob sends her to work as a prostitute in Soapland. Incredibly, the girl is the daughter of a famous tennis coach, who taught her all he knew before he died, and so her chances are...well...it's not impossible. I feel like this would have made a remarkable sports anime, and I'm surprised it never made it as a series or an OVA.

Anyway, co-signing your endorsement of Urusawa, whose work is endlessly fascinating. For fans of behind-the-scenes work, Urusawa also runs a Youtube channel called Manben (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=manben), where he does documentaries of his own approach to comics, as well as profiling, interviewing and documenting other artists style as well.

Agreed, Feihong. I keep waiting for Viz to license Happy! or Billy Bat or Yawara, but right now they seem content to repackage their already-released English language licences in slightly more deluxe formats. I hope they’ll get there one day as they slowly work through his (and Kazuo Umezz and Taiyo Matsumoto’s) back catalogue(s).

I also enjoyed Urasawa’s Master Keaton, though the short-story nature of the series required me to take a good break between each volume. Otherwise, it felt a bit too samey.

I’d also love to see more of Mitsuru Adachi’s work released, or at least a proper release of the Cross Game anime to go along with that beautiful manga.

[Michael Kerpan]

feihong -- I actually count Reiko Yoshida and Mari Okada as script-side auteurs. I will seriously consider watching shows just because they are associated with them. This was kicked off by discovering True Tears (PA Works' first show), then Lull in the Sea. I did not become aware of Yoshida until I saw K-On!, but later realized she had (much earlier) scripted one of our family favorite shows -- Boys Over Flowers. Yoshida also was involved in the composition of another (unheralded) favorite -- Deaimon (perhaps the most thoroughly shomingeki-like anime of recent years).

vsski -- Aquatope and Heike Monogatari were also my co-favorites of their season.

The PA Works "young working people shows" (Aquatope is one) all range from very good to excellent. Others are Hanasaku iroha, Shirobako and Sakura Quest. PA Works also put out one of the best "young witch" shows ever -- Irodoku. Sadly this got largely ignored in the USA because it was available only from Amazon Prime. It is centered around a young woman from 2060s Nagasaki who developed a loathing for magic and also lost her ability to see in color because her mother was unsuccessful at magic and disappeared (leaving her to be raised by her grandmother, who was an extremely skilled witch). Worried about her grand-daughter, the grandmother sends her back in time, to her own high school years. A very powerful and moving series (MUCH better than KIki's Delivery Service -- even though I like that movie a lot).

[jojo]

The only thing I would add onto feihong's great list of recommendations is to not be worried if Akira is overwhelming and feels rather difficult to follow on a first viewing - it was the big introduction to anime for many Western fans in the 1990s pre-Studio Ghibli becoming better available (not least through its Criterion Laserdisc release in the US) but it is a feature length condensing of a six volume manga into something drastically more streamlined for a feature film, which means that there are a lot of plot strands that it can only really allude to elliptically. It is kind of the equivalent of the Lynch Dune film in that sense, or the Ralph Bakshi animated version of Lord of the Rings from the 1970s. Or anything that is trying to cram enough material for a trilogy into just one film. But in some ways that was what made the film so fascinating to me as my introduction to anime, because of how densely packed it was with tangents that could easily have made for entire films in themselves and made the world feel more vibrant and alive because of that, whilst the friendship-turned-rivalry relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo is a more than strong enough and straightforward central story thread to power through and act as a backbone for all of the other material spinning off from it.

It's funny that many people still fear that Akira is too overwhelming for new audiences considering how convoluted the scripts are nowadays for your typical blockbuster franchise. Maybe it's my "dumb brain" simplifying things to something I can more easily digest, but the film version of Akira always struck me as being an old fashioned body-horror monster movie at heart, with the 'relatable' element of teenaged male testosterone gone awry being the foundation of the central conflict as you noted. The manga is more than that, obviously, but I thought they managed to distill the core elements of the manga quite well, without being a literal adaptation of it like what would be the case if it were adapted into a film today.

Michael Kerpan: it is so frustrating that I cannot yet recommend something like Kimagure Orange Road to you, simply because of not knowing how anyone could be able to access it!

KOR is definitely a classic of its genre, with the sobering first movie, Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to that Day being the one thing that people remember out of that franchise today. I prefer Maison Ikkoku as a more unified body of work, though, as KOR tends to fall into a sitcom routine of little to minute progress up until the final few episodes and ultimately the movie, whereas in Maison Ikkoku there is a steady progression as Godai tries to carve himself out a proper career and show that he can support himself to Otonashi. Money is as important a factor in Maison Ikkoku as the romantic component is.

As far as 'Slice of Life' series go, I've been in and out of the fandom for decades now, I've been able to follow certain trends and patterns in the industry and that sometimes colors my mindset when going into a series. K-On! for instance is a great series and deserving of its praise, but it also fits into and reinforces the popularity of the "cute girls doing cute things' genre of slice-of-life, which I've always been fairly ambivalent about. Bocchi the Rock is similar in a sense. While at heart it is a comedy about a girl with social anxiety trying to find her way with her music, it likely wouldn't be as popular as it is now if it didn't slot into the 'cute girls doing cute' genre. If Welcome to the NHK went in that direction, it probably would have been a bigger hit than it ultimately was. Quite frankly, there may probably more of these kind of series released every season now than there are new shounen action series, so we're certainly not lacking in any way lately if you are into the 'Slice of Life' genre.

[Michael Kerpan]

Alas, I have to say I find the character designs and art style in almost all really old anime series generally pretty unappealing. The content may be good, but I find little visual appeal. That's why Lain was one of the few shows that captured my attention back in 2000.

[colinr0380]

I have to admit that I have avoided almost all the Marvel and superhero movies in general to this point (the first two X-Men films, the 2005 and 2015 Fantastic Four films and Ant-Man being the exceptions so far), so my reference points for how convoluted things get for mainstream audiences may need to be recalibrated! And as for visual style I'm kind of the opposite of Michael Kerpan, where anything after the 2000s has to be really good to overcome my preferences for 80s and 90s designs!

[therewillbeblus]

I think the way narrative information is introduced in Akira (and anime in general actually, Evangelion and Bubblegum Crisis immediately come to mind) is very different than American blockbusters like Marvel et al. Whether or not these franchise scripts are convoluted or not hardly matters, since information is systematically revealed with ample space to adjust to the information we have, and typically the world of the film is one of greater familiarity or at least support in acclimating to its expectations in order to follow along, compared to anime. Maybe I've just seen the greatest hits, but in my experience anime tends to follow a form that trusts the audience on an adult level, revealing information sometimes all at once or withholding without winking at us that it's doing this, giving us what we need in the given moment according to where the character or story is at. Intelligent scripts like The Apartment or Chinatown come to mind, though these aren't really great examples since they don't ever leave us confounded whilst overstimulating us with other aspects of the medium. Sometimes I find that I need to rewind anime multiple times, especially near the start of the film or series. I consider myself a pretty talented multitasker, able to hold my attention on several elements of an art piece at once, but there's a unique difficulty for me when ingesting the visual flourishes (significantly ones that don't spoonfeed us their internal logic in advance) and verbal explanations often occurring simultaneously in anime. It's a lot to take in, and so sometimes moving at a rapid pace throws me off a bit- in a way I never experience in a blockbuster, particularly one that's live action. This is hardly a complaint, but I think Akira is a good example where the explosive and unpredictable visual bombast is introducing us into the internal logic of a world half-familiar and half... very much not; while we're being swiftly introduced to key characters, plot points, etc. I remember feeling overwhelmed by it when I first watched it at age ten, and I revisited the 4K disc a few months ago and felt very similarly, despite spending the last five years or so watching a fair amount of anime (I've also seen every Marvel film through its initial cycle of Endgame or Infinity War or whatever the cap was that released me from that self-imposed burden, and don't find them hard to follow in the same way at all- but, again, regardless of how complicated they try to be, I never feel like I'm being pushed off the deep end with narrative thrust while also provoked visually as I try to catch up; I don't think they'd be very popular here without that necessary hand-holding for popcorn entertainment)

[jojo]

I'd always been attracted to the hyper-detailed Kawajiri and Mikimoto-esque designs of the 80s-90s, even though nearly every professional animator will tell you that designing characters like that for animation flies in the face of every rulebook of proper animation character design. I've never been a big fan of hyper-streamlined character designs, mainly because it seems more impressive to me when I see a comic book style piece of art moving around--with all its shading, noodling and crosshatching--than a simplified character design. Of course, streamlining is done for ease of animation, so obviously I understand why "simpler is better" but the idea of watching a moving "comic book" always appealed to me more than maintaining a consistent frame rate or 'smoother' animation.

Still, some anime today give me a similar visual thrill as many studios haven't completely abandoned the "way too detailed to animate but let's do it anyway" practice of the 80s. Takeshi Koike's work carries this tradition, and Masaaki Yuasa doesn't completely shy away from it either.

colin--I was also thinking about the Harry Potter movies when I think of popular franchise films. If you watch the Harry Potter films today with a fresh set eyes, it would strike you how impenetrable they are to anyone who is unfamiliar with the books or the world. What are Horcruxes, Slytherins or Gryffindors anyway? You're thrown a steady stream of strange terms with little explanation about what they do and why for most of these movies. Unless you are familiar with the franchise, I imagine anyone new to the franchise who are watching the movies for the first time would need a guidebook. Many of the superhero movies have issues like these and more--they are interconnected and refer to minute events in other movies...if you watch an Avengers film you're also expect to be familiar with the solo films pf Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and vice versa as well.

At least with Akira you're still mostly dealing with classic science fiction themes and terms that have existed in pop culture for many decades prior to the film and it's mainly self contained.

[Mr Sausage]

Coincidentally I rewatched Akira last night for the first time since I was a late teen. It’s a lot less incoherent than it’s made out to be. The basic through-line is easy enough to follow, and the characters and their motivations are easily grasped (with maybe a couple exceptions). It’s not as tho’ it were a Hong Kong movie, where crucial connective tissue is elided. Despite the abundance of plot, everything is logically connected and developed. Its problem is one of context. There are larger socio-political and metaphysical concepts that aren’t given enough explanation. So a new viewer can be a bit unsure at how the military, council, and revolutionaries actually fit together (the film isn’t unclear on the details, it just doesn’t slow down long enough for them to sink in). The only part that is legitimately obscure is the ending, which I only understand because people familiar with the movie and manga explained it to me. But I’m not sure it matters. The bewildering visual and conceptual overload is part of the charm.

I still adore the movie. I’ve seen so many more anime since I last saw Akira, and found none of its power and creativity diminished. It’s one of the most impressively stylish movies I’ve ever seen. An outrageous, bombastic, hurtling experience. Might be my favourite anime, even tho’ I’ve seen ones that are technically better.

[beamish14]

You can’t go wrong with any of Otomo’s animes (or manga). Robot Carnival, Neo-Tokyo, and Memories are all amazingly consistent for omnibus films, and the Otomo-directed segments in each are among the highlights, particularly “Cannon Fodder” from Memories.

Steamboy is amazingly underrated. A hugely fun Victorian sci-fi romp that, like Akia, set a record for the most expensive anime feature made up to that point. Skip the edited dubbed version and behold it. Absolutely killer final scene and line.

[therewillbeblus]

Its problem is one of context. There are larger socio-political and metaphysical concepts that aren’t given enough explanation. So a new viewer can be a bit unsure at how the military, council, and revolutionaries actually fit together (the film isn’t unclear on the details, it just doesn’t slow down long enough for them to sink in). The only part that is legitimately obscure is the ending, which I only understand because people familiar with the movie and manga explained it to me. But I’m not sure it matters. The bewildering visual and conceptual overload is part of the charm.

This is a more specific description of my experience. I don't find this or other anime difficult to follow in the sense that they're too complex to take in, but it's the pace combined with the occasionally-alienating internal logic or conceptual explanations that can cause me to stall a bit. But I agree- what overwhelmed me as a kid in a negative sense is precisely what enticed me in revisiting it recently in adulthood.

As an aside, I find the ideas around developmentally-appropriate content interesting, because it's (obviously) not one-size-fits-all. Oddly I was able to endure cinematic graphic violence and sexual content without any sensitization in elementary school, but fell into a week-long depression after seeing Almost Famous in sixth grade, internalizing the prophecy that I would never have the romantic opportunities my shy-kid surrogate did in that film, despite no graphic sex or romance occurring on screen to trigger it. Meanwhile my partner can't handle anything that even hints at violence still, but grew up around such strong confidence in her social context regarding sexual liberation that I have no doubt she would've been able to see past the signifiers of my laced-insecurities in Almost Famous and appreciated it in a more mature way than I could at the time. That's all to say, Akira overwhelmed me with confusing body-horror elements I wasn't ready for and was disturbed by, while I was able to endure live action body horror that wasn't granted the elastic opportunities from animation to stretch the boundaries of imagination in ways practical effects rooted in some sense of reality could not. I also think the cyberpunk backdrop didn't fit with kinds of characters I found alluring or relatable at age ten, and that lack of connection disturbed me too- though at the same time of life, I was able to connect with William Hurt's self-destructiveness in The Big Chill, and Malcolm McDowell's juvenile provocations in A Clockwork Orange (not that I ever romanticized that character) as more comprehensible depictions of a familiar world. Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is that as one matures, their ability to ingest diverse content should improve, but it always interests me to hear what some people could/n't handle at younger ages and how that fits and doesn't fit with expected norms, MPAA, etc.

[Mr Sausage]

You saw Akira waaaay earlier than I did. I was 17 I think, whenever the Pioneer DVD came out. Got it for Christmas. Made my friends watch it, too, although their Disney-honed sensibilities led to some closed-mindedness that irked me.

For whatever reason, after Akira, the animes I most wanted to see as a teen were Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh, and Princess Mononoke. I never got around to seeing them until I was well into my 30s, but of the three, the first was a disappointment, the second a bit po-faced and pretentious but still good, and the latter a masterwork. But I’d still take Akira over any of them.

[therewillbeblus]

Many years later, it was Monster that jumpstarted my reintegration into the medium. Monster is very front-heavy, with the first third being near-perfect, but the way the story unfolds with the doctor evolving into a sort-of Western/Wrong-Man hybrid going town to town and finding himself in some pretty memorable wild situations is great fun. Plus the villain's incarnation and overall effect is deeply unsettling and makes for some interesting moral engagement. Unfortunately I don't think the series is available on physical media in full, but you can find it online.

Speaking of Monster, it appears that it will be coming to U.S. Netflix (not sure about other countries) on January 1st. I believe it was on the platform before, though I don't know when.

FYI, only 30 episodes are available, and the show has 74. No word from Netflix that I can find on whether they're going to release more episodes in batches (which doesn't make much sense) or if this is some rights issue (I always thought the DVDs stopped around 30 eps in because it wasn't a high seller, but maybe there were other forces at work?) but it's not complete. Having said that, I think the strongest part of the series is contained within the arc now available- even if there will be no catharsis to the overarching storyline for those tuning in

[feihong]

I think the way narrative information is introduced in Akira (and anime in general actually, Evangelion and Bubblegum Crisis immediately come to mind) is very different than American blockbusters like Marvel et al. Whether or not these franchise scripts are convoluted or not hardly matters, since information is systematically revealed with ample space to adjust to the information we have, and typically the world of the film is one of greater familiarity or at least support in acclimating to its expectations in order to follow along, compared to anime. Maybe I've just seen the greatest hits, but in my experience anime tends to follow a form that trusts the audience on an adult level, revealing information sometimes all at once or withholding without winking at us that it's doing this, giving us what we need in the given moment according to where the character or story is at. Intelligent scripts like The Apartment or Chinatown come to mind, though these aren't really great examples since they don't ever leave us confounded whilst overstimulating us with other aspects of the medium. Sometimes I find that I need to rewind anime multiple times, especially near the start of the film or series. I consider myself a pretty talented multitasker, able to hold my attention on several elements of an art piece at once, but there's a unique difficulty for me when ingesting the visual flourishes (significantly ones that don't spoonfeed us their internal logic in advance) and verbal explanations often occurring simultaneously in anime. It's a lot to take in, and so sometimes moving at a rapid pace throws me off a bit- in a way I never experience in a blockbuster, particularly one that's live action. This is hardly a complaint, but I think Akira is a good example where the explosive and unpredictable visual bombast is introducing us into the internal logic of a world half-familiar and half... very much not; while we're being swiftly introduced to key characters, plot points, etc. I remember feeling overwhelmed by it when I first watched it at age ten, and I revisited the 4K disc a few months ago and felt very similarly, despite spending the last five years or so watching a fair amount of anime (I've also seen every Marvel film through its initial cycle of Endgame or Infinity War or whatever the cap was that released me from that self-imposed burden, and don't find them hard to follow in the same way at all- but, again, regardless of how complicated they try to be, I never feel like I'm being pushed off the deep end with narrative thrust while also provoked visually as I try to catch up; I don't think they'd be very popular here without that necessary hand-holding for popcorn entertainment)

Just following up on this post after, oh, I don't know, weeks, at least...but I did start thinking about it more just recently. What you are pointing out, therewillbeblus, is I think a larger part of East Asian film writing in general; Hollywood tends to follow the so-called "rule of threes," repeating an important point at least three different ways in order for it to sink in with the audience––and East Asian films in general don't tend to do that at all. There are exceptions––the deliberate repetition of a film like Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, perhaps––but that film uses repetition in more than groups of threes, and a lot of the point of the movie is to focus on characters who keep reliving the same experience again and again, repeatedly knocking at a metaphorical door and not being able to get in––so the repetition is more pronounced. A lot of these films––virtually all the Japanese ones, at least––follow a 4-act structure taken from kabuki theatre, rather than the 3-act Hollywood prescribes––and that 4-act structure also tends to downplay progression towards a dramatic climax founded at the outset of the picture––the old Hollywood style really has very little place in the film language of East Asia. In addition, I think the frequently improvised narratives of a lot of Hong Kong movies keep them from using repetition much, either. It's almost like repeating things to make sure the audience gets them just isn't important to East Asian audiences. It makes me wonder if audiences in that part of the world are simply better trained by their cinema to look for visual detail, and to start putting together what's important to the story themselves.

[Michael Kerpan]

feihong -- I think one of my favorite aspect of Asian cinema (and anime) is this requirement that one catch and remember things that will NOT be repeated -- and save up that memory for later (sometimes much later) when it finally becomes important. I hate Hollywood's assumption that one needs to have things battered into one's head because audiences can't be expected to remember anything.

[feihong]

feihong -- I think one of my favorite aspect of Asian cinema (and anime) is this requirement that one catch and remember things that will NOT be repeated -- and save up that memory for later (sometimes much later) when it finally becomes important. I hate Hollywood's assumption that one needs to have things battered into one's head because audiences can't be expected to remember anything.

Thinking more on this weeks later, too...I wonder if, in the process of being hit over the head with the simplistic details of Hollywood blockbusters, we're being subtly conditioned to be less observant of what going on in our films? And I wonder if, being given a diet of mostly asian films, one is conditioned to do the work of putting the pieces together one's self? Not that there aren't plenty of Asian films as dumb as those in Hollywood. But the degree to which one world of film expects you to catch up and the degree to which the other expects that you won't get it anyway is pretty interesting.

[Michael Kerpan]

About THIS season, still following 30 (thirty) shows -- ten more than I'd prefer. A few are marginal, but the rest are enjoyable enough. A number of very good shows, but not (perhaps) many great ones. A very good season for romances (comic and dramatic) and fairly classic science fiction and fantasy -- but two of the loveliest are sports-related: Tsurune 2 (about archery -- a big step up in impact from its good first season, pre-arson murders) and Mou Ippon (about girl's judo). At some point I may give a fuller report on the better shows of the season (if anyone is interested).

[therewillbeblus]

Many years later, it was Monster that jumpstarted my reintegration into the medium. Monster is very front-heavy, with the first third being near-perfect, but the way the story unfolds with the doctor evolving into a sort-of Western/Wrong-Man hybrid going town to town and finding himself in some pretty memorable wild situations is great fun. Plus the villain's incarnation and overall effect is deeply unsettling and makes for some interesting moral engagement. Unfortunately I don't think the series is available on physical media in full, but you can find it online.

Speaking of Monster, it appears that it will be coming to U.S. Netflix (not sure about other countries) on January 1st. I believe it was on the platform before, though I don't know when.

FYI, only 30 episodes are available, and the show has 74. No word from Netflix that I can find on whether they're going to release more episodes in batches...

Netflix now has all 74 episodes up, which is huge as I think it's the first time it's been legally available in the U.S. (only the first batch of eps was released on DVD before being discontinued years ago). Anyone that hasn't gotten to this yet should prioritize it - one of my favorites (*cue: another anime project?*)

[knives]

It is one of the best. The manga is excellent as well.