Anime recommendations

[buzzmong]

Full Metal Panic! was quite good. Bit of a silly concept, but STOMPY ROBOTS!! Avoid the in-between series 1 and 2 offshoot of Full Metal Panic? FUMOFFU though, it's lacking in the stompy robots bit.
Hellsing is good, I really enjoyed the original 2001 13 ep series, didn't get around to the rebooted ova's.
Excel Saga is amusing. Quite random, but amusing and fairly light viewing. In the same vein, I've heard good things about FLCL (Fooly Cooly).
Gunsmith Cats is another 3 party OVA I've enjoyed.

I might get shot for this, but I quite highly rate Gundam Wing. All the Gundam stuff is fairly self contained, and I've only seen snippets of the many series that have been made, but Wing did seem well paced and pretty complete.

A good friend of mine absolutely bums One Piece, has the opinion it's amongst the best anime ever made.

Spriggan is definitely a good one to watch.
Bubblegum Crisis OVA's are enjoyable, bit like GITS in having a future Cyberpunk vein.

I appear to have deleted all the anime I had lurking on this machine, so I'm at a loss for other stuff I've watched that's not on my DVD shelf.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, takes the themes from Ghost in the Shell, but goes down a bit of a different path. Also, Tachikomas.

[Dog Pants]

I decided to watch Appleseed Alpha last night. I tend to go for the imagery in anime stuff over the story, and this didn't disappoint - cool robots in firefights, no fucking idea what was going on. Well, that's not strictly true, I had a vague idea what was going on - I liked Two-Horns and his cronies - but I didn't really care. Also, boob windows. Just seems weird and gratuitous, not practical at all for a combat situation, kind of breaks the suspense of disbelief for me. I guess that's just something that comes with anime. Anyway, I liked the robots.

[Grimmie]

I've only seen the first Appleseed, and yeah. It's certainly robots with guns. If you're wanting robots with guns, it does not disappoint.

[FatherJack]

Appleseed Alpha is a reboot of the 2004 film and it sequel, Ex Machina, which were alright, updating rather than redoing the character design - the reboot sounds as if they threw the design out of the window. They are all CGI, which I'm not always a huge fan of - particularly the "realistic" style used in Alpha, which looks like game footage.

The original OVA of the manga is from 1988 and considered a classic, it's intelligent and provoking. I have the VHS and quite rarely also bought the DVD later in that era, so much did I like it. She wears a scaled-down version of the big guy's body armour in that, not an Anna Miller's version of body armour.

[Dog Pants]

I quite like the CGI, for everything but humans at least. They're still a bit uncanny valley. The equipment is a great design. If this version is intelligent and provoking then it went over my head, but then I wasn't really paying attention to the plot. Important kid... bad guy robots... good guys get all misty eyed for no apparent reason... impossible buggy jump hundreds of feet into the air. Boob window. As I say, I did like the gang leader. He was a great character. I liked the dynamic between the main characters too. The two main bad guys immediately made me think of Team Rocket.

Like I say, I might have missed loads of subtlety (I was washing up while watching it), so it's not a disagreement, I just didn't pick any of that up.

[FatherJack]

Like I say, I might have missed loads of subtlety (I was washing up while watching it), so it's not a disagreement, I just didn't pick any of that up.

I haven't seen it, any comments about quality apply only to the 1988 original, because it kinda sounds like they ruined it.

[Dog Pants]

Yeah, I don't know how faithful it is. Not very, by the sounds of it. Anyway, it inspired me to watch Ghost in the Shell next.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Why the fuck is it all the anime my child watches on netflix has some massive faggot beta male as the main protagonist? I think I'm getting aids from how very faaabulous these things are.

[Dog Pants]

Maybe you're his massive faggot alpha male.

[FatherJack]

Been watching a few more series, as evidenced by my embarassing viewing history, should you wish to follow it: https://trakt.tv/users/fatherjack/

I think the theme this time is "well-drawn", as it was among the things I searched for a while back, or possibly "tits". One of the others was "most perverted" which might find its way to another list.

Urabe, drooling
Mysterious Girlfriend X
An odd, unsociable girl transfers to school and spends the lunch break asleep at her desk, drooling. The boy next to her notices and naturally has a little taste of her dribble. Becomes addicted to it. She keeps a pair of scissors in her pants. At times open, at others inscrutable, occasionally cute and sometimes a bit possessive. She seems mysterious, even alien but that's more about the guy's view of her and we discover she's more similar to him than he realises. It's well animated and a nice style, although the bits where they swap saliva, rather than being sensual as I think they intended look kind of gross, like she's flobbed up a massive greeny for him to munch on. Chewy.

Tenma pretending to be Harima, to Harima, showing him how to ask out his crush, not realising his crush is her.
School Rumble
Anime version of the manga I mentioned in the Recommended Reading thread, this is brought wonderfully to life and retains all the genuine laughs. Love triangles and polygons in school with the characters all jumping to the most insane possible conclusions while all remaining completely oblivious to who actually likes them. There are 22 volumes of the manga and the first series of the anime's 26 episodes covers only about 3 or 4 of those, the second about the same. While the first season is very well drawn, the second season has noticeably more corners cut and while the humour remained it's maybe best that a third full season never happened.


The Sacred Blacksmith
Somewhat clumsy and ineffectual knight girl is attacked by demon spawn remnants of a terrible war and rescued by a taciturn blacksmith and his bubbly elfin helper. The grisly human-sacrifice backdrop is quite the contrast as we watch the development of the bright main characters. High quality animation.


Scrapped Princess
We follow the titular princess, so-called because she was prophesised to be the destroyer of the world and so was supposed to be killed (scrapped) as an infant. Obviously she survived this and now travels with her protecting, foster-siblings, though her continued existence quickly becomes not only a matter of record but a source of danger for anyone even remotely near her, so it's kind of hard to settle down or make friends. Excellently animated, it first manifests as a fantasy setting, but gets all post-apocalyptic and sci-fi as the story unfolds.


Tokyo Ghoul
Man, I love ghouls, there's so little stuff about them. These are the must-eat-flesh-to-survive sort and the story centres around a shiny new ghoul who struggles to adapt to the new diet. They each have a superpowered organ that can adapt into a weapon. It is remarkably-animated with some great character design mirroring the theme - a riot of detail under a normal-seeming facade.


Blood Lad
A cute girl wanders into the demon world and meets a lazy vampire obessed with the human world, and now also this girl. As a vampire, he's an extremely powerful territory boss but while he's briefly called away by a challenger the girl unfortunately gets killed and turned into a ghost. He pledges to bring her back to life. To eat. A lively cast of characters and again, nice animation.