Anime and Manga - New Season

[Sarex]

Uf, what a cliffhanger for Berserk...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

23 hours ago, Sarex said:

Uf, what a cliffhanger for Berserk...

At least it'll only be 2 weeks instead of 2 years.

[Gorth]

Not really seeing anything obviously grabbing my attention these days (and to fair, following in the footsteps of Frieren and Dandadan is no easy task), I decided to turn back the clock a bit and pick up on something I missed in the past (because of time constraints). Watched first season of Nier: Automata and about to start on second season. I liked the first season, but then I also liked the game(s). Both Replicant and Automata

[Bartimaeus]

Parents: What's your New Years' resolutions?

Honesty is only the best policy if it doesn't end up with your parents beating you.

[Bartimaeus]

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) & Vampire Wars (1990). Right, here's my vampire anime tier list so far:

A (I love this!). Vampire Princess Miyu
B. Vampire Hunter D
C (I like this!). N/A
D. Vampire in the Garden, Darkness of the Sea and Shadow of the Moon
E (This is fine). Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (1993), Mermaid Forest
F. Blood: The Last Vampire, The Laughing Target, Mermaid's Scar
G (Meh). JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (2000)
H. N/A
I (I dislike this). Castlevania, Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge
J. N/A
K (I hate this). Vampire Wars
...
Z (This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my whole life). Hellsing Ultimate

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

Edited February 18 by Bartimaeus

[Bartimaeus]

Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011)...directed by Makoto Shinkai.

Who's his poster guy? Needs a new one, he or she just keeps making the same poster for all of these movies, and they're all kind of bad.

Even this alternative variant still looks mostly the same, but I guess it's a little less awful.

Doesn't start out with wimpy piano music. Not raining. No whiny monologue. Young girl who seems to be an independent explorer type. Okay, this one might actually be watchable. Don't like the voice direction of either the Japanese or the English audio, but what are you gonna do? I eventually settled on the English because the Japanese was more annoying: the lady voicing the main character in English at least sometimes sounds like a human being, as opposed to an always out of breath chipmunk.

. . .

Good lord, it's just a Laputa rip-off. It's not even a good one, and I'm not the biggest fan of Laputa in the first place. And it was a sappy piano drama after all, it just wasn't completely front-loaded like the rest of this guy's movies. Honestly, that kind of makes it worse, because it just means I was duped into watching the whole thing instead of only the first five minutes I usually do. I somehow hate this guy even more now.

[majestic]

6 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Who's his poster guy? Needs a new one, he or she just keeps making the same poster for all of these movies, and they're all kind of bad.

To be fair to poster guy, the movies all look the same as well, and from what I've gathered, they're also all a bit samey. Like I mentioned before I watched Weathering With You a while back, and it left me not wanting to watch a whole lot more of his films.  

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

@Sarex So what'd you think about 380?

[Sarex]

21 minutes ago, PK htiw klaw eriF said:

@Sarex So what'd you think about 380?

Idk, while the fast pace is nice for a change, to me this is now going at break neck speed and seems like it's skipping on a lot of the finer story points. On one hand it feels like we are missing out on a lot, but on the other I can see where the plot is going without having to go back 10 chapters. If I could describe it best it just seems like panels are missing in between plot points.

As far as the story, major hype for me. I think Guts is going to be emo for a bit yet, at least until Schierke comes back with info regarding Casca to rouse him. The less likely option is that the prince is somehow going to rouse him.

Edited Friday at 08:33 PM by Sarex

[Bartimaeus]

I've been watching Batman: The Animated Series. The quality in writing is all over the place - sometimes the show is really quite good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is pretty bad...and there are tons of inconsistencies that contradict each other between episodes. Not too surprising, given the nature of comic book writing and episodes being based off of individual stories by different authors, I suppose. But the reason why I post about it in here instead of the TV thread is because I'm through about 30 episodes so far, and I said to myself during one of the last episodes I was watching that I simply do not believe that all these episodes could have been animated by the same team: similar to the writing, sometimes the animation is great, sometimes it is pretty good, sometimes it is just fine, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it is really bad. I started looking up all the individual episodes that I've seen so far and to my total lack of surprise, there have been seven different animation teams that have made episodes so far of what I've watched (and there are more to come). They are...

Spectrum Animation Company [Japanese]
Sunrise [Japanese]
Tokyo Movie Shinsha Company [Japanese]
Studio Junio [Japanese]
Akom Production Company [South Korean]
Dong Yang Animation Company [South Korean]
NOA Animation [Canadian]

Yes, that Sunrise, and yes, there's not a single American animator between the whole lot of them. This certainly helps explain a number of things: all the episodes I thought that looked by far the worst were by Akom, and they were actually fired halfway through the first season. Spectrum and Sunrise were the best, but apparently Spectrum wasn't getting paid enough, because they literally went bankrupt and folded before the end of season 1 as well. I suppose it's a lot easier to get an episode out every week if you just hire half a dozen different animation companies and stagger their output...but it sure leads to some inconsistent quality.

[majestic]

Sunrise? Oh my. Does it look nearly as good as Love Live!?

 

Is it worth watching? On average, I mean. I watched a bit of the newer DC animated universe stuff and thought it was fine (Gotham by Gaslight was a novel concept, at least), I guess I could watch some more Batmany stuff.

[Bartimaeus]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Sunrise? Oh my. Does it look nearly as good as Love Live!?

 

Is it worth watching? On average, I mean. I watched a bit of the newer DC animated universe stuff and thought it was fine (Gotham by Gaslight was a novel concept, at least), I guess I could watch some more Batmany stuff.

I haven't made up my mind about it. I mean, I'm enjoying or at least tolerating it enough to keep going through it, but would I actually recommend it to anyone else? I am at conflict with that, probably because it is, as previously mentioned, so all over the place in quality that it feels difficult to just be like "yep, go ahead and watch it" to anybody (and I am generally quite harsh on any media that can't be consistently at least okay, but I am being uncharacteristically forgiving here with Batman, for whatever reason - possibly because despite all its issues, and really the general issues of DC stuff at large, I still tend to like the characters and world). If you aren't at all into the central conceit and formula of Batman as a TV show, then no, it's probably not quite good enough to warrant starting, especially if you know that the first season is an incredibly daunting sixty half-hour episodes long (strangely, the rest of the show, i.e. the next five seasons combined, is only 49 episodes total). You can also typically tell pretty quickly if an episode was written by one of the good writers or one of the bad writers, usually within a few minutes, and I won't lie, I can kind of mentally check out when I detect that it's going to be one of the worse episodes, which softens the blow a little. I think the more character-introspective episodes tend to be the biggest hits and misses - when they're good, they're good, but when they're bad, oh boy are they bad. As I've mentioned some number of times before, I can handle a whole lot of nothing (e.g. Batman doing his thing and beating up the bad guys in a largely unmoving but inoffensive episodic plot) a lot better than I can handle a show or movie trying to get all serious on me and thinking that it's being big and important and emotional while actually instead falling on its face painfully.

I will say that I am enjoying it more than The Big O, which I watched like ten episodes of some years back and which is clearly a ripoff of Batman: The Animated Series. Actually, I just noticed that The Big O was literally made by Sunrise, and Google results suggest that yes, they intended it to be their own mech-Batman show after their experiences with animating Batman: TAS. The only issue is that the addition of the mech elements were dumb as all get out and seemed to be as pointlessly formulaic as Sailor Moon monsters of the week (it seemed like each episode would always end in a completely shoehorned in giant mech fight no matter how irrelevant it actually was to the plot of the episode), and the main character is just a whiny manbaby instead of...well, you know, Batman. Batman might be badly and/or inconsistently written at times, but he is not a whiny manbaby at least.

I also just noticed that the episode that I want to watch most, the episode that is probably primarily responsible for me starting to watch this at all after I went through the trouble of reading the original comic for it, is literally the very final episode of the whole series. Season 6, episode 11: Mad Love. So...that's great.

Edited Monday at 06:23 PM by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

@PK htiw klaw eriF https://sabukaru.online/articles/sabukaru-meets-the-berserk-team

[uuuhhii]

didn't watch much new seasonal anime other than that okinawa commercial

it is pretty fun