vsski wrote: Mon Dec 26, 2022 7:59 am
This may sound strange, but I have never seen a single Japanese Anime movie ever, not in a theater not in any home video format, not even one of the famous Studio Ghibli ones (although I have read about them over the years of course, so am familiar with many titles).
And it’s not because I don’t care for animation, I have seen almost all the Western animation movies since the beginning of time.
So for 2023 my resolution is to fill that blind spot in my knowledge of film history. But this poses a challenge for me of course, most notably where to start.
So I thought I ask folks on this forum who are very knowledgeable:
1. Which handful of movies (or series) would you recommend for a novice to start with?
2. Which editions out and available are considered the best to pick up? I should qualify this by saying that I typically don’t like dubbed versions of any movie period, so it needs to have the original Japanese version with proper English subtitles. I also like collectors editions that provide lots of contextualizing extras, although glossy cards, posters, etc. are not needed, but I like to read books or booklets that come with releases. I also can pick US or UK releases, as I’m completely region free.
3. Given that the first 4K releases making their way into the market, should I wait for them to be released (I know Belle was released as 4K outside of Japan, but I believe Ghibli so far only in Japan).
Any recommendations are greatly appreciated - thank you in advance!
Maybe someone else is more knowledgeable on this front, but I don't think it's too important to wait for 4k editions of these films. This is coming from a guy who was renting bootleg VHS tapes of
Patlabor and
Dominion: Tank Police in the 80s, subtitled by fans in 3rd-or-4th-generation transfers, so, your mileage may vary. But the Blu rays I've seen of a lot of anime are beautiful enough to convey the visual depth and sophistication and excitement in the art.
The top picks I would suggest are these:
1) My Neighbor Totoro: one of the best films of any genre about childhood (positing the gulf between childhood and adulthood as a question of what you see, and what you make of what you see), and kind of a primer in just how sophisticated and subtle anime storytelling can be. This is a really gorgeous movie, with what I think of as a sort of perfect story structure, and a kind of gentle celebration of the imagination––not just the lively imaginations of the the main characters, but the imaginations of the animators that are bringing life to every quirky detail of these scenes. Other anime will offer you visions from the imagination of their creators, fantasy and science fiction worlds full of invented creatures and planets and alternate, fantasy rules for how everything works; My Neighbor Totoro only needs our everyday reality from which to conjure amazement––which to me is sort of the high point of fiction.
What's it about? Two little girls and their father move to an old country house to be close to the childrens' mother, who is convalescing at a nearby hospital. Excited by local stories of spirits haunting their house, they discover a spirit of the forest, a Totoro (kind of a massive bear/raccoon/cat cryptid), who takes them on surprising adventures in the forest. But is the Totoro they're seeing real, or a figment of their imaginations? That's it. It's a very compact story––no need to watch a whole series to get into it.
2) Akira: Flipside of Totoro, Akira is like an extended demo reel of what you can do in anime with world-building. Bikers trawl an overbuilt, cyberpunk slum that is Neo-Tokyo. A military tests old-looking, big-headed kids for psychic abilities, and these two plotlines collide in a potentially world-ending event. The visuals are pretty next-level stunning even today, with a layering of detail beyond pretty much anything in the era of hand-drawn animation. This is the kind of movie that would probably be too expensive to make in live-action––every setting seems rigged to be demolished, any given wall might collapse into a pile of oversized Legos. The story is pure cyberpunk sci-fi. The movie is exhausting, but in a pretty good way.
3) Your Name: A recent film, with an animation approach of similar detail to Akira, but for a modern age. Here every puddle seems to have a quivering, lively reflection, sun glints, running off of every metal surface on a passing train, and a comet breaking into two pieces is rendered with a visual innovation beyond what anyone might expect. This is one of those films that seems to change genre every 25 minutes or so––which I usually equate with the kind of sure and purposeful filmmaking you see going on in this movie. A girl living out in the countryside and a boy living in urban Tokyo start randomly switching bodies every so often, living in one another's skin. Their radically different personalities lead to them messing up one another's lives while living as the other person, and eventually this leads to a kind of contentious affection between them. The boy loses contact with the girl, and starts trying to find her by recalling the details of his stay in her body. But he remembers less and less. When he finally finds her hometown, he makes the kind of shocking discovery I couldn't in good conscience spoil for you here, so I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say, the story is twisty and clever, funny and heartfelt, and the style of the film is winningly impressive. Very worth it.
4) Summer Wars: I don't know how much Summer Wars holds up any more, except to point out that everything it suggests about the internet seems to be coming true on a daily basis. This is a fun story about a math-league runner-up in high school who gets invited by the school's most striking beauty to pretend to be her boyfriend for a gathering of her enormous old samurai family. They go back to this ancestral manor to celebrate her grandmother's birthday, and the math kid solves a problem texted to him over his cellphone by someone he doesn't recognize. The next day, it seems he's crashed the internet all over the country as a result. The film is lively and funny and fast-paced, and it imagines the incredibly disastrous results of a large-scale internet crash in the near future, with chilling results.
Now I'm going to have some more personal recommendations, including some series––because the heart of anime is really more in these series, I think, than in the feature films. Most anime films besides those of some particular auteurs are just continuations of popular series––usually with not altogether satisfying results. But the TV series, and OAV miniseries, are where a lot of the great stuff emerges.
5) Flip-Flappers: just discovered it this year, and it became maybe my favorite anime. This is a short series about a lonely high-school girl, Cocona, who gains an unwanted companion, a free-spirited, slightly crazy lab-rat with a flying surfboard named Papika, to be the companion she doesn't want but maybe really needs. Together, the girls can travel to a place called Pure Illusion, which is a wild, imaginary fantasy-land full of complex games and ceremonies to enact in order to collect shards of crystal. Cocona is a troubled teen, very insular, very closed-off, with a subtle sort of persecution complex and something initially undefined, which ends up being a kind of fear of her own sexuality––but which is manifested in the series as a fear of play. This makes for a lively series, because all Papika wants to do is play, and she is, in a way, exactly the playmate Cocona needs. The series offers different delights in each episode, with every journey into Pure Illusion increasingly slippery and psychedelic, redolent of Alice in Wonderland, but with a beguiling mixture of genre combinations. Different episodes send up anime genres like the giant-robot series, or the froo-froo "private school for girls" sort of series, or send up movies like Mad Max––and some episodes turn out to be more introspective games––like when Cocona loses Papika, and then keeps running into different versions of her, as a mousy, non-verbal child, as a delinquent teen boy, etc. In one episode, Cocona and Papika keep involuntarily invading a classmate's memories, trying and failing to change them. The show has a unique combination of an anarchic sense of gamesmanship and cheerful camaraderie, mixed with an underlying sense of the sinister which never quite goes away. It is the best kind of anime, where part of the challenge is to discover just what it is you are really watching. Can't recommend this experience highly enough.
6) Giant Robo – The Day the Earth Stood Still: This is a collection of 6 mini-movies, making an OVA (Original Video Animation––the kind of "direct-to-video" of anime, without the stigma that implies in the U.S. market––OVAs generally had a higher marker of quality than TV series––though the market is now mostly TV and film, and few OVAs are created these days) series that is a deliberate throwback to the comics work of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, one of the founders of the "giant robot" craze that seized Japanese pop culture in the 60s. Giant Robo takes characters from all of Yokoyama's major manga works and mashes them together into a giant, screaming, world-ending story about a young boy and the Egyptian-themed robot he commands through a wristwatch, trying to save the world from a source of perpetual, low-cost energy. The boy works for a United-Nations-sponsored team of superheroes, the Experts of Justice, who are combatting a secret society known as Big Fire––but everyone has deep, Jungian motivations behind the work they do on one side of this struggle or the other––and we find out all those motivations, and then some, over the course of this grand opera of boyhood fantasy. Nearly every character dies valorously here––even some of the villains––and almost every one of them gives one or more tearful speeches about why they're all right sacrificing themselves so that young boy and his robot might change the world, finding the answer to the question: can we live without suffering? It's...it's a lot all at once. The animation is a step beyond most TV projects (though a little below the caliber of some of the feature films––you will see these varied budgetary limitations expressing themselves in all these different films, miniseries, and series, with considerable regularity), and the art itself is unusually westernized for most anime-–coming primarily from Yokoyama's Disney-inspired comic style. Yokoyama did a famous, long adaptations of Chinese literary classics in his manga, so some of the characters here in Giant Robo actually come from The Romance of Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin––and knowing something about those sources makes the project more interesting to see. But you don't really need to know anything about Yokoyama's work to get into the heady tone and pace of this action-packed, tearful, and juicily melodramatic series. There is one of the great scores for any anime here, played by the Warsaw Philharmonic––lending incredible atmosphere to these stories or giant robot battles on zeppelins, trains that transform into giant robots, and a father dying in his son's arms, entrusting the son with his greatest, most terrible invention––an unstable, nuclear-powered, giant robot that only obeys your commands when it believes in your friendship. Some of the surprising tonal whiplash common to a lot of Asian cinema (and anime in particular) is on display here, in one of its most appealing forms; a kind of rollicking adventure, tinged with a melancholy desire to recapture the turbulent moral considerations of youth.
7) FlCl: This is striking in a completely different way. It's a 6-episode OVA miniseries (don't bother with the terrible recent follow-ups, FlCl Progressive and FlCl Alternative) about an adolescent boy living in a dead-end suburb, who hates all the "irresponsible" adults around him. The older brother he idolizes has gone off to the U.S. on a baseball scholarship, and Naota, the frustrated little kid so desperate to be an adult, hangs around in vacant lots with his elder brother's delinquent girlfriend, Mamimi. Naota hates it when she starts necking with him––but he keeps going back to see Mamimi, again and again.
Then an alien named Haruhara Haruko rides up on a vespa, hits him in the head with an electric guitar, gives him CPR, and drives away, calling him a good-for-nothing, That night, a horn sprouts from the welt on Naota's forehead where the alien hit him. From this point through the end of the show, all kinds of robots will start sprouting out of Naota's head and inopportune times; like, for instance, whenever he feels horny, or distraut. FlCl is told in a manic, anarchic blur, filled with obscure local cultural references (different kinds of powdered curry, different kinds of ramen, different local celebrities all get name-checked too fast to process). The animation style changes from scene-to-scene, including a famous scene in which the characters seem to be animated leaping around the panels on a page of manga, and scenes that show the characters as actors, waiting in their trailer to come out and say the lines of the show. There is an overarching story, of Naota's desire to wrangle control of his out-of-control life from his nemesis, the vespa-riding alien bass player who turns his already agonizingly disordered life upside-down on a constant basis––but each of the 6 episodes has its own story, profiles a different character from the series, and has its own themes which get fully developed over the course of 25 or so pulse-pounding minutes. There are guest animation directors in about 4 of the episodes, who direct a scene or two (and the art style changes radically to match). And the whole thing is accompanied with a rowdy, post-punk soundtrack of classic songs by The Pillows. FlCl is a a great, constantly creative and searching show about the turbulence of adolescence, confusing and hilarious throughout. I did not put it on as a first recommendation, because I feel that the self-conscious postmodernism of the show would be more than a little jarring for a first outing into anime. But the show shows so many things anime can do––not least of which, the kind of exhilarating narrative compression it can sometimes inherit from 60s-era manga. The blu-ray for this series has wonderful commentary tracks with the director, which are fascinating to hear. He waxes eloquent for most of each talking about the brands of ramen in the background of the scene, and what happened to his own vespa, which was the model for Haruko's vespa in the show. Then as the episode credits roll, he quickly summarizes exactly what all the wild, confusing material in each episode is really about. It's the funniest thing. I watched these episodes released as single episodes, released months and months apart, but I found I was always going back to the same episode and watching it over multiple times––there is so much density in these episodes, that they repay that kind of attention.
8) Bubblegum Crisis: historically, Bubblegum Crisis is generally considered to be the first OVA series. It's a cyberpunk series with a heavy, and well-acknowledged debt to Blade Runner (it's protagonist is named Priss, after Daryl Hannah's character in that film), about a group of vigilante women in robot hardsuits, called the Knight Sabres. Together, they track down out-of-control, rampaging robots––called Boomers––and destroy them, because essentially the police can't. The series has an incredible, dark look, through which the Knight Sabres' bright, saturated hardsuits cut like a scalpel. The series is also a bit of an unofficial musical, since Priss headlines a band when she isn't running around fighting robots. The music which drives the show is a vivid collection of the "City Pop" music that was popular in Japan during the era of the show's production. It lends the show a hard, glassy, and compelling edge. But as the first OVA, Bubblegum Crisis also has another curious legacy; it's one of the rare anime projects left unfinished. Incredibly ambitiously, the show was intended to be a multimedia marketing coup, with original music sung by the voice actress stars of the show, designed to make them famous in real life as the singing characters from the show. The show's gritty narratives were apparently brought about by a combination of the show's various creatives behind the scenes. Both systems fell apart quickly, with Kinuko Ohmori's agents quickly putting the kibosh on her singing on the episodes (after the first 3 episodes we stop seeing Priss performing on stage), and the production team ended up splitting and going their separate ways, each faction going on to litigate the rights to Bubblegum Crisis, and each of them at the same time producing their own alternate endings for the show. Neither group succeeds––both Bubblegum Crash, the immediate sequel, and Bubblegum Crisis 2040 A.D., a full-length TV series remake, fail completely. But the 8 finished episodes are pretty great by themselves, and over time I've come to peace with the idea that they are basically enough on their own, without any need to go further. The series is best as an attitude, as a state of mind, drifting in the lane of early cyberpunk, with hard, brutal action, and noir-ish tales of an alienating city full of machines. It's kind of a throwback now, but the animation is good, and the art––including top-of-the-line character designs by Kenichi Sonoda (later the manga artist on a curious series called Gunsmith C.A.T.S., which is worth looking up––there's also a Gunsmith C.A.T.S. OVA which isn't...bad, exactly...). It's at least a fine sensory experience, but I think it still has a philosophical interest as well.
9) Mawaru Penguindrum: This show is another one to file in the general category of "crazy" shows, alongside Flip–Flappers and FlCl––you can possibly tell, it's my favorite subgenre of anime (and if you like these three, I'd recommend Excel Saga for further dementia––not as great, but truly insane--and maybe Girls und Panzer, which is an inexplicable sci-fi series about high school girls living on a battleship, engaging in extra-curricular tank battles with tank clubs from other schools). Mawary Penguindrum seems to be put together from entirely disparate ideas, somehow magnetized and attracted to one another in a way that's hard to explain. It's about three teenage siblings, who live alone together in a house that looks like it was made by children. Cool Kanba is the eldest, and sensitive Shou is the middle child. They are the brothers of Himari, their cute younger sister, a former idol singer, who is dying of cancer. She dies in the first episode, at an aquarium, where the boys have taken her to take her mind off of dying. They bought her a knit penguin hat at the aquarium, though, and as they grieve in the hospital, the hat magically brings their sister back to life, and uses her to channel the voice of an inter-dimensional dominatrix queen, who makes the boys a deal; she'll restore life to their beloved sister, so long as they help her recover the penguindrum. They want to know what that is, but rather than answering, she gives them the name of a person who has the penguindrum...maybe. This starts a cross-town, cross-reality odyssey, as the boys race to do the bidding of this crazed tyrant in their sister's body, so that they can have their beloved sister back. Along the way, every-single-thing we've assumed from the story gets called into question, dismantled, and reconfigured into a new reality. Are this trio really siblings? Is Kanba really in love with Himari? Who is tracking down Kanba's ex-girlfriends, shooting them in the head with ping-pong balls that make them forget they ever dated Kanba? Where are the trio's parents? What is the so-called "Child Broiler," which keeps coming up in multiple episodes. Who is Ringo Oginome, who allegedly has the penguindrum? What the hell is the penguindrum? We get staggering answers to every question, except what the penguindrum actually is. That remains a mystery. The art is remarkable (though a strange element is the way the background extras in scenes appear as "man" and "woman" symbols from public restrooms; this appears very cheap until the end of the series, when the symbols all suddenly turn around and reveal exquisitely fully-animated people––and we suddenly understand there was a thematic point to doing this all along). The music is top-rate, compelling and tuneful. The show blends all sorts of references from modern Japanese culture, from Takarzuka opera to the Aum Shinrikyo subway gas attacks. It's a dark and dizzying experience trying to make sense of this show––and that's the fun of it.
10) Star Driver: Giant robot shows have been a staple of anime forever––as have shows about high school. Star Driver is a fairly recent show that blends those two subgenres with real elan. Written by the author of FlCl, Yoji Enokido (he will show up again on this list), Star Driver has some of the quirky kinkiness of FlCl, in a secretly mostly wholesome scenario. There's a private high school on an island off the coast of Japan. A new student, Takuto, shows up there on the beach, nearly drowned––he tired to swim to school. He is rescued by other high school students, and immediately, quasi-accidentally inducted into the secret life of the school. The school actually drives everything that happens on the island, and plays an important role in the safety of Japan, and maybe the rest of the world. There are four virgin high school-age girls, who serve from birth as the island's shrine maidens. Various factions within the school want to get to these shrine maidens and "break their seal." Breaking their seal creates an opening into an alternate dimension called Zero-time. Inside that dimension are frightening, enormous robots, and the various members of the student body who want to break the seals of the shrine maidens fight there in Zero-time against other pilots––other "Drivers"––who want to stop them from nullifying the shrine maidens' seals. Nullifying them would radiate the dimension of Null-time over the entire world, enabling these robots to get out and, theoretically, change the balance of power in the world. Takuto falls into all of this by mistake, but also on purpose, as it turns out he has a giant robot of his own, ready to roll out against the captain of the school's boxing team, who is eager to nullify a seal or two, if ya know what I mean (wink wink nudge nudge, welcome to the world of Yoji Enokido). The robot Takuto unveils is...just...really, really fabulous. There isn't a better term for it. It's lithe, curvy, and beplumed, with enormous high-heels, narrow shoulders, and wide hips. It's a very strange robot. But inside it, Takuto is invincible. He ends up getting recruited by the school drama club, which is arrayed against most of the student council, trying to stop them from discovering all four shrine maidens and nullifying their seals. The show features four key songs, which are each performed regularly in a quarter of the series episodes, each sung repeatedly by one of the shrine maidens when the robot fights break out. There is a big mix of episodes, with some getting deep into characters, some mostly just for laughs, and some which get at the more serious themes of the show. But all told, Star Driver is fun, funny, and heartfelt at its core; the kinkiness is entirely benign, and there is no exceptional violence, and no gore. The battles are understood to be largely symbolic, taking place on an abstract plane, and so what matters most is the presentation, and hidden feelings and reasons that characters do what they do. This engine keeps the show fun and clever all the way through.
11) Vision of Escaflowne: Fantasy used to be a way bigger element of anime, from series like Record of the Lodoss War to Rune Explorers, from The Trouble with Elves to Ninja Scroll. The replacement for it now is this subgenre called Isekai, a deeply un-fun subgenre about characters from the normal world being trapped in what is usually a fantasy video game––using what they know of the game from the real world to dominate it now that they're in its midst. In a way, though, Vision of Escaflowne is the delightful precursor to all these miserable postmodern isekai variant––a show in which an unexceptional high school girl called Hitomi, good only at running track and telling people's fortunes with tarot cards, gets sucked into a world of swords and sorcery, of boys with magnificent angel wings, or humanoid cat-creatures, of giant robot suits of armor...in which Hitomi's ability to read tarot cards turns out to be the rarest of magical skills, and just the thing she needs to survive an enormous adventure and find true love. The series has a justly famous, adventuresome score by Yoko Kanno, and a very straightforward, heartfelt earnestness that is the direct obverse of all these later Isekai stories. The combinations of fantasy elements Hitomi encounters in this new world are always interesting, and the characters develop in deeply satisfying ways over the course of the show. There is high adventure, and compelling romantic melodrama in equal measure. This is a very different show than a lot of what I'm putting on the list. During the 90s, it was the odd show out of the four television anime hits that sort of changed the face of television anime for the better (Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, and Revolutionary Girl Utena). Each of these shows deepened the sophistication of what television anime might provide, but Escaflowne's earnestness I think earned it a background role in any later retrospectives on these shows. It is seldom mentioned in the same breath with them anymore. But it was as popular as the rest of them in its time, and it is just as satisfying a story to see today as it was then.
12) The Big O: Back to the postmodern with a vengeance, The Big O is a show visually drawn from the Batman animated series (with some of the same creative staff on board), and thematically reminiscent of Dark City. In a cityscape straight out of a film noir, everyone woke up one day, with no memory of what happened previously. They woke up in houses they weren't sure they lived in, in jobs they didn't know how to do, in relationships they couldn't be sure were real. They woke up in a megalopolis with buildings collapsed onto other buildings, with a sinister sense that they were not alone. 40 years passed, and people learned to survive in the city of amnesia––in spite of how, every once in a while, someone would seem to get a pesky, persistent little fragment of a memory from 40 years ago.
The series follows Roger Smith (everyone has a name that sounds like an alias), who works as a negotiator in the city called Paradigm. Roger is very good at his job, resourceful and quick-witted. But when negotiations go a little too hard, Roger has an ace up his sleeve, for Roger is secretly the chosen pilot of a giant robot that emerged from the frightening underground below the city, a robot with a hard-hat and pistons for arms, called Big O. A negotiation gone bad leaves Roger with a girl android, who he despises, called R. Dorothy Wainwright. It becomes clear very quickly that R. Dorothy is in love with Roger. But is that even possible for a robot? And what of the display on Big O, which reads, whenever Roger starts it up, "Cast in the name of God...ye not guilty?" The show piles on mystery after mystery, but it does eventually solve them all in philosophically intriguing ways. Big O has two seasons, which straddle the era between hand-made animation and computer-based animation (FlCl is the first fully digital OVA in anime, around this same time). The first season is hand-made, and the second is drawn on computer, creating a bifurcated look for the show which might take some getting used to. The series was a flop in Japan, and, in a rare move for the time, was cancelled after its' first 13-episode season. But it had started showing on Adult Swim in the U.S., and the 13th episode ended in a fascinating way, throwing up dozens of questions that the show then ended before it could answer. The outcry against this in the U.S. led Adult Swim to fund the production company in Japan to make the second season. This results in a little bit of a schism, where the first 13 episodes move at a meditative pace, heavy on atmosphere, and the second season's 13 episodes run at a breakneck pace, swiftly trying to resolve every question posed in the final episode of the first season. It's bracing fun, with an interesting, existentialist outlook that is well-explicated and thoroughly examined throughout the show.
13) Cowboy Bebop: This very famous show about a collection of down-at-their-heels intergalactic bounty hunters always seems to remain relevant, thanks to its world-beatingly eclectic score by Yoko Kanno (featuring jazz, bluegrass, funk, close-harmony, opera, pop, grunge rock, etc.), and what I would describe as the quirky, postcapitalist, slacker outlook of anime auteur Shinichiro Watanabe––most of whom's shows have some element of this same moody, almost improvisatory-seeming drift to them (later on he did a series about the joy of playing jazz, which I very much like, called Kids on the Slope). The whole show seems to drift like a state of mind, with a loose structure offering mostly standalone episodes, occasionally interrupted by the advance of a very perfunctory overarching plot. Spike Spiegel is a bounty hunter who believes in nothing––but he used to be a guy who believed in everything, a slick gangster on the make, with friends and a love for the ages. But now he's partnered up with ex cop Jet, and they're having trouble getting two nickels to rub together––much less enough to buy food, or fix their grungy spaceship. They accidentally team up with mysterious fugitive Faye Valentine, a computer hacking child named Ed, and they get a welsh corgi, Ein, in an adventure––a dog who is actually a genetically-engineered "smart dog"––but they don't know that, and they believe him to be worthless. These losers ply the galaxy, looking for jobs, while, unbeknownst to him, Spike's past creeps closer and closer to him. This is not usually a hard show to sell to anyone; it usually sells itself. On blu ray it looks great, it's definitely worth checking out. More than in most series, I recall individual episodes for their unique attributes––the episode where everyone's chasing the dog, or the episode where they all accidentally eat psychedelic mushrooms, or the episode where Faye gets a message from her past self---on a old technology they discover is called "video tape." Then there are the episodes where they encounter characters from Spike's past, which are almost like their own different thing, sometimes––or the two-episode story, Jupiter Jazz, where the two different kinds of storylines dovetail together very organically and neatly.
14) Neon Genesis Evangelion: The experimental TV anime that really got the world at large anime-crazy, Evangelion is a giant-robot anime show with a twist––actually, about 60 major twists, in about 45 episodes. The show is a kind of sinister mind-f*ck, about abandoned, psychically-wounded kids who are recruited to pilot enormous, sinuous robots called Evas, in support of Earth, against an invading force of aliens called "angels." There is a lot of Christian imagery in the show, but I wouldn't try too hard to see those allusions through to any sort of purposeful theme of some kind; calling them Evas and Angels exoticizes the whole mysterious conflict, with different government entities vying for control of earth's resistance against the angels. Shinji, the distressed teen protagonist, is far from a hero. He spends most of the first season trying to summon the courage not to run away from the fights. The angels are fascinating designs, all radically different (I recall one that looks like a pyramid floating in the air––but the actual creature exists only in the shadow that this illusory pyramid casts) from one another. Shinji's father heads the Eva program, but he is a cruel, distant figure, as much Shinji's antagonist as the thoroughly alien angels. The show is very quirky and strange, but the takeaway that sinks in most demonstrably is how much of it is about the psychological state of the children forced to pilot these nerve-encrusted killing machines––every wound the eva experiences, its pilot experiences in the same way. The series is full of shocks and surprises, characters who behave in ways diametrically opposed to what you expect of them, and moments where the rug slides out from under you, revealing an even more sinister new revelation you didn't expect. The show ends in what I think of as a very satisfying way, with a two-part disquisition of the main character, Shinji––like an interrogation, in a dark, echoey room with a single spotlight on Shinji. Audiences of the time were not pleased, and some of them went so far as to vandalize Studio Gainax's office building and call in death-threats to the filmmakers to express their frustration. The result of this is the increasingly curious lineage of Evangelion, in which there are follow-up movies, seemingly going on forever. There's Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, which is mostly a clip show, End of Evangelion, which offers an entirely different ending to the series, with Shinji eventually trying to strangle one of the other heroes, while she calls him pathetic (earlier he has masturbated on her comatose form in a hospital bed)––a sort of backhanded reference to the vandals at Gainax––photos of the vandalism are featured in the film––and then a film quartet that remakes Evangelion, though not entirely from the ground up, but which goes much farther in different directions from the original material, and which seems to be adding entries until the audiences are finally happy, dammit. Exhaustion has kept me from seeing the fourth film yet. Frankly, nothing past the original series is really worth your time, but the series itself is the original anime mindf*ck, and it still packs plenty of oomph.
15) Keep Your Hand Off Eizoken!: Here's a recent show, which is, hilariously and imaginatively, about a group of high school girls who form a film club at their school in order to pursue animation together––by hook or by crook. The show is slightly sci-fi, with an intriguing background world, and the heroes are unusual types for girls in anime, never characterized by their romantic designs, but rather, by their intense, shared excitement over animating. The show is funny in a very grungy, unusual, slice-of-life sort of way, and it is full of actual advice on how to make an anime, which is integrated seamlessly into the story. The show never balks at getting into the labor of animation, the financing of it, the shortcuts that have to be taken to make it work, or the extreme and sometimes off-putting personalities it takes to make these creative endeavors. The animation in the show itself is top-notch, and wildly creative––especially when the characters start to plan their animation, and the world around them melts into the drawings they are planning to do, with themselves stepping into the drawings they're breathlessly describing.
16) Revolutionary Girl Utena: Sailor Moon is an enduringly popular show, but Utena, the follow up for most of the creative team there (including the director of the later Mawaru Penguindrum and the writer of the later FlCl and Star Driver), is a deeper, more mysterious show, aimed at a slightly older audience. It posits a fairytale, in a princess cries at the feet of her dead parents, then meets a prince who makes her feel much better, and who gives her a signet ring and tells her to find him one day. The princess is so impressed by this encounter, she vows to grow up to become a prince herself. This is the beginning of what was known at the time as a sort of gender-confusion, romantic adventure/psychological mystery saga, with comic overtones and a psychedelic rock score by J.A. Seazer (composer of the music to Shuji Terayama's live-action surreal movies from the 70s and early 80s). Utena has grown up into a teenaged girl, who stubbornly wears the boys' uniform at her private academy, and acts like her own ideal of a prince. Watching a girl named Anthy Himemiya get slapped around by the student council vice president, Utena interferes on Anthy's behalf, inadvertently challenging the vice president to a duel in the school's trippy dueling arena, which boasts an upside-down floating castle above it, and a bunch of singers screaming about "the absolute destiny apocalypse." Utena wins the duel, and as a result becomes the betrothed of Anthy, the so-called "Rose Bride," which all of the student council are dueling to possess. Smiling blithely, Anthy shows up at Utena's dorm room and moves in. Utena, shocked by all of this, looks forward to a future in which many more duels await her.
"Yuri," the girl-on-girl romance genre begun in early-20th-century novels in Japan, and eventually migrating to plays, then to manga, has taken its' sweet time arriving in anime. For many years,
Sailor Moon was the main anime sporting a lesbian couple as side-characters. Utena advanced precociously in terms of putting the genre out there in the larger public eye, in a hit show––but the way that is expressed in the TV series is not very clear or explicit. The show is mostly about the complications that arise from Utena refusing to conform to gender stereotypes, with a "absolute destiny apocalypse" at the ending which seems to negate the chance that Utena's goal of transcending gender restrictions will be successful. Almost as if they felt bad about the way that shook out, writer Enokido and director Ikuhara went and made a movie follow-up,
Adolescence of Utena, which retells the whole story in fast-forward, and then moves lustily into a far more explicit "yuri" ending, in which Utena transforms into a car and Anthy "rides" her to freedom. The show is fascinating, funny, strange, and kind of ritualistic (most of director Ikuhara's works involve transition or transformation sequences that repeat ad nauseum, episode after episode, to cut down on animation time––but it becomes fun to anticipate at a certain point). The movie is a wild reworking of the same material, which feels very much like writer Enokido has finally been let out of the cage. His follow-up to this film was FlCl, where his id seems to flow freely, entirely unhinged from any proposed restrictions.
17) Patlabor: Director Mamoru Oshii is most famous for his adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, and while I like that movie, I value the Patlabor series a lot more. Patlabor begins as two sets of OVA series, Patlabor the Original Series and Patlabor the New Files. Then there is a television show––which frankly, you can skip entirely (it reboots the story and is an utter bore). Following that, there are two exciting movies (the second is rather spectacular), followed years and years later by a worthless third picture. Oshii directs the first two OVA series and the first two movies, which, put together, make up the grand vision of Patlabor. The series is about a pilot program in the Japanese police department for giant robot police pilots. The initial class is considered a bunch of loopy rejects, and the series are their adventures trying to prove the viability of a giant robot police program in metropolitan Tokyo. Increasingly, crimes committed using robots are getting out of hand, and the police feel they need a robot unit. The show is surprisingly grounded in this context, focusing on the difficulty of moving and operating the robots, the gulf in understanding between the cops' awareness of their own bodies and their awareness of the robot exoskeletons, and the practical complications of navigating a metropolis with giant robots. The physicality of the animation is genuinely unprecedented––the studio, I.G., became justly famous for their animation of machines, specifically. I.G. is traditionally a little stiffer with human animation than most studios, but the vivid city they create in Patlabor, alive with machine technology that is always going rogue in mundane ways, is very striking and original. The show spends equal time with all the principle characters, as they hang out in squalid, smelly squadrooms, waiting for a robot crime to occur––then they go out and flub the police action disastrously. The later OVA and the movies take the series into Tom Clancy-like political technothriller territory, but that is a natural evolution of the show from lumpen hijinks to the larger implications of the technology that is the show's focus. Ghost in the Shell is great, too, don't get me wrong. But I wanted to include Patlabor, because people tend to forget about it. The OVAs and the movies are on gorgeous blu ray sets, they look great.
18) Liz and the Blue Bird: This feature film is a spin-off of a television series called Sound Euphonium, about a high school orchestra. But the film is designed in such a way that you don't need to have seen Sound Euphonium to follow any of it––witness how I haven't seen any of Sound Euphonium, and would still recommend this as one of the must-see anime out there. The story follows two best friends in the school orchestra, extroverted lead flutist Nozomi and introverted lead oboist, Mizore. Over the course of a semester of school, told in fractured, possibly non-linear sequence, the orchestra rehearses a challenging new piece, and Nozomi and Mizore's friendship is quietly, intensely tested. The film is very atmospheric and tactile (reminding me a bit of Satiyajit Ray's Pather Panchali in its attention to small details of physical environment, and how characters react with them), dwelling on flashes of light through band room windows and dust floating in the air, and in a sequence of chopped-up pieces of scenes, little discreet moments of behavior, odd snatches of seemingly inconsequential conversation, we come to understand that the friendship between these two girls is not equal. There are secrets to it that threaten to undermine what they're doing together in the band, and maybe just the very nature of their relationship. Nozomi is light as a feather, a social gadfly who seems comfortable in any environment. But in fact, what we don't see at first is the way in which she turns tail from challenge, brushes it off when she can't equal it. Meanwhile, Mizore is there, quietly pretending she is like her friend. But Mizore is quite different, quite serious, quite extreme. She needs her friend, lovers her friend, in a way her friend might not appreciate or accept. And Mizore is hiding a secret about the piece they are practicing, keeping it from Nozomi. What happens when she reveals it is, I think, fairly remarkable. This is a film that counts on you to interpret the meaning in different ways of playing a piece of music––the action of the film is all bound around this one practice, where, through their playing, we come to understand the gulf between these two girls, and the way they look at the world, and look at each other. It's more than a bit yuri, and it's a very beautiful, subtle film, with a real feel for just what it's like to be in a high school band––that strange mixture of hothouse drama and dusty boredom––punctuated by everyone picking up instruments and trying hard––or trying less hard, or coasting and hoping no one will notice. It's a really well-observed film, with a beautiful look and a really interesting editing style.
19) Baccano!: Baccano! imagines an Agatha-Christie-like prohibition-era cross-country train journey in the U.S., but with gunplay, vampires, con-artists, homonculi, and immortal gangsters, and a snappy swing score. If you get past the first episode, everything is fast-paced fun, with a different subgenre mashup for almost every scene. there is energetic, goofball humor, rubbing shoulders with blistering violence and thrilling action. There are alliances forged and broken, unlikely meetings full of import, and intrigues that melt into horror, into romance, into suspense, from scene to varied scene. The art style is splashy and gestural, and the series just keeps going in unexpected directions. It feels very short, but sweet.
20) Last Exile/A Place Further than the Universe/Waiting in Summer/The Tatami Galaxy/El Cazador de la Bruja/Super Cub/Yuru Yuri/Princess Principal/Captain Earth/Birdy the Mighty/Yurikuma Arashi/Sweet Blue Flowers/His and Her Circumstances/The Rose of Versailles/Macquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms/Garden of Words/Durararara!/Kiki's Delivery Service/Cyber City Oedo/Nadia: Secret of Blue Water: Just a list here of things you might like if you liked any of my previous suggestions. I know I didn't include a lot of romance anime in here; truth is, there's a lot of harem stories that I hate, and a lot of het romance stuff that just doesn't sustain my interest as much these days, unless it's done really well. I also didn't get into horror, like Rintaro's Doomed Megalopolis, or sexual horror anime, like Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend. I just wouldn't hold much of that up as evidence of what heights anime can ascend. If I had to pick one out of the ones I listed in this last one, which is markedly different from what I already including, it would probably be A Place Further than the Universe, which is of a kind of anime we are seeing more of in the last 10 years; slice of life. This particular one is about a bunch of high school girls who join a scientific expedition to Antarctica. It covers their experiences and feelings and ideas about their trip, and a whole lot of technical details and facts about the expedition. Super Cub is another like this, but more mundane, about a high school girl living alone, who decides to buy a Cub motor scooter, and her life improves ever-so-gradually as a result.
The great thing about anime is the volume of it out there. There are new shows coming out all the time, and lots of them are fantastic. The current anime season has offered up at least 4 shows I found really engaging:
Do It Yourself!, Akiba Maid War, Bocchi the Rock, and
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. Last season I was very into
Lycoris Recoil, about a cafe run by secret government assasins, and the sort of anti-isekai show,
The Executioner and Her Way of Life, which is probably too hard to try to explain here. I usually check the Anime charts, where they aggregate what's coming up for the next season, along with trailers and countdowns to new episodes:
https://www.livechart.me/winter-2023/tv
As far as viewing, since the advent of DVD it's extremely rare not to get an original Japanese language-track on a disc set, with English subtitles. Nowadays, lots of shows don't even seem to warrant a dub. The blu rays for
Star Driver, Rose of Versailles, and
Mawaru Penguindrum are without them. As far as what editions to pick up go, there's often relatively few choices, and in recent years there's been the saving grace of a generally high quality standard for the releases across the board. I have U.S. blu ray editions of the Ghibli films,
Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, Bubblegum Crisis, Patlabor, Flip-Flappers, Princess Principal, Captain Earth, Mawaru Penguindrum, Star Driver, Summer Wars, Liz and the Blue Bird, Garden of Words, Vision of Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, The Rose of Versailles, Kids on the Slope, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Waiting in Summer, Tekonkinkreet, Macquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms, Giant Robo, FlCl, and
The Big O. They're all high quality and awesome. I've heard some complaints about dubtitles on the Ghibli pictures, I think? I never worry too much about that stuff, I'm mostly interested in picture and sound quality. I also have a U.S. DVD set of
El Cazador de la Bruja, which is fine. I have U.K. blu rays of
The Tatami Galaxy and
Baccano!, which are good. There are always high-quality blu rays of
Akira and
Ghost in the Shell out there––though Ghost in the Shell has some re-drawn version out there I haven't seen, and don't know much about. I might just check and make sure the original version is viewable for that one. I have a great Japanese blu ray of
Your Name that has English subtitles, but that was because I couldn't wait for a U.S. release to arrive.
But it's also worth mentioning that many older and many more recent anime are not out on blu ray, or possibly not out on home video at all--or only out on blu ray in Japan, with no English subtitles or English dub tracks.
A Place Further than the Universe springs to mind, as well as
Keep Your Hands Off Eizoken!––neither of which have, I think, seen home video at all. Lots of classic stuff has made it onto blu ray in Japan, but not in the U.S. or the U.K.––things like
Noir, Last Exile, Venus Wars, Ninja Team Gatchaman, etc. There are streaming sites that offer a lot in this respect––Crunchyroll seems to be where people go for anime releasing currently, and HiDive offers a lot of old-school rarities (I was able to see the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the terrible traffic cop squadroom drama,
You're Under Arrest! only on HiDive). But there are so many titles, and so many relatively inaccessible ones, that it's also worth remembering how anime got its start in the U.S.––mostly through people fansubbing and pirating the shows, so that people knew to even want to see them. There's a reason that system still exists, beyond pure profit, and it's accessibility. Also, unsubtitled Japanese blu rays of vintage anime are absurdly expensive. I always remember with a chuckle the inscription I saw on a t-shirt they were selling in Little Tokyo: "Anime: Crack is cheaper." Still holds true, sometimes. But there are a lot of more affordable blu ray collections in the U.S., also. At least, more affordable than they are in Japan.
. Again, a big thank you! 
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