So a couple of years ago I got into watching anime and reading manga. I love it. It's so vibrant and imaginative and wild. In the same way that anything is possible in bizarro, anything is possible in anime and manga. And the volume of content is just incredible. Here are a few of my favourite anime series:
It's a classic. Bounty hunters in space set to a wild jazz soundtrack. It came out in 1999 and it's still the benchmark for cool. There's plenty of action, gunfights, fistfights, wild spaceship flights and big explosions. And the characters have enough mystery to them that the backstory teased out over the 26 episodes and one movie keeps you emotionally invested. And Radical Edward. Yeah, at times she's annoying as fuck, but she's also one of my favourite characters around. You should also take note of the director, Shinichiro Watanabe, and the composer, Yoko Kanno. Their work together really sets this series apart from other sci-fi anime. I'd recommend Watanabe's other series, Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope, and Terror in Resonance. The latter two also feature fantastic soundtracks by Kanno, and Terror in Resonance is currently only a few episodes in, but it already seems to be something special.
Some fan favourites are fan favourites for a reason. This series is unforgettable. I watched the last 6 episodes of Evangelion right before I went to work and I spent my shift in a shellshocked daze. Evangelion is about a post-apocalyptic world where earth comes under attack by outer space monsters called 'angels'. They fight back using children piloting mechas called 'Evas'. The main character, Shinji, struggles with the responsibility that the entire human race is counting on him to not be a fuck up. Combine that with the fact that he's working for his estranged father and has never known love and acceptance in his life, the poor child has no idea how to process his emotions. Evangelion is a manic spiral into the darkest spaces of the human psyche. And the thing I love about it, is that it teases at resolution. It teases you into thinking maybe things will turn out okay. Maybe Shinji will learn how to be a normal child saving the world time and time again. Be prepared to face a world without closure or resolution. The rebuild of Evangelion as a film series was meant to make the whole thing more accessible. Three of the four films are out now, and all I can say is that Evangelion is hellbent on tormenting you. The films definitely aren't more forgiving than the series. Evangelion plays with your emotions in ways you could not imagine. It is truly unforgettable.
Brotherhood is a remake of a series simply called Fullmetal Alchemist, which in turn was based on a manga series. At the time the original series came out, the manga was still being written. By the time Brotherhood came along, it was complete. The original anime was brilliant in its own right, but Brotherhood is a more faithful adaptation, and as such, it captures that artistic vision just that much clearer. The scope is much bigger. And it is pulled off expertly. The basic concept is this: When their mother dies, Ed and Al try to bring her back to life using alchemy. They fail. Ed loses his leg and Al loses his body. Ed sacrifices his arm in order to bind his brother's soul to a suit of armour. As a result of playing with death, they find that the world is populated with homunculi, powerful creatures embodying the spirit of the seven deadly sins. The story itself has a lot of complex ins and outs, a brief summary just can't do it justice. But at the core there is the existential struggle between life and death, the ethics of trying to bring people back from the dead, and facing the monsters which plague such decisions.
This anime is a strange one. It's a colourful sci-fi story where people have memory chips stored in their heads. They can buy good memories and delete bad ones. They can remove their memories from one body and put them in another. The story revolves around a mysterious character who doesn't quite know who he is. The world is corrupt, and people are hunting him down, thinking he's some sort of mastermind behind a planned rebellion. This series is surreal, it's abstract. It's sad and beautiful and overwhelming. Storytelling is minimal and the animation style is strange. It's a visionary masterpiece.
I have been waiting for something like this for a long time. Tsutomu Nihei is one of my favourite manga artists. Knights of Sidonia is his latest manga, yet it's the first one to be picked up as a proper anime series. I haven't finished season one yet, but the adaptation is brilliant. His style of storytelling is fairly minimal, and the action and sprawling landscapes are things you need to pay close attention to in order to fully appreciate and understand the story. The anime does a great job adapting it, making it easy enough to follow, while also doing justice to the elaborate architecture of his worlds and detail of his monsters. The things which make his stories stand out. Knights of Sidonia is about a space ship carrying what might be the last of human civilisation through space infested with shape-shifting monsters known as 'gauna'. The humans pilot mechas to fight off the gauna. Plenty of action. It's hardcore sci-fi mechas vs kaiju in space, with the characters inside the space ship Sidonia driving the story along.
This is the big one people are all over right now. For a while, it slipped through my radar, but while I'm still only about 11 episodes into the anime, I'm much further along into the manga. The story follows a human settlement living within a series of walls built in concentric circles, keeping out giant naked human-eating humanoid creatures called titans. They're pretty much giant, brutal zombies. There is an elite military network trained to fend off the titans, killing them by propelling themselves into the air using some form of grappling hook system, and slicing the back of the titans' necks. I don't want to give away plot details, but what the humans know about the titans is kind of hazy, and what they find out throughout the series turns those assumptions on their head and really ratchets up the action. It's intense. The anime is directed by the same guy who did Death Note and Highschool of the Dead. The action is awesome. The animation is slick and visceral. From what I've seen of the anime and what I've read in the manga, I think it looks better on the screen than it does on the page, which is saying a lot. You want to check this series out. It's ridiculously entertaining.
This series is probably the least insane one on this list. A lot of series I like tend to pump up the action or drama so much it ends up blowing apart and going into unreal proportions (Dragonball Z, anyone?). Eden of the East is an incredible anime because it doesn't have to resort to that. After Japan comes under missile attack for unknown reasons, a select few citizens are chosen to participate in a game where they are given an incredible amount of money and resources and are given the job of fixing Japan by any means necessary so that it doesn't find itself carelessly under attack like this again. The series is a bit of a mystery/thriller/drama. An innocent bystander gets caught up with one of the participants of the game, and with each participant trying to achieve the goal their own way (or not) and trying to keep tabs on each other (should they fail or run out of funds they will be hunted down and killed by one of the participants), Eden of the East is as much about survival as it is about understanding the game, and understanding how things have changed so much in such a short amount of time. The animation is crisp and clean, the story is brilliant. You think of what anime typically is, and this series undercuts it and produces its own captivating vision.
http://themanifold.wordpress.com/
Check out S. T. Cartledge's books:
In a world dominated by the milk industry, only one milkman remains after a terrible storm sinks all the ships and throws the Great White Sea out of balance. The storm has left HiLo, the last milkman, to endure the memories of a world that left him behind. Adrift upon a lonely sea in a lonely world, his search for food, drinkable milk, and survivors is soured by the ghosts of those he lost.
But World Milk, HiLo’s former employer, left many secrets in its wake; with the company of a ghostly hologram woman, HiLo’s quest for answers might resurrect the once-glorious milk industry and return the world to creamy freshness.
The day of the milkman is upon us.
Finding a good house is a house hunter's job. If you want a great house, you need Imogen. She's the best at capturing young houses and training them to be homes. But all of her skills will be tested when the Association goes after the mythical Jabberhouse in order to breed houses in captivity. With a mysterious helper, Imogen and her house fight to stay alive and keep houses free.
A bizarro adventure, with cockroach people, spider-cars, assassins, house-fights, and a big-ass castle stomping into battle against an ancient temple. House hunting has never been so weird.
No comments :
Post a Comment