Any anime fans?

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My viewing of anime sits at close to 300 series, and it is currently one of m favourite times of year that is repeated four times, the time when new series start.

To jump the gun and say what has grabbed my attention from only one episode I would probably say: Servant x Service , Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka, Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku , Love Lab, and the new Symphogear.

Isn't there a new version of the butler anime which has the word cuties in it the title Brad?

Right now the three Anime I am paying attention to are Toriko, Gintama, and Hunter X Hunter 2011.

There was Hayate no Gotoku Cuties, yes. The majority of it was working in manga chapters for specific characters, I was happy to see some of my favourite chapters get animated (it is one of the few series I collect), and then had an interesting anime original couple of episodes that used out of order timeline to good effect, and tied a bit into the previous season which was anime original.

The shows that I most enjoyed last season were: The Devil is a Part Timer, a great show about a Demon Lord adjusting to life in Japan by working at a McDonalds, it effortlessly went through comedy, action, and drama without any problems, and believe me it was funny. The other was My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (My youth romantic comedy is wrong as I expected.) which was surprisingly insightful with how subtle it was, and how it avoided the usual clichés that are in high school romantic comedies, in fact it was anti what you usually get.

Although I was also a fan of Date A Live, mostly out of personal preference. Currently using an avatar of the somewhat scary Kurumi from that series on another site.

I might also say that my anime watching eyes have also attention of an anime's titlt that translates to "No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!", the character design really draws me in for some reason. I will watch the first episode today.

Ya know what anime is good? Fullmetal Alchemist. Seriously three episodes in and I'm hooked.

I recently finished watching 3000 leagues in search of mother, really liked it, though no one have answered the thread I made about it.
Oh well, guess it's to be expected when I talk about a old anime that no one care about.

I sorta like anime, but I haven't seen a lot of it mostly because it's so hard to find in stores where I live and I'm very picky about it. Plus I don't like watching those English dubbed messes that come on TV with all the censorship and terrible voice acting.

Some anime I do like (even if I haven't seen every episode) are Sailor Moon, Pet Shop of Horrors, Inyuasha, Trigun, Mermaid's Forest (the original), Mermaid's Scar, and Read or Die (the OVA). I also want to see High School of the Dead one day just because it has zombies.

Oh and I like Azumanga Daioh because it was my best friend's favorite anime before he passed away, and he gave me his Vol. 1 DVD of the show which I still have. I haven't seen the rest of the episodes but the first 5 on this DVD are very cute, my favorite character is Osaka.

Dubbing has gotten much better than it used to be. As someone who previously a pure subtitle fan I now usually enjoy watching both tracks. Compared to before, some dubs even keep the Japanese mannerisms of honorifics without looking like they are trying too hard.

Reluctant fan.

There's a LOT of crap out there, and frankly it seems like a lot of them are literally just recycling old characters into new shells. Plus the animation is pretty poor tbh. Half the time all you see now is still images of faces or whatever with the mouth opening and closing while they talk, and that's it!

Hmm... I admit, it is getting harder to find interesting or original anime projects these days.

It's far easier for studios to go with the tried-and-tested tropes to get a decent return (hence why in a parallel, American movie animation is going through a very safe mediocre sequel/prequel period right now), especially as Japan's economy isn't looking too great (so much so, the Bank of Japan released a statement recently to allay concerns overseas) than to risk a lot of money on something that'll be a major loss (Trigun and Puri Puri no Melody come to mind first).

The problem with anime that makes it to America (I'm in the UK by the way, so until two years ago, we got even less anime that wasn't Studio Ghibli or associated with a toy/card-game) is that most of it pretty much shounen (aimed at 10-17 year old boys) action-/comedy-/fantasy- attire; the easiest to market for the biggest demographic in the US. However, sift past that and you'll find anime is a lot broader and a lot more thought is put into character development and plot-heavy continuity and interesting storytelling for various projects. Josei and seinen material (aimed at 18+ audiences) makes up a lot of stuff I personally enjoy - and not all of it graphic violence or sex. I really enjoyed Nana and Nodame Cantabile for example, which are pretty much slice-of-life and are heavily mired in a believable reality (and aren't set in a high school!) Of course, anime's not going to be for everyone and I have pretty eclectic tastes anyway. I'm enjoying Attack on Titan right now, which is heavily shounen, and I just finished Flowers of Evil, which was a very brave and interesting project (they used rotoscoping). I also liked The Devil is a Part-Timer.

I'm not particularly bothered about the upcoming Sword Art Online dub -- I heard it pretty much is a hack.sign for the present generation so if you're into gaming and JPRGs and that, that's fine. I'm more looking forward to watching Silver Spoon, Hiromu Arakawa's (Fullmetal Alchemist) semi-biographical manga.

Not saying there's anything wrong with the likes of Toriko and Hunter x Hunter and whatever by the way - I'm just not interested in that sort of material.

Toriko and Hunter X Hunter/2011 are much more advanced than Dragon Ball Z. Toriko is pretty much about the need to conserve our resources. Only kill what you need to eat or wear.

In true anime is smarter in it's use of ressources that what is generally seen in western animation. This is television shows, they can't animate like a Disney movie, so they must cut corners somewhere and that's why they use still images. This is still more visually appealing that what is generally seen from western animation, as the drawings are more detailled. Also the still images are frequently used to instill atmosphere to the scenes, which allow anime to breath with more life that western animation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js6g971TwJ8

take a look, lol. There are literally several scenes where there is NO animation. Very lazy stuff. Scenes that DO have something going on usually only animate tiny portions of the screen while the rest is still.

"smarter in it's use of resources" is an interesting spin on it. They will put in the least amount of work possible to rush a product out to television.

It really depends on where you're looking for anime. I'm not going to excuse the fact that generally speaking, Japanese animation tends to be a lot more limited than its American* counterpart, particularly with television series. So yes, I concede - you're right.

But I don't think it's really fair to condemn all anime because of one studio, who were actually in a lot of financial trouble at the time and their work reflected that - please see here for further information: http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.uk/news/ ... on-july-30 and http://www.japanator.com/man-arrested-f ... 4640.phtml

That said, I'm not going to start crusading for anime - just like with Western animation, you get your good and bad studios, some hits, lots of misses; I wouldn't necessarily condemn Disney forever just because they're going through a phase of merchandise-driven animation (nee Marvel tie-ins) - the new Mickey Mouse shorts by former Dexter's Lab/Powerpuff Girls storyboarder Paul Rudish prove otherwise, in my humble opinion. Same with Dreamworks. Same with Nickelodeon. Same with Cartoon Network.

At the end of the day, if you want to see a great example of Japanese anime that can rival the Western (nee American) material you favour, then investigate and research - for example, Little Witch Academia was fantastically vivid and expressive for such a young studio (Studio Trigger, merely founded two years ago). And anime movies tend to have far bigger budgets than their television counterparts too.

So yeah, see what works for you and you can't find anything, then at least you tried.

That said, I don't really like surreal things anymore - I guess that's why I was fine with Dragonball and the like when I was younger, but nowadays I find things like One Piece, Fairy Tail and Toriko too bizarre in logic to follow (though I actually liked Yakitate Ja-Pan! and I'm getting Steins;Gate on DVD next week- so I guess the saying 'never say never' does sometimes apply - heh).

* I only say 'American' for argument's sake; technically speaking, most "American" animation these days is Korean or Thai, though it's not been unheard of Brazil, France and even Canada filling in for certain projects; alas, Australia's high-taxes act as a deterrent, hence no Happy Feet 3 ever being possible).

Something from 2004 does not quite show what is happening here in 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0XssHL6ka4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAAnUqhKWZI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwNI0mwXI8g

I was a huge fan of Beast Wars here in the States and fortunately Japanese were too so much so that they did their own spin off never released here in the US. I spent 600 dollars buying and shipping the entire season of Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo on VHS because they haven't created DVD copies (at the time when I bought them). However NOW they just made a DVD box set of Beast Wars II (still expensive as hell) and they probably are going to make a DVD box set of Beast Wars Neo as well in the future. Now if they could only make a DVD box set of the TMNT Original with Japanese dubs!