Furuhata Ninzaburo > Columbo tbh

It’s about ten minutes to '70s Sámi miniseries + fanime!

It’s 1 hour and 15 minutes to Ante and Supernova ☆! Note that we’re starting half an hour earlier than usual.

I’m glad that other people think this is a great list, because I keep thinking “Oh, I should’ve mentioned X and Y and Z!” — like if I’m listing influences of influences of influences, then I have to stop myself somewhere, right, or else I’ll just end up listing literally every single anime ever made, over and over again, which is both unmanageable and redundant. I have to keep in mind that I’m supposed to only be scratching the surface, and have some faith that other people will mention the ones I didn’t think of, when it comes to stuff like mecha or yuri or magical girls.

Edit: for that matter, even if I did list every anime ever made, that still wouldn’t be a complete history of anime, because anime also draws inspiration from cartoons of other countries and from live action shows and films; and a lot of why anime has evolved as it has is because of budgetary/time/technical/bureaucratic constraints that are best understood by actually trying to animate something yourself.

Tsee………

Why does anime look “like that?”

• Astro Boy
• Kimba the White Lion
• Sazae-san
• World Masterpiece Theater
• Lupin III

Should at least be a start. Those first two are works of Osamu Tezuka, the “godfather of manga”, so they were especially influential in creating the standard practices and visual language of anime and manga.

You can also check out Aggretsuko and Kemono Friends as two anime that buck the typical “anime style” in one way or another, and also Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, which will come up again later.

Why are there so many cute girls?

To trace the historical development of moé and “waifu” culture, these works in order:

• Urusei Yatsura
• Gunbuster
• Project A-Ko
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Azumanga Daioh
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Lucky Star
• K-On!

While you’re already watching so many shows by Kyoto Animation, you might as well throw in Nichijou and Clannad, too.

You can also take a swing after Evangelion to watch

• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
• Kill la Kill
• Little Witch Academia

I just wanna know the memes!

• Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
• Kaguya-sama: Love is War
• SPY x FAMILY
• Toradora
• Steins;Gate

These are anime that are either extremely popular today or were extremely popular in the 2000s or 2010s, and spawned a lot of enduring Internet memes.

Edit: Ghost Stories is known for its dub, but like… Honestly, it’s probably better subbed. The hashtag edgy jokes in the dub can be funny as clips but it’s kinda tedious to watch as a show IMO.

Tell me about some auteurs or great directors!

You’ve already seen or been recommended other works of Satoshi Kon (Paprika, Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers etc) and Shin’ichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop), so to add to them I will mention Paranoia Agent and Samurai Champloo. The latter is also notable for being a major inspiration on The Boondocks.

Your Name is the first of Makoto Shinkai’s “disaster trilogy”.

Akiyuki Shinbo is a famous anime director known for frequent use of techniques like collage. Some of his most famous works include Bakemonogatari, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Hidamari Sketch.

Other works of Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki have already come up elsewhere in this thread, so I will mention

• Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• Spirited Away
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• My Neighbor Totoro
• Grave of the Fireflies

There’s also these works of Mamoru Oshii:

• Angel’s Egg
• Patlabor
• Ghost in the Shell
• Urusei Yatsura

If you’re already watching Urusei Yatsura, and have already seen Ranma ½, you might as well add Maison Ikkoku and InuYasha to your list as other adaptations of Rumiko Takahashi, one of the most successful women manga artists of all time.

Introduce me to some genres!

For magical girls (mahô shôjo):

• Cardcaptor Sakura
• Ojamajo Doremi
• Precure
• Tokyo Mew Mew

For anime aimed at girls where the girls aren’t magical: Kodocha has my personal recommendation, Fruits Basket is extremely popular.

For idol anime, there’s Idolmaster and Love Live.

For iyashikei, there’s Yuru Camp, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and ARIA.

For yuri, Kase-san and Morning Glories and Bloom Into You.

Anything else?

Stop!! Hibari-kun! is notable for having a pretty well-written transfem protagonist for an 80s anime.

Summer Wars is a movie I never cared for, but a lot of other people like it.

And also, everything everybody else has mentioned in this thread.

Edit: Added and moved around a few titles; I wrote this in a bit of a hurry.

7 hours until we finish our three-week exploration of Sámi TV and cinema with Ante, a children’s drama miniseries that revolutionized Sámi representation in media, created at the height of the Alta dam conflict and critiquing contemporary assimilatory residential schools with shocking realism. I wrote the subtitles myself, because the actual official English subs are nowhere to be found online (copyright delenda est). There is also a feature film version of Ante from 1976, but I couldn’t find that, either, so we’re watching the miniseries.

After Ante, a very well-animated fanime called Supernova ☆ about four lucid dreamers battling monsters in their shared dream.

Bringing this back to my own first comment in this thread: This is precisely why out of all the forms of independent animation out there, I love fanime specifically so much. A work like Tokyo Crystal Mew is particularly illustrative and interesting to look at from this perspective: the way it was never finished, but later videos by the creator indicate that a lot more of the series was planned/made than was released; the way that the first two episodes were remade as the artist honed her skills; the way the visuals go from storyboards to very rough MS Paint drawings to very well-done black and white line animation to very well-done full-color animation, often in the same episode; and the knowledge in the back of your mind that the creator started the series I believe as a preteen and posted the last episode in her late teens, and you can see this in how the quality of the whole show tends to improve as it goes on. Something like Tokyo Crystal Mew is basically a celebration of imperfection and incompleteness, of creativity for creativity’s sake; and it basically challenges anyone who sees it to try making their own animation, even if it looks rough, or the writing isn’t all there, or you never finish it, making something is still better than nothing. You know?

I dunno if this makes sense, but it’s like fanime is Kamina telling you the viewer/Simon to believe in the Kamina that believes in you, to do the impossible see the invisible, row row fight the power. And that’s what I like about it: the unbridled human creativity, the unabashed reflections of pedestrian subjectivities.

Yes, very well said! I’m glad that we can have this sort of frank and enlightening discussion, I always appreciate your comments specifically.

Ai-yai-yai. Some people pick the absolute strangest hills to die on. In cases like this, my first thought after Carl started going on about how “the ‘fuck off’ was unprovoked” was “Is this guy autistic? Is this why he can’t understand how he comes across to others? Does he really not see how he was being condescending in that first comment?” — but as the comments kept continuing, and continuing, and continuing, and people angrily yet patiently explained over and over again what the problem was… no, he was just being a dick! I mean, not that there’s a dichotomy between being autistic and being a dick, but you know what I mean.

My second thought then went to that viral video of the middle aged man on the Tokyo Metro yelling to complete strangers about how “THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO IS FULL OF IDIOTS!!! WHY DON’T YOU THINK THEY ARE?!? GIVE ME PROOF!!!” — which was obviously a public disturbance that wasn’t right to do, but obviously there’s a reason why he did that, right? Explanations I’ve heard being that he was either fired from UTokyo earlier that day, or more dramatically that his daughter had been killed by surgical error earlier that day and he was blaming it on the surgeons’ education. These are just unsubstantiated rumors, but either way there was something that made a lot of anger build up inside that man until he ended up having a public outburst that was unfortunate enough to be filmed, and unfortunate enough to make it past the general noise of the Internet to become an enduring meme.

It’s going to be similar in cases like this, surely. I’ve remarked before on how I think a lot of Hexbears live in materially challenging, stressful life situations, and that can make people emotionally volatile and prone to die on random hills like this. At the same time, there is probably some element of wanting or being used to power in Carl’s case — I don’t know — but there’s definitely a lot of ageist/ableist/elitist brainworms he has stubbornly refused to acknowledge, much less confront. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for him.

The thing about alienation driving people to kids’ media has been on my mind too lately, as a long-term fan of kids’ cartoons who recently read The Catcher in the Rye. — I mean, becoming an adult means being thrown into this whole alienating machine that is being a worker under capitalism, right? And this fact practically gives working class adults a pathological fixation on the people who haven’t yet been thrown into the capitalist machine, namely children, and by extent children’s things. The form this fixation takes varies between adults based on their individual circumstance and disposition, like some people might proudly be fans of children’s media, some people might bitterly despise children out of envy, whatever it may be; but the fixation is always there and cut from the same cloth in any case, because being an adult necessarily means existing in relationship to children as an individual actor in the social institution of age, no different from how men are pathologically fixated on women, cis people on trans people, the unracialized on the racialized, et cetera.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around―nobody big, I mean―except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff―I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.” —Holden Caulfield

@Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net I will show Nuummioq on July 18 and Maison Ikkoku: Apartment Fantasy on August 15. I will assume I have your permission unless you state otherwise.

Edit: Lemmygradwontallowme confirms on Matrix that this is OK.

I have taken a few hours to do some fun things and hopefully calm myself down a bit, lest I get unnecessarily fired up about a cartoon I haven’t even seen more than a few minutes of and didn’t particularly like from that limited experience. What I’ll say is that there is a valid point that you’re trying to make, which is that people shouldn’t be reading only YA until they’re 35. I would agree that people need to challenge themselves and “nurture the ability to be serious.” But your actually valid point here is just getting completely muddied by this whole condescending superiority complex you have, the brainworms around age making you unnecessarily hostile, and also that you assume what other people mean instead of letting them explain themselves. I did actually click like on your first comment: I thought you were being very unnecessarily condescending, and the person you were replying to was in their right to tell you to fuck off for that, but if you’d just left your comment at you finding the writing in TADC to be too on the nose with the characters always spelling out their feelings, then that would’ve been a perfectly valid critique of the work. I mean, I’ve heard people say that Moby Dick is on the nose with its symbolism, and it is! All the symbolism in that book is spelled out for you, yet it’s still considered a classic and I’ve enjoyed it. I also find House, MD to have very on the nose writing with the characters’ emotions being constantly spelled out for you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like House, it just means that that aspect of it does irritate me a bit. And I thought at first that when you said “baby’s first”, you were referring to the writers, not the viewers — because the writing in TADC is going to suffer a bit from the fact that it’s an independent production, right? My understanding is that projects like TADC are made at least partially to build portfolios for the people who work on them, so the most masterful episodic writing won’t be found in independent animation of any kind, writers in independent animation are still finding their footing and honing their skills. But no, you were referring to the viewers as babies!

All that Doubtingtammy said was “the overall plot explores cartesian skepticism/dualism, much like the Matrix (and I Have No Mouth…)” — which is a very different claim from saying that TADC is a “benchmark for good writing”: that claim is entirely your own invention pulled from thin air. Doubtingtammy didn’t even assert that they thought that TADC explored those themes well or even intentionally, just that they thought that the themes were there, and likely inspired by those previous works, and a reason why they found it surprising that young people liked the show. We can maybe infer that Doubtingtammy thought that those themes were explored “well” in TADC, but “well” in what sense? “Well” for a work of contemporary independent animation, or “well” for any work of fiction in any genre or medium, ever? Doubtingtammy didn’t specify, but I would’ve assumed the former, and I guess you must’ve assumed the latter and just run with your interpretation. The least you could’ve done is asked why Doubtingtammy had that reading of the work instead of jumping right to calling them an emotionally stunted adult baby. Isn’t critical consumption of media all about backing up your analysis using the text?!

In conclusion, I want to say that there doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between enjoying “mature” and “immature” things. I’m assuming that Doubtingtammy has read a lot more books and seen a lot more shows and movies than just the ones mentioned in their first comment, and many of those unmentioned works probably are things you’d consider much more well-written than TADC. People should learn to read more than just YA, but that doesn’t mean losing the ability to enjoy YA! YA doesn’t have to become boring just because there are other things you can read, you just need to be able to appreciate YA for what it is. You know? Like, I like Ante (1975) for what it is — a groundbreaking representation of Sámi issues in the popular culture of Norway — but that doesn’t mean I think a 70s live action kids’ show is the best thing since sliced bread, it really isn’t.

It’s just a good thing that some people are able to like things that other people can’t.

A second season has already been confirmed, I heard!

Oh, absolutely, there’s no question about that.

Time to put a copy of The Catcher in the Rye on this kid’s desk so he can finally have a story about a straight cis teen boy wearing a mask of cruel cynicism and emotionally distant toxic masculinity, and see what happens!

I’m yet to see the Akane-banashi anime, and I’ve only read a bit of the manga, but what I’ve read of the manga has slapped. “Jugemu” is of course a much much older story in real-life rakugo, though, referenced in a lot of Japanese pop culture from Super Mario to Fullmetal Alchemist.

Personally, I would dismiss anyone complaining about “emotionally stunted adult children” out of hand as a form of reactionary nonsense. “Arrested development”, by which I mean people being stuck in life situations seemingly broadly unchanged since high school, and left unable to attain any of the typical markers of adulthood, is an issue that impacts countless people; but it is a systemic issue of our mode of production literally pricing people out of adulthood. This issue won’t get solved by yelling at strangers over the Internet for watching cartoons — doing so is counterproductive in fact! The cartoons, as a matter of fact, are a complete “goddam” non-issue, unless you’re already fully programmed into some depressing idea of “adulthood” meaning that one must become a drone of capital that decries any form of whimsy or creativity, because you need to appear Sophisticated™ and Mature™ at all times. Are we really going to return to the brony struggle session of 2023?

Bangers, I’ll join — how long is that until?

The person you’re replying to said they were in their mid 30s in the comment you replied to, so perhaps he hwa beareþ þe Aqua Teen Hunger Force profile Picture sholde not be þrowynge Stanes in his owne glass Hus when it comes to media literacy. I see you walked back your “adult baby” comment with that edit, too.