Anime/Manga - Discuss Japanese cartoons and comics here; NO CULTURE WAR DOOMPOSTING!

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For me, it was watching a lot of the kiddie anime dubs from the late 1990's and very early 2000's. I grew up with shitty independent cable at my house at first, so we didn't get Cartoon Network for a while, so I had to watch Toonami at my grandparents' house until we finally did get Cartoon Network on Satellite TV.

So most of my early anime exposure was through a mix of Fox Kids, Kids WB!, Fox Family, and old late 80's/early 90's anime OVA VHS tapes my uncle had (you know the kind of old OVA's I'm talking about, the ones with the graphic violence, excessive fanservice, and the profanity-laden dubs), with Cartoon Network/Toonami being a secondary source of anime at the time.

My main childhood anime shows were Digimon, Sailor Moon (I remember when it was aired on USA before moving to Toonami), Cardcaptors, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and even the stuff that is obscure nowadays like Monster Rancher and Flint The Time Detective.

Never watched much Pokemon as a kid as I was a Digimon fan, but in my school there was an unwritten playground rule that you couldn't like both. You had to pick one or the other, and I preferred Digimon. My little brother liked Pokemon though and we had the first movie on VHS.

Then we got Direct TV back in the early 2000's and around 2003-2004, I discovered Adult Swim and got to enjoy the heyday of Adult Swim's anime block in the mid-2000's. Stuff like InuYasha, Fullmetal Alchemist, Ghost in the Shell, Lupin III, and the like. That cemented my status as an anime fan.

Sometimes, I wish I could go back to 2005 when I was a carefree twelve-year old staying up nearly every night to catch Adult Swim's anime block. But then again, a lot of that stuff is available to watch on streaming media and the internet, so it's not all bad.
 
Well this might seem a little shocking, but I actually didn't really get into anime until about 3 years ago. I had watched some before, but it was mainly just animes based on video games like Pokemon, Sonic X, or Kirby Right Back At Ya. It wasn't until March of 2015 when I discovered a little show called Cardcaptor Sakura which despite not really being interested in most animes before, this one actually seemed to intrigued me, so I thought "Well I suppose one anime wouldn't hurt" ... by the end of that same year I probably already binged through like 50 or 60 different shows.
 
While we already know the story, I always like it when people go out of their way to explain it!
 
ForgedBlades said:
Out of curiosity, what got you guys into anime? Not sure if this has been discussed, but I'd be curious to know, and would be interested in any cool stories. Was it just watching Pokémon/Digimon/Yugioh as a kid, or something else?

I'm weird, as I didn't really get interested in it until my late 20s. I was on a big JRPG kick for some reason, and absolutely fell in love out of nowhere with the Legend of Heroes series. I went seeking something, anything with a similar style and themes, and I guess I came to the epiphany that anime was a good place to find it. I had never watched anything before outside of a few episodes of Pokémon as a kid, but I sat down and binged FMA:B over three days and was instantly hooked. This led me to other normalfag series like Death Note, AoT, Cowboy Bebop, Eva, etc., etc., etc.

What's surprised me the most is the scope of what anime and manga is. I had fallen into the trap of believing the stereotype that pervades the west of everything being moe loli trash or stuff for autistic children, but there's just so much stuff out there. Saying "I don't like anime" is akin to saying "I don't like TV," or "I don't like books." It's too general a statement.

This revelation also creates a sense of frustration that I will likely never be a guru in the hobby. It's too wide and too deep, and I started too late to ever have a full grasp of it. I go to /a/ and even lurk this thread, and I barely understand half of what is being talked about. As a general rule, if they don't sell t-shirts of it at Hot Topic, I probably can't engage in a meaningful conversation about it. And that pisses me off, because I love the medium and the culture that surrounds it, but the time needed to become fluent would be tantamount to a full time job.

But I keep pushing on. I'm usually trucking through one or two classic series at a time, while keeping up on a current season show. I've also cultivated a small, but respectable manga collection over the last couple of years, which has kept me sane as my hobby of collecting vidya has sadly been put on the back burner for the time being.

So yeah, that's my story I wrote to kill time while I'm at the laundromat. How about you guys?
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I just had a realization while pondering your question: I don't remember a time in my life when I wasn't watching an anime.

My childhood was defined by dubbed versions of Captain Tsubasa, Grendizer, Mazinger, and most importantly, Iga no Kabamaru, because its ninja-based premise fed into my other childhood obsession: TMNT.

Later on I watched stuff like Detective Conan (Which I still follow today). Eventually, after I finished Uni, I started watching the big three shonens: Naruto, One Piece and Bleach, and the rest is history..

Also, The Legend of Heroes series is really awesome, and I intend to start a thread about it in the Games subforum.
 
Human Institute Director said:
Akagi is so fucking good. I surprisingly liked it better than Kaiji and Kurosawa. I wish the rest of the manga would get adapted too.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4FOAVlqDBP0
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The first half of Akagi's anime is good. I read all of the manga (and finished it recently) and wow, Fukumoto was surprisingly incompetent with how he handled Washizu. When your series is a prequel you do not need 30 volumes of the same mahjong match on the same night to convey the seriousness of it, especially when the chapters just became Washizu monologuing about "I WILL KILL YOU AKAGI, I WILL KILL YOU DEAD, YOU'LL DIE, BECAUSE I WILL HAVE KILLED YOU," Akagi discards a tile, then Washizu flips out with "IMPOSSIBLE, I AM IWAO WASHIZU, HOW COULD THIS TRASH DEFEAT ME" and then the chapters end with him going "NO... I'M NOT DONE YET." The ending for the manga was just flat out garbage, which is mystifying considering Fukumoto spent 21 years building up to it.

The rest of the manga is unadaptable past where the anime goes except for like the last six chapters. A full 24-episode season of just Washizu Mahjong would be unwatchable.
 
Coster said:
The first half of Akagi's anime is good. I read all of the manga (and finished it recently) and wow, Fukumoto was surprisingly incompetent with how he handled Washizu. When your series is a prequel you do not need 30 volumes of the same mahjong match on the same night to convey the seriousness of it, especially when the chapters just became Washizu monologuing about "I WILL KILL YOU AKAGI, I WILL KILL YOU DEAD, YOU'LL DIE, BECAUSE I WILL HAVE KILLED YOU," Akagi discards a tile, then Washizu flips out with "IMPOSSIBLE, I AM IWAO WASHIZU, HOW COULD THIS TRASH DEFEAT ME" and then the chapters end with him going "NO... I'M NOT DONE YET." The ending for the manga was just flat out garbage, which is mystifying considering Fukumoto spent 21 years building up to it.

The rest of the manga is unadaptable past where the anime goes except for like the last six chapters. A full 24-episode season of just Washizu Mahjong would be unwatchable.
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Washizu was the best part for me, maybe because I could read it all without waiting for the next chapters. It starts being slow about halfway, but that's fine with me, since I can read the manga at the pace I want, that just means more pictures and less words cramed into single panels so we avoid a Hunter x Hunter case. I'm always a big fan of Fukumoto monologues so seeing so many of those only improved the experience for me. In this case most of them are about Washizu's murderous intent/Akagi's madness, but I consider those to be the main themes of the story: how Akagi and Washizu see and experience death. That's how Washizu develops a lot over the course of this single night, and how we get to see a lot more of Akagi's personality. It's slow, but also very consistent and with tons of nuances, which is what I'd consider great writing.

In terms of gambling and tactics, Washizu was one of the best things Fukumoto wrote, alongside Kaiji part 3 and Ten. The psychology is rock solid, I especially like how everyone in the room start fearing Akagi more and more to the point of overthinking everything he does, which was a nice change of paradigm. And a single gargantuan 250 chapters gamble where the protagonist could die at any moment while the villain has almost unlimited funds? That's pretty awesome.

Didn't like the last 10 chapters, just like you. It'd have been perfect if it ended at 296.
 
Now that you mention it, I love Hunter x Hunter, but it's basically a novel now: So much dialogue and so, so many characters to the point that I can't keep track of it all. At least the current arc is getting somewhere now after so much preamble..
 
Human Institute Director said:
Washizu was the best part for me, maybe because I could read it all without waiting for the next chapters. It starts being slow about halfway, but that's fine with me, since I can read the manga at the pace I want, that just means more pictures and less words cramed into single panels so we avoid a Hunter x Hunter case. I'm always a big fan of Fukumoto monologues so seeing so many of those only improved the experience for me. In this case most of them are about Washizu's murderous intent/Akagi's madness, but I consider those to be the main themes of the story: how Akagi and Washizu see and experience death. That's how Washizu develops a lot over the course of this single night, and how we get to see a lot more of Akagi's personality. It's slow, but also very consistent and with tons of nuances, which is what I'd consider great writing.

In terms of gambling and tactics, Washizu was one of the best things Fukumoto wrote, alongside Kaiji part 3 and Ten. The psychology is rock solid, I especially like how everyone in the room start fearing Akagi more and more to the point of overthinking everything he does, which was a nice change of paradigm. And a single gargantuan 250 chapters gamble where the protagonist could die at any moment while the villain has almost unlimited funds? That's pretty awesome.

Didn't like the last 10 chapters, just like you. It'd have been perfect if it ended at 296.
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The thing is though, Fukumoto isn't writing an action series carried by the art. A hallmark of his ability as a mangaka is writing extremely psychological stories with art that's just enough to get by (not to trash him because he does exaggeration well, but his art is very simple). The psychology of Washizu was good, but it's sunk not only by the amount of time it takes for it to reach its conclusion but also because everyone knew how the match was going to end because Akagi's a prequel. Your argument almost holds up in the case of it being a life-or-death thing, but when the outcome is already preset then any momentum that could be gained from that is rapidly drained from it. For how minute each chapter becomes, even when binge-reading it, it's a slog. I actually play Riichi Mahjong and even with a fundamental understanding of the game it's just not a good read.

In the defense of the last 10 chapters? Akagi traveling with Osamu was actually really entertaining. Fukumoto decides in his closing chapters to suddenly humanize Akagi and provide depth to him. Osamu pointing out that Akagi needed him with him because Akagi is really socially inept was something that caught me so off-guard it made me enjoy Akagi as a character even more than I did. I just didn't like the final chapter, specifically, because it was such a non-conclusion that I felt like I had wasted all of my time at once waiting for the chapter to finally drop.
 
Coster said:
The thing is though, Fukumoto isn't writing an action series carried by the art. A hallmark of his ability as a mangaka is writing extremely psychological stories with art that's just enough to get by (not to trash him because he does exaggeration well, but his art is very simple). The psychology of Washizu was good, but it's sunk not only by the amount of time it takes for it to reach its conclusion but also because everyone knew how the match was going to end because Akagi's a prequel. Your argument almost holds up in the case of it being a life-or-death thing, but when the outcome is already preset then any momentum that could be gained from that is rapidly drained from it. For how minute each chapter becomes, even when binge-reading it, it's a slog. I actually play Riichi Mahjong and even with a fundamental understanding of the game it's just not a good read.

In the defense of the last 10 chapters? Akagi traveling with Osamu was actually really entertaining. Fukumoto decides in his closing chapters to suddenly humanize Akagi and provide depth to him. Osamu pointing out that Akagi needed him with him because Akagi is really socially inept was something that caught me so off-guard it made me enjoy Akagi as a character even more than I did. I just didn't like the final chapter, specifically, because it was such a non-conclusion that I felt like I had wasted all of my time at once waiting for the chapter to finally drop.
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Fukumoto stories are carried by writing and psychology, but the art (or rather the storyboarding) plays an important part in setting the tension, by creating a sense of pacing and heaviness behind each character's action. And the Washizu mahjong is, along with the Bog and Minefield Mahjong, one of Fukumoto's best ominous settings in my opinion. Doesn't matter that you know more or less how it's going to end, the same goes for Kaiji: you know there are parts after the one you're reading, so you know Kaiji can't die, but it still takes you by the guts. Because each event means something for the characters, so even if you have an idea of the general outcome you can empathize with their despair when something bad happens.
Speaking of mahjong, while Washizu mahjong wasn't as complex as this Fu-based Mangan in Ten, it was still easily one of Fukumoto's most sophisticated gamble (and obviously the longest) with Kaiji part 3 (haven't read part 5 yet, so I can't say anything about that).

Akagi traveling was interesting, but those chapters felt like an anticlimax compared what happened in the last round and could have been skipped altogether, but I think it's hinting at a sequel to cover Akagi's yakuza years.
 
Seriously if it wasn't for the insufferable male self insert Killing Bites would be animu of the year material in terms of mindless fun and entertainment. This show keeps on delivering.

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My favourite character by far is the commentator chick. How can you not like someone who commentates both fights to the death and lesbian sex acts with such passionate enthusiasm like some soccer commentators.
 
Fougaro said:
Seriously if it wasn't for the insufferable male self insert Killing Bites would be animu of the year material in terms of mindless fun and entertainment. This show keeps on delivering.

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My favourite character by far is the commentator chick. How can you not like someone who commentates both fights to the death and lesbian sex acts with such passionate enthusiasm like some soccer commentators.
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You got a winner right there. Kinda reminds me of Big Order on how much it was entertaining.
 
Human Institute Director said:
Fukumoto stories are carried by writing and psychology, but the art (or rather the storyboarding) plays an important part in setting the tension, by creating a sense of pacing and heaviness behind each character's action. And the Washizu mahjong is, along with the Bog and Minefield Mahjong, one of Fukumoto's best ominous settings in my opinion. Doesn't matter that you know more or less how it's going to end, the same goes for Kaiji: you know there are parts after the one you're reading, so you know Kaiji can't die, but it still takes you by the guts. Because each event means something for the characters, so even if you have an idea of the general outcome you can empathize with their despair when something bad happens.
Speaking of mahjong, while Washizu mahjong wasn't as complex as this Fu-based Mangan in Ten, it was still easily one of Fukumoto's most sophisticated gamble (and obviously the longest) with Kaiji part 3 (haven't read part 5 yet, so I can't say anything about that).

Akagi traveling was interesting, but those chapters felt like an anticlimax compared what happened in the last round and could have been skipped altogether, but I think it's hinting at a sequel to cover Akagi's yakuza years.
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Washizu Mahjong was a really gripping setting but it didn't require 30 volumes. Akagi convincing Washizu to start betting his blood was really cool, but there is so much that precedes that and follows it that the highlights of the game are marred by its overall awful pacing. Good writing does not make up for pacing that is almost definitive in how bad it is. We can joke about "5 minutes" in Dragon Ball Z or being stuck on the boat for 7 years in Berserk, but Washizu Mahjong was a gamble that took 21 years to conclude. The Kaiji comparison isn't apt because when Kaiji was running there's a legitimate fear that he won't succeed, but at no point with Akagi could you ever be uncertain of his victory if you knew Fukumoto's body of work.

I'll totally read yakuza Akagi. My saving grace of the closing chapters for Akagi was specifically that it wasn't Washizu Mahjong.
 


I am in love with the music for this series. Haven't really enjoyed a show's soundtrack this much since the original Fullmetal Alchemist.
 
I haven't watched the movie let alone go looking for reactions to it, but is Nina in it? How many people have dehydrated themselves over her for a gajillionth time?
 
Kari Kamiya said:
I haven't watched the movie let alone go looking for reactions to it, but is Nina in it? How many people have dehydrated themselves over her for a gajillionth time?
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She is, but the movie itself isn’t handled that great. Its way too rushed and oddly out of order in places, among other things. Just watch the Mother’s Basement review instead.
 
Not technically anime, but recently it came to my attention that the North Korean propaganda cartoon Squirrel and Hedgehog actually received an english dub for the first 26 episodes. Some Italian company called MondoTV licensed it and reedited it a little bit and re titled it Brave Soldier. The dub is credited to Kip Kaplan and Audioworks Producers Group, a new york dub studio. I'll be nice and not name any voice actors, but if you've watched any 4kids dub(Pokemon or Yugioh) you'll recognize most of the voice actors.

MondoTV was nice enough to share this with the world legally on youtube. Enjoy
 
SuicideIsPainless said:
Not technically anime, but recently it came to my attention that the North Korean propaganda cartoon Squirrel and Hedgehog actually received an english dub for the first 26 episodes. Some Italian company called MondoTV licensed it and reedited it a little bit and re titled it Brave Soldier. The dub is credited to Kip Kaplan and Audioworks Producers Group, a new york dub studio. I'll be nice and not name any voice actors, but if you've watched any 4kids dub(Pokemon or Yugioh) you'll recognize most of the voice actors.

MondoTV was nice enough to share this with the world legally on youtube. Enjoy https://youtube.com/watch?v=id=HfND3QxVzcQ;list=PL-6jVU2Xd3NTGtNvkZNbf45xQEP06op-y
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It's quite a challenge getting through this if you already saw these. Of course they'll have snipping things out!

Speaking of dubbing foreign material to English, I noticed the former Soviet Union attempted this with "Nu, Pogodi!" to interesting results.

A few more here...
 
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