Cartoons (Part 1)

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I rewatched the Rebuild movies recently and the way they give up on following the original series’ plotline in favour of wildly divergent stories is certainly compelling but I have a hard time finding an emotional resonance with them. Think it might take the finale to see how I squarely feel about them.

I definitely appreciate the effort in adding further details and texture to its setting, the second especially has some good stuff in that respect. That’s also the one where the story veers wildly from the original by the end of it, the third one is utterly novel.

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what a waste of a great property on a no budget manga trace

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they should’ve pushed even further into inferno cop vibes

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i think i might have posted this before, but it’s really a shame i didn’t have any way of watching inuyasha as a teen, because every episode i watch of yashahime, i think “i would have loved this when i was 14”

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god I wish Yashahime was that good

Listening to Rebuild soundtracks on Spotify and was surprised to hear covers of the Kare Kano music in there as though it was a shared universe somehow. And I was a bit startled to find myself much more nostalgic for Kare Kano than Evangelion, it’s probably time to give it a rewatch (if I can find a good version somewhere)

It comes down to micro-details that I can’t pin down but Miyazawa’s character design is somehow iconic isn’t it

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Also after 2 decades this is still a gif I can hear, Miyazawa-as-narrator saying: oouso da. (Huge lie)

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3.0 has Nadia music in there too if I remember it right

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kare kano mostly holds up better than the manga its adapted from, tbh

In some ways, it feels like where the animators were building up all the stylistic elements that would go into FLCL

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christ im so sick of evangelion

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legend of calamity jane is a late 90s western cartoon that got cancelled after three episodes(in the us. it aired fully in canada and a few other countries). there’s vhs rips on youtube, and i recommend you go seek them out, it’s really good

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hell yeah

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megalobox was GOOD and i always hear people thought it was dismal

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i watched the first episode of vlad love last night, the new mamoru oshii series that’s just really dense with like, japanese politics and heady allegory about what it means to be hu–

ok actually it’s a slapstick yuri comedy about a vampire who won’t drink from humans because she feels too irresponsible to take care of a thrall, so instead she shacks up with the protagonist, a tired eyed weirdo with a blood donation kink who gets really upset when people talk about her having a blood kink except she wears a jacket that says “i have a blood kink” at all times.

it’s visually all over the place, using picture-in-picture cutouts over gorgeous watercolour bgs, except sometimes the cutout is just a lingering still of some lips while a different character monologues in another cutout. sometimes people monologue in multiple cutouts at once from different angles. the whole thing flows like a dream, hopping from location to location without much regard for connecting any of it together. there’s a belligerent school nurse decked out in latex and obsessed with collecting “rare blood” and nobody seems to really comment on it. the vampire girl’s last name is literally Transylvania

(i don’t know where the subs in these screenshots are from but the ones on crunchyroll are much better lol)

i don’t know if it’s actually like … good? but “horny, dumb and visually inventive” is usually my kind of thing so i’m liking it so far?

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…this all sounds not out of place for his Urusei Yatsura work.

He did some really good comedy directing before his grim explorations of the militarization of the police, and much of it was horny.

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yeah! i was going to mention that junji nishimura (director of ranma & assistant director on beautiful draemers) is co-directing this but as those are still on my “really should get around to watching this” list i wasn’t sure how accurate the comparison would be

I had to give this a shot and it’s weird how rapidly it ossolates between bog standard horny moe comedy stuff and attempts to do creative animation choices on the cheap.

The opening being a bunch of riot gear cops busting open a shopping crate on a rainy night after a long helicopter shot of a skyline tickled me in the context of this show, I gotta day.

Also this

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made a strange mistake last night of seeing that there was a “South Park Vaccination Special” and weirdly feeling compelled to check it out. it’s been probably over a decade since i’ve seen an episode of South Park that i thought was funny (or maybe even watched, in general), and so i guess some part of me felt like maybe this one would be fun or something.

anyway, i couldn’t make it more than about 7 minutes into it lol. i mean idk what i was expecting, but it was very not funny and all the characters sound…weird, now.

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a weird thing to me is that i feel like i must have watched hundreds of episodes of south park when i was younger - my brother got a set of pirated dvd-rs on ebay which had the entire show to that point - but the one single joke i can remember from any of them is when the cop character pulls over a visiting celebrity to ask if they know fiona apple.

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