the comic was carried by Toriyama’s confidence in his illustration, his skill with form and panel composition enabled him to just make any kind of visual gag work, and it translated naturally to animation, and everything else just kind of siphoned off that animation to a degree. sorry I don’t really have a point to my post other than I like Dragon Ball a lot
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This is my fucking SHIT
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I mean anime has always been low budget productions chasing trends, with specific trends dominating particular demographics. The reason the good ones are good is because there’s always something good amongst all the crap.
For every gundam there were a dozen generic mecha shows, it got attention because it stood out from the crowd.
Similarly, even though there’s a lot of highly visible crap, Devilman Crybaby and Keep your Hands Off Eizoken are both incredible and really recent.
i’m kind of joking about the fall of anime, mostly. i think i am just reflecting on how missing out on DB as a kid means that a lot of stuff hit harder than if i had seen it. kind of like how when i first discovered there were all these unreleased games from Japan on retro consoles but then eventually realized that many of them are actually not very good, with some notable obvious exceptions (and occasional surprises).
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I don’t think it’s terribly contentious that anime production did bottom out sometime around the 2000s though – naively I would attribute it to a combination of 2D production pipelines dying off and their replacements being pretty cheap and comparatively unskilled for quite some time, plus the ascent of horrible moe aesthetics, but I’m sure others have a more prescise take on it than I do.
I will say that a lot of modern anime has been much better than I expected after being tuned out for a long time – Lupin part IV and V, almost all of Jojo, recent one-off stuff like Vlad Love or Godzilla Singular Point, Netflix’s Thermae Romae adaptation or even their Castlevania, is all like… extremely accessible and well-written and just fun
I think it’s because they have more money than the rest of the industry combined and they can colonize it at will but even so, Netflix’s anime production is very reliably good. like, the little Witcher prequel movie they produced was good, the recent Bubble movie even was pretty good. no complaints
treize is not sane. he’s rich
Insert “But Kinnikuman” grumbling here
Not that DB didn’t do its part in cementing some of them as well as introducing some stuff Kinnikuman didn’t.
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whatever alignment of planets got us that castlevania anglo dub, i wouldn’t mind if that happened again
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As far as UC stuff goes Id watch Origins and then if you care about the plot go to 0079, if you wanna see gundam in peak OVA quality watch 0083 Stardust Memory and if you like the gundamn but dont like space everyone likes 08th ms team.
The thing that zeta and future Gundamn fail to remember is that there are kids fighting because most of th the ‘fighting age’ adults are dead. The world and space is a depopulated hellzone because the cool robots are TOO GOOD. And the final battle should have been nearly it for all of the fighting machines and people. I dont know if there is something I don’t understand but Zeta has too many people and too much infrastructure for how 0079 ended. 0079 also deals with the less glamours issues of war like supply shortages and fatigue from constant battle. Elements which do not return in any gundam as far as I know. Which is a shame as its a really grounding way to create drama and conflict. 0079’s Amuro can get annoying but he has good reason to be, Zeta’s protagonist Kamille seems to mostly be annoying to be a stand in for Amuro.
I never started double zeat after pushing through to the end on single zeta. I hear people don’t like it.
I tried to get into Turn A but it seemed to have a lot of “humans dont talk like that” moments even for a gundam, which might just be the subs I had. Everyone naked now! Its got great designs for everything except the robots and the animation is just kinda bad in a weird way. like the tweening is choppy but the composition is good??? I dunno I watch a lot of awkward anime and its weird to have something I just cant with. Prolly has the best kid pilot in gundam. I can’t not recommend it because people really like it and I like reading about it.
G gundam looks fun and loud. I should check that out.
Wing is too dumb not to love. I dunno, it was my first gundam. Its a show where the protagonist will kill anyone that so much as sees his 50 foot tall robot. The char replacement has a robot call Tallgeese. Is it a goose? What WHAT Its so dumb and goes sooo hard.
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best show is back
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The guy who calls himself the god of death and dresses up like a priest all the time? Totally sane.
in my defense, the word “seem” is doing a lot of work in my post, as is saying they seem it in comparison to everyone else
but yes, the guy wearing the priest collar and acting like he’s the grim reaper is saner than the nameless guy who stole the name of a guy he murdered or the guy who named his robot after his dead wife or the woman with the split personalities triggered by putting on her glasses
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can I talk about the scene in Endless Waltz where a bunch of former Oz soldiers are watching a broadcast of the climatic battle on a jumbotron and talking shit about how the Gundam kids ain’t shit and then Dorothy, the girl with the eyebrows, walks into the scene and starts talking shit to them and going “put up or shut up” and one solder responds “I would but I don’t have a mobile suit” and she goes “yeah?” and then summons several trucks with guns and suits and the soldiers arm up
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there is clearly a point in Wing where the show has run out of plot and it’s like someone looked at the schedule and went “ah shit, we still have 11 weeks of airtime paid for” and so they have to invent some new organization (but not because they were the guys who concocted the original Operation Meteor) to poach Zechs (who isn’t Zechs anymore because his mask broke so now he’s just Milliardo Peacecraft) to reboot the “fuck Earth” plan
and this clearly isn’t even the most insane thing when you realize the response by Earth is to name his little sister Releena Queen of Earth
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I keep telling myself cartoons can’t hurt me
and yet
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Screenshots from Joshiraku keep filtering through my Tumblr feed. Does anybody know if there’s something worth watching there…?
I have the blue ray and have only seen 3-4 episodes. It has some really fun bits but kinda dry when trying to fill in a whole 30 minutes. It’s based off a comic from the same author as Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and you can feel a similar flow of the comedy (weird observation or societal cometary and then seeing how far they can push the bit) but no where near as dense as the SZS adaptation. I feel like you can get most of what you want out of watching a curated selection of clips to get the highlights faster but certainly not an unpleasant show. I still think about the shows plight for animators that work so hard on low stakes slice of life shows.
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