Yeah, Future Boy Conan is a full series directed by Miyazaki. Totally overlooked.

Rose of Versailles is amazing.

So, in summary, anything by Leiji Matsumoto, Go Nagai, and Hayao Miyazaki, plus Rose of Versailles. I see.

(I've already seen Castle of Cagliostro, btw. Any chance that it might come out on Blu-Ray in America?)

Honestly, add Dezaki to the big dogs there. He is probably above and beyond my favorite "series" director that wasn't exclusive to movies. He always had an insanely awesome style, and used the still shots better than anyone else (Japan seems to call them "harmony")... Rose of Versailles, Nobody's Boy Remi, Treasure Island, Space Adventure Cobra, Ace wo Nerae! (finally fully subbed just recently), the old Golgo 13 movies, lots of Black Jack material, Onii-sama e..., etc... you just simply can't go wrong with Dezaki!

I crave for the day that Ashita no Joe is finally fully subbed, that together with the second season, over 100+ episodes of Dezaki greatness? Oh man.

Ryosuke Takahashi is another one of my favorites, especially because of his 80's mecha stuff. His shows were so much more serious than the rest. I always dreamed of this combo, but despite being pretty up there in age he's still keeping busy and will be directing some new Leiji Matsumoto series coming up. It's gonna be amazing I'm sure.

Sadly not all of Go Nagai stuff is great, while I do enjoy Cutey Honey, The original Devil Man, and Mazinger Z, stuff like Violence Jake I would stay clear of.

Also add Rintaro to that list of great directors, while I might have not enjoyed his X movie (Gorgeous film but it makes no fucking sense), most of his other stuff is really good.

Don't Forget to check Kotetsu Jeeg and Gakeen if you haven't.

Another quality ol' mechas you can search are Daimos, Raideen, Dumbine, Getter Robo, Combattler V and Voltes V.

I liked what I saw of Mazinger Z, what didn't you like about it?

Granted, the manga is only 5 volumes I think, turned into 90 some episodes... so yeah, haha. Lots of filler I'm sure...

Sorry I meant that I do enjoy all 3 of those (cutey honey, devilman, and Mazinger Z) I was just saying how bad Violence Jack was! haha

Mazinger Z is really cheesy, but it's also pretty damn entertaining.


I got a question for all of you, were or are you guys part of an anime club? Either in school or off campus, do you guys partake in a club?

Neither my high school nor Penn State Altoona had an anime club. I was stuck on my own.

And knowing how backward this area is, the only shows people around here would show would be dull and passé.

I hate to be so judgmental, but no matter how much I watch and big of a fan I am, I think visiting an anime club is the last thing I'd want to do. My friends go to a lot of cons though, I'll probably consider that someday.

Also finally watched the Berserk anime myself over the weekend, literally watched the whole thing in about two days haha. Wow, it was not quite what I expected it to be like... and that ending was beyond fucking fucked up. Holy balls Griffith, never have I hated (in a good way, author's intent I'm sure) a character so much. I know why Guts is fucking furious in all the artwork now.

Gonna hit up the manga soon.

Cons are always, always a lot of fun. Last year I went to GenCon, and while the anime events were few, they were some of the best times I've had in years.

Hit it fast. Despite its frustrating ending, the anime is still one of my favorites, and the manga is glorious. The past few volumes have toned down the grimdark nature of the series in favor of being a more straight-up action series, but it's still done really well. The point where the anime ends is still probably the darkest point in the story thus far.

@Xeo, Yeah the ending blew hard, but it's still one of my favourite series. Really enjoyed the story, and I thought the old-school animation really boosted the atmosphere, and made the show much grittier. I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much if the animation was really flashy and modern.

But I agree with you, fuck Griffith. He became a slave to his ambitions, and by the end he was totally a lost cause.

I'd like to read the manga sometime, but I'm not really sure when that'll become possible.

Diving a little into the manga and it's amazing so far. I've heard all about how the manga kind of loses itself eventually, but oh well. I'm sure it'll be a fun ride so I might just seriously read all of it, this guys art is too good. Reading it with Unreal / UT music works really well... haha (I think these OST's go good with anything, loved it while reading Gunnm too).

Definitely one of my new favorites as well I'd say. Probably one of the deepest friendship x rivalries I've ever seen in a series, damn. So much weight there...

The new movie doesn't look that great at a glance though. The art and character designs look terrible from samples I'm seeing around, yikes...

GenCon is the one my friends go to, I'll have to check it out sometime.

There wasn't one when I was in high school, but I wish there was. I think there's one at the university near me, but I'm afraid of the backlash I'd get from wanting to watch something that was made before 2003. Not that I think ALL new anime is terrible, but I can tell that I'm a little more old-school in my tastes.



What I do is make my local library pick up them all up (if you're not up for less legitimate methods, of course). While your "Location" says "Ever Changing," I wouldn't be surprised if your local library had the series in their graphic novel section. You could just walk in and read them there if you don't want to check them out. Of course, I'm speaking within the context of the US. However, while I have no idea about libraries in other countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they had graphic novel sections, too, especially in Europe. Just a thought.

I should've mentioned, this is probably the biggest reason why I'm apathetic about approaching any clubs or whatnot myself. I remember my friend dressed up as someone from LOGH last year or something, nobody had a damn clue who he was from what he told me. lol...

But yeah, I'm one who finds it hilarious when people call stuff from the 90's ancient and it's disturbing how many people out there won't even watch old shows because they're... old.

Even if the desire to watch older anime is strong, there are plenty of newer anime to watch in Anime Club to keep the club going for years. A-Assuming, of course, you watch 1-3 episodes per session and meet once or twice a week.

But the sad fact remains that times change and newer fans aren't as interested in the older stuff as we are, because, well, that older stuff wasn't 'older stuff' when we became fans. We were just as into the shiny new shows of our day as the new kids are into theirs.

EDIT: God, now I'm getting flashbacks from GenCon's "Name That Anime Tune" event, where we took turns listening to an anime opening theme and had to guess what it was from. I was among the 3 winners (out of about 40 contestants) because we just kept getting them right until they ran out of songs. Anyway, I remember being absolutely livid when the Cowboy Bebop opening theme eluded TWO PEOPLE. But in the end, it was the most fun I had at GenCon, and easily the most fun I've had in almost a decade.

Well this is true and not so true to an extent, some people just need to broaden their horizons or do their own research into the medium to discover the goods. I definitely don't ask or think watching old stuff makes someone a better fan, but they should at least give stuff a chance. But basically what I'm getting at here is that when I grew up or whatnot, it was just Toonami... but there was no Touch, Maison, or whatnot airing on TV, or heck half of the pre-90's stuff out there really since half of them aren't even licensed/dubbed. So despite being very old, watching all this old stuff was a "new" venture for me and still is to this day with a lot of stuff. If that makes any sense at all.

Maybe it was Iria, Armitage, Bubblegum Crisis, etc... or something, but I never really batted an eye at release dates when it came to watching stuff and just easily really got into old stuff pretty quickly.

But I'll stop there because it's been such a long week and I don't even know what I'm trying to say anymore!

As a person who founded an anime club and is still President, I will say that a lot of newer anime fans tend to not see the older shows. For our first meeting I showed GunXSword, Working, and then ended with Outlaw Star, most the new kids had no idea what that show was. I remember one girls saying how the animation was "Old" and not pretty. THen again I remember Toonami coming out when I was in high school and these kids were only like 8 or 9 when it came on.

When running an anime club, I tend to make it appealing for all. I always hated how anime clubs would mostly continue watching shows from previous week. I always felt it excluded others or newer members. This is why every week I show NEW shows (old and new ones), shows people have not seen at all. I make it a purpose to expose people to shows they would never branch on their own. I showed the club Bartender and everyone ended up loving it. We did our year traditional Golden Boy Marathon and everyone was laughing their asses off. If you have a good leader and good members the club can be extremely fun, but there is always gonna be some douche bags who will ruin it or make it worse, that's why they don't come back if you keep them in place.

Like I said, i have been in clubs where everyone were fucking dweebs and were lame, but if you have good leadership and are able to COMMUNICATE (very important) with people then it can run fine. But I do have to say keep watching newer and older shows to people. A club is a great to get introduce to something you probably never heard or seen.

also this is our website:

http://www.nauanimeclub.com/

That's quite nice. Good to read that someone's making use out of a club. The UW one I went to in Seattle had me laughing my ass off for the first day and then I bailed immediately after. Just a bunch of peace-sign waving douches that are all on the top 5 most popular anime bandwagons. Sad as hell. All the non-Sakura / Nami jizzing fanboys that I've met in real life are the guys that lived in my dorm that were into the gritty stuff. But not only that, they were OPEN to at least hearing what I had to say regarding other animes and they'd actually show some continuity in discussion when we'd meet on another day or something. They had an attention span longer than one conversation - what I'm essentially saying.

Then again, I'm not one to complain. I've been on a huge DB / DBZ gushing period since I overcame my incredibly awkward reactions to hentai related to the anime. I WON! That's why I've been on rule34 / deviantart / won't-say-the-name-of-the-forum for the past week.

I saw anime massively for some years, with some friends where we played roleplaying games. I also conducted (mastered as we call it here) full sessions for things like Cyberpunk, Vampire: Masquerade and lately The Trail of Cthulhu. I still watch series and look for new things tho.

About the new anime, I haven't found too many really good ones. I'm also sick of the ecchi and teenage romance-like animes which seems a plague nowadays and some new anime/movies that rip off older series shamelessly and get an undeserved praise like Jigoku Shoujo or Inception.

There are some really good "Newer shows", by new I mean stuff between 2001-present, some good shows to check out are:

Kinos Journey
Baccano!
All Key titles (Air, Kanon, Clannad)
Human Crossing
Noir
Texhnolyze
Shigurui: Death Frenzy (this one is very gritty)
Phantom
Angel Beats
Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya
Gungrave
Gankutsuo: The Count of Monti Cristo
Haibane Renmei
Welcome to the NHK
Steins; Gate
Eden of the East
Eve no Jikan (time of Eve)
Planetes
Bartender
Kara No Kyokai: The Garden of Sinners
Detroit Metal City (a hilarious show on heavy metal)



These are just several titles I recommend, I tend to like these kind of shows more then the typical Shounen action shows.

Here's a few that I think you're missing:

Gurren Lagann
Fullmetal Alchemist (BOTH of 'em)
Hyakko
Squid Girl
Guin Saga
Everything by Makoto Shinkai
Astro Boy 2003
Full Metal Panic franchise
Phoenix (Hi no Tori)
Shangri-La

I don't think that anime has to be old to be good, but I have noticed that I prefer anime series that have an old-school vibe, like Guin Saga and Shangri-La. That's why I'm kind of excited about Bodacious Space Pirates. I've only seen one episode and I want to watch more, I just haven't yet.

I also understand that things change and anime fandom is one of them. I probably think highly of the Toonami days, plowing around through Anipike.com to find fansites, because of sheer nostalgia. I "look" around (the internet, mostly) and see that all of the younger anime fans are into anime for a different reason. Not that their reason is wrong, but I have a hard time relating with them and what they like and why they like it. Essentially, I'm hitting the generation gap and I don't know what to do about it, though I imagine the same thing happened to all of the Robotech and Akira fans of the late 80s-early 90s when Toonami exploded.

Though, now that I'm writing it out, it's probably not all that unique. Considering the forum, I'm sure this has happened throughout the history of heavy metal. 70s fans probably not getting "hair metal," 80s fans shunning nu metal, old-school fans baffled by metalcore, and so on. As Helloween sang, "Time marches on," and all it's succeeding in doing is making me, in my mid-twenties, feel old, and it's happening more often than I like.

Just because I feel like sharing it, here's an example of what I'm talking about: I go to my local library because they have an awesome collection of graphic novels, and one day as I was perusing the shelves, I noticed a talkative trio of teenage girls who were kind of looking as well. One of them pulled out a book and glanced through it, then realized that it was "one of those comic strip books" before putting it back down. Do you know what it was? THE FAR SIDE!! BY GARY LARSON!! I thought that stuff was ubiquitous (at least in America), but here I learned that there is a generation growing up that doesn't know the master of one panel comic strips. I couldn't believe it, and it made me feel old.

Well, if you read all of that, thanks for indulging me. Now back to anime in the following post. GO:

lol

I don't know what's worse man, when you see young people and can't wrap your mind around their growing up, or when you see people your age bat an eye at older stuff or whatnot for ridiculous reasons. I hate to keep drilling away at that, but it just blows me away some people my age (mid 20's too) sometimes can't watch anything before 2005 or whatnot.

I'm sure we could mention tons of new good shows. They're definitely out there. I think the market has just kind of evolved like videogames have, it's a bit more mainstream nowadays (maybe just in Japan), and most companies cut corners with short ~13 episode seasons and throw out sequels if it does well. You can' tell the ecchi shows apart anymore by the season when there's 20 of them. But beneath all the garbage there's still some decent stuff from time to time, just like videogames. My preference is the 80-90's shows myself, but yeah there's still great stuff at there here and there.

Rainbow is a really good one I don't see mentioned here much. And I don't mean the pachinko girl Rio Rainbow, the delinquent jail series Rainbow from Madhouse. Then of course there's Kaiji, and just about everything Madhouse does. They know what's up.

After I watched LOGH though and a bunch of other longer shows, I came to really prefer the longer length. It's a shame though if you're not Gundam or a shounen, you don't see many shows pass the ~25 episode mark anymore. I guess some sports shows can still be pretty long though. And on another note, with all the moe junk out there, I really do think it's funny and interesting that in comparison I'd say a lot of the shounens out there are actually pretty quality and good stuff (keeping up with One Piece, Fairy Tail, the new HxH, and Toriko myself). But yeah might be another reason why I love the 80's and 90's so much, more shows back then were a lot longer pretty often.

I already saw these and some of them I still read the manga for Shigurui. Haruhi was one of the shittiest IMO.



I'll check these, I've heard good things about Steins' Gate.



From these ones, only saw FMA. I've heard things about Gurren, Hyakko and FMP and not good ones, but I'll check them as well.

Monster was the last anime I've seen deserving a 10. I fucking love Kaiji and Akagi too.

Other 'new' stuff I've seen were Angel Heart, Ayatsuri Sakon, Ayakashi (Samurai Horror Tales)... I'm sure there's a lot more but I can't recall it right now.

You should definitely check out Rainbow then.

I'll never make an AMV since I'm so lazy, but I always get ideas. New one is a video of Guts just slaughtering everything, with this playing! Ahhhhhhhhhh yeaaaaaaah!

Kaiji is a manly show that showers itself with manly tears. That 2nd season I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was seriously shaking my monitor during that pachinko machine tournament.

Still gotta hit up the second season myself, I'm sure it'll be just as addicting as the first. That was all too easy to marathon!

Oh! and how could I forget the incredible Hokuto No Ken OVA's and Souten No Ken!!

You may not believe me, but there is no library where I'm living right now, which is in Canada, by the way. Though I'm sure in my travels I'll be able to aquire them somewhere along the way.

I've not been watching to much anime lately, despite having over ten series sitting on my hdd. The only thing I've watched over the last two weeks was the last four Hellsing Ultimate OVA's, very epic. So I guess I get to join the wait now huh?

I did watch the first two episodes of Kino's Journey last night, it looks to be a promising show so far.

Don't worry, I have over a TB worth to watch someday... someday.

lol, I don't really care though. It's not a race to me and I just let the mood decide what to watch, usually works pretty well.

Yo, I want an anime that's clearly Japanese, but has Western style mythology/monsters/weapons. I.E something like the Dark Souls universe. I dunno where to start and I feel so damn out of anime...and with fifty million series on netflix and all of them rated fairly highly...help

Slayers, Berserk, Claymore, 12 Kingdoms, Record of Lodoss War, and Those Who Hunt Elves.

PhilosophicalFrog should try Berserk first I think...or Slayers if he wants a more light hearted approach (Ignore the Slayers movies unless you really want to see them).

That's funny you speak of them in the same sentence, after finishing up Berserk I started up Slayers for something "nice", haha. Taking it slowly, but so far good times. Lina has all the potential in the world to be the most annoying character ever, but she's awesome!

Slowly catching up to The Eclipse in the Berserk manga, fucking can't wait to get to new content after that!

Finishing Claymore, that show is dope. Gonna move to Berserk, then Slayers, then prolly Clannad....

Another soon to be disappointed viewer.

Fantastic series, but be prepared for the ultimate let-down ending and the strong desire to read the manga to find out what happens.

Alternatively, Frog could just read the manga, there is really no reason to watch the anime instead, the manga is more complete and simply better in every way.

The manga doesn't have the awesome soundtrack and hilariously awesome English dub. With outtakes.

Yeah, mayhaps I'll just do the manga, those things take like twenty minutes per volume, so I can manage.