Serial Experiments Lain.

I was rewatching a couple of episodes and I had forgotten how eerie and creepy this one was.

The Persona 4 English dub is funny (good) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIERguCzJD0

I have been craving for a Sky Crawlers video essay and I’m happy to see STEVEM deliver.

This is one of his better videos in my opinion, and he did his research well and covered perhaps everything there is to talk about the movie although some sections felt cut a bit too short. Particularly on Jean Baudrillard who I think has been highly influential in many of Oshii’s films.

I hope STEVEM (or anyone else) would make a video on Oshii’s live action films too. I think that side of Oshii is often overlooked by his anime fans.

Oh wow that’s Senjougahara Hitagi’s birthday

Your Name is always a good choice.

It’s a movie so newcomers don’t need to invest a lot of time to finish it. It’s visually stunning, the soundtrack sticks with you, the narrative starts simple but becomes increasingly complex and memorable. It fits into most age brackets and its not marketed toward one gender only.

I think it’s still widely available for streaming too so it should still be pretty accessible.

Here’s mine. I kind of cheated with the last three though.

I didn’t particularly enjoy The Sky Crawlers as much compared to other films that I did not include in the list but I often use these type of threads to suggest works that aren’t commonly suggested anyway. Sky Crawlers doesn’t have the same meditative feeling you get from watching other Oshii Mamoru films but Oshii always had a very complex understanding of war and its relation to media and global politics (see Patlabor and the Kerberos Saga) which are often absent in many war-themed films.

The next one, Genius Party, is a collection of short films. I don’t think short films get enough discourse within the anime community but if you’re looking for originality in anime this is often the place to go. There’s one short there with a yapping salaryman and sitting through it makes me want to jump off the roof for fun but in the end I realized that’s kind of the point. The life of a salaryman is mundane and boring. Thank god it was a short film.

Last one is from Koji Yamamura. I actually didn’t enjoy this one as much as his other short films like Atama Yama, Inaka Isha, and Muybridge’s Strings but I think Dozens of Norths is the only one that could be classified as a feature length film.

Finished Oshii Mamoru’s Kerberos Movie Trilogy with Jin-Roh. It’s the only animated film in the trilogy and it’s a lot more serious than the other two films (they are all very good IMO).

I was debating whether to submit a clip of Fuse being a killing machine or this one but I really liked the human emotions he displayed here that we never get to see in any part of the film and yet he still ultimately plays the role of the wolf.

Really love what they made. Even if it’s just 15 minutes long it’s nice to revisit the alternate worlds of Eva, this included. Eva is timeless.

In the video, it’s framed that the world thinks manga is a “uniquely Japanese” thing but the video counters that by using Eike Exner’s book on manga history.

I did not finish the video yet (this is just the first minute or two) but I am going to guess that it’s either the Meiji period or the American occupation having influence on how manga eventually developed to what we know today. This is the same argument used by theorists like Azuma Hiroki but he talks about otaku culture more broadly.

Again, I did not finish it yet so…

Boys’ Love

I don’t know if it counts as horror but Perfect Blue. Maybe more thriller than horror.

Thanks! Wasn’t aware it behaved differently in Chrome. On Firefox, it seems to play with the audio just fine.

Thanks! Seems like it mostly works on Android but is limited by app support.

How about this one? This one is VP9.

edit: I’m getting “failed to load media” on Android. I think Voyager doesn’t load videos in comments.

Yeah I think they changed the ending theme for newer releases due to licensing issues. My sister watched NGE on Netflix and she was confused whenever I brought up Fly Me to the Moon.

The only disc that didn’t work when I tested them is the one that has something called “Evangelion:Death(True)2” and the End of Evangelion movie plus some bonus content – this is an AACS issue rather than physical damage so there’s hope that I can watch it eventually, just… not now.

Death:True^2 was a recap movie with some extra scenes IIRC. It was like watching an experimental edit of NGE. The End of Evangelion movie is really important to the original series though. Hope you get to watch it!

Monogatari Series.

This is the first 45 seconds of the first episode:

It’s really perverted but I’ve never seen perversion presented in such a way. I instantly knew it had a different kind of “language” in anime. I love every second of it. ^{and i love hitagi so much}

Finished Kemonozume last week. I think it’s Masaaki Yuasa’s most underrated work so far but I’ve yet to see all his works. Really love how crude-looking it is and yet it feels very intentional and complete.

Glad you like them!

I thought Anno was done with Eva

If you like Evangelion and jazz, I recommed The World! Evangelion Jazz Night Tokyo 3 Jazz Club and EVANGELION-VOX album.