This here is a record of Anime I Have Seen, and What I Have Thought Of It. For anime which I think is obscure, or about which I have something to say, I include descriptions of plots, et cetera. If I haven't seen a significant portion of an anime, I include episode numbers. A note: I have been told that some of the reviews in here are unnecessarily negative. (I went through and counted, and it seems to be about half and half.) If you disagree with something I've written here, then please, flame away, you'll be almost the first person who's ever done so. In fact, I'll probably be flattered by the attention. (My email address starts with dkb@andrew, and it ends with .cmu.edu.) This list was inspired by Sprite's lending library book list at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~scifi/dvl/sprite.html. I do not plan to lend out any of the anime listed here, mostly because I saw it all at anime clubs, but writing flippant one-sentence reviews looked like fun, so I decided to make a list anyway. -------------- Like most subculture thingies, anime has its own terms for things. Before I start, I should present some sort of definition for the ones that I use. Actually, if I did that it would be an awfully short list, so I will present additional definitions for terms that I don't use but might still be relevant. If you have knowledge of anime already, scroll down. bishounen: (lit. "beautiful boy") A particular kind of male anime character with long (usually white or gray) hair and a calm disposition. Sometimes they appear as romance interests; other times they're evil mages. Not much in between. fanservice: The practice of producing fans from nowhere and waving them around to indicate one's emotions, thoughts, et cetera. This is a highly developed tradition in Japan - not unlike thought bubbles in American cartoons, except more complex. Unfortunately it makes little or no sense to foreigners. It's a little disconcerting when all the characters suddenly start waving around pieces of paper, all the Japanese-speaking members of the audience start giggling, and the rest of us are just sitting there looking confused. genki: An adjective, meaning "cheerful/healthy/energetic/hardworking". Also used as a one-word-sentence imperative, meaning "cheer up". mecha: Also known as "giant robots"; people climb into the chest cavity and fight things with them. It's amazing how many series these things show up in. Especially when they show up in low-tech medieval fantasy series, and the characters are piloting with pulleys and levers. otaku: A die-hard, raving fan of something, usually anime. This is considered an insult in Japan but not in America. sentai: Crimefighting (or more often, alien-invader-fighting) superheroes. An American example is "Power Rangers". shoujo: (lit. "girl") A very broad genre of anime in which the target audience is obviously female. This is explained in more detail below. shounen: (lit. "boy") A very broad genre of anime in which the target audience is obviously male. This is explained in more detail below. sweatdrop: Actually drawing a character as sweating makes them look ugly, plus it's hard to get it to look right. Instead, tradition dictates that one draw a single, very large bead of sweat on the back of the character's head. Sometimes this indicates nervousness but more often it indicates surprise. -------------- The Funny: For no terribly good reason, other than my urge to categorize things, I am breaking the list up by genre. This will make it no easier for you to search for anime, but it does make it slightly more interesting to read and write. I'm also sorting the genres (approximately) by my interest in them. The first genre I shall describe as "Funny". Mobile Battleship Nadesico: Science fiction; parody of other anime I have never seen. Very, very funny. Highly recommended. Mahou Tsukai Tai OVAs: Comedy. Magical girls. Quite good. Mahou Tsukai Tai TV series: This isn't quite such pure concentrated humor as the OVA series but is still good. Azumanga Daioh: The title means "the manga produced by Azuma, published in the magazine Dengeki Daioh". Well, not literally, but that's where it comes from. From what I can see, the comic itself (and the resulting anime) must have been a lot like Calvin and Hobbes. Or Peanuts. Maybe more like Peanuts. Among other things, this means most of the story arcs are five minutes long. Excellent series, but why is it "anime"? Full Metal Panic Fumoffu: Slapstick comedy; spinoff of "Full Metal Panic". Sergeant Sagara grew up in some horrible war-torn country and sees everything in terms of military strategy. He's given undercover work protecting this girl from terrorists, except the terrorists don't actually show up, because this is the comedy-only version of the show. It's quite good for eight or nine episodes, and then they start running out of ideas a bit. Slayers: Three-quarters of this series is slapstick comedy, some of it quite good, too. The remaining quarter tends to be bloody and violent. The theological model is somewhat questionable, too. ("Channeling power from the Dark Lords of the Underworld? Cool!"). Still recommended, for the happy 75%. Dragon Half: A short series, but funny. I'm told the end theme is clever, but nobody ever seems to translate it. Nurse Witch Komugi-chan 1-2: Apparently this is a spinoff of Soultaker, which I Did Not Enjoy. But this OVA series is pure concentrated silliness. I approve. Mahou Senshi Riui 1-14 - The subtitlers translate this as "Rune Warrior Louie", which initially I found amusing, but that title does a surprisingly good job of describing the series as it turns out. My anime club has described it as "Dungeons and Morons", which is also quite apt. Terrestrial Defense Force Mao-chan 1-3: "The enemy is the CUTE ALIENS! If we sent the army against them, our public approval would plummet! Cute things must be fought with other cute things!" The concept is great; the execution could use a little work. Episodes are 12 minutes, counting 2 or 3 for opening and closing themes. Characterization is weak. Still funny, though. Sorceror Hunters: Medieval fantasy. Sometimes it's episodic, sometimes it has a plot. The former was pretty good. The latter was just depressing. Sexy Commando Masaru-san 1-2: The "Sexy Commando" fighting style apparently cannot be performed whilst wearing pants. My reaction was a strange combination of "hahaha" and "ewwww". I would watch more of it. Galaxy Angels 1-5: Silliness and stuff blowing up. Another 12-minute- per-episode series. It's not bad, but there's not a whole lot to it. Excel Saga: All humor, no plot. The art was pretty bad too. Humor counts for a lot, but it isn't everything. ----------------- The Weird: A major genre in anime seems to consist of having weird things happen and not explaining anything until the last episode. A lot of the fun comes from speculating about What The Heck Is Going On. In the final episodes, the authors reveal What Was Going On, and a surprising fraction of the time it turns out to be pretty lame. (Example: For twelve volumes weird stuff happens around this girl, and it seems like she has some sort of mysterious powers. In Volume Thirteen, it is revealed that she has - gasp! - "some sort of mysterious powers." I kid you not. Well, maybe a little.) Anyway, the way these series end is very important to how I feel about them. Which is a little paradoxical, because more than once it has meant that I really like a series until I see the final episodes, at which point I never want to watch it again. People are funny like that. Evangelion: This is a giant robot fighting show. More accurately: this is THE giant robot fighting show. It does have its flaws - the last three episodes, and the two movies, are bad in almost every way that anime can _be_ bad - but in terms of really fun plot weirdness, in terms of strong characterization, and in terms of giant robots beating the crap out of each other, this is the anime by which all others are judged. Blue Seed: Like above, a series of giant monsters attacks the city, and Our Heroes are the only team that can fight them off. But our (female, this time) protagonist isn't nearly as neurotic and dysfunctional as Shinji was, and the ending isn't nearly as lame. And they don't use giant robots. High marks. Revolutionary Girl Utena: This series gets kinda surreal in places, but if you're not picky about the difference between metaphor and reality, it's not a major problem. The ending was so weird that I can't decide if it was lame or not, which is a good thing, unless it is a bad thing. Oh, yes, and I thought the second closing-credits-theme-song was an act of unnecessary cruelty. Good series, though. The Utena Movie: All the surrealness and crypticality I could possibly have asked for, plus something resembling an original and well-defined plot. Not bad for a movie that retells a 39-episode series in 90 minutes. Alien 9: A Gainax horror series about twelve-year-old girls (not the magical kind) and aliens (not the cute kind). This is the true Next Evangelion: the characters are just as angstful, the plot is just as weirdly symbolic, and the ending (after only four episodes) is just as @^#$% dissatisfying. I am tempted to try to get the manga. Mai-Hime: Starts out kind of magical-girl, except with slightly older characters than normal. Then it's a lot like X TV for a while - I enjoyed that bit. The last episode was disappointing. Nightwalker: There's this vampire, and he's all moral and stuff. Normally that sort of thing bugs me (see: Trigun), but this was a good series. Noir: There are these assassins, and they're all female. They kill stuff. Most of them are dysfunctional, though perhaps not more than would be expected of people who kill other people for a living. Good stuff. Serial Experiments Lain 1-7: So, uh, there's this internet thing, and it's really widespread, and it starts leaking into reality somehow. As a result lots of weird stuff happens for no good reason. This girl Lain is somehow involved, but for a protagonist her motives are awfully obscure. Apparently she's got funky memory issues or split personalities or something, that might explain it. FLCL (pronounced "Furi Kuri"): By Gainax, who also made Evangelion. This has the same sort of feel as Eva but with much less angst. I have been told that, if you watch it enough times, it starts to make sense. Aquarian Age: The setting is some sort of neo-Tokyo in which almost everyone female has amazing magical powers. (Well, it doesn't actually _say_ that, but it seems like it.) But the plot itself is a romance. After I finished watching it, I looked on the web and discovered that this series traces its origins, not to manga like most anime does, but to a collectible card game (like M:TG). Well, that explains why they were so cryptic about the world mechanics; we're expected to know them from playing the game. But, I think the fact that I watched the whole series without ever suspecting this has got to be a tribute to something. The authors' skill or my density. Not sure which. Witch Hunter Robin: A British detective agency hunts down and kills "witches", which have superhuman powers. Robin, the protagonist, is a fire witch who works for the agency. The first thirteen episodes are episodic; the remaining thirteen are quite plot-heavy. The art is detailed and Gothic, which isn't bad, but it sets a slightly more angstful mood than I really prefer. Hack Sign: An anime about an MMORPG (like Everquest) and intended to be made into a CRPG (like Final Fantasy). The main character is sucked into the game world and can't get out. The first episode of this is worth watching just for the world it's set in: all the things you'd expect to find in an MMORPG are there, accurately represented as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, after that it gets a little dull. See, the problem is, for everyone but the main character it's just a game. They can't feel pain; they can't die. That eliminates physical violence as any sort of a plot point. The authors try to replace it with politics, intrigue, relationships, that sort of thing, but they aren't entirely successful. ...Unless this is actually an extreme shoujo series, and focusing on the relationships was the whole point? Dunno. Doesn't seem like it. Escaflowne: Unlike most anime, this series was designed to appeal to both male and female viewers equally. So, it's about half giant robots fighting, and half teenage romances. Towards the end it looks like they're going to do some fun stuff with concepts like "luck" and "destiny", but then (spoilers deleted). There's no sign that they noticed the irony. I never really got into this series for some reason - kept waiting for the main character to do something interesting, but she never did. Most of my friends liked it, though. Kii The Metal Idol: Very weird, very dark. Like Evangelion without the blowing stuff up. Too depressing for my taste. Boogiepop Phantom 1, 2, 4: Each episode focuses on a different character, who angsts for a while and then dies. Some people have special powers, but it's the Cthulic model of special powers, where the more you use them the worse off you get. Soultaker 1: This anime takes the "virtues" of confusing uses of perspective and lighting, incoherent and unexplained plot development, and gratuitous use of poorly understood Christian imagery to a whole new level. I am told that it starts making sense at the end of the third episode but cannot imagine how anyone could get that far in the series. --------- The Shounen: Much of anime can be descibed as "shounen", meaning "having a young male audience". This frequently means the plot is entirely centered on power attacks and blowing stuff up. The "guy with three girlfriends" theme is also common. Also the "guy who is a ridiculously powerful fighter but also has the most impeccable morals of anyone on the planet" subtheme, though that theme is certainly not unique to anime. But that sort of thing is lame and overdone; I've moved those subgenres to their own categories. This genre describes what's left, most of which is pretty good. Mahoromatic: Another from Gainax - this is some sort of a romance. The fanservice is a bit extreme, but the characters are likable. The ending was a little weak, though not inappropriate. The female lead in this anime is supposed to be an android, but I don't think that I'm using the same definition of that word as Gainax is. She eats, she sleeps, she bleeds, and, okay, she has the occasional super power, but no sane technology would create a war robot with the physical and emotional detail she exhibits. 3x3 Eyes: This almost went in the "weird" section, but just because it's about zombies and demons doesn't really make it mysterious. Good stuff, in a gothic and unnecessarily gory sort of way. Orphen: Sorceror-guy runs around blowing stuff up. Quality - both plot and animation quality - varies wildly. The filler episodes seem worse than the plot ones. The ending was well done. Full Metal Panic: Most of this series was giant robots fighting, which was okay, I guess, but Evangelion did it way better. The filler episodes were really funny, which redeemed the rest of it somewhat. Read or Die: This three-episode OVA series is about a group of resurrected mutant geniuses who are trying to steal all the world's rare books, either for pleasure reading or because they contain the secrets of world domination (either would make sense). Combatting them are the superheroes of the Special Operations Division of the British Library System. Once you get past the premise it's a fairly standard series of superhero battles - but even so I felt it was well worth watching. Lost Universe: This series shares a lot of ancestry with Slayers - artwork, important names (Dark Star, Gorun Nova), character designs - but the story is much different. If anything, it's like Star Wars - there are enough similarities that it's probably a deliberate reference. The main character spends a lot more time angsting over his personal inadequacies than Lina ever did... The Slayers cast didn't _have_ personal inadequacies, really, just eccentricities. Still, this wasn't a bad series. DNA^2: I thought this was pretty good, actually. Well, except they kept ending the series and then inventing a reason to un-end it so they could do a few more episodes. But the first story-arc, before it ended the first time, was good. El Hazard I: I watched this series a long time ago, and my memories of it go like this: guys, alternate plane, super powers, girl, giant bugs, insane laughing guy, extremely touchy-feely girl, guys, booze, more bugs, three girls, war machine girl, magic transformation scenes, kaboom. I'm no longer sure what exactly the series was about, but I remember thinking it was pretty good at the time. Maze TV 1-4: Fantasy world, giant robots, transformation scenes, much fanservice. Magic attacks are called "folm"s for some reason. Probably it's supposed to be "form" and the fansubber was just silly. Ghost In The Shell TV 1-2: Future, cyborgs, police, fanservice. Thus far it's episodic. Generator Gawl 1-8: There are three guys who have come back from the future to change the present. Two of them are angstful bishounen scientists and one has the ability to become a giant robot. Abenobashi Magical Shopping District: Another by Gainax; it does eventually start to make some sort of sense. The first several eps are mostly fanservice. The later eps are... also mostly fanservice. I thought the ending was appropriate. Jungle Wa (long name) 5-6: There's this six-year-old kid who lives in the jungle, and this six-year-old girl who lives with him and makes his life a living hell. I suspect this would have been a better series if I had tried to laugh at the main character, rather than empathize with him. Gatekeepers 1-4: Evil alien invaders, high-tech defense organization. Stops just short of having transformation scenes. This series thinks it's a parody, but actually it's just dumb. Angel Links 1: This series seems to be primarily about fanservice. I don't know anyone who likes it. --------- Shoujo: "Shoujo", as far as I can tell, means "young girl". When used as a genre, it apparently means "having a young female audience." Sometimes this means being concerned about relationships and who's going out with whom ("psycho shoujo" - psychological, not psychotic), and other times it means chromatic transformation scenes and named magical attacks ("mahou shoujo"?). Either can be interesting when taken in moderation. I could divide this into subgenres ("Science Fantasy", "Romance", "Way Too Young"), but it turns out that the various series clump together nicely when I just order them by interest. Scrapped Princess: This series rules. There's a plot - it's basically science fiction - and there are compelling characters, and interesting storylines, and stuff blowing up, and everything. If I ever write a (serious) anime series, this is the standard I will aim for. X TV: Two groups of superhero-types battle in Tokyo for the fate of the world. They all have deadly power attacks, and none of them wear armor or have any healing ability at all. There's also this worrying "everything-is-fated-to-happen" thread running through the whole series... If done poorly, that sort of thing can really ruin a show. But this show isn't about people fighting and being doomed to get killed gruesomely. It's about personalities, and characterization, and good shoujo stuff like that, with an apocalypse going on in the background just to add atmosphere. And it's done _really well_. If you don't mind that more than half the main characters die before it's over. Wolf's Rain: Deals with the angst of being a werewolf-equivalent in post-apocalyptic Japan. I keep the first few eps of this on my laptop as anime-to-show-to-girls-who-aren't-into-anime: the bishounen are eye-candy, and the plot is good enough that I don't mind rewatching it. Note: Apparently due to production-delay issues, there are four recap episodes around eps 13-16 which are not worth watching. The producers later made up for this by publishing four OVA's, numbered 27-30. Magic Knights Rayearth I: Three Japanese schoolgirls get sucked into an alternate plane (NOT dimension, dammit!), given magic powers, and asked to save the world. I have never been able to explain why I like this series, but I do. Maybe it's the art: this was the first series I saw by CLAMP. And the ending was well-done. Magic Knights Rayearth II, 1-12: Where the first series was magical girls and The Legend of Zelda, this series is mecha-piloting girls, dating, and X-Com. No, really. Aliens attack the fantasy world, and Our Heroes fly up to meet them and talk about their feelings. (How many different genres can we fit into one series?) This would actually be pretty good, except that this series has about a 20-episode plot (same as Rayearth I) but it's stretched out into 29 episodes to meet TV season requirements. You can tell. Rayearth, the OVAs, ep 1 of 3: An "elseworlds", not a sequel; the cast from Rayearth I and II invades Earth for some reason. I see it as kind of a crummy movie that happens to use the same characters. Fushigi Yuugi: Two Japanese schoolgirls get sucked into an alternate plane, given magic powers and a large group of male followers, and asked to aid their respective countries in attacks on each other. Some parts are formulaic (eg, Miaka's instinctive reaction to any situation is to do something mindbendingly stupid and almost get herself killed), but others are quite original. Something I try to pay attention to in anime is the significance of the characters' names. Usually, as someone who doesn't speak the language, I have trouble with this. But I thought it interesting that the main character of this series is named Miaka and the other girl-sucked-into-the-other-plane is named Yui. ('Cos it's like "me" and "you", only not! Get it? Get it? Isn't that nifty? I'll stop now.) Juuni Kokki 1-16: Adapted from a novel rather than manga. This series does the alternate-world thing slightly more realistically than, for example, Rayearth. Focus is on personalities and relationships; combat happens off-stage mostly. More exposition in this one than in most manga-derived anime. Still good. Card Captor Sakura 1-31: A Japanese schoolgirl is given magical powers and asked to go catch these magic pokemon-like card thingies at a rate of one in every episode. The target audience on this one is even younger than that of Rayearth (12 instead of 14). I'm going to watch the rest of this if I get a chance, but I don't really recommend it to others. Fruits Basket: This excessively perfect (the term I actually want is "genki") girl lives in a house with a large number of bishounen guys who turn into cute animals when glomped. She solves all her problems through unrelenting cheerfulness and good nature. It gets a little syrupy after a while, but not a bad show. Gakkou no Kaidan 1-2: Translates, I'm told, as "School Ghost Stories". It's about gimmicky ghosts defeated by gimmicky characters using the Special Gimmicky Book of Gimmicks to Defeat Ghosts. The "Ghost That Asks You What Color Toilet Paper You Want" was novel, but overall I suspect it would get boring pretty fast, Marmalade Boy 1-4: I watched this late at night, a long time ago, and for some reason it was extremely funny to watch trouble after trouble heaped on Mia's indignant head. See the comment on Ranma, below. This series is notable for, like Fushigi Yuugi, having a protagonist named Mia and a quasi-antagonist named Yui. I guess there are worse ways to select character names. Haibane Renmei 2,4: Deals with a girl who has wings, though apparently she can't fly. She wanders around and talks to people. In episode 2 the major crisis was a bunch of youngsters who wouldn't eat their carrots. This probably has a worthwhile plot hidden somewhere - the reviews say it "deals with issues of loss and redemption" - but I'm not willing to sit through all the blah to get to it. Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto 1-12: Eerily similar in theme to Haibane Renmei: an aspiring mage struggles to fit into a rigid, controlling society that places heavy restrictions on her powers. Nothing gets blown up. Title translates as "Things that a magic user would want" or some such. *************************** *** Note: The genres in this file, and the series in each genre, are *** (approximately) ordered with the ones I like most coming first. *** This is the midpoint. From here down the reviews are going to be *** somewhat negative. *************************** Ayashi no Ceres 1-17: By the creators of Fushigi Yuugi, aimed at a slightly older audience. The first several episodes of this anime take themselves a little too seriously. The later episodes, by contrast, take themselves way, way too seriously. This is the only anime I can think of that I liked after the first four episodes but actively disliked after seeing more of it. Weiss Kreuz 1-4: There are these four extremely bishounen guys, and at night they go out and angstfully hunt crime. During the daytime they run a flower shop for some reason. For those of us who don't have the appropriate organs to appreciate the angstful-bishounen thing, the plot on its own doesn't really justify watching it. Gravitation 1.8-2: So, I walked into the anime club room, and up on the screen this guy was randomly kissing this other guy, and all the girls in the room were laughing like crazy. I sat down and watched for ten minutes; it seemed like some sort of boy-band was involved somehow too. Then the show ended, and although the girls nominated the series for showing many times in the weeks to come, for some reason it was always voted down. Saishuuheiki Kanojo 1: This series is about an awkward, embarrassing high school romance, but the girl has some sort of cyborg implants that let her defend Tokyo from enemy invaders. (Hence the title: "Ultimate Weapon Girlfriend".) But apparently the implants are painful (or the combat is painful, I could certainly understand that), so she doesn't enjoy her job at all. I'm told the show is basically a giant steaming mound of angst and depression, and the first episode didn't convince me differently, so I don't plan to watch more. Tokyo Mew Mew 1: Hello, six-year-old-girl demographic. Earth Girl Arjuna 1: I do believe I would rather watch Captain Planet. Cha-Cha 1-2: The transformation scene featured the phrase "Magical Princess Holy-Up!" When I made the comment above about "taken in moderation", I was thinking of this series. Hime-Chan's Ribbon 1: And this one. Magical Project S (aka Pretty Sammy) 17: And *especially* this one. I've heard some people claim that it's actually a parody of other magical-girl transformation shows, but haven't seen any evidence of this myself. Fancy Lala 1: Pure concentrated shoujo wish-fulfilment. Panyo Panyo Di Gi Charat 1-3: The protagonists are six-year-old girls. So is the target audience. So, I suspect, were the writers. I did not like this series. Magical Cat-Girl Taruto 1-2: If I were about 25% of my current age, I might have liked this. As is, it's far, far too cute. -------------------- Shounen Romance: Ooh, the shame. Shoujo romance stories are about the girl who finds the Perfect Guy, and they have a long elaborate courtship and eventually decide they really do love each other right before the series ends. (Well, mostly. Weiss Kreuz is an outlier.) Shounen romance stories are about the goofy "everyman" guy who keeps getting hit on by random sexy girls for no evident reason. Two girls competing for him is a bare minimum, three is average, and Tenchi had like five or six at one point, didn't he? Dual: Those who have seen Evangelion will understand why so many people are inspired to write fanfiction about it. There are such interesting dysfunctional characters, there's such an interesting dysfunctional plot, and there's such _potential_ for not-dysfunctionality if only the characters could stop being dysfunctional for one freaking minute. Sadly, they never do. Thus people are inspired to write Revisionist Eva Fanfic. Usually this involves the characters sitting around talking about how happy they are, along with alternately blowing stuff up and having wild underage sex. Eva characters don't *work* when they're not dysfunctional, and it gets old very quickly. Anyway. "Dual", especially the first several episodes, can best be described as a professionally-produced Revisionist Eva Fanfic, except they changed the names and swapped some buzzwords around so they wouldn't get sued. (Those who have seen lots of Tenchi tell me it's also a lot like that series. I think it's just the similar art styles.) Not bad, if you like that sort of thing. Raimuiro Senkitan 1-2: Five girls - magical girls, no less, with transformation scenes - fighting Communist Russia for some reason. Much fanservice. Vandread: Spaceships, giant robots, fanservice. Not a bad series. Vandread II: Same series, different numbering. The opening theme is much worse. Tenchi (some non-contiguous fraction of the OVAs): Wow, this was fluffy. If anime were sound, this would be elevator music. If it were literature, this would be Heinlein. Whole episodes are devoted to the cast talking about how happy they are. (Actually, I get the impression there were a few episodes where stuff actually happens, but they weren't among the ones I saw.) Still, not bad in small doses. Saber Marionette J: This guy has three girlfriends, all of which are robotic. Stuff happens - it's about what you'd expect. Great Teacher Onizuka 1-4: This guy is a former gang member who wants to get a respectable job as a teacher. Periodically he gets upset over some moral issue and handles it by beating somebody up. This always turns out to have been exactly what the situation called for, and everyone sings his praises. Golden Boy, four episodes: Totally episodic. The plot is basically fanservice. Mamotte Sugogetten 1-2: One guy, three girlfriends. In this case they're goddesses. In all fairness, judging by the animation quality this series probably came out when the theme was halfway original. Not that that constitutes a reason to watch it now. Video Girl Ai 1-5.5: One guy, two girls. One girl is fake (hence the title); she spends a lot of time depressed because her job is to help the guy get the real girl. The last episode of this series irritated me so much that I stopped watching halfway through, but I have since forgotten why. Chobits 1-7: This series is about the romance between this fairly standard guy - "Everyguy", if you will - and this near-mindless, eager-to-please robot girl he found naked in a garbage heap. Definitely cute, but feels too much like pandering. Ai Yori Aoshi 1-4: A lonely male third-year college student is visited by a girl whose apparent only goal in life is to marry him / make him happy. On behalf of my gender, and my target demographic within that gender, I am mortified. Rizelmine 1-2: There's this fifteenish-year-old kid who suddenly finds out he's married to this cute, hyperactive, and distinctly lolicon eight-year-old girl. She practically worships him, and, as is required by the genre, he insults her at every turn. Even aside from the fanservice thing, such blatant stupidity/cruelty is painful to watch. --------- Monster-Of-The-Week-Series: One very easy pattern for a series to fall into is to set the main characters to fight battle after battle, each for high stakes against a horribly evil foe with amazing powers whom the characters defeat in exactly twenty-five minutes, minus time for commercial break. This is interesting for a few episodes, depending on how well the characterization is done (usually not very) and how skillfully the authors can contrive reason after reason for stuff to attack the main characters. An interesting feature of this type of series is that there's no real need for it to terminate, because there's no real plot to maintain. Monsters keep attacking until the audience gets bored and stops watching. Ranma 1-??: Ranma is this guy who sometimes turns into a girl, and for some reason there are tons of cute girls who want to marry him. This annoys all the guys in the series, who attack him and get beaten repeatedly. This is a good series, but it lasts _way_ too long, until you're sick of seeing all the characters and just wish he'd marry someone already. Apparently this dragging-on thing is a characteristic of the author (one "Rumiko Takahashi".) In some fiction, the audience is supposed to sympathize with the main characters. Most of anime is like this. In other fiction, such as most American situation comedies, it's funny when bad stuff happens to the "protagonists". Ranma became a much better series when I realized it fell into the latter category. Inuyasha 1-??: Same author as Ranma, but the target audience is female. The main character is female, and the gender ratio is 50-50, except for poor Shippo-chan who has to go find a girl from the nearest village when he wants to do a romance subplot. The girl's boyfriend kills most of the monsters with his curiously phallic sword, but the girl does save his life enough times for it to be interesting. The girl spends a lot of time worrying about how hard her homework is, a feature curiously absent from Ranma. ("Math is hard! Let's go kill youkai!") Bleach 1-29ish: Shounen fighting show, ghost theme. Some interesting plotlines for the first fifteen episodes or so, after which it becomes extremely generic. Ruroni Kenshin 1-??: Oh, look, there's a villain! He's mean and nasty! For some reason his life's goal is to kill the main character! Can our hero survive? (Our hero survives.) Repeat, ad nauseum. Flame of Recca 1-??: Like Kenshin, but slightly more interesting characters. Instead of randomly inventing reasons for villains to attack the main characters, the producers decided to enroll everyone in a tournament at around episode 15. From what I saw, the tournament showed every sign of continuing right up until the end of the series. Possibly the producers deserve my respect for not being like Kenshin and contriving reason after reason for the villains to attack the main character. Or possibly they deserve my contempt for not even attempting to have a plot beyond "we want to win the tournament". Not sure which. Samurai Deeper Kyo 1-2: Some random pervert guy can turn into an amazingly powerful swordfighter guy when sufficiently beaten up. The swordfighter guy is apparently evil, but he seems to be the protagonist anyway. (The antagonists are evil too, plus they're ugly, so you can tell the difference.) Angelic Layer: A shoujo anime, produced by CLAMP; rather than real battles, the main character has a cute little doll that fights for her (against other cute little dolls) in tournaments. But the battles themselves are the same as above: one week, one battle, one foe with amazing powers, one last-minute recovery and come-from-behind victory for the main character. Hellsing 1-6: There's this vampire guy who spends a lot of time fighting things and talking about how powerful he is. ("Ah, you deflected my attack, but I was only using one-hundredth of my true power! Now I shall use one-tenth of my true power. It is good to have such a powerful foe.") There's also this random girl, his protege, who does stuff occasionally, but it seems like her plot is kind of tangential to the main one. Tokyo Underground 1-2: Another fighting show, it seems. The protagonists are more "Three Stooges"-ish than usual, which produces odd cognitive dissonance: am I supposed to empathize with these characters or laugh at them? Scryed 1-2: Seems to be mostly about power attacks and blowing stuff up. I did not like any of the characters. Shaman King 1-2: Some sort of generic shounen thing. Similar to "One Piece", which I have not reviewed here because I couldn't sit through a whole episode. The feeling I get is similar to that from reading bad Web fanfiction... the author seems to have the general idea of how to tell a story, but the characters are cardboard cutouts. I feel like I could write better than this. Trigun 1-4: A particularly nasty special case of this genre. The main character is a ridiculously powerful fighter, but also has the most impeccable morals of anyone on the planet. Kenshin does this too, actually, but less annoyingly. The point of this series is not to be funny, or to be weird, or to be dramatic, or anything like that. Instead, the point of this series is to inspire hero-worship and fanboyism (fangirlism?) of the main character, to the greatest possible extent. There are many types of anime I dislike, but this is the only type I dislike that I can't understand why other people don't also dislike. --------- The Nonterminating: These are anime series that I have watched some of, thought they were decent, but never felt any real desire to see more of. Frequently this is because the series were immensely long and drawn-out and repeated the same plot over and over again. I think if a series doesn't have a continuing and evolving plot, it's no better than American cartoons and shouldn't really count as anime. Cowboy Bebop ??: There are guys in a spaceship, and they're broke, and they do stuff. It's completely episodic. Decent music, I guess. *shrug* Samurai Champloo: From the makers of Cowboy Bebop. Where that series was wandering-space-mercenary blues, this one is wandering-samurai hip-hop. Patlabor: Police force, giant robots. I watched 52 episodes of this but can't remember much happening. The OVAs were parodies of the episodes, and they were pretty good. Maison Ikkoku 1-8: I watched this for a while but never felt any real desire to finish it. It's another by Takahashi; it's like a fighting anime, except instead of fighting bad guys the main character is trying to get a date with this girl he likes. Oh, yeah, and instead of beating the bad guy, he ends up embarrassing himself in front of the girl. Again and again for 96 episodes. Kurogane Communications 1-4: There was this war, and this girl survived, and she's being taken care of by robots. There are some brief characterization episodes, and then the Killer Death Robots attack. I really didn't empathize with any of the characters. Legend of Galactic Heroes 1-??: There's this war, and there are people on both sides of it, and they are all very serious and heroic. "Heroic" meaning "not funny." Crest of the Stars 1-4: Like above, except the main characters aren't even heroic; they're just earnest. It's like a Miyazaki movie, except it doesn't end. Infinite Ryvius 1-2: Like above, except there aren't even any main characters. There are people running around being generally earnest in the face of a disaster of some sort, but in the episodes I watched that was really all there was. ----------- The Movies: I don't like most anime movies. Very few of them are funny, and the plot and character development get compressed too much. Putting more money into animation just makes things look more realistic... If I wanted realism, I'd watch live-action. I particularly can't stand Miyazaki. His main characters are too... a friend once described it as "full of childlike idealism". It feels like something somebody's grandparents would enjoy. One exception to this rule was "Firetripper", by Rumiko Takahashi - but I liked that because it was science-fiction, not because it was anime. And it was a pleasant surprise to see a plot by the author of Ranma and Maison Ikkoku that ended in two hours. I've also seen a Card Captor Sakura movie and two Sailor Moon movies that weren't totally awful. I guess my primary objections to movies are that (a) you lose all the plot and the humor and (2) the violence and fanservice reach a realism level that isn't fun. For a series that really doesn't have much of any of those anyway, I guess there's really not a big difference. Movies that I have seen but not liked include part of Akira, Baoh, Crystal Triangle, Escaflowne, various Lupin, Mononoke Hime, Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, the first Slayers, and part of Vampire Hunter D. After a while I developed the habit of walking out after the first five minutes of any anime that didn't have at least six episodes. ======== As Yet Unclassified: Asagiri no Miko 1-3: Three shrine maidens and one random visiting guy, but this series doesn't feel like one of those silly shounen-romance things. Plot shows promise except that episodes are 15 minutes each. Kino's Travels: Named by analogy to Gulliver's Travels. Episodic. Good series, a bit Nivenish in its exploratoriness. Wandaba Style 1: A mad scientist tries to send cute girls to the moon. Mostly fanservice. Spiral 1-10: Sort of a mystery/psychology series. Remember that scene in that one movie, where there are two glasses of water, and one of them's poisoned, and the villain tries to use psychology to figure out which? This whole series is like that. And, I mean, that's okay and all, but I don't think they've yet run into a problem that couldn't be resolved just by pulling a gun and shooting the bad guy as he stands there taunting him. The bad guys don't hesitate to off NPC's, but for some reason it never occurs to anyone that they can just shoot them. This is particularly silly around eps 6-10, in which the villain is a psychotic murderess twelve-year-old schoolgirl, and the main character could probably noogie her into submission if he tried. Uchuu no Stellvia: Kind of like Fruits Basket: there's this girl, and she's all precocious and hardworking and stuff, and everybody tells her how amazingly cool she is. Also she has the same hairstyle as Tohru did. There are weird lesbian overtones for no obvious reason. The setting is similar to Ender's Game: the characters are cadets in an elite space-station academy. Last Exile: People fly around in these two-man airplane things. The main characters are painfully earnest, the art is beautiful and well-animated, the plot is often confusing. Reminds me a bit of Miyazaki. Mantantei Loki Ragnarok 1-4: I think the target audience on this one is pretty young. Theoretically Loki is a detective, but he doesn't seem to detectify so much as get attacked by stuff that could have been taken from Norse mythology except that everyone looks about ten years old. There's a girl, but she's kind of annoying and apparently only exists to be mind controlled by villains. The art is nice. Tenshi na Konamaiki 1-2: A guy gets turned into a girl. She used to be a badass, apparently, but now she's got all these girl hormones or something and she keeps going mushy over this guy. She spends a lot of time going aargh-what's-wrong-with-me. How come there isn't any anime about girls getting turned into guys? Gundam Seed 1-2: There are at least two military forces trying to blow each other up, with varying degrees of success. I couldn't actually tell what was going on for most of it... I liked how in "Legend of Galactic Heroes" they had subtitles that introduced each character so you could tell if they were good guys or not. Er, needing such measures at all is usually a bad sign, but it's better than being confusing. Gunparade March 1: Giant robots, piloted by young children for no readily apparent reason. Looked like drama rather than comedy. Mecha anime has one strike against it already, and nothing grabbed my attention enough to make me watch more than one episode. Something no House Cosmos 1-6: Superhero parody. The first episode sets up the main characters and establishes a few characterization gimmicks for each of them. The second through sixth episodes repeat the same characters and gimmicks, in a slightly different setting each time. Then I stopped watching. Quiet Country Cafe, ep 1: I refuse to accept that this is anime. A training ground, perhaps, for an animator-in-training, or a portfolio for same. A girl named "Alpha" walks around and looks at things. The landscapes are beautiful, the weather is beautiful, the eyecatches are each unique and are also beautiful. Alpha's character design is well-done and drawn in lots of different poses, though the other characters (what little we see of them) are much less so. None of this changes the fact that I spent half an hour of my life watching an anime where _nothing happens_. Teki wa Kaizoku, ep 1: A team of accident-prone space police. One of them is a cat. A bit gimmicky but would not have minded watching more. Yami no Matsurei, eps 1-4: Bishounens and vampires. Not so bad as Weiss Kreuz but more shounen-ai than I really need. Full Metal Alchemist: The main characters wander around looking for the Philosopher's Stone and having adventures. Appears at first glance to be standard shounen fare but actually has a well-done and complex plot for a while. Touches on some moral questions. Ultra Maniac: From the creators of Marmalade Boy. There's a magical girl, and a nonmagical girl, but they don't fight monsters. Mostly they have wacky hijinks, and the nonmagical girl wishes she had a guy. Gratuitous Lesbian Overtones (TM). Read or Die TV: Set ten years after the Read or Die OVAs, this series deals with an authoress and three paper users assigned to be her bodyguard. The series has character episodes and action episodes, with the traditional Grand Plot behind the scenes. Tsukihime: Translates as "Moon Princess"; similar, oddly, to "Aquarian Age". There's this guy, and he has weird powers, and there are these girls, and they all secretly have weird powers too, and they all want a piece of him. But really it's mostly about vampires. Gantz 2-4: Set in modern-day Japan, except a mysterious high-tech black ball periodically orders the protagonists to kill aliens. The protagonists are astonishingly bad at killing aliens, so mostly this is an act of sadism. Creepy and disturbing. Planetes 1-2: Set in The Near Future (TM), a cheerful girl is assigned to the crummy and downtrodden Debris Retrieval Section of a space station. Reminiscent of Patlabor. Madlax 1-4: By the creators of Noir. An assassin woman kills people, and there's at least one weird secret society behind the scenes. Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien 1: Present-day; awkward high school romance. Oooh, the awkwardness. This is the only anime our club has ever booed off the screen. Elfen Lied: Catgirls; nudity; violence; shounen-harem. Deals with the main catgirl's double life as an amnesiac sex-kitten / unstoppable psycho killer. They did a good job with the plot, and the characters are compelling (really!), but you get the feeling the point is really the fanservice.