:;()$&@"\The Anime Pub/:;()$&@"

Ah fuck me, Higurashi is actually as good as they all said.

I really shouldn't have started watching it at 2am last night.

there exists real anime horror? i don't believe you(outside of shinsekei yori and that shows horror is something else entirely)

and J.C pulled a fast one with Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road, can it be that this show isn't bad?!

I don't find Higurashi horrifying at all. Or Hell Girl. Or anything deemed as horror in any entertainment medium. I'm too good at enjoying a work as a work rather than 'getting into it'. That doesn't mean I didn't find myself slack-jawed at some of the revelations in Higurashi -- they're incredibly well delivered and foreshadowed. That's my awe at the storytelling craft, not my horror at the internal reality of the show.

I can watch or read so-called horror in bed at 3am no worries. Hereditary? Midsommar? Get Out? Sure. Cheap horror with jump scares don't interest me UNLESS they're also well-made. I like the novel l 'IT' but the remakes had way too many cheap jump scares, for example, and sadly the original TV miniseries was far too sanitised.

But I did find the basic idea of kids facing a terror that adults couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge horrifying. That's very realistic.

So what I find horrifying is what most people would call 'drama'. Movies about dying. Diseases crippling families. Financial ruin. Emotional isolation. Gaslighting. True horror for me rarely includes anything supernatural or fantastic. It has to be possible for me to feel horror at it, and the more likely, the more horrifying it is.

In anime, this actually does exist (Perfect Blue's an easy example, as is Grave of the Fireflies) but it's very rare because, well, why choose a medium like animation if you can just act it out?

When I said I shouldn't have started watching it at 2am, I didn't mean it scared me. I mean I burned through 30+ episodes in a hit.

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Iangyratu wrote:

Is The Mysterious Cities of Gold an anime or not? I have no clue. I only know I liked it.

Mysterious Cities of Gold is technically NOT an anime but it was a co-production with a famous anime studio: Studio Pierrot. It has a Japanese title (Taiyou no Esteban: Esteban of the Sun) with a big profile Japanese cast (Nozawa 'Goku' Masako plays the titular character) AND a very rare Japanese soundtrack. You can definitely find merch for it in Japan with a little digging. It was part of a wave of Franco-Japanese 'pseudo-anime' of the early to mid 80s that included Ulysses 31 and Inspector Gadget.

It's also a fucking amazing show to this day -- we rewatched it a few years ago having acquired a dvd set. Almost zero filler, decent English dub, pretty compelling story, catchy as hell opening, and unique setting. A wee bit racist in the 'after show true facts' segment, but eh, that's the 80s for you.

I'd say that Mysterious Cities of Gold was the best animated serial aimed at kids until Avatar: The Last Airbender came along. Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series were also great but they were also aimed more at teens and up. That said, MCOG has a much stronger claim to 'anime' than any of those, given it was animated largely by a Japanese studio.

Getting back to watching more anime once again. This season is STACKED. Kaguya-sama and Shield Hero being the two HUGE sequels (well, Komi being the third, but I haven't finished season 1 yet) and then there's one of the (to my knowledge) most anticipated shows of this year - Spy x Family. And oh my is that one just a delight to watch. I can wholeheartedly recommend that one. Top tier comedy while also having quite some heavy themes in there as well. Set in definitely not eastern Germany and definitely not western Germany during the times of definitely not the cold war.


Recently got to see Jujutsu Kaisen: Zero in that trusty local cinema I keep mentioning. It was a great watch, some very well made action and oh so much screen time for Gojou. Getting to know more about the backstory of those characters made it well worth the watch.

Also, they showed a trailer for another movie I'm now unreasonably hyped about, Belle. In case anyone's interested, it's the newest movie by Mamoru Hosoda and the trailer in question was the so-called 70 second trailer. Which has no dialogue, only scenes and ost. And my god that ost. That, combined with a certain shot they show during the trailer really, REALLY makes me want to see that movie.



Anyways, I still got more to watch. Again, this season is nothing short of amazing and there's also stuff from previous seasons I haven't gotten to. "The List" just keeps growing and growing...

Much more low-key for us. Watched Thermae Romae to prepare for Novae, which has to be one of the more unusual situations when it comes to Tsuda and Netflix: the NAZ-produced Netflix version is actually 'animated' whereas the original was a flash animation gag anime. I won't lie, I was worried we were facing another Househusband situation. Novae has this cool after-show feature where the mangaka travels to various bathhouses and onsen around Japan -- the first one she went to was in fact the only one I've been to, a fairly famous town called Kusatsu. Kinda cool. Kinda hot, too.

I paused my Higurashi watching because I am 99% sure the final season, Sotsu, was hit hard by Covid production issues. I know it doesn't end well and I know it's a lot of recap. I'll get back to it, but right now I've other things going on.

JJK0 played at our local but dub only, and we aren't willing to trek into the city for the sub. It's fine, it'll look decent enough on my tv.

Belle came and went here I think. Or not yet. Not sure. I know it's had its season in Japan though.

My god doesn't Bubble look stunning? That one I'd like to see at the cinema.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

My god doesn't Bubble look stunning? That one I'd like to see at the cinema.

It sure does. I'm quite excited for that one for a multitude of reasons. With it being a netflix exclusive though I wouldn't count on it getting a cinematic release. Sadly.

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FCK42 wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

My god doesn't Bubble look stunning? That one I'd like to see at the cinema.

It sure does. I'm quite excited for that one for a multitude of reasons. With it being a netflix exclusive though I wouldn't count on it getting a cinematic release. Sadly.

It's a netflix anime the way Apocrypha was -- they stream it, but it has much wider distribution otherwise (eg. Aniplex did the blurays for Apoc, whereas some actual 'netflix anime' will likely never see blurays). Bubble will absolutely get a cinematic release; way too much money to be made from such a dream team doing a full-on movie rather than a movie based on an existing series (which can have hit or miss animation quality -- see Gintama The Very Final). Friend in Tokyo actually saw a trailer for it when he went to see a different anime film.

__

Unrelated: three episodes into Thermae Romae Novae and my goodness, it's a very different beast to the old Froggyman flash animations. The quirkiness is gone but what we have instead is actual animation and story. Neither cancel the other out (the quirkiness was hilarious) which is sort of rare when a remake is so much closer to the original work.

Huh, so apparently there is a new Shinkai Movie on the horizon, "Suzume no Tojimari". The trailer looks quite interesting. Art, soundtrack, fluidity of animation is as usual from the looks of it, though the story appears to be a fair bit more... let's say "fleshed out" than his latest two movies. In both Kimi no Na Wa and Tenki no Ko it felt more like a tool to deliver the character drama, where this feels more like the story itself will be the focus. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more news on that one.

I still haven't seen Tenki no Ko. Other than 5cm, I never really liked Makoto Shinkai's work, and even then 5cm is sort of like a budget, one dimensional Only Yesterday/Omoide poro poro.

meanwhile...

Science Saru are releasing a sequel to Tatami Galaxy on the sly ON DISNEY+ OF ALL PLATFORMS this week.

And a silly Macross F x Macross Delta album (wherein singers from F sing songs from Delta, and vice versa) continues to dominate the Oricon, despite fans not really liking it that much.

Strange fuckin' times.