Disclaimer to the Disclaimer: Mark Twain was known for deliberately degrading his works in short prefaces with the intent of deliberately raising the reader's awareness that it was, in fact, an important and meaningful work. In case there was any confusion, I am no Mark Twain.
When I was really really young, my dad for some reason had a copy of Vampire Hunter D, a feature length anime (can you guess the plot?) and I thought that was some pretty cool stuff. The look and tone was worlds apart from the serial cartoons I liked to watch at the time, like "Conan The Barbarian."
I started off wanting to get into anime while I was living in Singapore and Beijing in middle school years, but I just couldn't do it. It was exotic, colorful, and eye catching, and profoundly boring. Pretty much until high school, I could only classify anime in to the "Sailor Moon" type and the "DragonBall-Z" type, and neither one held ANY interest at all to me. I kind of liked the hint of a larger story behind DragonBall-Z, and my little brother loved to watch it for reasons beyond me. The typical episode was a good guy flying in the air with the bad guy and they spend the entire episode powering up and threatening each other. So I lost interest in anime for awhile.
In high school, Miyazaki's Spirited Away was released in the US and we all went to go see at the movies. That was a pretty amazing movie- Miyazaki makes the kinds of animated movies that Disney wishes they could make. For me, his movies broke the idea that an animated movie could not be a serious piece of cinematography, and I thought that if other animated movies from Japan were half as good as Miyazaki's works, then it would be well worth pursuing. In college, I was introduced by my dorm mates to some of his other works, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro. The latter is a kid's movie, but it had a kind of transportive sweetness to it regardless.
Two years into college and I still dismissed other anime movies and definitely the anime serials, which to me, signaled a hopeless decent into nerd-dom. Yes, I am a nerd, but at least I wasn't one of those nerds. My roommate was really excited about the series Golden Boy, and tried to get me into it as well. It was kind of entertaining, but the series was pretty much an excuse to get as close to hentai as possible. In its own way, it was sillier than Dragonball-Z. As anime became more mainstream, there was more of it and a wider variety of it on TV. While anime series such as Gundam Wing were getting favorable reviews, I could not and still can't get over the idea of someone flying a sophisticated space plane and then transforming it into a karate-chopping robot getting into fisticuffs. I scoffed at anime series. I was a nerd, but I wasn't one of those nerds.
I don't know how or why I first saw Ghost in the Shell, but my days of sticking with Studio Ghibli were over. It was a dark, gritty cyberpunk cop movie, with phenomenal visuals but also a great story and characters. I'd never thought of anime that could deal seriously with politics or philosophy. Definitely not a movie for children. I started branching out, looking for other serious anime in the Zia's anime section.
Saori introduced me to even more anime. She's never been the "sailor moon" type, so she had some good directors in mind. Stuff that was harder to find in Phoenix because it wasn't the usual "Dragonball-Z" or "Gundam Wing" exports. Satoshi Kon's bizzare and trippy Paprika. Old school classics Akira, and Metropolis. Radical, new forms of the genre like Tekkonkinkreet, which uses a form of animation like no other movie I've seen. We ended up watching most of the Studio Ghibli films including Grave of the Fireflies, a profoundly moving movie which Roger Ebert described as one of the most important war movies of all time.
And then she got me the Cowboy Bebop series. This is some of the best anime you will ever see, hands down. Done in style reminiscent of the old Johnny Quest tv series, with great music, well-developed interesting characters. The episodes were by turns comic, action-packed, horrific, and bittersweet. The characters are complex and evolving, and the ultimate arc of the story is tragic, but extremely compelling.
At this point, I had Netflix, which offered streaming episodes of the anime series Ghost in the Shell so I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching episode after episode. When I got my Wii disc and was able to stream anime series to my flatscreen TV, that was it. Now I've got six different anime series lined up in my instant queue, and I've succumbed to utter nerd-dom.
Still havn't been been to a con though. Or descended to the level of cosplay. I'm not one of those nerds.
I don't know how or why I first saw Ghost in the Shell, but my days of sticking with Studio Ghibli were over. It was a dark, gritty cyberpunk cop movie, with phenomenal visuals but also a great story and characters. I'd never thought of anime that could deal seriously with politics or philosophy. Definitely not a movie for children. I started branching out, looking for other serious anime in the Zia's anime section.
Saori introduced me to even more anime. She's never been the "sailor moon" type, so she had some good directors in mind. Stuff that was harder to find in Phoenix because it wasn't the usual "Dragonball-Z" or "Gundam Wing" exports. Satoshi Kon's bizzare and trippy Paprika. Old school classics Akira, and Metropolis. Radical, new forms of the genre like Tekkonkinkreet, which uses a form of animation like no other movie I've seen. We ended up watching most of the Studio Ghibli films including Grave of the Fireflies, a profoundly moving movie which Roger Ebert described as one of the most important war movies of all time.
And then she got me the Cowboy Bebop series. This is some of the best anime you will ever see, hands down. Done in style reminiscent of the old Johnny Quest tv series, with great music, well-developed interesting characters. The episodes were by turns comic, action-packed, horrific, and bittersweet. The characters are complex and evolving, and the ultimate arc of the story is tragic, but extremely compelling.
At this point, I had Netflix, which offered streaming episodes of the anime series Ghost in the Shell so I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching episode after episode. When I got my Wii disc and was able to stream anime series to my flatscreen TV, that was it. Now I've got six different anime series lined up in my instant queue, and I've succumbed to utter nerd-dom.
Still havn't been been to a con though. Or descended to the level of cosplay. I'm not one of those nerds.
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