My top Ten: Anime

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:39:47 GMT

I thought that I have watched enough animes by this time to compile a top ten list for myself. So here they are in no particular order the top ten animes that I like. Please note that I have not watched the entire series of some of these anime, but I have seen most of the episodes. My opinions below are based off of what I have seen.

1. Blood + Being one of the few animes that I have watched beginning to end and was hooked by it for that entire length (the series is 50 episodes long) this series deserves its top spot on my list. Blood + follows the journey of Saya Otonashi and her family and friends as they come to terms with what she is. She starts out the series as an average schoolgirl on modern day Okinawa Island with the unusual traits of having no memory of her past except for the last year and a large appetite. This seemingly normal existence is shattered in the span of a half an hour as she is attacked at school by a Chiroptera (monstrous bat-like creatures that feed off human blood and are capable of super-human feats of strength, speed, and hearing. basically this anime's version of a vampire.). the battle (in which Saya in some sort of trance like state literally cuts the monster in half) reveals a new side of Saya that utterly terrifies her after she see her blood soaked form and red glowing eyes in a reflection from a window. Thus begins her journey to figure out what she truly is.

Blood + is filled with enough action and intrigue to keep you hooked even through the slower parts of the anime. The slowly unfolding story of Saya's past is deep and dark, and keeps you guessing as we are given flashback memories from Saya's point of view. The character development is superb with each and ever character changing significantly over the course of the anime. The animation and sound are also very well done. Blood + is an anime that I would defiantly recommend watching.

Acting as a prequel/stand-alone is the movie "Blood: The Last Vampire" which follows Saya's exploits at a US air base in Japan just a few months before the Vietnam war breaks out. While the movie can be seen either before or after you watch the series, I would recommend watching it after Blood + to get a bit more understanding of what is going on in the movie.

2. Full Metal Alchemist FMA is another anime that I have watched from beginning to end, and like Blood + it does not disappoint. FMA takes place on an alternate history earth; technology has not gotten past the steam engine. Instead the science of alchemy is what drives the world. It can do just about anything through the use of transmutation circles and is governed by the law of equivalent exchange (to obtain, something of equal value must be lost). In this world, two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, are two up and coming alchemist living in a rural town. Their father left when they were really young and there mother died years later of an illness. Desperate to have there mom back they attempt to bring her back through the use of alchemy. They fail utterly with the result of their mom coming back as a misshapen hunk of flesh, Edward losing his left leg, and Alphonse losing his entire body. In a desperate attempt to keep Alphonse alive, Edward sacrifices his right arm to affix his brother's soul to a suit of armor. Now the two brothers, Edward with an automail arm and leg and Alphonse as an empty walking and talking suit of armor, wander around the countryside searching for the way to reclaim there lost body parts. They quickly find that the answer may not be the salvation that they were hoping for.

FMA is another anime that I recommend as a must watch. The action is quite intense and is interspersed with comedy in the right places. Multiple story lines abound and are well executed. Plus the number of plots surrounding the answer the Elric brothers seek is astounding. This anime is worth every second of its 50+ episodes.

FMA also has a movie called "FMA the movie: Conqueror of Shamballa". I recommend watching the movie after the series since the movie serves as a sequel to the anime and indeed picks up not long after where the anime ends.

3. Trigun Trigun is another good anime to watch. Taking place on a desert planet, a lone man known only as Vash the Stampede has a bounty on his head of 60 billion double dollars for his single handed destruction of an entire town. Two insurance workers, Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe are sent by their company to find this man and try to prevent him from doing any more damage. the man that they eventually find out is Vash the Stampede is not the kind of man they were expecting to find, and as more and more about the man is revealed we begin to wonder just who or what he is.

This anime is best described as a space western, barrowing quite heavily from old western movies and TV shows. Yet the fact that you are on an alien planet shows with the odd technologies that crop up here and there. The fact that there are four moons in the sky also helps to set the mood too. Action and light comedy go hand and hand here in the somewhat comedic yet serious ways that Vash deals with a situation. So be prepared for rapid mood swings in this anime.

4. Fruits Basket no that is not a misspelling. Fruits Basket follows the story of Tohru Honda who was recently orphaned when her mother died in a car crash. Recently living with her grandfather she starts living in a tent when her grandfather’s house needs to be renovated. Not long after, she finds out that where she set up her tent is on land owned by the Sohma family which includes Yuki Sohma who is her classmate. Taking pity on her they offer to let her stay at their house in return for doing the housework and cooking. She accepts after a landslide buries her tent and all of her possessions. It isn’t long before she stumbles on the family secret. The Sohma’s are cursed. They turn into animals of the Chinese zodiac if they are hugged by the opposite gender, are under a lot of stress, or they are really weak, and Tohru might be the only person that can help them.

Fruits Basket is more of an emotional anime than anything else with comedy interspaced throughout. The main theme of the anime is the characters trying to find their place in the world. The story is told in such a way that you can’t wait to see the next episode to find out more.

5. FLCL no one word that I can think of can accurately describe this anime. It starts out fairly normal. Nandaba Naota is your average teenager. He goes to school and tries to act mature, that is until he is run over by a Vespa scooter driven by Haruhara Haruko and then is hit in the head by her bass guitar. Weirdness soon ensues as giant robots start coming out of Nandaba’s forehead, Haruhara becomes the live-in maid at his house, and he is hit even more times with the vespa, the guitar, and several other things. You wonder why he is not dead or at least paralyzed by the end.

Parodies abound in this anime, poking fun at anime, Japan, and its own makers. The anime is relatively short, only spanning six episodes. So the plot is fast paced and full of action and weirdness. The only thing I can say about this is that you better be ready for anything.

6. S-cry-ed here is yet another action oriented anime. This one takes place in Japan sometime in the future. A geologic event called “the Great Uprising” has separated a large section of Japan from the main island. This section of land now known as the lost ground is populated by people who have the ability to deconstruct matter and reshape and crystallize it into any form using only their thoughts and willpower. These people are called alter users, and for most of them it is a day to day struggle to survive. Kazuma is one of these alter users and the law on the island is about to seriously piss him off.

S-cry-ed is what you could call a brawler anime since most of the story revolves around Kazuma and another Alter user, named Ryuhou, trying to be the best there is period by fighting each other till one is defeated. Yet their fights are always interrupted. Still there is enough story left after this for the anime to be very enjoyable and yes the fights between Kazuma and Ryuhou do tie into the story very well.

7. Inuyasha your typical fantasy adventure anime. Modern day school girl Kagome Higurashi living in a suburb of Tokyo has a relatively normal life living on a shire run by her family. This is until her 15^th birthday when a centipede demon bursts out of the old well on the grounds and pulls her into it. After somehow getting away from the demon she climbs out of the well to find herself not in Tokyo anymore. Many things happen after that. She finds out she is still in Japan just 500 years in the past, demons exist, she is the reincarnation of a priestess that died 50 years ago, her body houses a jewel of great power that is ripped out and then she shatters it while trying to get it back from a crow demon, and she frees a half-demon from a tree. Rough life? Oh it gets better as she teams up with the half-demon and attempts to track down the shards of the jewel before they fall into the wrong hands.

I have not seen all the episodes of this anime yet, mostly because it is over 150 episodes long. I have only seen up to episode 90. Inuyasha was the first anime that got me hooked not counting digimon which I had watched years before. Each episode serves as sort of a mini adventure yet still ties into the main story line, and each episode gets progressively darker and darker as the series goes on and more characters are introduced. Character development is slow but very well done, and the main villain is possible the most evil heartless monster I have ever seen in any of these series.

In addition to the large number of episodes there are four movies out there as well. Each with a storyline that is separate from the main anime. I personally have not watched any of the movies so I can’t tell you if they are any good or where they fit into the anime.

8. Read or Die Read or die takes place in an alternate-history earth, where the United Kingdom is still the dominate superpower. There are two read or die anime series “Read or Die: OVA” and “R.O.D. the TV”. In the OVA we are introduced to Yomiko Readman, a bibliomaniac to the “n”th degree, and a powerful paper master (someone who can manipulate paper to do there bidding. i.e. they can make familiars out of it, use it to stop a bullet, etc.). Working as a special agent for the British Library, she is tasked with getting and protecting rare and ancient literary works. “R.O.D. the TV” is a sequel of sorts for the OVA that follows the story of the Paper sisters (all of which are paper masters, but are not as powerful as Readman) as they act as the bodyguards of Japanese author and Readman’s friend Nenene.

I have seen the OVA and the first 12 episode of “the TV”. From what I have seen the anime is really good. Action is aplenty especially in the OVA. ROD the TV has more humor stemming from the interactions between the three sisters and the author.

9. Ghost in the Shell best described as a cybernetic police thriller, Ghost in the Shell’s story focuses on a covert operations group within the Japanese National Public Safety Commission known as Secton 9. They work in a world where the line between man and machine has bleared so much that it is almost impossible to tell who is human and who is a cyborg.

This anime has so many things going for it as the writers focused more on the ethical and philosophical conflicts that come with the widespread merging of human and machine. Lots of action, great animation, and some of the best opening themes I have heard. This is defiantly one of the best out there.

There are three movies and two seasons of the anime out there. The first two movies “Ghost in the Shell” and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” are on a different storyline than the anime which is titled “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”. The third movie ties in with the anime storyline and is called “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society”. They are all rather good.

10. Witch Hunter Robin What is the best way to catch a witch? Why use another witch of course. Robin is a 15 year old witch that was raised by the Roman Catholic Church in Italy. She is the new member of STN-J a secret organization that hunts down witches that have just come into there power to keep the rest of humanity in the dark about witches. The members of this force are themselves “craft users”. As her powers grow will Robin stop being the hunter and start being the hunted?

I have seen most of the episodes. All are very dark and moody. Near the beginning it has the feeling of doing the monster of the week plot but soon get to the main story. This one is worth watching.

Honorable Mentions: these anime I find to be very good, but don’t make my top ten obviously.

-Deathnote: Purely a thinking man’s anime since the main antagonist and villain are trying to outmaneuver each other rather than fight. I have only seen about ten episodes of this one, but it is different from other anime I have seen.

-Bleach: mostly action with some good story elements. The two main drawbacks are that it is now over 180 episodes long and they tend to extend the fights over two to three episodes or more. Plus the fights get repetitive after awhile.

-Cowboy Bebop: I have only seen a few of the episode from this one, which follows intergalactic bounty hunters. However the ones I have seen have good story telling and look nice.

-Granadier: similar theme to Trigun with the lone gun story. Yet Trigun is the much better anime of the two. Granadier is shorter than Trigun and much less serious, but it is good for a break from your more serious action anime.

-Digimon: especially season one. Of the animes based off of games this is by far the best one. It has a believable and enjoyable storyline, and characters that grow and evolve. Later seasons start to suffer from the “been there done that” feeling, but are still good.

OS-tans and others

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:18:05 GMT

Ok, i found this a few months ago and i just had to say something about it. this is a good waste of a few hours looking though all the stuff.

about a month ago i was surfing the net with my stumble application when it took me to a wikipedia entry that was entitled "wikipe-tan" and featured an artwork of a girl done in a manga style wearing a maid outfit with the wikipedia puzzle pieces decorating her hair and outfit. turns out this is one of many personifications of the Wikipedia website and is a product of Moe anthropomorphism, or the giving of moe (basically, cute girl) qualities to a non-human being, object, concept, or phenomena. they are also seen with various accessories that denote the being or object that the character is representing. even the way the body is built and the personality that is given to the "-tan" represent something about the object that it is representing. As you can guess from the "-tan" suffix at the end of the name, it is of japanese origin.

well as i read through that entry i kept seeing mentions of "OS-tans". Curious, i clicked on the link and this is the entry that popped up. it turns out that the "OS-tans" means Operating System-tans. Every single operating system that has ever been made for a computer has had a personification made for it in the same fashion as "Wikipe-tan". for example, the personification of the windows 95 OS (which is considered to be the the first of the modern windows 32-bit OS's) is typically depicted as a traditional brown-haired lady from the early modern era of Japan wearing a kimono and has a hair ribbon that shows the four windows colors. Linux was originally depicted as a bearded penguin, but a more friendly girl image with flippers and a helmet has been used as a human alternative. also these "-tans" have the weird trait that breast size represents the amount of memory required to run these operating systems. so as you can guess the breast size of the "XP-tan" is rather ...Um... large.

Digging even further many programs, hardware, file-types, and web-applications have also been made into "-tans". "wikipe-tan" is one of these. other examples include: Mozilla Firefox (depicted as a beautiful female humanoid fox spirit), Mozilla Thunderbird (a girl dressed in yellow and blue with a letter or keyboard near by), Google, Outlook, Gmail, some of the more infamous viruses, blue-ray disks, and even USB connections.

these are all fan made artworks and even more of the images of "OS-tans", other "-tans", and even some male personifications can be found here.

Edward's stuff: Anime and manga

My top Ten: Anime

OS-tans and others