FLCL? I would never recommend FLCL to a newcomer. Trying to get someone to sit down and watch anime is hard enough, so I try to make sure the show is something I know they'll like or I know they'll relate to. So I avoid the weird good stuff, like Lain or Paranoia Agent or NGE... the list goes on. I guess I just don't have much faith that they'll come back looking for more.
I think a lot of the reason why the people who have recommended shows like FLCL and Paranoia Agent here is that we have a certain degree of history with the two main people who have asked for the recommendations (sleazenation and Boboss), as well as a conception of Barbelith that it's the kind of place where many people appreciate texts that can be difficult, multi-layered, fairly bonkers and quite extreme in the way they present themselves in both style and ideas.
I can't speak for the people for whom sleazenation is intending to hold anime screenings, but I do know that sleaze himself, and Boboss for that matter, have read a whole shedload of comics, which like anime is broadly and generally perceived from the outside as being a trash medium. From my experience of them they probably like superhero comics when they're intelligently created and well made, because, well, superheroes are pretty fucking awesome when done well. But from what I know of them they gravitate toward a variety of texts and appreciate something that's designed to make you think, something that will surprise them, and something that operates on a number of levels.
From their responses and requests in this thread it seems to me that they've seen a bunch of anime, some of which they like, some of which they don't, and are already familiar with some of what they might expect. I wrote my recommendations with what I know of them in mind, and I think that part of what they're asking for here is recommendations that might fall outside the very limited scope of the anime that is easily accessible in the UK, things they might not have thought to seek out otherwise. Because I'm writing for them specifically and with Barbelith in general I'm more likely to use references to frequently sited authors like Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan, who are pretty familiar names here. Those reference points, in my humble, are both accurate and hopefully meeting their request for a sale pitch.
1. Cowboy Bebop
Because everybody loves Cowboy Bebop. I mean, every human on the planet likes to sit in front of the TV and watch a show like this one. It's fun, lighthearted, action-packed, with inside jokes and a soundtrack from heaven. What's not to love.
While I respect that a great deal of people love this show very much, I disagree that it's the type of show that everyone loves, and I deliberately don't recommend it to anime newcomers. I know at least two people who agree with me and my reasons for doing so.
There's a common criticism of a lot of anime that it's about style over substance, and this is one of the main criticisms I'd level at Cowboy Bebop. I found the characters to be static, the stories to be mostly generic and trite and the through-arc to be underdeveloped and inconsequential due to a favouring of a mainly episodic format. I was really excited by the two-part episode halfway through the run, as it seemed as though the scenario and the characters were complexifying and becoming more three-dimensional. I was then disappointed when it went back to the episodic format, for me it didn't capitalise on the directions it could have gone in. Conversely, the design, music aesthetics and storytelling techniques were so overly developed that the show became too focused on gloss and presentation, and as a result I believe its heavily stylised aspects are detrimental to what might have been a fun if fairly standard show. I was disappointed with it because it seemed to me to be a lot of bluster around nothing very much in particular, and from my experience of the first few episodes of Samurai Champloo that show seemed more of the same (apologies if it's actually excellent and gets rich and interesting later on, if so I might give it a second chance).
Taking this premise a little further, many people object to Ghost in the Shell and Innocence (the sequel) because they believe they present themselves as much more intelligent than they actually are, as though the philosophy is not only a signifier of cool in similar manner to Bebop's design and scoring but also that it's a shallow grasp at creating an illusion of depth that the texts themselves don't actually deserve. Although I liked much of Ergo Proxy I felt it was also guilty of this in places (see my thread on the subject). I like the first Ghost in the Shell movie and love Innocence, but I admit that I can recognise a hollow ring to both, in that the inner story is much less consequential than its external trappings. Many people I know who are passionate about music, art, philosophy or religion feel as though these shows/films are insulting to a degree, because it as though interests in which they have invested a lot of time and soul searching have been repackaged back to them as a shallow marketing device, one that doesn't do the original material that it's referencing adequate justice. Many people take issue with The Matrix Trilogy for similar reasons, for a non-anime example of the same.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a million and one types of people who have often very different preconceptions about anime, and that this thread is becoming a fascinating means of examining some of the main criticisms of the medium through what different people choose to recommend for or against, based on their perceptions of who they believe their audience to be. Which is again an argument in favour of these shows and films being considerably more than just one homogenised mess. |
