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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Anime movie recommendations

14:20 / 20.08.08

Hi all. I wanted to ask you for some recommendations on anime movies (please not series) with the following characteristics:

Genres: Drama / Psychological horror / Crime Thriller / Chanbara.

Style: Art and "feel" should be preferably more on the Satoshi Kon line (I watched his movies recently excepting "Tokyo Godfathers", which I'll probably catch sooner or later) - anatomically realistic drawing, subdued direction, physically realistic action, leisurely pacing etc.

(Is there chanbara anime that's more in line with these traits instead of the more frantic, mythical, exaggerated approach? Kinda like slow old school samurai movies a la "Sword of Doom" or "Harakiri"?)

Thanks in advance.

19:44 / 20.08.08

This is such a funny coincidence: I wanted some suggestions myself on the same subject... I am also open to more of a sci aspect, as well.
I'm afraid that I'm not too well versed and I have only really had access to more of the mainstream fair, but I'll assume that you have seen A Perfect Blue? Are you looking for flims along those lines?
I just picked up Paprika (I know there's a thread here on it...) but haven't seen it yet.
, of course, and I remember two excellent mystery/mecha films called Patlabor 1&2
(Just wikipedia'd Satoshi Kon: now feel like an idiot, but will leave my above statement in... Also found that the Patlabor films were originally a series which was compiled into two films... Still worth watching)

20:31 / 20.08.08

I *think* Seth might be grinding his teeth a little.

Anyway. Wings of Honneamise. I mentioned this in one of the other generic anime threads a couple of years back, so I'm risking repeating myself. It's one of the first bits of anime I ever saw, when I was initially getting into the form (and before I suddenly forgot all about it for a few years) and there's a good chance that it spoiled me.

It's graceful and beautiful. Backdrop of international warfare. Hero works for a peaceful, under-funded space agency, dedicated to exploration and, as the film progresses, fighting a losing battle against the politicians and military who want to use its facilities for furthering the war effort. He meets a single mother, living in rural poverty, falls for her. And that, to a large extent, is that.

It's all about the contrast between the financial poverty of that simple life, living off the land, and the emotional and moral poverty of the high-tech war machine that defines the other extreme of the country. There's also a heavy dosage of spiritual message in there, which is crystalised in the film's closing moment. It's a wonderful movie.

As far as I remember, anyway. Seth, unsurprisingly, can probably confirm or deny any of the above. I've still only ever seen the official, dubbed release, and the last time was over a decade ago. I see it's recently received another official outing, this time on Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but that's not made it to the UK yet.

21:39 / 20.08.08

I *think* Seth might be grinding his teeth a little.

You mean because I could have checked his current anime thread? I did, but quickly lost stamina. I found that thread a bit daunting in its scope - and it also contains primers for series, which I'm not interested in. I thought it would be faster to establish a narrow set of traits I wanted to find, instead of reading through his whole thread - which of course I am reading, albeit in small chunks. It's a nice reading material for one who wants to get a grounding on the subject.

Also, definitely will check Wings of Honneamise, sounds very interesting already.

Lui qui s'approche, yeah, that's the guy; I really liked everything I've seen from him so far. Actually I wouldn't mind some sci-fi recommendations as well, as long as they have the characteristics I described in my first post (The Ghost in The Shell series maybe being the epitome of what I'd like to watch).

23:30 / 20.08.08

I loved "Ghost in a Shell" liked "Appleseed"... I still highly recommend the "Patlabor" movies for a pretty complex, gritty police thriller.
As for Sci I liked the "Macross - Super Dimentional Fortress", but admit a weakness more for the American "Robotech" series, which is useless advice considering your parameters of discussion.
I'll shut up now, Must not post drunk... Patlabor - That's my only substantial input.
Thanks for starting the thread, I'll watch it with interest as I had thought of starting a similar thread...

23:46 / 20.08.08

Which reminds me... I was gonna post this in the "Youtube " thread, but maybe it's better here. Verily, I drool.

02:05 / 21.08.08

For psychological horror, there's Perfect Blue, by the same guy who did Paprika. It's very "Alfred Hitchcock" in tone, and the animation is superb.

02:06 / 21.08.08

Lui qui s'approche is damn right about Patlabor 1 & 2. They're both fantastic films with strong characters, intriguingly plotted, thematically satisfying and well directed by Mamoru Oshii who directed the two Ghost in the Shell cinema movies. They're police procedurals only with giant robots.

Randy Dupre is also spot on with Wings of Honneamise. He has a very good memory! It's the first full length effort from Studio Gainax, who are without doubt my favourite creators of anime and seem to have an uncanny knack for producing texts that are like Rosetta Stones for the medium (Honneamise, Gunbuster I & II, Evangelion and FLCL being amongst their greatest works).

From your description you might also like Tekkon Kinkreet. It's a vaguely supernatural Borribles style urban crime tale about two street children and their relationship with the mob and the police. It's fantastic for the first two thirds but lost its way in the final act a little for me.

You're already familiar with Satoshi Kon so all that will remain for me to do here is to encourage you to break your series rule and watch Paranoia Agent. In my humble it's his strongest work, only Paprika can really compare from the rest of his canon.

The Ghost in the Shell series does indeed sound exactly like what you're after. I haven't seen any of it bar the very first episode, but reviews are uniformly glowing. But it has the disadvantage of being two seasons of a series.

And sadly this is where my contribution to the thread ends. Outside of Studio Ghibli's work virtually all of the most satisfying anime I've seen has been in series, and more often than not I'm left disappointed by the movies. All of my favourite creators bar Hayao Miyazaki either only work on TV shows or OVA (straight to video mini-series) or have done their best work in those formats, the notable exception being End of Evangelion which is not only my favourite film but also about fifty times better than the closest runners up (but you'll need to see the series in order to have a hope in hell of understanding it).

02:39 / 21.08.08

Pretty much any Satoshi Kon (Paprika) film is going to be a cut above. I have a soft spot for Millenium Actress, which does wonderful things with metatextual narratives.

03:03 / 21.08.08

I have to admit, the mandate for this thread is diametrically opposed to what I want from my cartoons...

Give me reverse-harem high school comedies! Give me thousand foot tall pink tennis player robots that get delivered in heart-covered blister packs! Give me lesbians that turn into cars!

Give me near-incomprehensible apocalyptic Oedipal nightmares, give me children who have to shout out their special moves as they execute them, give me comic relief animal mascots, give me bell peppers on underwear, give me parents that turn into pandas, give me mecha with surf boards that fight using rainbows that turn the enemy into salt, give me detachable mind-controlling pig tails, give me twelve thousand year revenge missions, give me death threats to showrunners, give me bass-playing Vespa riding alien girls, give me gods that take the form of TV game shows, give me teenagers who unwittingly form after school clubs full of aliens, time travellers and espers, give me students who get hassled to do homework while playing World of Warcraft because their teacher is in their raiding party, give me spirit archers who specialise in sewing and embroidery, give me fourteen year olds in berserker freak-outs, give me TV-headed big brother substitues that sprout from hormone-addled pubescent male foreheads, give me partnered zombie teens who have to swap forearms with each other in order to activate their powers, give me bread that sends you back in time, give me cats used as mediums for interstellar communication, give me a Desolate Land of Wind and Hungry Ghosts populated exclusively by mask-wearing Spaniards, give me mile long insects that hatch in suns, give me heroes who punch the bad guys so hard that it knocks a hole through space-time, give me Warriors of Love, give me ten mile high hermaphrodites whose thousand-eyed forehead vaginas get penetrated by giant robots that are crucified on the Tree of Life!

Give me sentient beards! Give me Buster Beam! Give me Bankai!

But most of all... GIVE ME DRILLS!!

Mysterious Transfer Student

05:14 / 21.08.08

Epic copypasta was epic.

I'm sorry to say I don't have anything to recommend that approximates what you're after (and so ignorant am I, I had to go and check the meaning of chanbara on Wikipedia). Subdued realism is not really what anime does, as a medium - the best series and movies tend to couple deeply three-dimensional characterisation and very sophisticated plotting with surface material that at first glance seems so flashy, absurd or inane that you aren't quite sure how to process it. See Seth's discussions of the first and second Gunbusters in that series' thread and in the Primer thread for a good outline of how Gainax have made this type of storytelling their stock in trade.

On the other hand, I can guarantee that just about any of the series alluded to above will improve your life, sometimes beyond all measure.

13:23 / 21.08.08

Give me lesbians that turn into cars!

Stop drilling, you hit oil.

But yeah, I plan to delve further in animeland. This is just the entry point for someone like me, who's prone to feel overwhelmed quite easily. You can see how some of my choices were fostered by ignorance about the current state of the medium: Choosing movies when you say that the bulk of quality is to be found really in series, or speculating about the existence of "realistic chanbara anime".

There's much more that I like about the Japanese sensibility - the nonsensu humor, the cutting edge tech/biological design, the unapologetic whimsicalness (a huuuge etc follows) so I hope I'll be able to leap to other genres/styles as my taste becomes more informed.

08:46 / 22.08.08

For me, 'Mind Game' by Studio 4°C is the pinnacle of Japanese animation. It's done in an amazingly free-form style of animation that mixes impressionistic linework, close-up animated photographs and CG. It's also one of the most colourful and aesthetically pleasing animes I can think of.

The plot concerns a loser comic author called Nishi, his childhood girlfriend and her sister. It's essentially about personal growth as it applies to control over his own life (via split realities). This manifests in some bizarre sequences including (but not limited to) a trip to heaven to meet God, a technicolour phallic DDR trip, an intergalactic swimming race, a team of microscopic astronauts eating delicious shit to survive, a man being kissed by a plesiosaur and the single best sex scene ever committed to animation.

Mind Game. Get it.