Consider that the investigators didn't know that the girl in question was the voracious eater nor that she was a ghoul. For them it was just an accident that didn't concern them.The Wykydtron said:
As for the doctor...
That's for season 2 to show
Is the Western golden age of anime really over?
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As for the doctor...
That's for season 2 to show
Have you given Parasyte a shot by any chance? I'd say I'm similarly cynical about modern anime, but Parasyte's been a breath of fresh air among a sea of mediocrity this year. It's an anime adaption of an 80's manga that is allegedly extremely faithful to the source material and doesn't fall into the all-too-common trappings of modern anime tropes/cliches.Casual Shinji said:
I think you may like it
I actually did watch the first two episodes of that show, and it was refreshing to see a bit of bodyhorror in anime again, eventhough it is still framed as this highschool setting/monster of the week story. Atleast the protagonist actually has onscreen parents.Fappy said:Have you given Parasyte a shot by any chance? I'd say I'm similarly cynical about modern anime, but Parasyte's been a breath of fresh air among a sea of mediocrity this year. It's an anime adaption of an 80's manga that is allegedly extremely faithful to the source material and doesn't fall into the all-too-common trappings of modern anime tropes/cliches.
I think you may like it
And this might seem a bit petulant, but I wish it had more of the dark visual style of the comic. The anime looks fine with great production values, but it looks a bit too, I don't know, friendly. I'm not the biggest fan of most anime styles today period, they just lack a certain weight and punch. Again, this can probably be attributed to anime being digital now.
I might still give Parasyte another shot. Who knows, maybe it'll surprise me and become another Watamote.
Yeah, give it a few more episodes. If you aren't into by the time the story takes its big turn (around episode 4 or 5 I think?) then you probably won't care for the rest. It does have some silly high school setting stuff, but nothing too overdone or monotonous. The protagonist has a very interesting and refreshing character arc you don't really see in anime/manga these days and it actually has a decent romance subplot not typically found in modern anime.Casual Shinji said:I actually did watch the first two episodes of that show, and it was refreshing to see a bit of bodyhorror in anime again, eventhough it is still framed as this highschool setting/monster of the week story. Atleast the protagonist actually has onscreen parents.Fappy said:Have you given Parasyte a shot by any chance? I'd say I'm similarly cynical about modern anime, but Parasyte's been a breath of fresh air among a sea of mediocrity this year. It's an anime adaption of an 80's manga that is allegedly extremely faithful to the source material and doesn't fall into the all-too-common trappings of modern anime tropes/cliches.
I think you may like it
And this might seem a bit petulant, but I wish it had more of the dark visual style of the comic. The anime looks fine with great production values, but it looks a bit too, I don't know, friendly. I'm not the biggest fan of most anime styles today period, they just lack a certain weight and punch. Again, this can probably be attributed to anime being digital now.
I might still give Parasyte another shot. Who knows, maybe it'll surprise me and become another Watamote.
As for the animation style... well it doesn't ever really change, but when the gore ramps up it's fairly grisly and the style gets a bit grittier. It's honestly not as gory as it could be, but I am pretty indifferent to gore anyway. After seeing Hellsing Ultimate nothing really compares anymore, lol.
I just watched up to episode 7, and it does take a pretty drastic turn, one I really didn't expect, certainly not this soon. But it does seem to wrap things up a bit too neatly, I don't know. When "that" happens at around episode 5 it's fairly shocking, and I mean 'Game of Thrones Red Wedding' levels of shock, yet Izumi seems to have made his peace with it fairly soon afterward.Fappy said:
The way it's set up initially it's like they made the parents go on vacation to sort of get them out of the way for Izumi and Migi to go more balls out in battling other monsters without him having to explain his absence from school or home, or without having his mom and dad get caught in the crossfire or used as blackmail or something. Again, this is a regular anime trope; Have a teenaged hero in contemporary times, but without the need to answer to any parental authority which would limit their freedom for getting into adventure/conflicts.
But then his mom gets murdered and taken over by a parasite while on vacation, and that really took me by surprise. I was like, 'Good on you, anime. I didn't see that coming.' And it duplicated the engagment tenfold, because... now it's personal. Really, REALLY fucking personal! It's extremely life scarring for Izumi, way more than anything that's happened prior, but it seems to resolve itself fairly quickly. While I did really like what they did, I think they sprang this card too soon.
But then his mom gets murdered and taken over by a parasite while on vacation, and that really took me by surprise. I was like, 'Good on you, anime. I didn't see that coming.' And it duplicated the engagment tenfold, because... now it's personal. Really, REALLY fucking personal! It's extremely life scarring for Izumi, way more than anything that's happened prior, but it seems to resolve itself fairly quickly. While I did really like what they did, I think they sprang this card too soon.
The show does seem to suffer a bit from every girl having the hots for the protagonist. By the time you got to that girl from the hotel it was just getting silly.
You can't have a golden age until you're the producer. I mean, that might have been Japan's golden age of getting us to buy their second hand crap, but not ours. Our golden age will happen when anime becomes the desired and chosen animation style and we have some honest classics. That is not the case yet.
We have better access, but as for your "golden age" let me break it down for you. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, you know what your golden age really was? It was cheap animation they could import quickly and just new enough that they could feed it to your teenage self with hopes that you'd buy their heavily over priced DVDs because they're "imported". That's it. The golden age of anime was because it was easier to buy and half ass dub a show from there, then it was to make one or get it from Canada. Which, by the way, should have also been the golden age of Canadian cartoons in the US. (With Cartoon Network pulling a large line up from there as well).
Now that the DVD market is saturated, you're seeing the price go way down on them. Actually if anything, your access and supply is greater now then it ever was, so wouldn't THIS be your golden age? Japan's price for new show import on broadcast syndication probably went way up after the early 00's and we're just not pulling as much anymore.
We have not made our Tokyo Godfather yet, or our Paprika, or our Tekkonkinkreet, or our Lovely Complex, or Puella Magi Madoka Magica, or...
Actually, we've not produced enough to be able to subvert it. But seeing as we're riding high on Avatar: TLA ( and Korra), Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, etc. I don't think we'll be seeing a production of anime flare up again as it did in a long time. Everything old is new again, and you'll just need for the western world to run out of stories it wants to tell before we start accepting anime as a thing again.
We have better access, but as for your "golden age" let me break it down for you. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, you know what your golden age really was? It was cheap animation they could import quickly and just new enough that they could feed it to your teenage self with hopes that you'd buy their heavily over priced DVDs because they're "imported". That's it. The golden age of anime was because it was easier to buy and half ass dub a show from there, then it was to make one or get it from Canada. Which, by the way, should have also been the golden age of Canadian cartoons in the US. (With Cartoon Network pulling a large line up from there as well).
Now that the DVD market is saturated, you're seeing the price go way down on them. Actually if anything, your access and supply is greater now then it ever was, so wouldn't THIS be your golden age? Japan's price for new show import on broadcast syndication probably went way up after the early 00's and we're just not pulling as much anymore.
We have not made our Tokyo Godfather yet, or our Paprika, or our Tekkonkinkreet, or our Lovely Complex, or Puella Magi Madoka Magica, or...
Actually, we've not produced enough to be able to subvert it. But seeing as we're riding high on Avatar: TLA ( and Korra), Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, etc. I don't think we'll be seeing a production of anime flare up again as it did in a long time. Everything old is new again, and you'll just need for the western world to run out of stories it wants to tell before we start accepting anime as a thing again.
FMA Brotherhood has an excellent dub, also recentish and great is Baccano!Dead Century said:
The ongoing Funimation dub of One Piece is also excellent.
I totally agree about the "all girls have a crush" thing. Good thing about that is Murano is the only one that sticks around (the one he's actually interested in). As for Izumi getting over what happened quickly... that's actually a really important aspect of his arc that gets explored more as the show continues. His newfound lack of human empathy starts to mess with his mind.Casual Shinji said:
That wasn't the golden age. That was just the age where anime was a "fad". Nothing more, nothing less.
The stuff you describe, things such as anime "being on tv" and whatnot, those are not significant to the essence of being into anime, they never were. No, what matters is how many well informed anime fans are out there. It doesn't matter if anime is more mainstream if only 5 popular shows will ever get any attention and if only dubs get watched because people won't do anime the honor they do French and other European movies and watch them in their original form.
Basically, all that stuff that's gone was the tip of the iceberg. Anime fandom always, even then, was all about shows that would never get shown out of Japan, fansubs, cosplay, conventions, certain types of videogames and manga. These areas have steadily increased in popularity and there's more people who know their shit about these fields than they did back then. Back in the early 2000s you had to bittorent stuff from random fansub websites, one website per show, now you can go and stream HIGH QUALITY anime from a myriad of sites and each site has hundreds of full shows. Back then it would take you years to amass this level of content and now we are privileged enough to have it at our fingertips without any work vetting the fansub group, installing weird plugins and all that other stuff. The golden age is right now and it's only getting golder. What's gone is the mainstream popularist fad BS stuff.
The stuff you describe, things such as anime "being on tv" and whatnot, those are not significant to the essence of being into anime, they never were. No, what matters is how many well informed anime fans are out there. It doesn't matter if anime is more mainstream if only 5 popular shows will ever get any attention and if only dubs get watched because people won't do anime the honor they do French and other European movies and watch them in their original form.
Basically, all that stuff that's gone was the tip of the iceberg. Anime fandom always, even then, was all about shows that would never get shown out of Japan, fansubs, cosplay, conventions, certain types of videogames and manga. These areas have steadily increased in popularity and there's more people who know their shit about these fields than they did back then. Back in the early 2000s you had to bittorent stuff from random fansub websites, one website per show, now you can go and stream HIGH QUALITY anime from a myriad of sites and each site has hundreds of full shows. Back then it would take you years to amass this level of content and now we are privileged enough to have it at our fingertips without any work vetting the fansub group, installing weird plugins and all that other stuff. The golden age is right now and it's only getting golder. What's gone is the mainstream popularist fad BS stuff.
I don't know how it is in the show but the manga(I started reading it after I caught up with the show back when it was still airing new eps), but I remember Izumi actually suffering from a lot of PTSD after this event and his outlook on life changing drastically, namely his view on the value of life.Casual Shinji said:
I'm glad an obscure manga from the 80ies is getting its glory day in the sun, but it still speaks poorly of the industry if they feel they have to dig up more source material from the past rather than creating their own stories.
The anime industry is getting a little to comfortable with the niche they have carved out so its no surprise they have begun to stagnate. The only things that can shake it out of this current phase are: if a show/movie breaks the mold and is wildly successful or if another animation industry steps up and starts taking away fans.
oh btw Shinji, you might want to check out (shinsekaiyori?) aka from the new world. It was a interesting show. I haven't gotten around to finishing it but it was pretty weird in a refreshing sort of way.