Check out “The Sky Crawlers” or “Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade” for something that a typical hollywood production would never even attempt.

As medium anime is lot better suited for crazier projects, because it allows for greater creative freedom due to lower financial requirements. In hollywood, only a few people like Stanley Kubrick were able to get both total creative freedom and sufficient financial support to actually implement their creativity. Anime can change all of this!

However, I do agree the vast majority of anime is total crap, ranging from Pokemon to bland crap which recycles the same imagery/stereotypes over and over again. But if you guys want to check out some thought provoking anime, check out my anime list:

http://myanimelist.net/animelist/levictus

P.S. This game looks pretty bad, I have yet to find a game that uses anime graphics/style that was worth playing. Although I’ve heard good things about “Oni”.

Science Girls is a good game. The idea is refreshing. It’s a nice combination of “RPG” and “Moe”, without relying on fan service or violence— which is something too common nowadays. If there’s anything it lacks, it lacks story elements that go beyond girls defeating aliens. It’s still fun to play and a bit challenging. It certainly doesn’t deserve all this hate.

I expect someone will eventually manage to transplant a decent quality original Japanese visual novel type game to the Western market. Trying to clone them (particularly with no budget, horrible art and writing, etc.) seems like an exercise in futility.

FLCL is da bomb. TTGL is awesome also.

Akira comes up a lot, and I love it, but its in a category of its own imho. Its not really representative of anime generally, as many western fans find out when they hopelessly struggle to find something similar to watch after seeing Akira. Every now and then some Japanese media poll gets translated with a top-100-anime-titles-of-all-time type thing, and in recent years there have been a few where Akira hasn’t even made the list!

I’m watching Ergo Proxy at the moment. Its hit and miss for sure (what 20+ episode serial isn’t, in any medium?), but there have been some great episodes, and the art is often quite nice. I’m looking forward to the next season of Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu. Also Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei was excellent.

Off the top of my head I have never played a good game based on an anime so I can’t make this comment go on-topic. Sorry.

I totally loved Paranoia Agent, one of the strangest, bravest and thoughtiest tv series I’ve ever seen. But for every Paranoia theres ten Battle Vixens and Dragon Ball Z spin offs. You can never dismiss a whole medium/genre because sooner or later you’ll find something which single handedly justifies its whole existence.

Our comics also range from Disney’s anthropomorphism to the mainstream superhero comic style, reaching extremes of hardcore porn like Druuna. The main difference with manga is that we tend to draw more realistic when we refer to a more mature or adult audience, while Japanese artists follow the same norms whatever their target groups.

The thing is most of us that grew up on superhero comics throughout our pre-teens soon got bored of the body and costume stereotypes found therein and the politically correctness of the heroes. Vertigo was a way out before the manga “invasion”, but most found in many of the Japanese titles the same characteristics.

A very important factor was that we are a generation that grew playing video games and even if you never owned a console (like me), you’d probably play arcade games. These, coming from the Japanese market, had character design heavily influenced by manga and anime.

It’s true that manga cliches as the schoolgirl uniform have become annoying, but I believe the western comic stereotype of the female hero is equally irritating. The difference is the school uniform seems to be a lot more offensive than the chain mail bikinis or latex superhero uniforms. Both are references to extremes of sexual behavior, pederasty and sadomasochism, but it’s natural (thank God!) that the first is unacceptable.

Being critical of both, I cannot condemn the international comic industry as a whole when it has produced titles as Sandman, Preacher, Strangers in Paradise, Akira or Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. It’s the public’s responsibility to push those mediums towards good stories and abandoning their stereotypes.

Come to think of it, I guess it’s hopeless if you see where Hollywood movies have been led to…

Generally I don’t have much of a facination with Japanese pop culture, but those two films *were* pretty fucking amazing.