Hyperactive anime character behaviors/sounds usually reduce the joy I get from the rest of what I'm watching.
While I heard Studio Ghibli films aren't "real anime," their works are the most anime-like thing I love.
I heard Studio Ghibi films aren't "real anime"
You will most often hear this from incels who are mad that Miyazaki is a leftist feminist that doesn't make his girl characters into lolis for pedo nerds to drool over.
IMO Ghibli is not only real anime, it's some of the best anime.
You might enjoy some these movies where the characters act more human:
Summer Wars
Your Name
Tokyo Godfathers
your name makes me bawl every time i watch it. i highly recommend it
Tokyo Godfathers is goooooooooood. Almost Christmas time, too, so it's perfect!
Second Your Name, watched it without reading anything about it and it was wonderful
Summer Wars trailer: "On my back, my very small back, rested the fate of mankind."
I'm under pressure and can't handle a story like that atm, but maybe another time. It looks good.
Bro Your Name looks SO pretty! It looks like a male and a female take up the same amount of storytime. I'm not sure why, but that seems nice. I'll certainly try to make time to check it out.
The three main characters in Tokyo Godfathers seem very likable, kickass people. Your Name comes beforehand. Then I'd like to see the journey of these three later.
Your name is beautiful and I recommend it as long as your heart is ready to be flilled upside down three times
Wait what? How upside down? I was just about to find and watch it as a de-stressor.
Summer Wars is not very good IMO. The whole conflict is very silly. It will be difficult to take it as seriously as you've made it sound. I still enjoyed it though.
to be fair he didn't do it on purpose afaict. he just made a 14 year old or whatever with a crush on the protagonist and people went insane
don't the call the villain that? like, i don't remember it that well but from what i remember the villain wants to marry her and he gets called a lolicon (which just kind of means pedophile) and then so many deeply gross people saw this and agreed with him that they now believe lolicon means something less bad
but to be clear i haven't seen it in a long while and i could totally be wrong
I watched Your Name. Loved it! I want my city looking just as gorgeous as the ones in it. The people were very well drawn too.
:blob-help: How do you type out a "spoiler?"
SPOILER:
~~_I'm gonna forgive this because someone watching with me said anime often does this, and you unfortunately gotta make do and get used to it: Did not dig the first scene where the guy stripped down to check out the girl's body. And not that they should've, but notice how they didn't do the same thing when the girl first finds herself in the boy's body.
Omg LOL the "I love you" thing was so cheesy and unnecessary. They were so intimately connected in every aspect of each other's lives. You couldn't make them closer. That spurred nothing but laughter from me.
I thought they'd never actually meet. Especially because all the men were dressed the same. That was a nice ending._~~
While I heard Studio Ghibli films aren’t “real anime,”
idk where you heard that, but they are.
I think Mushishi might have the vibe you're looking for. It's very down to earth and calming to watch like some Ghibli films. It has supernatural elements incorporated in the plot but it focuses more on the people and communities the main character meets on his travels.
I just watched the episode called The Warbling Shell. As the trailer described, the show is thought provoking. Watching the slow frames of mundane details is meditation. This meditation carried me through every second without being hyper at all. It's enticing calmness simultaneously left wanting to see what's next, and not minding how long the present scene was. Impending doom and tragedy has never felt so peaceful. The beautifully drawn mushishi were so cute. They're a good counterbalance to the doom.
Btw, when I'm depressed, I often forget what my favorite songs are. Now that it's quieted my mind, I'm in the mood to listen to music I like more.
Mushishi is lovely. Ty for the recommendation. :meow-hug:
Ahh I'm so very happy to hear it brought some calm your way. Mushishi will always have a special place in my heart, it truly is meditative to watch. Enjoy! :meow-melt:
I liked Perfect Blue so in most cases it'd be a good recommendation but the characters don't act like real people. It's not moe shit ofc but I don't think that should be the only standard.
spoiler
The murderer character is a harmful misrepresentation of people with dissociative disorders. Aside from the murder thing and inaccuracies the film isn't even structured in a way that fully explores the choice of giving Ruri an "alter" rather than have her willfully impersonate Mima. It really fell flat when it came to these portions of the plot whereas I thought that Mima as a character was done well in that the film got the viewer thinking more about the entertainment industry, misogyny, dealing with mental illness, the interactions of those things, and so on.
Flying Witch is a pretty chill slice of life anime.
Akira is dead, dead serious
Jinroh: Wolf Brigade is likewise extremely serious.
Most of the Ghost in the Shell products. The only genki stuff are the Tachikomas, and there's a reason they're like that.
Same with Appleseed.
Berserk. Uh. Berserk is very dark. It has all the content warnings.
That hyper active, exaggerated genki shit is a genre thing, not an anime thing. It's mostly kids shows and shonen stuff and what have you. There's lots of serious minded anime, or just stuff that's lighthearted by more grounded.
Even Durarara manages to be pretty surreal and high energy without really getting in to what you're describing.
Really, anime just means Japanese Animation, and you can find every imaginable genre from small kids shows to serious period dramas in their somewhere.
Lain, along with Evangelion (especially the last six episodes and EoE), is the only anime to ever leave me with such a distinct feeling that I struggle to even capture in words. Haunting is accurate, but it doesn't even scratch the surface.
Haven't seen it in a while but
spoiler
I think it is towards the end. In the first episode you just think it is a robot but as it goes on you get the sense that there is more going on. In one of the earlier episodes you see a chunk of the armor fall off and you see the eye of the Eva looking real organic
spoiler
Pretty sure it's in the back half, maybe even EoE. it is absolutely not important to the story.
I feel obligated to point out that there is more sexual content that may be off-putting, but imo Evangelion is doing it mostly for valid reasons and not just for :awooga:
I think Lain would make a good candidate for saturday night anime on the cytube instance.
extremely seconded
suggestion: Lain paired with Donna Haraway Hexbear study group
Lain goes all the way in the other direction into Lynchian uncannyness. Of course it owns bones and everyone should watch it.
I'll usually recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena to most people, although I can't say it's free of anime antics. There's a bit of a surrealist aesthetic going on but what the show does is comment on the way people are led to fill certain roles and ways that can be harmful. So there's real human behavior underneath it. I was kinda vague in my description because it's the kind of show where a lot of it is contextualized by the ending.
Content warning for sexual violence though, but absolutely not as a joke the way some shows do.
Terror in Resonance. It's an anti-nationalist anime by the guy who made Cowboy Bebop. The animation and overall atmosphere is highly realistic, with a few caveats near the end (mind games bullshit). I like the english dub because the female character sounds like an actual girl and not a high pitched anime girl
Welcome to the NHK. It's about a depressed suicidal NEET who has conspiracy brain and meets a manic pixie dream girl who's actually as fucked up as him. Everyone is an adult and has realistic desires and miseries. I recommend the dub for the same reason as above. There are some "hyperactive" moments e.g. characters yelling and fantasizing, but most of the show is grounded in reality. In fact, the characters even change clothes on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times in the same episode.
I really liked Terror in Resonance. My sister and I watched it all in an afternoon and we both thought it was great but for some reason I don't hear it get talked about a lot online.
Yeah especially since Shinichiro Watanabe was the director. I guess the more hyperactive and stylistic stuff is what people care more about these days. That, or publishers were too afraid to push it because of the anti-nationalist themes lol
I usually suspect certain shows just don't get pushed too much because the characters weren't made to be figure sellers. If someone made a youtube video with an attention grabbing title that emphasized how sad/fucked up it was I bet it could still catch on though. lol
Damn you're right. I remember reading somewhere that the merchandise makes up a bulk of the sales for franchises
Legend of the Galactic heroes is a sci-fi epic that is pretty cool. It's mostly follows the military commanders in different factions. I've seen the first season of the newer 2018 adaptation but the original 80s/90s series is also supposed to be very good
Megalo Box is a boxing anime that was pretty realistic in terms of characters
Monster is a mystery show about a surgeon investigating one of his patients who became a killer. It's a very good slow burn
some anime movies tend to be more real life/subtle with their characters compared to TV anime. Wolf Children and Perfect Blue are really good
I keep meaning to watch the original LotGH, but that 100+ episode length is so intimidating!
I started a month ago and I'm 20 eps in. The pacing is surprisingly good, and every episode so far has been engaging, even if it's just a side story.
LoGH is right at the cusp of class awareness, it's frustrating how often it'll do a "both sides" thing. I'm pretty sure the author of the novels is an ideologically coherent liberal, and it shows sometimes.
spoiler
It's still extremely good. It's one of the only pieces of media to attempt showing realistic reasons for warfare. The show puts the ideology stuff at the forefront, stuff like democracy versus dictatorship, but the show is aware enough to portray these as sitting on top of conflicts money, land, resources, trade routes. The most outright villainous characters are the Phezzani merchants and Job Trunicht, the president of the Free Planets Alliance.
Now that I'm typing this out though, the liberal capitalist Free Planets Alliance is shown to be completely at the mercy of a corrupt lazy political class that disintegrates from within due to pressure from an internal fascist cult (Cult of Terra) and is quickly overtaken by a pseudo-fascist galactic empire. It didn't matter that the FPA had more talented generals or more conviction, they were doomed from the start. The author knew what he was doing.
Where could I watch this for free?
It's pretty. A youtuber said it's good to watch before sleeping. I could use such help. :sleepi:
I would super highly recommend it! One of my all time favorites. Really nice atmosphere and consistent story telling
Hibike! Euphonium is about a high school jazz band and most of the dialogue is very realistic, and the characters' reactions and the direction are basically what you would expect from a western drama. The dialogue is so grounded, it's the anime I recommend most for people learning Japanese. It's a bit of a character study that relies very heavily on the realness of the characters. There is a touch of anime humor and the occasional intense reaction but none of the repeated multi-shot garbage or character screaming as it transitions to the sky. It's actually very serene most of the time. And the big band performances are great.
Planetes is about space trash cleaners
Vinland saga the authors more famous work is also good but definitely more conventional
Planetes is so hard to watch because it's literally just real life in space. like the most fantastical thing about it is that it's set 50 years from now but literally nothing has changed about capitalism. and if you stop and think about it for too long, that has really dark implications. like so dark that I'd classify Planetes as Existential Horror. I'll take an elder god from Lovecraft before I spend a second more thinking about 50 fucking more years of the present day.
Yeah and the
spoiler
Lib ending where the "terrorists went too far" definitely didnt help thing
Its another example of lib media accurately diagnosing a problem but coming out with no solution
honestly, given the accurate class analysis and anti-imperialism, I assumed the writers were leftists trying to unsettle libs through the uncanny valley effect, where the element in focus but distorted is our present society dragged into the future. but yeah could very well be libs that got lucky with an accurate portrayal without any analysis on what it implies.
Megalo Box. Went by kinda unnoticed but was super rad. Some sports themes but mostly about intergenerational trauma and poverty as it relates to sports.
Not to mention the animation and music are dope AF. I loved megalo box
It has layers. The gimmick robot arms wouldn't actually do anything. If anything they would only make you weaker and increase your risk of back injury. They could only take the weight from your arms and put it directly onto your spine. They have no purpose couldn't do anything as a safety or utility product. So of couse some dumb company goes all in with marketing and esports. They would work like brass knuckles so punches would cut, but that is it. It would be like ancient roman boxing. So it is more like fencing than boxing. Fighters generally being poorly socially adjusted would of course blow that all up, even if it is supposed to be a "fighting entertainment" type sport.
I just like crisp drawings and japanese rap, but i'll take your word for it.
It would be fascinating to know how much of it is intentional. I am sure some ammount of it has to be given the gearless gimmick. But a fair ammount of it could be accounted for just with classic tropes. I will never have the language skills to know. But the art is crispy as hell and the music slaps.
I looked up an interview with one of the writers and there was this, "during the production I looked back on Ken Loach's works and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing"
