Forum - View topic

The List - 8 Most Visually Striking Anime Productions

[(Actually, the other place where the artistry stands out the most is in the subtle artistic variations amongst the episodes of the Endless Eight arc, which will never get that much credit because almost everyone abhors the arc.)

If I remember this correctly, it was Stream It Again Sam and the problem is that the title is controlled by the same company that controls Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Tokuma Shoten, which is very old-fashioned as has unrealistic, demanding expectations for licensing.

Tenchi wrote:

It's almost a decade-old and was never licensed for American release, but I gotta admit I'm a little sad to see no mention of Windy Tales (Fuujin Monogatari),

I enjoyed that one enough to import the R2 DVDs after it seemed that no US company was going to pick it up. It was a nice product from Production IG. Kenji Kawai did the music, Oshii looked over the crew's shoulders, and it looked beautifully different. Heck, it had flying cats! ANN's encyclopedia entry for Windy Tales

I just want to add another vote of thanks for including Nakamura Kenji's Bakeneko and Mononoke on this list. I don't read this feature religiously, but I do not believe I have seen an unlicensed work appear on one of these lists before. I do hope that these shows would have been included even if Ayakashi Samurai Horror Tales had never been licensed.

A few days ago I looked at the RightStuf page for Bakeneko and saw that TRSi still had about 200 copies available for sale at just $9, making it one of the best bargains in anime today. There were about twice that many copies left a couple years back. Perhaps the remaining copies will sell out now after appearing on the list.

I always have problems with lists that include both feature films and televised anime given how enormously different the budgets that producers and directors have to work with. I would have preferred to see this list limited to television series and have a separate list for movies. Since movies were included I must say I'm a bit surprised to see no mentions here of Summer Wars which intermixes quite conventional scenes of family life with the more hallucinogenic sequences that take place in the online world.

I can understand the reluctance to include Moribito on the list for the reasons Key mentions, but I would have to disagree. Right from the opening it was obvious that this show would be one of the most beautifully animated television series ever. Especially striking are all the animations that involve water, from the glistening rice paddies in the opening to the clarity of the pools later on. Given the centrality of water to the overall story, and to the Asian empires Moribito depicts, Kamiyama and his team obviously took special care to illustrate those scenes.

Noein is another mixed bag. I found the 3D effects jarring, particularly the rotating house which appears much too often in the series. On the other hand the scenes where the other universes impinge on our own are often brilliant. Some people complain about the lack of animation consistency in this show, but that was inevitable given the collaborative manner in which it was produced. Noein used a collection of directors with Akane as the overall creative force. That method resulted in character models that often varied quite widely from episode to episode, from overly moe~ styles some weeks to rather ugly models with rectangular eyes in others. All these quibbles aside, Akane's decision to build an entire story around the controversial "many-worlds" interpretaion of quantum mechanics makes this an extraordinarily intriguing and intellectually challenging show. Noein has sold for as little as $20 at times, but even at its current price of $30, it is a show that any serious collector of anime should own. I cannot, however, recommend the dubbed version which is currently streamed on Hulu. It has some of the most appalling casting and direction I've heard. I switched once between the JP and EN tracks during a conversation between Haruka and Ai and could not listen for more than couple of minutes. The voicing of Uchida-sensei is painful as well.

Dennou Coil has also been mentioned and for good reason. While many of the episodes are quite conventional, the show has many remarkably original and unusual sequences. I like how Iso depicts obsolete space as overlays of large black pixels. He was also careful in his use of 3D objects like the Searchmaton; they blend naturally into the illustrations unlike Haruka's house. The scene where the Saatchis try to enter a shrine and are flattened as a result is an especially good example.

The fact that R1 licensors have ignored two of the most stunning and most original anime of the past decade, Dennou Coil and Mononoke, never ceases to amaze me. Now that both have been released on Blu-ray in Japan, perhaps someone like NISA will bring these gems to Western audiences.

Why is it that Akane Kazuki and Iso Mitsuo have dropped out of sight? I often wonder if we do not see shows by them any more because they got fed up with an industry that eschews original works like Noein and Dennou Coil in favor of adaptations of existing material. Nakamura has persisted, though, perhaps because he seems to be a favorite of the noitaminA producers.

As much as I like PMMM, it is much more of a series with visually striking sequences thrown in, the majority of the show is not much different from a regular "high quality series" visually when the girls are not battling witches...

Vracer111 wrote:

As much as I like PMMM, it is much more of a series with visually striking sequences thrown in, the majority of the show is not much different from a regular "high quality series" visually when the girls are not battling witches...

Well, there was the school, Homura's apartment, Madoka's house, the city's skyline, stuff like that. Certainly wowed a lot of people.

The list is of 8 visually striking anime productions, but it's missing a few titles that should be in the 8 MOST visually striking anime productions list...

The missing ones being Redline (...I'm trying to think of an anime I've seen with more visual presence than it and am coming up empty...), FLCL, and a work of Mamoru Hosoda (especially his latest, which I' can't wait to see) and Makoto Shinkai.

And then there are other titles that would fit in as honorable mentions like Akira, Casshern Sins, Die-Buster, Ergo Proxy, Jin-Roh, Origin: Spirits of the Past, and Pale Cocoon and others as mentioned in this thread.

As much as I like PMMM, it is much more of a series with visually striking sequences thrown in, the majority of the show is not much different from a regular "high quality series" visually when the girls are not battling witches...

I'm surprised no one has really mentioned Panty and Stocking yet. Striking is definitely one word I'd use to describe the visuals in that, as they're so insanely bright and hyper and they're also quite unlike most other anime.

Just seems like everyone wants to complain about how "insert anime" didn't make it on the list, rather than talk about the things ON the list and why we may or may not find them striking. Ya know?

Every one of these articles is written by an individual, so we have to realize that it is, of course, attempting to be objective while inherently being subjective since it wasn't like the list was generated by a poll or anything.