As promised, here are the list of anime titles recommended in the order they were shown along with Amazon links to get them. The Amazon link may not always be the lowest price, so search around:
Akira
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Sea Prince and the Fire Child (review)
Sword of the Stranger (review)
Planetes
Macross Plus
Golgo 13 (review of sorts)
Black Lagoon (review)
Toward the Terra (review of the original manga)
The Story of Saiunkoku
Princess Tutu (review)
The Glass Mask
Requiem From the Darkness (review; will soon be airing on SyFy and thus will probably get a DVD re-release soon)
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (review)
The Tatami Galaxy
Titles without links to reviews are in all likelihood titles we reviewed for Otaku USA Magazine instead of this podcast. If you’d like to see a full listing of all the titles we’ve reviewed, simply click on the Review Index at the top of this page. Thanks for showing up!
My first thought upon seeing the list was, “Got it, got it, need it,…”
Requium From The Darkness has aired in Canada already, back when many stations were playing with anime. I would have thought it aired in the US already; there’s a number of anime shows that the US has seen on TV and Canada hasn’t.
I’ve been indecisive about whether to watch The Tatami Galaxy. This gives me reason to check it out.
Certainly, if you’re a listener to this podcast already then the titles on this list are probably ones you have either seen or at the very least heard of since–what do you know!–we’ve mentioned most of them. But this was a panel for a US comicbook/media convention, so I figured most people would be less “hardcore” than your average AWO listener.
As such, the titles mentioned are all ones that are in print and legally available in the US. If you’re already a fan then you know what to do to find unlicensed or out of print materials, but I put this one together to try and cover as broad a spectrum as I can as far as presenting anime titles which aren’t “for anime fans only.”
Certainly, as is always the case, most of the people who show up to the anime programming at such cons are people that would also attend an anime convention anyway, but I did notice the panel attendance as being older than usual. Roughly 3/4 of the attendees noted they’d seen Akira, and one lady afterwards noted that she first started watching anime back when Prince Planet aired on television. (In retrospect, I should have recommended she check out Dave Merrill’s awesome “Let’s Anime” blog, but I didn’t have anything to write with.)
I would add Gungrave to the list. It’s the type of anime there’s some chance a comic book fan might have heard of it since it’s based on a game which you can buy for six dollars at a Gamestop (them comic book fans buy anything on bargain). It’s an above average anime with that non-Japanese feel.
[This panel already happened, so I can’t really add or remove anything from the list of what was shown. In any case, even though I think the show is surprisingly good and do own it all, Gungrave has one of the lamest first episodes of all time which puts a LOT of people off of it. –Daryl]
I read your Otaku USA review on Gungrave, Daryl and skipped the first episode. At this point my only qualm on the series is the geneticly mutated people weren’t introduced earlier in the series. Really awesome show that ranked up there with me. I don’t know whether that first episode is bad or not, but better a show that starts crappy than a show that ends crappy.
I was really surprised Paranoia Agent didn’t end up on the list considering the praise it got here on this podcast — is this title not readily available any longer? And since Nausicaa seems to be on the list as an obligatory Ghibli/Miyazaki title (and, true, its awesome), why wouldn’t there be a theatrical Satoshi Kon title on the list as well? I’m not saying you haven’t mentioned it on the show — I’m just wondering/curious about your reasoning considering your audience. I would have thought Satoshi Kon would be an easy sell to an older comic-book oriented audience, but maybe you have a different perspective on that.
Really great to see Planetes up there. I only just started watching that and am totally loving it.
Oh, I certainly think Satoshi Kon is great. But aside from Tokyo Godfathers, most of his work is a bit wanting on the “general audience accessibility” front. And the trouble with Tokyo Godfathers is that it’s hard to sell people on using just a short clip.
The challenge here was to pick stuff people could easily get. Paranoia Agent was a Geneon release and is therefore out of print. Millennium Actress is also out of print. That leaves just two choices: the Magnetic Rose segment of Memories and Paprika. Prior experience has suggested to me that the opening scene to Paprika goes over much better with people who are already anime fans. Magnetic Rose is also hard to pull a clip from without spoiling it. (That incidentally is also why I didn’t show Baccano! You can’t easily pull a cool clip from it that doesn’t spoil something.)
I did have the Paprika opening on hand, and I would have shown it at the end. But I started a few minutes late and didn’t want to run over into the next panel’s allotted time, so both it and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time were set aside. The next panel, for those curious, was for noted anime dub voice actor Troy Baker. Troy is exceptionally good at devising elaborate lies on the spot, and I commend him for his improvisational ability. That said, ever since he started bleaching his hair and doing the frosted tips, I cannot take him seriously. It makes him look like a Mini-Me version of Vic Mignogna!
That’s a real shame about Millennium Actress; it’s my favourite of Satoshi Kon’s work.
It’s still available in Australia, though that doesn’t help people elsewhere very much… We’re cursed and blessed down here: We only have one real anime distributor, and their releases aren’t cheap. On the other hand, they haven’t gone bankrupt.
Very happy to see Princess Tutu on the list. It’s a remarkable show and too often overlooked – if it weren’t for Clarissa’s review I would never have seen it myself.
yea, agreed, Pixy — Millenium Actress is not only one of my all-time favorite anime, it’s just one of my all-time favorite movies. i have no idea about where someone would pull a good representative clip from it though.
I am kind of astonished that Giant Robo didn’t get a mention, considering it is in-print, cheap, and has lots of awesome scenes in the first few episodes (not as good as the scenes in the last ones of course, but you can’t really show “What would you have done if you’d been given this terrible thing” without spoiling stuff). You could have shown the first scene in Paris. The music totally sells it.
Other than that, great job! It’s really too bad that Summer Wars wasn’t out here in time for you to use it.
Giant Robo isn’t really a good anime for new fans/people who don’t like anime. It’s still the best, but the melodrama and the general crazy styling pretty much requires a decent level of anime-tolerance.