densuke

Okonomiyaki is more like a pancake than a pizza. It's made from a batter of flour, egg and water. Ranma is definitely the best girl in Ranma. I think "Ryouga" and "Tendou" are the proper romanizations of the names. It's just a matter of whether the "o" sounds in each name are long or short and I don't see that commonly-used forms for either name use short "o" sounds.

Huh, I was looking over some old posts and I noticed that I was hoping here for a fresh digisub of this [b]otherwise unobtainable property[/b]. Central Anime did the honors and the entire series has been available for awhile. It was made from the same ancient laser discs the VHS subs were and of course looks far better. And Bakuen CG can still beat the stuffing out of many or most series made ten years later.

Looks like [b]Kimagure Orange Road[/b] needs to be dusted off -- again. It's one of the first shounen romance anime and definitely still the best. No need to go into the characters and so on as you can easily google up some well-made shrines. A couple of classic shoujo romance titles have been licensed and completed, namely [b]Marmalade Boy[/b] and [b]Hana Yori Dango[/b]. Both of these feature the sort of melodrama which drove FY. These titles also have easy-to-find shrines.

CLAMP doesn't even necessarily think up ALL the characters for the anime based on their works. Card Captor Sakura anime (by Madhouse) includes Meirin Li, a character not in the manga. And I consider Gundam to be a SUNRISE property -- take a look at [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundam[/url] : "...Gundam is the collective term for the Universal Century (UC) series like Mobile Suit Gundam and series in alternative timelines, such as Gundam Wing, made by [b]Sunrise Inc...[/b]"

For a lot of Americans it pretty much IS the "end of the world." The population is getting damn OLD. Putting a Republican in the White House hasn't gotten us any peace or riches -- in fact quite the contrary. And whereas America used to be THE place where everyone just had to come to enjoy a prosperous life, nowadays they just stay home and "steal" "our" jobs... But as far as the stuff in the initial post is concerned, I wish to be reassuring by mentioning that 1) your pastor or whatever is far from the first religious leader to claim to have seen the signs. This sort of thing has been going on for hundreds of years ~_^ 2) unless you are looking for an excuse to commit sins and hurt others it might be useful to think about what you would do with your life if it really WAS the end of the world. Would you learn some new skills? Have some long-forestalled conversations with friends and acquaintances? Fall in love? Lots of people would just sit on their butts and moan -- would you be one of them?

[QUOTE=bismarck_adnu]well,, the story is just great!!! It was obvious thou, Bandai created the series and who knows,, maybe they are making a new batch of anime much like oneagi teacher,, I hope they would extend the shows farther than the original 13,, :animesigh :animesigh :animesigh[/QUOTE][b]Onegai Twins[/b] was already released in the US, wasn't it? For a lot of weird reasons I can't quite remember I thought the second series was awesome, but I doubt I will bother rewatching Onegai Teacher.

This topic is vague enough to mean different things to different people but it seems some people are thinking in terms of ART styles -- cel vs. CG animation. And that's good enough for me for now. I prefer the older style because of the way many scenes in older series tend to revolve around a specific striking image. This sort of thing makes it easier to grasp the point of each scene.

Taxi Driver cheated by using soliloquies. Even there the language is very flat. It's great for hard-boiled stuff but it doesn't compare to a novel by someone like Kenzaburo Oe. Claiming that certain movies do a great job with certain books is too easy. Once you've experienced both you're tainted by knowledge of both.

I can't see the point in pitting these bands against each other. Queen started out in the heyday of British glitter rock; comparable bands from that time include Slade, "Ziggy"-era Bowie and T. Rex. And I'll take T. Rex over Queen as far as that goes... Queen was already a superstar group by the time the Police came out and tastes had changed quite a bit via punk rock. That's why the sound and scale are so different. The Police can be roughly lumped with, say, XTC and the Members. You could also maybe throw in U2.

[quote name='Shadow Blade']Where the heck is the creativity in film making today?[/quote]Well, in South Korea for sure. South Korea's film industry is young and fresh and loaded with talented filmmakers. Try and rent [b]Swiri[/b] (or Shiri) for starters. I had a nice conversation just today with someone at work who was very impressed with Swiri's depth of character and storytelling. "It's not the kind of thing you can just jump into halfway through" said my colleague, which I take to mean that American movies can be viewed in little bits and pieces or just kind of fast-forwarded through because there is no effort put into the story. Or you already read the damn comic book... As for American film? Just boycott the whole damn mess. The only alternative is to reinforce what the Hollywood money men already know - "You'll never go broke underestimating the American public." Booklovers will never find their concerns or favorite books mirrored in cinema because it is an anti-literary medium. Until home media got big moviemakers only ever had one shot at getting the story across -- and movies still have to be made as if this were true. Movies can only hint at the [i]inner life of their characters[/i] while books can be packed with pages and pages of almost nothing else. Some books are much less concerned with thoughts and subtle emotions and are easy to screen more or less intact but those books are not booklovers' books...

OP and ED themes/sequences for anime in Japan are actually [i]90 second[/i] edits -- 3 minutes is an awful long time in American TV. Up until hip-hop became a levelling (downward) influence, Japanese pop was working wonders with recycled rock and pop idioms and doing things that Americans or whoever were either too bored to play with anymore or just too jaded to care about. There are still a few groups and albums from the late '90s that I would like to find or hear more of. I will also recommend enka, which is the sort of thing karaoke was made for -- a stagy and incredibly sentimental ballad form cobbled together out of Asian and Western sounds and themes. It might seem laughable and goofy at first but it is also quite loveable and many of the singers are very skillful. Enka is not an exclusively Japanese form but is common to many Asian countries. Enka songs used in anime include the themes for Oniisama E, Rose of Versailles, the ED for Gokusen and (best of all) the theme for Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran.

I am not going to type out a bunch of lyrics. Lyrics are supposed to go with music -- they don't hold up as a written-word form, no matter how many misguided English teachers or whatever wish it wasn't so. I always liked a lot of the early Who songs because they were rather witty and silly. Loads of Guided By Voices songs are striking because they are non-linear but loaded with great lines. And a guy from New Jersey (or Nashville, TN if you take it back that far) named R. Stevie Moore came up with perhaps hundreds of funny and witty song titles and lyrics in his time.

[quote name='wayofthreversed']Has anyone seen Jubei Chan 2...[/quote]Sure I did and I enjoyed it very much. It is very self-indulgent and very unlike the first series in many ways. If you liked the first Jubei-chan series it is almost certain that you will like it. Just give it a few episodes to grow on you and give it a chance to tell its story in its own way.

The nasty surprise for me at the end of #12 was #13, which dawdled endlessly and came up with one decent scene. The writing staff ran out of things to say after #12 and it's too bad the series wasn't wrapped up right then. One huge blunder in #13 was re-using Agnes' transformation scene -- [spoiler]Agnes no longer possessed the ring by then and that was not a minor plot point.[/spoiler] This sort of inattention to detail helps to make this short series into a minor series. I don't think it had to be that way. Episodes 10-12 contained quite a few touching scenes and there were a few nice digressions along the way. [spoiler]I found some of the premise to be downright anti-intuitive. If you start with a human female and, let's see, add magical powers (+?) but make her sexually unresponsive (-?) and take away her ability to reproduce (-) (I don't get how anyone was anyone else's mother in the show) -- what exactly are you left with? Ureshiko seemed to be able only to "nurture" the men she loved by frustrating and keeping secrrets from them. No wonder her emotional range only covered the ground between wistful and weepy... *sigh*[/spoiler] For me the strengths of the show were the visual design and the palette (it was nice to see some definition and color in a CG-era show) and of course the characterization, which from time to time made for enjoyable viewing at an adult level. The score was also pretty good (there was one woodwind piece which was irritatingly overused, though). Trivia -- "Kurenai" can be read as "I won't give." [color=green]Although my post is top-heavy with complaints I recommend this series because it really is something different. There are too many recyclings and rehashings lately (To Heart 2? BLEAAGH!) and I much prefer this flawed work to any of those franchise-type offerings.[/color]

SAC is an alternate world - it does not belong in any chronology involving the first movie or the manga. Episode 50 was particularly satisfying in terms of visuals and animation. One sequence in particular was simply amazing.