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Makoto Shinkai’s debut is a testament to his skill as a director, and a primer for every broad emotional and aesthetic through line that would go on to define his work. When middle-schooler Mikako Nagamine is recruited by the UN Space Army to serve as a mecha pilot to fight off an alien threat striking at human civilization from the fringes of the solar system, she leaves behind her friend Noboru Terao on Earth. Initially committed to being pen pals, the gulf of time between their responses grows longer and longer given the relative distance of Mikako’s ship traveling from Earth. Produced almost entirely by Shinkai himself with music composed and performed by long-time friend and collaborator Tenmo, Voices of a Distant Star hones in on the themes of time, space and distance, and how they impact the fragility of human relationships in a way that few other works can, securing Shinkai’s status as one of anime’s premier auteur directors.— Toussaint Egan Officials released the identities of the victims Tuesday afternoon. They were from multiple families and all involved in the property dispute with the suspect, officials said.
If you’re looking for a collection of some of the most eccentric, colorful, and unique animated shorts from some of the most preeminent anime directors working today, you can’t go wrong with Genius Party. Released in 2007, the film serves the purpose of what any good anthology should—putting supremely talented animators on a project and allowing them to throw whatever they want at the wall. And that’s what it succeeds as a whole in doing—to varying degrees of individual success, of course. Shoji Kawamori’s “Shanghai Dragon” is a wild free-wheeling take on Super Sentai hero antics, Yoji Fukuyama’s “Doorbell” is a unsettling and confounding psychological thriller, and Shinji Kimura’s “Deathtic 4” is a bizarre 3D-animated short that’s sure to play well for Tim Burton fans on an aesthetic level. The only dud in this collection is Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle,” which, although having one of the most unique art styles of the bunch, meanders in pop-scientific pontification and pretentious navel-gazing. The crowning jewels of the collection however are Masaaki Yuasa’s “Happy Machine” and Shinichiro Watanabe’s “Baby Blue,” which each exemplify the best defining talents of their respective creators. All in all, Genius Party is a stunning collection of shorts produced by one of the most eclectic production studios operating today and should not be missed.— Toussaint Egan Because if you get the reference it’s like high-fiving the creator in slow motion, but if you don’t get it you feel like you’ve brought great dishonor to your family. Or you just turn it off and move on. Before his name became synonymous with such titles as Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii first cut his teeth as an animator directing the television series adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura manga and its first two theatrical installments. While the series’ first film, Only You, is a fairly typical fantasy romance-romp that plays close to the formulaic familiarity of the series, Beautiful Dreamer was a far more experimental and ultimately divisive film among the series’ fanbase and set Oshii on the path to become the director we know him as today. Beautiful Dreamer follows Ataru Moroboshi, a lecherous if well-meaning high schooler and his extraterrestrial fiancée Lum as he and his friends scramble to finish preparing for their high school’s annual school festival. It’s not long before they discover something strange is going on, with each day seemingly repeating itself ad infinitum. It’s up to Ataru, Lum and the other to discover what’s causing this bizarre temporal loop, and whether such a state of existence is either a blessing or a curse. With Beautiful Dreamer, Oshii stopped playing to the gratifications of his audience and instead made a film that was, for better or for worse depending on who you ask, entirely his own. In many ways, Beautiful Dreamer can be viewed as the forebear to The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, at least in terms of its ambition to upend and experiment with the status quo of an established series. If you’re looking for an engaging romance drama that doubles as an important touchstone in the history of one of anime’s most influential directors, Beautiful Dreamer is wholeheartedly recommended.— Toussaint Egan Hanime could be a reasonably animation that has its origin in Japan; Hanime.tv is a web platform on that you can enjoy free hanime series and films that too fully HD quality. Through this app, the user gets unlimited access to the series simply once the launch and it guarantees you the simplest quality as well as high Japanese animation and Manga movies of all time and every one the best hanime songs and even wallpapers which will revive your recollections of hanime movies from time to time. The nature of Miyazaki’s oeuvre is such that it brims with an embarrassment of riches, each film in its own part situated indelibly into the continuum that is the anime canon. His films garner so much acclaim for their visual storytelling and emotional virtuosity that even those few that could be considered his “worst” movies still rank leagues above those animators who only aspire to his status. Case in point: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. Miyazaki’s take on Kazuhiko Kato’s notorious master criminal is at once a rip-roaring heist film with heart and what might arguably be Miyazaki’s lesser films. Chalk it up to Miyazaki’s nascent efforts as a director, Castle of Cagliostro suffers from a plodding middle-half and a disappointingly simplistic antagonist while still somehow managing to sparkle with his signature charm peeking through the baggage of a preexisting work. Fans of the series passionately criticized the film for relieving Lupin of his anarchic predilections and instead casting him in the mold of a true gentleman thief, stealing only when his nebulous sense of honor permits it. In any case, The Castle of Cagliostro remains an important and essential artifact of Miyazaki’s proto-Ghibli work. A flawed Miyazaki film is a triumph all the same.— Toussaint EganIsao Takahata’s final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, also happens to be his first in over 14 years. When Takahata’s previous film, My Neighbors the Yamadas, was released in 1998, it was unofficially known by those who worked on it as “the film that broke Studio Ghibli.” Such an ignominious title was owed to Takahata’s choice to eschew traditional cel animation, the process by which all previous Ghibli films had been produced, and opt to animate the film entirely through computer, with each frame meticulously painted and animated through digital process. For Princess Kaguya, Takahata would again return to reiterate and arguably refine this technique, imbuing every frame and scene with the sort of scrupulous attention one would expect from a master calligrapher or Ukiyo-e artist. The film recounts the story of Japan’s oldest folklore story, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, wherein a young celestial maiden born from the root of a bamboo plant is adopted and later championed as a princess as she struggles to understand her identity as both a mortal and a child of the heavens. The movie’s grueling seven-year development and Takahata’s uncompromising commitment to perfection ultimately paid off, delivering a film of uncontested visual and thematic beauty.— Toussaint Egan At Paste, we believe there’s an anime for everyone. With lists like this, diverse demographics are often left unconsidered, effectively sidelining female and LGBT viewers. Hobbyists and fandoms have long had distinctive, individualized communities, lively groups that often do not intersect except, maybe, at anime conventions, given over half of North America’s attendees are female. So why is it that lists like this leave out anime made by women, for women? And why can’t these anime be enjoyed by men, too? Based off of the first two volumes of Yukito Kishiro’s long-running sci-fi manga series, Battle Angel (or Gunnm, as it’s known in Japan) is the story of Gally, an amnesiac cyborg who wakes up to a dystopian future after being rescued by a kindly prosthetic scientist and later embarks on a personal journey of self-discovery and adventure. Despite the series’ popularity and the manga having run for a cumulative nineteen years, Battle Angel adapts only the first two volumes of the series. The film is premium cyberpunk material, with sprawling cityscapes, homicidal cyborg junkies, brooding bounty-hunters, and an enormous megacity hanging above the mainland separating the haves from the have-nots. Battle Angel does a wonderful job of fleshing out Gally’s initial arc from an unassuming youth to a formidable bounty hunter and martial artist. The film’s impressive quality only makes absence of any subsequent adaptation all that more peculiar. Battle Angel just barely scratches the surface of its source material, but if you’re looking for vintage cyberpunk story and a concise introduction to Kishiro’s opus, you’d be remiss not to give this one a shot.— Toussaint Egan
Gurren Lagann is a 2007 anime produced by Gainax. This mech anime is initially about a young man named Simon and his older brother figure Kamina as they fight in the titular Lagann against the oppressive Spiral King and his army of Beastmen. Not content to redefine the mecha anime genre once with Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax did it again with Gurren Lagann, and the result is just so over-the-top that it's hard not to love. After wrapping production on Akira in 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo returned in 1995 to helm his third anthology collection of short films, titled Memories. Initially scripted around the theme of the collection’s namesake, the anthology eventually yielded a series of three shorts, each directed by one of three of the most acclaimed directors working at the time, Otomo included. The collection’s first segment, “Magnetic Rose,” is unanimously praised as the anthology’s best and for good reason. Directed by Koji Morimoto and scripted by Satoshi Kon, “Magnetic Rose” is emblematic of the themes of perception, identity and uncertainty, which exemplify Kon’s work at its best, depicting the terrifying story of a deep space salvage cruise’s ensnarement in the siren wiles of an aristocratic opera singer. The anthology’s other two installments, Tensai Okamura’s “Stink Bomb” and Otomo’s “Cannon Fodder,” are worth the price of admission as well, the former a crassly comedic take on an extinction-level crisis and the latter a wartime parable animated with a intriguing Terry Gilliam-esque art style in one long take. Whatever your palate as anime film-goer, Memories is not to be missed.— Toussaint Egan There's no question about whether the story of the Elric brothers belongs on any list of the best anime of all time. The more contentious issue is whether to choose Fullmetal Alchemist or Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. If you're not a fan of anime, you might think it's all about school girls and giant robots. However, the top 10+ shows below can be downright terrifying, as they're some of the scariest anime of all time. Some are psychological horror like Paranoia Agent, while others involve fun action, zombies, and creatures, like High School of The Dead.
23. Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (2006)
What do you get when you combine a god of death so bored he drops off on Earth a notebook capable of killing any person whose name is written inside, a high school student who wants to clear the world from criminals, and an eccentric detective known only as L? One hell of a cat-and-mouse four-dimensional chess game. Death Note doesn’t have a villain really, but instead it lines up two opposing sides who believe in justice but follow vastly different paths to achieve it. There are questions about morality and justice that will make you think, and nail-biting schemes and plots that will keep you guessing and enthralled. Isao Takahata, for all his legendary status as a director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, is sometimes a hard director to pin down, stylistically. Case in point: the delightful, virtually plot-free, humane comedy My Neighbors the Yamadas, which looks and feels like nothing else in his oeuvre. Despite this, it somehow also feels like quintessential Takahata. Based on the comic strip manga, Nono-Chan, the film is a series of vignettes centered around the Yamadas, an average family living in metropolitan Japan. These vignettes cover everything from how Takashi and Matsuko (the parents at the center of many of the tales) met, to family arguments over who has control of the TV remote, to grandmother Shige’s advice and proverbs told to the family. Despite not having an overarching story, by the end of the film, each character and their interconnecting relationships are finely and realistically drawn, and it’s easy to find oneself in love with this family, and their silly, crabby humanity. Complex truths about aging, marriage, family, and childhood are expressed through these simple tales about particular family members and their trials, tribulations and daily foibles. Also of note is the striking visual style of the film, designed to look like a watercolor comic strip. Takahata was so firm in his desire to achieve this look that My Neighbors the Yamadas ended up becoming the first fully digital film from Studio Ghibli. Whether you find it slow-moving or delightfully sedate, the visuals will captivate. My Neighbors the Yamadas is a film only Ghibli would make, and only Takahata could shape into such a poignant ode to the humanity of everyday families. Essential Takahata, indeed. —J.D. Working on this list allowed me to examine my own taste and the sort of aesthetic that guides me. I’ve long enjoyed shoujo for its florid style and high melodrama, but when I thought of anime that deserved to be on a list of the best ever, only shows with male protagonists came to mind. Prestige anime is often centered around a man and his struggles, themes that often disclude varied viewers and create an echo chamber of impenetrable, inarguable taste for fans to discuss. These anime are great, and you’ll find many of the expected takes on this list, but in compiling this, I tried to consider every genre’s most exemplary offerings. Shows both young and old are represented, with at least one show for everyone, no matter their age, gender, or sexuality. In these anime, almost everyone can be seen in some way, whether it be in the rosy meditations of a slice-of-life show or
The sheriff's office said deputies discovered two men and a woman dead at the scene. A fourth victim was found wounded and was taken to a hospital in critical condition, according to the sheriff's office. She's expected to survive. The feature debut of Masahiro Ando, whose career was distinguished solely by being a episode director and key animator for such series as Wolf’s Rain and Witch Hunter Robin, Sword of the Stranger possesses all the key pieces and players that make up a prototypical, though otherwise satisfying chanbara action film—a nameless ronin who abstains from bloodshed in a quiet bid for atonement, a youth cast at the heart of a fanatical plot, and a ruthless foreign adversary who yearns solely for a worthy opponent to face in battle. What really distinguishes the film apart from its ilk are the sparse yet impressive action sequences choreographed by legendary key animator Yutaka Nakamura, culminating in what is arguably one of the most stunningly animated sword fight showdowns between “No Name” and the European Ming commander Luo-Lang. If you’re looking for a solid samurai action film with sword fights that are a cut above the rest, Sword of the Stranger is that film.— Toussaint Egan
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Hailed as the apex of serialized anime since its debut, Neon Genesis Evangelion’s champagne reputation belies just how strange it is. Set in a post-apocalyptic Japan where kaijus known as “Angels” repeatedly ravage humanity, the series follows Shinji Ikari, an insecure boy chosen to pilot one of the Evangelions, which are giant, mysterious robots that are the only weapons capable of repelling the Angel menace. From there, Evangelion transforms from a mecha procedural into an impressionistic allegory about the inherent loneliness of being human. The virtually plotless finale divided audiences at the time and remains contentious to this day. Series creator Hideaki Anno responded to fan outrage with a supplemental film titled The End of Evangelion, which brought closure to the story while diving headlong into a darkness that the show merely glanced at. The result is a harrowing but unusually frank exploration of mental health. Taken altogether, Evangelion’s hallowed status is understandable: While the saga becomes more inscrutable the deeper it goes, viewers will come out the other end having gained a deeper understanding of themselves. Get access to all or any the hanime.tv films that embody top-rated Japanese animation or manga movies of all time. changing into a user of this app permits you to urge unlimited access to the series obtainable in varied video streaming applications that too with none cost. Don’t worry regarding the legalities and virus issues; this app is free from all the bugs and just about legal all told aspects. So, use this app without any worries and revel in the show either alone or together with your family.
Of course, with so many high-caliber shows produced over the years, much of it readily available at our fingertips, we invite you to create your own guide. Let us know what you think are the best, most essential anime series out there in the comments. The deceased victims were all involved in the dispute over easements, Smith said. An easement is a portion of a person's property that is legally granted to others to use. Smith said an easement on the suspect's property allowing his neighbors to drive through his property was a "source of irritation for him." The shooting began with a dispute over property lines, the sheriff's office said. In a news conference Tuesday, Smith said a dispute between the suspect and his neighbors had been ongoing for some time. Like Futurama, Star Trek, and Firefly, Mobile Suit Gundam was one of those sci-fi shows that found significant life even after their early cancellations, as fans united and rallied around their beloved series. In Gundam‘s case, the powers that be were convinced to resurrect the franchise after model kits of the show’s mechs flew off the shelves for years. Audiences were clearly vibing to Gundam‘s revolutionary new style of personalized giant robots in space warfare, to the point that decades later a Gundam blasted its way into a major fighting appearance within Ready Player One‘s climactic battle. Outside the cool mech design, the original Gundam series is notable for hero Amuro, and his rivalry with Char, whose redemption and fall in the sequels make up one of the great character arcs in classic anime.The show’s longevity itself speaks volumes to how good it is. Gintama has been going on for hundreds of episodes, with specials and movies, all of which are highly critically acclaimed. Custer County Sheriff Rich Smith said Tuesday that the suspect was detained peacefully and no one was injured. A woman, who was not immediately identified by police, was in the vehicle at the time of Clark's arrest and police are investigating her involvement in the incident, according to Smith. There’s a lot of ways to go about describing Cat Soup to someone who’s never seen it before. Hallucinatory. Macabre. Avant-garde. Adorable. The only thing you can’t call it is boring. Directed in 2001 by Tatsuo Sato and co-conceived by Sato and Masaaki Yuasa, Cat Soup is an award-winning dark comedy short film inspired by the work of cult manga artist Nekojiru. The film is a brilliant example of stream-of-consciousness animation, following the exploits of a young kitten named Nyatta who embarks on a bizarre journey to recover the soul of his sister Nyaako. Describing what happens in the film is insufficient in attempting to understand it as compared to simply watching it. Cat Soup is a disquieting head-trip, a pastel-colored fever dream, and above all else a supremely creative short film that’s as visually entertaining as it is conceptually unnerving.— Toussaint Egan
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