Ask Lemmy

I really got into anime in 2018 with Little Witch Academia but as a kid my first anime ever was probably Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or another early Ghibli movie. Also as a kid I watched the Cardcaptor Sakura movies.

My first impressions were very positive. I was kinda primed to expect all anime to be trash and cringe so I was surprised when Little Witch Academia was actually just a great show. I've been watching non-stop since then, learned the language, translated some manga, etc.

My favorite series since I first watched it in 2020 has always been The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Every arc is amazing, the characters are so interesting, and the presentation is so creative. Though I just recently started PaniPoni Dash! and it's the first thing that's ever challenged Haruhi for me; it might be my new #1. It's 2005 Shaft and it's kinda the peak of Shaft's style and quirkiness and it's also really funny.

I also just recently watched absolutely the worst anime I've ever seen: Kennel Tokorozawa. It is funny, which is a positive, but not enough to outweigh how overwhelmingly awful it is as a whole.
The worst things I've seen that (somehow) have an actual level of popularity and acclaim: Shinsekai yori, 86, The Boy and the Heron. All bad for different reasons, but each one irredeemably terrible.

You didn't ask, but I'll also mention what I think is the most underrated anime ever: Christmas in January. Amazing short movie. Not very popular or well-regarded, but very subtle and emotional and whimsical. Definitely the most "hidden gem" thing I've ever found.

Lol, I can't believe you'd say Love Hina since that was the first anime I pirated for a friend on his request and it ended up being the first one I saw that wasn't like, Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon. It wasn't great, but the second one I pirated and therefore saw was Chobits, which was.

I guess my childhood isn't too different from others, although we've never had the money to actually buy anime until streaming was a thing. Back then, it was like 30 dollars for a few episodes on dvd l...

First would have been either Battle of the Planets or Starblazers. I was a kid at the time and they were just weird new cartoons where the mouths didn’t quite match the words. I think they came on around the same time as Banana Splits or some Sid & Marty Krofft nightmare. I remember eating taco flavored Cheetos while watching them at my grandma’s house after school. I enjoyed the shows but miss the Cheetos.

Best? Toss up between Frieren and Cowboy Bebop for opposite reasons. Frieren is so quiet and Yoko Kanno and Seatbelts drive Cowboy Bebop so hard. Bebop still has the best intro of anything ever.

I haven’t seen a lot of anime, so most has been cherry picking the good stuff. And I’m not so wed to the genre to remember the bad ones. More of an “Ew, that sucked” with an almost immediate erasure from my head.

First anime I actually seeked out on my own to watch was Death Note.

Earlist Anime I remember was Detective Conon... because I didn't know anything better at the time...

Like I remember my older brother just watched it or told me about it??? i dont remember

Fun murder investigations was what made me wanna watch...

I remember watching it in Mandarin Dubs.

I also vaguely remember Doreamon... in Cantonese Dubs.

My brother mentioned dragonball z or some shit but I don't have much memories of it...

Edit: Okay I realized I didn't answer all questions:

2. My first impressions that animated content was childish... and I thought Anime was "weird" at first. Then later on I realized how deep it can be since you can depict concepts that you can't exactly act out live action

3. Best is Steins;Gate. Most fun is Spy x Family.

4. I don't have a worst yet... but there are a lot of "weird" ones that I went "wait wtf".

1. Nausicaa (a Ghibli movie, by the way)
2. Compared to cartoons, I loved the pacing and realism. And, of course, the much more interesting story. (To be fair, the cartoons I am most familiar with are Tom and Jerry and Road Runner, so draw your own conclusions.)
3. ~~JoJo, naturally.~~ Ghibli movies and Violet Evergarden will probably be the peak of anime, both in terms of animation quality and storytelling. But there are plenty of novel shows, from The Heike Story to Black Lagoon and Tatami Galaxy to Kino's Journey.
4. Cowboy Bebop has a large following, but I found it too loud and flashy, and didn't really like any of the characters.

My first series was Inuyasha. It was on Toonami which was Cartoon Network’s anime block they do right before it switches to Adult Swim. I figured that Toonami was just cartoons for adults since it was only on late. It was pretty cool and I tried to catch Toonami whenever I could growing up, but I was young and couldn’t really keep track of the plot. I didn’t actually learn what anime was until like the 7th grade (So I was like 11 or 12?) when I met some anime fans on the swim team.

My favorite series is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It’s essentially a perfect 10/10 show to me. I rewatch it every like 2-3 years. It has: excellent action, complex characters you really get attached to, great pacing, a consistent world and power scaling, great tension and stakes, and a clean and satisfying ending with almost no loose threads.

My worst experience with anime? One night A friend and I were up late watching TV and Big O came on. We’d never seen or heard of it and the entire episode was some bizarre sequence with a guy randomly in and out of a mech surrounded by tomatoes. It was completely incomprehensible.

The first I'd ever seen at all?

considers

Probably some extremely-poorly-dubbed TV release long prior to anime gaining mainstream popularity in the US, as there were a couple series that people brought in on shoestring budgets. Speed Racer, maybe. That was in the US on TV reruns ages ago.

Speed Racer, also known as Mach GoGoGo (Japanese: マッハGoGoGo, Hepburn: Mahha GōGōGō), is a Japanese anime television series produced by Tatsunoko Production, that aired on Fuji Television from April 1967 to March 1968. In the United States, the show aired in syndication at approximately the same time.

For American consumption, major editing and dubbing efforts were undertaken by producer Peter Fernandez, who likewise not only wrote and directed the English-language dialogue but also provided the voices of many of the characters, most notably Racer X and Speed Racer himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHn6KCvRsdI

Ok, ill bite.

1/2) I guess technically pokemon, but I didnt classify that as anything different than normal saturday morning cartoons until much later in life. Since ~2007, serialized weekely episodes have been my personal time keeper and I pick atleast one show to follow each season. (Right now its Frieren)

3. as for favorite show... Gurren Laggan, tastes change over the years but it remains the most motivational show, the score still slaps all these years later and it was the peak of studio Ginax/ soon-to-be Triggers golden years. I rewatch it once a year and its one of the few shows I have on disk.

4. for worst show... Ive sat through some real stinkers, but I never got mad at a show until Shield Hero... Portal fantasy/Isakai as a sub-genre is overdone as a plot/set up mechanism and rarely do new shows do anything different with that established formula. Following tropes and trends is usually fine (a lot of these shows are media junk food anyway), but in this shows case they just drop the ball so intentionally it felt like a rug pull.

1. That's quite confusing because the very first anime i watched was Naruto, but i was 7 and didn't understand anything on the story, it was available on TV but it didn't followed any chronological order. The first anime i actually watched, understood and liked was Dragon Ball, then Dragon Ball GT and then DBZ, in this order. My dad gave me the pirate DVDs he bought on a open Market bcs he also used to like DBZ.

2. Some stuff were quite bizarre, like Goku having a tail, but other than this, i wasn't a very picky kid.

3. I think One Piece, but Samurai Champloo also has a special place in my heart. I just couldn't drop it after the Arlong arch, the worldbuilding is absurd (and worldbuilding is something i value a lot)

4. Nanatsu no taizai, because at every 5 seconds the main character is touching someone inappropriately, i seriously couldn't watch much, all characters are despicable. Also watched some Black Clover and hated it, i think it's peak clichè

They weren't known as anime, they were just cartoons (or more like dibujos animados in Spanish), the anime tag came much later.

My earliest memories of japanese cartoons are from Mazinger Z, Heidi, Captain Harlock and Dr Slump.

I used to rotate through the same three episodes of Duel Masters from the video store when I was small. That was technically my first anime, although I wasn't familiar with the concept of anime at the time.

The first anime I watched while being aware of the fact it was anime was Sword Art Online. I was introduced to that when I was in 5th grade, and I guess it made me feel like I was "in." I could never get past the first episode of Gun Gale.

Nowadays, I really don't watch anime. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I find that in most anime I've experienced, there is so much shallow exposition that I'm left with very few questions and without a sense curiosity by the end of it. Two exceptions: psychological horror and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Psychological horror pretty reliably avoids the whole excessive exposition thing, and JoJo is rife with it but gets a pass because it sparks my inner 12 year old.

However, I'm going to start watching more anime. I'm finally picking back up my Japanese studies, and I need a way to hear the language consistently.

The first things I remember watching were Lensman, Akira, Iria:Zeiram, and Armitage that I borrowed from a friend after asking what this anime stuff was all about.

I was always a huge animation fan, and as a 20 year old, stuff like Batman the Animated Series was still great, but this anime stuff was definitely offering things geared with an older age bracket in mind. They were as diverse in content as a movie, just animated.

What I have always loved about animation is there are no limits to what can be done, because things like physics or actor safety aren't concerns, and having outrageous shapes, colors, giant robots, aliens, transforming objects, etc can all fit in perfectly with the overall aesthetic of the animated world, so the most outlandish or impossible things don't feel out of place.

All this, along with subject matter as childish or mature as I desired was perfect for me.

I've seen tons of anime at this point, and there are so many great titles it's hard to name just a few good ones. Overall, One Piece is amazing, such rich and diverse characters and islands, and it seems the creator has always had a strong vision of the story he wanted to tell, as stuff from 20 years ago still fits perfectly with new lore being revealed today in a way that feels intentional, not just how do we keep new stuff canon with the old stuff. Gintama is equally amazing. It starts very bland and boring, but holy heck, does the story go places by the end! Like One Piece, there is so much content and the world and characters are explorer so thoroughly that they feel like real people and lived in places, not just set pieces. Gintama also has a ton of parady of other anime, so if you've been a long time fan, there's so many jokes and bits and spoofs, that there's just jokes on jokes for whole episodes. Both these series can make you laugh until you cry while also having some of the deepest emotional moments because I know more about these characters "lives" than I do about a lot of real people. You get invested in characters after a few hundred episodes! 😆

There have been plenty of anime that just weren't for me. With specific exceptions, I'm not big on the isekai stuff (someone in the modern era is transported as-is or is reincarnated in another world) because so many feel like rip offs or cheap fan service.

I wouldn't call it a bad experience, but Farming Life in Another World was my big disappointment. I liked the premise. Was curious to learn about the farming. The animation style looked great. The character designs were beautiful. It even had an adorable giant spider family, but instead of being scary, they ate potatoes. But there was no real farming or world building. The show was basically beautiful women (and women is sometimes stretching the age) one after the other moving to the village to help on the farm and sleep with the main character. 😒

I asked manga readers if it got better and was told if I didn't like it by the point I was at, it wasn't going to get better. Reincarnated as a Slime is similar, though has some things done not as ideally visually for me, it's got a million times more plot and while it has fan service and some questionably agreed characters, nobody is actually doing anything with anyone else so whatever.

First anime was .hack//SIGN.

First impression of anime was, giant robots, fights that took several episodes, and girls way too young to show that much skin. I asked my anime obsessed cousins to show me something intelligent that didn’t have any of those three things, and they delivered — see first answer.

Favorite series is Sword Art Online, but I prefer one season and done miniseries like Erased end Your Lie in April. Also The Promised Neverland and Tokyo Ghoul — we don’t talk about their seasons beyond the first. Favorite movies are your name. and Wolf Children.

Only one bad experience with anime I can think of. My cousins who got me into anime were watching one when a child goes into a changing room and it shows everything. That was creepy AF. We were all teenagers so it wasn’t like “I should report this to the police” but more like “let me catch you looking at that again and I will kick both your asses.” I don’t remember what they were watching, if they told me.

First: Sneak-watching Ronin Warriors with my cousins when my parents forbade anything non-christian

Impressions: I was a child. I ate it up. Even though Ronin Warriors may have been dumb as hell. It's a show like Power Rangers that was stiched together using footage from two other unsuccessful shows. I would unsuccessfully go on to try and convince my parents that it was a Christian show with our cultural values. Which should have been funny to most people but alas.

Best: FLCL is not my favorite show but it has always just kept turning up in my childhood at strange times. The music and vibes experienced with no context were great. And then when I was older, they're great with context

Worst: my neighbor asking me to watch some Isekai with him. Just write every Isekai on a really big wall and throw infinite darts until 80 years later when there's only one left. That's the worst one. And it statistically will also have incest or sexualize minors

I find most anime kinda cringe, but...

1 Vampire Hunter D

2 I thought it was very weird, but ended up mostly liking it.

3 Cowboy Bebop - it doesn't meander too much, the music is solid, and it didn't put me off.

4 Probably Eureka 7 - It just annoyed me the whole time. There's probably worse out there but it's the worst one I can remember.