A Guide To Other Anime
Hey Everyone! Did you know that there was more than just SailorMoon out there? (Usagi pops up-"WHAAAAAT?!") Well, there is! This is my little guide to other Anime that I personally like. Some of it is on TV, and other is just on video. Hopefully, this guide will have you interested in other anime series.
ratings are out of a scale of 5 stars
You are listening to "Revolution", The Utena theme song
WARNING!-This document is spoiler-intensive, read at your own risk.
Shoujo Kakumei Utena/Revolutionary Girl Utena
One of my personal favorites-Revolutionary Girl Utena. This is a series about a girl, Utena Tenjou, in 8th grade at the exclusive Ohtori Academy. After a series of events, she finds herself involved in a Dueling "game", by way of the rose crest ring she was given as a girl by a mysterious prince. I personally love this series, although a)I only have one tape, b)They've only translated the first 13 episodes(out of 39,though SUPPOSEDLY CPM has the rights to the Black Rose Saga and maybe the Ohtori Akio Saga) and c)The series is PHENOMONALLY confusing. I'm serious. The plot can get pretty hard to follow. All that aside, this is a great series. The director is the same guy who did some stuff on Sailor Moon. The music here is really great. Very lively, and the theme song, is, in my opinion, very good, and it just gets you in the "mood" for the series.
side note-*sniff* I just finished reading the episode summaries for this series. The ending seems very sad ~_~ But very, VERY good! ^^
RATING
*****
Available On
Dubbed or Subbed VHS, bilingual DVD.
LINKS
Blood Soaked and Honor Bound:Revolutionary Girl Utena-Don't let the serious name fool you-this site is VERY funny. But it's not just jokes. They have plenty of info, "special" pictures, games, quizzes, and other neat stuff. I reccomend this site as much as the series!
The Utena Encyclopedia-A comprehensive listing of everything Utena! I haven't had a chance to visit much, but it's a great site!
Shinseiki Evangelion/Neon Genesis Evangelion
A very nice series about giant robots (EVAs), secret government cover-ups and the troubled children stuck in the thick of it.
A pretty average "Giant Mecha" series, right? wrong. for starters, the EVAs are half-alive(by the end Unit 01 IS alive), now add in android pilots, AT(Absolute Terror[?!?])Fields, and an enemy called "Angels", and you've got a rather confusing series. The main characters (main pilots only, there are 2 more but one for only 1 or 2 eps and the other turns out to be an Angel...whoops did I let that slip?) are Shinji Ikari,otherwise known as the "second child",pilot of EVA 01, and the son of the director of NERV, the company responsible for the EVAs; Rei Ayanami, the "first child", Pilot of EVA 00, and not quite human;Asuka Langley Soryu, the "third child", pilot of EVA 02, and (politely) a stuck-up b*tch. There are may, MANY other important characters but I would need my own webpage on Evangelion to list and describe them.
Overall, a good series, but very confusing and a bit above the 'target' "Sailor Moon" crowd, it's more for teens (i'd say about a mature 13-14 and up)
RATING
****
Available On
Dubbed, Subbed VHS and DVD(bilingual???)
LINKS
Project EVA-A pretty nice site.
Tenchi Muyo!
Tenchi Muyo! (literally, "No Need for Tenchi!") is a story about a boy, Tenchi Masaki, who is an average earth boy. Then some alien girls show up and things go a little crazy...
Tenchi Muyo! is odd in the fact that the 3 series (OAV, TV1 & TV2) are all different from eachother. In the OAV series, for example, one of the main characters from the TV series never shows up. When the TV series starts, all of the characters are re-introducted to us. In the second TV series, The characters origins change, AGAIN, with them all ending up on Earth at the same time, instead of over a period of time. Overall, this is a awesome series, although the last TV series (Tenchi in Tokyo) extends a sort of Sailormoon-esque kind of feel with it's attacking, incredibly dumb monsters-of-the-day. Thankfully, these guys only last for a couple of episodes.
RATING
****
Available On
Dubbed or Subbed VHS, Bilingual DVD(movies only...I believe...) and currently showing on the Cartoon Network.
LINKS
GenSao's Tenchi Muyo Homepage-A very nice page, with images, sound files, and episode/movie summaries.
(Vision Of) Escaflowne
A very cool series, Escaflowne combines giant robots, psychic powers, cute guys, cute girls, dragons, betrayals, crushes, and other worlds(among other things!) Into a nicely done shoujo series. A girl named Hitomi, from the "Mystic Moon" (aka Earth) ends up in the world of Gaea via a "vision" of a young man (Van) fighting a dragon. Escaflowne is a bit complex to explain, but basically Hitomi and company (Van, Allen, Merle the-cat-girl, and others [plus Zaibach-the-enemy-empire]) find adventures and get into lots of trouble exploring the world of Gaea trying to defeat Zaibach. That's not a good definition, because it makes it sound idiotic and childish, but it's actually very good. It was running on Fox Kids at 11:00 AM on Saturdays up until today (Sat. Oct. 21) so that FOX can replace it with "Nascar Racers" (WTF?!), and what really gets me is that FOX edited and changed around the entire series just for their network, and then stopped it before it was half-way through! grrr... ~_~ hopefully it'll back on again before long, it was getting very good ratings.
RATING
****1/2
Available On
subbed VHS (NOT Fox's version), bilingual DVD.
LINKS
A Comprehensive Look-Escaflowne-basically a storehouse of knowledge about the changes and edits between the original and FOX versions, plus I BELIEVE that there is links to other Esca sites
