Guaporense reviews animated series

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22) Is this a Zombie? (2011)



Pretty fun mix between satire of the magical girl genre and standard teenager harem fantasy light novel adaptation: you have a guy, which for no reason, is killed and ressurrected by a necromancer (the blue girl) and becomes an immortal zombie, then he is cut in half by a chainsaw wielding magical girl (with a magical pink chainsaw to boot):



And then he fights with a blood sucking vampire which also happens to be a girl with half a gallon volume fake boobs. Then all these girls (plus a couple other ones) start living in his house (he doesn't appear to live with his parents even though he is supposedly a highschool student).



And also, when he was cut in half by the chainsaw wielding magical girl he absorbed her magical chainsaw powers and became a magical girl himself:

So he had to fight with the giant flying whales that are terrorizing tokyo. Pretty fun isn't it?






23) Log Horizon (2013-2014)



One of those: trapped in a RPG world shows. As all the people who were playing a RPG that's very similar to World of Warcraft suddlently wake up and are living inside the world of that game. So they organize themselves into guilds and actually establish a healthy new society in this world that they now live in. A really weird world and the NPCs are called people of the land and they happen to be sentient so that after the virtual world became they the NPCs are most of the population and the actual "normal people".



Though despite the interesting world building in the series the animation and the characters were bad overall so it wasn't a great series.



24) No Game no Life (2014)



One of the best series of the majestic 2014 season, being perhaps the greatest vintage of animation in history. No Game no Life is perhaps among the best adaptations related to manga published in the nerd's manga magazine Monthly Comic Alive:


It's about a 18 year old game nerd and his 11 year old gaming genius sister who never go out of home and play videogames 18 hours a day, until they played against a god of another universe and beat him in chess. So the god was angry at them and transported the two kids to his world, a world where everything can be disputed as a game.



Given the exceptional gaming skills of these two kids they quickly start taking over that world, taking over entire countries' territories over the course of the 12 episodes of this series. The way they play is pretty cool though the excessive "OMG, I am so great and smart" starts to get repetitive after a while.



I also loved the extremely generic distillation of otaku manga artstyle presented in this series. And the vibrant colors.






25) Oreimo 2 (2013)



One of those harem shows. The first Oreimo (2012) was really great slice of life which managed to accurately portray the realities of otaku lifestyle and some of the social stigma related to pornographic videogames. This new season, however, descends into incest portraying the process in which brother and sister fall into love.

I found this to be rather disgusting but simultaneously entertaining.

The art and animation are pretty good too.




26) Infinite Ryvius (1999)



An old classic from the golden age of animation. One of the copies of EVA in terms of trying to mimic the science fiction atmosphere of EVA involving teenagers in an "adventure" of major implications for making.

Though I found it a bit boring and not very engaging, it appeared to opaque and lacking in personality. The drama didn't work very well and the characters weren't memorable.

Still the art and animation were very good.

7/10, because it has loads of artistic integrity.



I had made this thread essentially because Jiraffejustin suggested to me but apparently it hasn't generated significant interest hence I am closing it down. I made this post to commit to close it down.



27) Bojack Horseman


Just watched 6 full seasons of this stuff. Really great show and character study. It transcends the traditional limitations of Western animation and becomes the first truly complex narrative told by Western animation. A monumental achievement, it is perhaps the Western equivalent to Takahata's Horus from 1968.

(edit: now I think that Arcane is more like Horus because it combines narrative complexity with beauty, which Bojack lacks)



18) Rick and Morty (2013)
Finished watching the whole show. I think it is very entertaining but lacking in substance. Still, Rick is an entertaining character, Morty is just a stand-in for the audience. (similar to Sheldon and Leonard in Big Bang Theory).



Arcane - 1st season (2021)



I think this show is a truly revolutionary piece for Western animation. The reason is that it's the first western animation I watched that manages to forget it's a cartoon and instead believes in itself as a piece of fiction. That is, this is not a cartoon but a work of fiction that uses animation as its medium. Japan has been doing this since Takahata's Horus in 1968 in the western hemisphere; I think this show is pretty revolutionary in that respect. One might argue, "well but Futurama or Bojack had sophisticated dialogue and etc," and I agree (I even said that Bojack was also revolutionary and I also compared it to Horus), but this show is an animation that believes in itself as a piece of visual art:





This is something I did not see before, combined with complex dialogue and sophisticated storytelling. One might think, "well, but its true other French animations have creative art styles," yes but they lack the dramatic weight of believing in themselves as pieces of fiction. Being nine episodes of 40 minutes of animation allowed this show to flesh out a complex and sequential story (like Breaking Bad) that I think is unique for western animation.

It is based on a videogame (which I never played), and this influence is shown in the video game-like action sequences and in the colorful characters (there is, for instance, the character with the hammer and the character with the gatlin gun; clearly, a reference to the role these characters have in the videogame), but overall it works very well on its own.