I’m alive and more or less well (when I’m not coughing) but very busy right now, and I probably won’t post much for a while yet.
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Many excellent older shows are streaming legally online. If, like me, you have no interest in the current crop of otaku pandering vehicles, you can skip them and watch something good. Here are four of my personal top five anime: Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain, Shingu and Mononoke. (Missing is Dennou Coil.)
If you found Mononoke intriguing, you can watch most of Kenji Nakamura’s other series: Kuuchu Buranko, [C] Control, Tsuritama and Gatchaman Crowds. (I’d be curious to see what Eve Tushnet would make of Nakamura’s work, particularly Mononoke.1)
A couple of under-appreciated favorites: Pupipo, Oh! Edo Rocket. The following is from the tenth episode of the latter. It doesn’t make any more sense in context:
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Marie & Gali, one of Steven’s favorites, has finally been completely subbed. What I’ve seen of the second season so far is inferior to the first, though it may get better once the focus shifts from the new girl and back to the silly scientists. It’s unlikely ever to be licensed for North America, but it’s available through irregular channels.
Notes
- Josh on the first arc of Mononoke: “What it reminds me a bit of is Flannery O’Connor, who made use of the grotesque and horrific to jolt her readers out of moral complacency. I don’t know whether Kenji Nakamura and his writers actually had some sort of moral impetus here, or if they just felt it would be something messed up that they could use for dramatic effect. But it goes to show how simply telling a story well can have a potentially powerful moral effect on people. Part of the reason we live in a culture that is saturated with secular leftist values is that they’re by and large the only ones these days who care about good storytelling. Would that more orthodox Christians took note of that.”