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I grew up in France, so most of my "saturday morning" cartoons (Wednesday was actually the big day off there, since we had school on Saturday mornings) were in fact anime: Captain Harlock, Candy Candy, Maya the Bee, Astro Boy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Space Adventure Cobra, Ulysses 31.
I never knew these were created in Japan until my return to the United States when I noticed the different caliber of cartoon entertainment and started to miss "my old cartoons with the big eyes."
They lapsed out of my memory until my college years when I stumbled across an anime fan club in a random lounge watching an Akira fansub on VHS. I was... intrigued, but too busy to bother joining a club and re-initiating myself in that universe.
It wasn't until I'd graduated from college, moved to NYC, and picked up videogaming on the PSX that I became more immersed in anime iconography via JRPGs. The release of Ghost In The Shell circa '95 cemented my interest in anime, and I've since become a bit of a casual otaku.
As a parent of two young kids, I don't have a lot of spare time, but I do try to spend some of it watching a worthwhile series such as Monster, or quick love-polygon fun like Toradora. Needless to say, my kids and I are huge fans of Hayao Miyazaki and watch his films almost weekly.
On the flip side, I'm quite partial to uncanny, dissociative, weird anime, or anything that takes my brain down a path I hadn't expected.
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All Comments (36) Comments
Then there's Paprika, if you haven't seen it. AMAZING movie, and probably one of the best-looking, too. It's all about dreams, and to me it recreates that sort of non-sense dream logic that I have a lot.
And it's not anime, but if you're interested, there's an animated French sci-fi film from the 70s called Fantastic Planet. It's set on another planet where giant aliens keep humans as pets. I watched it probably about a year ago, and it's one of those rare films that stuck with me ever since seeing it. It's probably THE most uncanny and weird animated film I have seen. Really feels like it was made on another planet. I think you can find it online, but only the English dubs. I've heard they're horrible, but I watched it subbed in French so I wouldn't know.
BTW, seems like we have sort of similar tastes. I love Miyazaki films and uncanny, weird, ect. films as well :)
I made myself a busy schedule and so far I'm enjoying it.
How about you?
Hey Frohike! :)
How was your holidays? Must be quite hard on you too, considering you have a pretty nice personality which leads to many friends ^.^ You might have went to parties twice as many as I did. ;)
I absolutely loved Ponyo, to be honest. Maybe it's just because I'm so immersed in darker things otherwise, but the pure childish wonder and warmth of it had me gasping and misting up at the eyes while watching it -- probably just because it's so rare to see a work that beautiful, and that manages to give me the feeling of being a kid witnessing something that makes me dream. All it is is a simple fairytale, but the purity of it is just such a rare and amazing thing. I think it stirred such emotions in me because I was just so happy that I could still feel something like that so profoundly. No matter how demoralizing adult life can be, wonderful things like this still exist.
By the way, from your last.fm profile -- although our taste in music is a bit different (yet with some things in common, for sure), I know exactly what you mean by this: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off... I know that is music."
You seem to be a man of excellent tastes all around!