I just watched “Vampire Hunter D” for the first time. It rules, I can also see its influence in a lot of other anime, scifi, and other cool nerd shit. It’s really a shame I have never sat down and watched it until now. It fuckin’ rips!.
I need more animated films of that era that aren’t made for the selling of toys. Doesn’t have to be anime but really any sort of sleeper/underrated animated films from the 80s and 90s. I need more animated cinema.
Fist of the North Star and Record of Lodoss War
Does Lodoss have a film version? I’ve only seen the 12/13 part OVA series
Nope, just a thick stack of disks.
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Lodoss War was inspired by a DnD campaign the writer played I believe, there’s an OVA and then television series that progresses the story to the next generation, but the general consensus is the OVA is better.
Angel’s Egg if you’re into slow, melancholy eeriness
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Dallos (4-part OVA, but basically a film length): Mamoru Oshii makes space communism the anime.
Dragon’s Heaven: Cool one-shot OVA. Mobius vibes in the art and a banger scale model opening.
Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01: Another one-shot mecha OVA. Simple plot, but a fun ride with solid animation.
Space Runaway Ideon - A Contact and Be Invoked: a double feature movies by Gundam creator Tomino. The fist one is a compilation film - the TV version is better, but that’s not the assignment here. The second is one of the best sci-fi anime movies of all time. Evangelion copied a lot of stuff from this movie.
Oh, and it’s not old, but Redline fucking rips
Redline is so fucking cool. Get the og, don’t get any of the “4k upscales”, the hand drawn animation loses it’s magic when an ai smoothes everything over.
Good call, and happy accountiversary!
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NP! Watching old OVAs can be a fun rabbit hole to dive down since there’s dozens of them, and the time commitment is a lot shorter than watching a full show. Hope you have fun with it!
Megazone 23 is sick as hell.
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Ninja Scroll
Fist of the North Star
Possibly the A-ko series.
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Wings of Honneamise has gorgeous animation, when you boil the plot right down it’s a bit “we live in a society” but it’s still good
Metropolis came out in 2001 but it’s got even more gorgeous animation
The Last Unicorn is an excellent film - it’s western, but the animation was done by a studio that would later be hired by Miyazaki for Nausicaa
It might be cheating to keep mentioning Ghibli-adjacent films, but I also really love The Castle of Cagliostro
The Birdy the Mighty OVAs are pretty good, short and sweet - the TV anime is fine but kinda long and doesn’t really add much (banging soundtrack though)
On the subject of OVAs, you gotta watch Gunbuster if you haven’t yet, you will cry at the ending
The Patlabor OVAs and films are great, beautiful mecha animation and political intrigue (the OVAs+films form one continuity while the TV series and later OVAs form another)
That’s all I can think of for now, although this lot should keep you busy for a while!
Just re-watched Metropolis and I love it a lot more than I did back then. Fantastic film with only a little bit of dated 3d animation, but the 2D stuff is gorgeous and definitely captures the feel of an earlier style.
The Patlabor OVAs and films are great, beautiful mecha animation and political intrigue (the OVAs+films form one continuity while the TV series and later OVAs form another)
Mentioning Patlabor feels like cheating lol. The third movie, WXIII, is worth pointing out that it’s kind of a totally different thing. It’s a detective story set in the Patlabor setting. It’s incredibly mid and kinda trashy, so it almost evokes the vibes of watching a goofy 80s OVA
Going from Patlabor 2 to 3 had me fucked up.
spoiler
Going from 2 hours of Oshii goodness to “it’s a girl lizard monster because it has boobies” lmao
Yes! I mean it was okay as a movie, interesting setting of course, 5 second Labor cameo at the end, but… damn
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California Crisis is a great 80s OVA involving aliens, the CIA, and the KGB trying to get the main characters. Fantastic pastel color pallete and it’s really fun and it’s in one movie.
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Non-anime suggestion: The Secret of NIMH. Don Bluth’s first film after leaving Disney.
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Some Eastern Bloc animation:
The work of Karel Zeman (Czechoslovakia), like The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
The work of Marcell Jankovics (Hungary), like Son of the White Mare
Romania’s first feature-length animated film Delta Space Mission
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Royal Space Force
I very much liked Memories, an anthology produced by Katsuhiro Otomo. I didn’t watch Neo Tokyo, an earlier anthology but I hear it’s pretty good as well
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Cyber City Oedo is a lot of fun - a three part OVA about three prisoners who are offered a chance to reduce their thousand year sentences (for the crime of being total badasses) by donning bomb collars and going on suicide missions for the cyber-police.
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