Manga

LoLth

I've seen a few but there are some others I would like to see still...

Ghost in the shell - Still haven't seen it!

Oedo 808 - good trilogy (Benten's a puff!)

Projekt A-ko - didn't like it

3x3 eyes - very good at the start (first 2 parts) gets a bit weird (and I do mean really weird even by Manga standards). Good twist of the hero.

Crying Freeman - Great. Art is brilliant, the story is good, the action is fast and frequent but, as with all manga, it still has the slow internal monologue bits.

Wicked City - wanna see it! looks good.

Fist of the North Star - good start, sh1t otherwise

Urotoshidoji (Legend of the overfiend) -
Pt. 1 Great (a little disturbed), pt. 2 skips a bit, there's a lack of continuity between 1 and 2, didn't get to see it all.

RG Veda - only saw first 2 parts, very good though..

Venus Wars - excellent, some slow bits but in general , excellent (look out for the airship designs very Scientifiction / space 1889 )

Legend of the 4 kings - very good, but the heros get too powerful too quick, sort of the 'Superman' syndrome all over again.

Akira - the most famous of the Manga films. Great film, ruined at the end by all that hippy crap! The comic strip kept going past the Kaneda/Tetsuo showdown (and Tetsuo didn't turn into that thing). Comic was a lot better.

Streetfighter - actually a great anime! (not the van damme one, the cartoon)

Mortal Kombat - never seen it. Want to.

DragonballZ - still haven't seen it!

The Guyver - the anime series - saw pts 1 and 2 they were excellent. want to see the rest. Don't bother with the Film version.
Big rubber monsters (inflatable or not ) just don't do it for me...

Odin - want to see it.

A non-manga (I think) anime you might want to check out...

Starchaser - the legend of Orin (a Star Wars rip off) - is actually really good!

Also try the Ulysses31 series - done by a french company (some of the art done in O'Sullivan Bluth!) a brilliant series (even with the annoying Nono and Telemicus, and the crappy humourous interlude robots)

well that's it for now. I'll add more if I think of them.

J.

DeViant

LoLth,
I have the Sub-title version of Ghost in the Shell. I'll bring it on friday to the lads house, But their TV is too Fookin small to read the Sub-Title Properly.

Fiend

Oh oh, a thread on manga

LoLth, that's one heck of a post You trying to name and review every manga you've seen heeh?

Right, the best manga "film" at the moment would probably be "Ghost in the Shell". Story and art were great but they put the money into it after all cause they aimed for a world wide cinema release. (IFC was only cinema to show it in dublin) The story does not follow the entire comic strip though and is only a section of the entire story. Still, they did a fantastic job on this and it's much better than the comic. Read the comic though if you want the entire story

I think I'll post a second post and rant about manga in general haha.

Fiend

Other manga films worth mentioning...

Akira:
Everyone who watches manga have probably seen this one. This film started all the manga craze outside asia. Everyone knows this so not going to say much about it except the comic strip is incredibly long. It's so long in fact that they left out way too much cool stuff in the film. Ah well, go read the comic.

Patlabor:
Hmmm, might have mispelt that! This is a great manga film. It's based on a comic strip by the same name and they've made 2 films. Both with independant story lines. They're very good, great story, very intelligent and well worth a look.

Urotoshidoji:
LoLth mentioned this as well. I've seen all 3 films and there's even a series based on the 3rd film. It's a laugh, just don't take it seriously. Take this scene from the 2nd film for example, demon captures one of the heroin, flies off with her and starts raping her in mid-air all the while the heroin is trying to get some info out of the demon by talking to him!!!! WIERD!!!! (note: all the released versions over here were heavily edited censored

StreetFighter:
Story is not bad, very well drawn and fight sequences are great. (if you don't like this film you're probably just not a street fighter fan...not that you have to be one to appreciate it) Too many token scenes though so they can just include all the characters from the game in the film. I think the original japanese version is much better than the english version. They totally re-edited the sound track to the film. That fight scene with Chun-Li and Vega (one of the best fight scenes in the film and yes yes it's that one after the shower scene) was done a lot better with the melodramatic music int he jap version than the punk rock crap they used in the english.

I've seen all the other ones and don't really think much of them....
This is going to be a long post....so sorry for length

Manga series i liked.....
Well, I've watched a lot of manga and I have to say most of the released stuff in this part of the world are a lot of crap. I mean, Guyver for instance had lots of potential but ruined by badly drawn artwork and uninteresting dialogues and uninspired fight sequences. Crying Freeman is probably the best of the series available here but the comic are much better...

There are lots of very good series never released here and they probably never will be. Series like DragonballZ, City Hunter, SlamDunk etc Love to talk about them but this post is long enough and you guys will probably never see them so ta.

Kali

yeah ur right about streetfight..
jap version was a LOT better than the english version.. and as you said a lot of token scenes like Dhalsim and Blanka tho that vega and chun li scene is good
Akira and Ghost "..." are both excellent examples of manga films .. any1 who hasn't seen either.. GO friggin get them!!

Fiend

StreetFighter:
Forgot to ask...anyone one else spot Akuma in the film?

One manga film to look out for is the Final Fantasy Film. it's based on the Final Fantasy Universe from that playstation game but don't worry, it'll be all new characters and storyline. The film is scheduled for world wide cinema relase in 2001 and it's all computer generated. There's a mpeg floating around which shows the look of 2 of the characters and they look absolutely amazing. Very life like and stuff. Goto www.ff8online.com if you want to see it, it's in the movies section.

DeViant

So then,
Whats the Best Manga out there??
IMHO (not that I have seen vast amounts, and I do find it hard to find Vol 1 of ANYTHING) is "Ghost in the Shell", kinda "Snow Crash"esque what with the Ghost hacking and all.
Opinions?

Shinji

Oooh, my pet subject.

Firstly, I wanna point out something here.... "Manga" means comics. The correct title for the animated stuff is "anime" - "Manga Video" is just a video label over here, and a pretty trashy one at that.

There is a _lot_ of anime out there if you're prepared to look, and much of it certainly doesn't fall into the sex & violence type of movie usually released by Mangle Video. However, the vast majority of it has good music, good animation and excellent storylines.

Just to make a few points about some of the anime mentioned here:

Ghost in the Shell: Excellent film, although if you see the translated graphic novel (manga) about, pick it up. It has a lot more plot threads, and has a great sense of humour which the film lost out on.

Akira: Superb, although not the best film out there by any measure or means. It was very confused, because the manga that it's based on is very long, and wasn't finished when the movie came out. Trying to compress that down into one movie was a nightmare, and it shows.

Urutskodoji: The last parts of this are completely banned, and the earlier ones are hacked to bits due to censorship. This is a Bad Thing, because in the process most of the plot is lost. It's not nice in the first place - lots of violent tentacle rape, and nobody dies cleanly - but at least Go Nagai's original version had a moral, and a decent plot that justified the violence.

Odin: Avoid like the plague. It's as boring as bedamned, and that's even after they cut 40 minutes of crap from the Japanese version. The plot is badly thought out too.

I suggest that anyone who is interested in anything other than sex and violence from anime should try some of the other shows available. The majority of anime is actually aimed at a general audience - Manga Video scrape the bottom of the barrel because they know that tits and gore sell videos to the lowest common denominator saddo gits.

Try out some of the following:

Macross Plus: There's a movie available subbed, but the dubbed version of the 4-episode miniseries is good as well. Really gorgeous to look at, and a wonderful plot.

Evangelion: 13 tapes have been released dubbed. The most controversial anime to come out of Japan, not for reasons of sex and violence, but because it has some really freaky religious imagery deemed blasphemous by a lot of people, and because some of the later episodes feature some very horrific scenes. It can also be very funny and quirky, and the characters are genuinely easy to warm to, not to mention intrigueing. And it has some attractive females too...

Bubblegum Crisis: Despite the name, it is actually a really good anime, and fairly serious. Ghost in the Shell fans will love this. About to be rereleased by MVM Distribution.


There's a lot of other really good stuff about, but much of it hasn't been released here. Anime is _huge_ in the USA, and some of that is about to spill over - there will be cinema releases of Perfect Blue (a superb psycho-thriller), Princess Mononoke (the best animated film ever made, by director Hayao Miyzaki - the man that Stephen Spielberg rates as his favourite director of all time) and Spriggan (manga available under the title of "Striker") in the near future.

I myself have about 100 tapes of anime, mainly 3-hour tapes of stuff which has been imported from Japan and subtitled by fans... This can become an obsession very easily!

Mata ne!
Rob