I think it depends on which aspect of it you were most impressed with, almost all of the directors work all has a similar visual and animatic feel so there’s that aspect to it, but if you were most interested in the gritty future-core swapping of bodyparts and the specific characters personalities that’s the other side of it. So I think I could make some recommendations but it would probably help to know what you liked about it to pin down what you’d be interested in.
I mean something like technolyze or ergo proxy has similar aspects but they’re ultra dark and the animation is nothing like cyberpunk, on the other side something like kill la kill or gurrenn lagann have some of the visual cues but less of the setting/plot. Also there’s a number of things that could be said to be more inbetween, but yeah if you try (at least loosely) to articulate what it is you’d like to see more of I can definitely give you something else. If it’s just that the specific combination of parts made a nice machine and you’d like to see a continuation of that exact formula, unfortunately that probably doesn’t exist
On a separate note, I started castlevania and after 5 minutes I couldn’t listen to the western cast doing the mismatch of bad english and european accents, it sounded like a trainwreck. So I started the japanese dub and it’s much more palatable, however it seems like there are only the first 4 episodes with the japanese dub so after that if I’m into it (which it seems like it could be a good watch) I’ll have to go back to the english cast. I don’t know, we’ll see how it goes. I’m not 100% sold on it yet, but they’ve only visually introduced simon belmont in 1 scene by the end of the first episode so it’s stock could continue to rise.
I also checked out a couple of the new releases for this season and I’ll wait to say anything but so far there’s only 1 that’s not too bad and overall, it’s not so different from anything else that has been making the rounds recently but it’s a madhouse production so I’m giving it a chance.
Yeah, I’m possibly hoping for something that doesn’t exist as I loved the animation, setting, soundtrack, character designs - everything just worked so well together
But I’d be interested in anything with a similarly dark and gritty kind of setting
I’ll give it a good think, the aforementioned would be good but they’d be less in the pocket just due to a different feeling. I go off how an anime feels sometimes rather than only visual cues or only the plot, it’s odd but sometimes director plays a huge role in the overall production and storytelling. One that’s sort of an easy recommendation is Promare which is also done by the same director but I didn’t have any strong feeling that it was “good”, it’s just sort of from the same lineage and in the same general pocket. I’ll give you something better if you give me a bit though.
Just so that I don’t mince words, I was underwhelmed by promare, it’s probably not as gritty as what you’re looking for, where as technolyze that I mentioned before is plenty gritty but might be too dark and too slow to ramp up. That’s why I need to give it more consideration.
I’ve been meaning to give it another try myself, it was written by Warren Ellis - Wikipedia one of my favorite comics writers. I had a hard time getting into it the first time but maybe it was just my mood at the time.
just to get an idea of where you’re at, have you watched any of the ghost in the shell franchise? If not, I think some of it might interest you.
I’d look at dorohedoro which we were talking about upthread a bit as it has a gritty texture and more than a little entertainment value but it’s not futurepunk it’s more like (if I had to pick a name) magic punk? I’d check out FLCL the original from around y2k if you haven’t seen that, also from that era or a little before is Serial Experiments Lain but it’s totally different from cyberpunk but I have a feeling you might be into it. Closer to the animation of cyberpunk maybe redline which is a story ostensibly about a futuristic deathrace that takes place on mars or some other planet, the direction is excellent and the plot is entertaining (still not very cyberpunk though). Technolyze or Ergo proxy both have something similar to what you’re looking for but there’s no romance aspect and they’re phrased a little more nihilistically, or with a bit less of the stylistic you probably enjoyed. I guess I’m having trouble thinking of a middleground, everything is falling a little off the mark and I know you aren’t a big anime person so I don’t want to make a bad recommendation.
Definitely watch Paprika like you mentioned before, I think there’s definitely something for you in the first and probably second ghost in the shell movies. Try dorohedoro and if you like it, should probably be pretty easy to get into. My bad I’ll try and give it more thought.
@shigginpit, a question from a listener for you:
“An anim where the madness of robots is triggered voluntarily by a deceased engineer using a frequency generated by the wind which blows through buildings? Perhaps a connection with birds, a police investigation atmosphere, in My memory is failing.”
An idea ?
Probably around the 2000s.
At one point the inspectors are in an industrial area at the edge of the (green) water, it is there that they find documents in a slum above a warehouse and that they understand that it is the form of a large tower under construction that triggers everything. Drone excavators that go crazy first it seems to me.
Sorry my memory is very patchy between 1995 and 2005.
that’s a patlabor movie, maybe patlabor pt 2 directed by the ghost in the shell director. let me verify. it has police robots right? like mecha sort of?
well the detectives are human, the police ride the robots. So it’s not a patlabor movie? because there’s a plot where the other worker robots have been taken over and they end up at this new construction site which is down by the water where they’re trying to build an artificial land jutty in tokyo bay, there’s a huge half constructed building and they have to infiltrate it or something and I’m pretty sure there’s something to do with the wind noise.
Patlabor the series is pretty different from patlabor the film series. Also, there’s these detectives in the films that aren’t part of the patlabor unit so they’re easy to forget, these 2 guys who are kinda older middle aged and the stories usually connect up at the end or something.
Anyways, if it doesn’t sound like patlabor any other small hints?
Also in the patlabor movie I’m talking about, the first robot to go apeshit is a military test drone type thing on wheels I believe, they’re out on an exercise and all of a sudden it goes crazy and people think it’s being piloted by a human remotely so they think someone else is behind it but it turns out to be like the plot you described about the creator having baked the program into them before he died. The other robots/ machines that go crazy are all like “construction labors”, basically construction and military robots. And the robots the police use aren’t like sentient robots, they’re more like vehicles.
That must be it, I’ll watch it again but it seems to fit really well with my memories and the fact that the director is the same as Ghost In The shell seems quite likely to me.
