Can you name an anime without any trains in it?

Sekai De Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai and Queens Blade :-P

Dem trains.

In my childhood, I heard a song called "Runaway Train", that I took to be about a literal runaway train (maybe influenced by a children's song I knew that was about such). Years later I found the lyrics and saw that it used a train as a metaphor for a life going out of control.

I bring this up because trains make good metaphors in several ways. Everyone knows about them (since the nineteenth century in Britain). In some cities there are tracks crossing the road, giving a closeness while moving that planes and ships don't have. (They force all traffic to pause, so it's easy to animate the protag stopped by them on the way to school/work.) They are big, fast and dangerous (less so than cars though). They cannot be turned or stopped quickly, and the distance from the driver makes them feel more like a moving automaton than buses.

This is why they are good as a backdrop or metaphor: as something powerful and unstoppable (Stop That Train); something headed the wrong way and no way to turn it (Runaway Train); an impersonal transport where people sit alone in a crowd (Evangelion, Yume Nikki, Spirited Away); a symbol of society and government working well (fascist propaganda). Or as the first mechanised transport (and the first publicy listed companies), they can tell the audience this is the rough, dirty first era of industry. Or they can aloow for some movement in an urban background that is not as cluttered on screen as a road would be.

Hope that explains a large part of their ubiquitousness.

I'm a bit of a Rumiko Takahashi nut, and I can't recall any scenes she's written that put any focus on trains. Usually any traversing of distance that can't be walked/biked is cut or made a one-panel gag.

edited 8th Dec '13 6:46:00 PM by Watchtower

...darn, there's a train in Paranoia Agent.

There isn't a train in Urutsei Yatsura, to my knowledge. That's a thing.

I didn't watch it all, but there is no train in Ultra Maniac.

Black Cat had no train...wait, what?

Getter Robo Armageddon and New Getter Robo both have no trains nor overly sexualized females edit: also Dangan Ronpa

edited 17th Dec '13 5:06:03 AM by bassgs435

Dangan Ronpa does have oversexualized females: Asahina, Owari and Junko's librarian personality.

THANK YOU.