Anime from the 60s, 70s and 80s is when it was at its best.
I do enjoy a lot of the stuff that is well known in the US (Kimba The White Lion, Speed Racer) and that which isn't (Tatsunoko's dark take on Pinocchio).
The Cartoon Research website has a column called Lost Planet Anime about the period. Well worth checking out.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Eh, there's some older stuff that's okay, but to be honest, I don't think a lot of older anime has aged that well in terms of animation or design (Early anime aping on Walt Disney's classic style is fine at first, but I'm glad that over time other artists hlep branch out and make more varied art styles).
Watch SymphogearI watched some of Miracle Girls, a pre-Sailor Moon magical girls show, switching between the Italian dub and the original, and what put me off most was the clumsiness of the overall story. No proper introduction, the first two episodes have no apparent story arc, scenes that should establish character are out of context and it manages to make a plane hijacking look pedestrian by distracting side scenes and a silly, easy resolution. Some may come from adaptation troubles, but it seems that the director simply didn't understand the medium or it was hellishly rushed.
Comparing old shows to new, one thing that has improved is the very important skill of storyboarding.
A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.Does anyone know where to find some Lady!! with subs?
I'm curious about Cutie Honey.
As for classics I know well and enjoy, Lupin III is on top of my list.
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My mistake, the manga ran from '91 to '94 and the animation is from '93. It just looked much older.
It's odd, from the seventies to the start of digital animation there were no major period shifts in art, whereas after that the change was huge. Though that's also because character art has become very homogenised.
All I've seen (television-wise) from before 1990 is Goldrake (which is very episodic, really just monster of the week with very slow development and little change to the formula), Captain Future (good, though campy by today's standards) and Gundam (which I find rather slow, wish I could find the compilation films).
I know that a big reason for this is that much of the talent in animation at the time went into OVAs where returns were better. Though at the same time, most of the OVA market was softcore pornography.
A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.I don't really agree that there was no change in styles before digital finishing. If you want to compare changes withing the same franchise, 60s Astro Boy looks different from the 80s one, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam is very different from Mobile Suit Gundam and Macross7 is even more different from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. You can also usually tell the decade the series was made of. With movies it's not as simple although with them it's less about production values and more about trends.
I agree. Mobile Suit Gundam The08th MS Team, released in 1996, is suppose to take place during the same time as the original 1979 Gundam anime. However, the character designs between the two shows look nothing alike.
Bump.
I've been thinking about getting a book called Anime: A History
. It's from the same guy who wrote The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 and what makes it special is that it looks at the history of the whole anime industry rather than just talking about the milestones.
Bumped agin.
Just found this site
, which subtitles classic anime and runs on a donation model.
They're even actually partners with Tezuka's studio and Tatsunoko Production!
For those of us who'd like to see older anime gain some more visibility, this is terrific...
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Something I'm wondering about, the anime adaptation of Tiger Mask*, does it still have all the real-world wrestlers in it? For those not in the know, Tiger Mask is a manga about a bad guy wrestler who turns good guy after Antonio Inoki and Giant Baba threaten to kick him out of the Japanese wrestling leagues for being a dirty cheater. Eventually he faces off against National Wrestling Alliance champions such as Mil Mascaras and Dory Funk Jr. Does the anime still have all those real people I just named, or was image licensing out of the question even then, for anyone who's seen the Tiger Mask anime?
(*) which was apparently an inspiration for Go Nagai when he started making robot cartoons.
Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great
The whole thing is available on You Tube in both Italian (adapted from the Japanese) and English (Saban's dubbed version which is censored).
Ooh, I had Harmony Gold's Compilation Movie of that Pinocchio! I looked up some of it on Youtube last year, where someone mentioned that the firing squad scene in the ending was actually less censored in the movie than in the TV dub. Apparently, though, since there was no time to establish whatever the military's beef with Pinocchio was, they turned it into a literal "War on Christmas", which was hilarious. I also really don't remember the mermaid sequence I saw in a Youtube copy at all, so I wonder if it was cut from some tapes because there were topless mermaids in it.
I saw that. I was aiming to submit it to the Synchtube bad movies group I'm a member of, but the only upload on You Tube was missing a couple parts.
That part came at the end of a long story arc, which wouldn't have worked in a movie... But seriously. "War on Christmas?!" Did Bill O'Reilly write the script?
And in that dub, Geppetto has a bad Italian accent... The only other version where this was true was in Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales. It's hard to take anything a character with a Mario accent does seriously.
The Saban version is a lot better.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
The cheesy 80s-tastic music may have been the one really enjoyable thing about it. (The Saban dub's music, though, is genuinely enjoyable.)
The voice of Pinocchio in that is quite obviously a woman and they make no attempt to hide it.
(I could also rant about how they included the episode based on the money tree sequence, which was in the book and Benigni film, but not the Disney version; but not the Pleasure Island episode, which everybody knows!)
edited 13th Nov '14 6:52:50 PM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."So, Evengalion and the quality revolution are the cutoff date, eh? Okay then...
Noriko: Great pilot, or the greatest pilot?

This is a thread for classic anime, which here will be referred to as anything that came out before the original Mobile Suit Gundam.
To start with, I'm glad anime from this era seems to be getting a bit more exposure in America in recent years. I know Discotek loves to distribute old anime like the original Cutie Honey and I did find a youtube channel that has fansubbed episodes of the original Magical Girl anime, Sally The Witch. I think it gives anime fans on the other side of the Pacific a chance to see where certain genres and tropes come from and how far the medium has come in general.
Has anyone here seen any 60s or 70s anime? If so, what are your favorites?
edited 20th Apr '14 6:36:14 PM by DS9guy