Recently in mecha anime Category

Everyone has a list of their favorite anime shows. That's a given. But do you have a list of the anime you consider so pedestrian, lame or terrible you wouldn't show them to you ex ever?

Lemme share my lame list. It's not in any order by the way.

1. "Bartender" - Show about a mixologist who can ease your troubles with a drink. Each episode comes with a history or story behind the cocktail du jour. Employs fourth wall techniques. Verdict: bleah and just plain boring

2. "Boys Be" - Tales of boys at school and the way they drool, pine for and leer at girls and women. Contains fanservice which means scenes where female characters inadvertently end up showing their underwear. Verdict: sexist and dumb

3. "Diamond Daydreams" - Show about the lives and loves of several women who reside or work in the nothern part of Japan. At times seems like an ad for certain locations. The character designs are among the ugliest I have ever seen. Memo to the show's animators: Go back to art school and learn how to draw. Then smack yourself for producing what amounts to nothing more than a disguised travel brochure.

4."Haunted Junction" - Kids from different religious backgrounds attend a haunted school with well-known ghosts from Japanese popular culture. Well they focus mostly on spectres Japanese school kids yak about such as the girl who haunts toilets. Verdict: A big mess. Supposed to be funny but is excruciating to watch. Has disturbing characters like a teen-aged girl overly fond of little boys. Gag.

5. "Gregory Horror Show" - MIni episodes about a mouse the unseen protagonist encounters in a place full of "scary" characters. The segments are too short and choppy. The characters are NOT scary at all since they are drawn simply. Think of wooden blocks then imagine them with faces and stubby appendages. The premise isn't bad but the animators faltered in the execution.

6. "Oh My Goddess" OVA - The first installment in a series that should have been buried long long ago. Geek meets one of the Nordic goddesses of fate. She ends up keeping house for him and falling for this very common guy. This show is nothing more than wish fulfillment for the guy who cannot get a date and still lives in his mom's basement. This tripe is an insult to any woman who can think for herself.

7. "Onegai Teacher" or "Please Teacher" - Half-human/half-alien lands on Earth and pretends to be a teacher to gather data on humans. Circumstances force her to marry one of her students. She looks like a well-endowed woman in her mid-20s. He is actually 18 but looks 15 because he was in a coma-like state for several years. They keep their marriage a secret and eventually fall in love.

Skip this so-called romantic show. If you have the DVDs, burn them and fumigate the room where these were kept. I found the relationship between the main characters disturbing and just wrong. The creator of this show should be ashamed for producing this putrid excuse for an anime. He or she deserves a flogging.

8. "Rahxephon" - Show where giant statues ( actually just prettier looking giant robots) wreak havoc in a walled-off world. Hero is a teen with a murky past. There is also a mysterious girl and a woman who is more than what she seems. Great animation, nice CGIs and compelling storyline at first. But I found the plot too convoluted for my taste and the pace of the show can be glacial at times. I couldn't finish this out of frustration and boredom.

9. "School Rumble" - HIgh school anime about a clueless girl, the guy she likes, the bad boy who loves her and their classmates. Typical show where someone can't tell the object of their affection how they feel because of certain reasons and circumstances. (e.g. the person they love just doesn't get it). Some people like this show. I don't. I got tired of the main characters' inability to confess their love.

10. "R.O.D." the TV series - Three sisters with the unusual ability to manipulate paper. They solve cases and are called paper masters for a good reason. One can create paper animals that do her bidding while another can fashion weapons out of paper. This is the tv spinoff of the popular "Read or Die" OVA about a bookworm who is really a special agent for the British.

The television show buchers certain characters in the original movie much to its detriment. The plot is more complex and folks double cross each other out of the blue. The series also runs too long and gets bogged down by the different subplots. This is one sorry spinoff to a decent, original movie.

OK OK so it's been ages since I last posted. I've been on vacation (whine whine) and was out of the country too. Don't ask where. Suffice it to say I won't be back there.

Anyway, I've been watching this new anime called "Persona - trinity soul" which apparently is based on a video game. The show is set in Ayanagi City and happens 10 years after the last game. Our protagonists are three brothers who seem to lack the gene for expressing love. This trio of cold fishes are Ryo Kanzato who heads the local police department, his high school-aged brother Shin and their youngest sibling Jun. They had a sister, Yuki, who was Jun's twin but something happened and she's no longer with them. Ditto their parents.

I've only seen up to episode three and the show still hasn't explained if Yuki died or was kidnapped or got vaporized. Since I never played the game, I'm reduced to getting my info solely from the show.

In the first episode, Ryo gets summoned to check out a submersible where the crew vanished. At the same time, his two younger brothers return home after several years of living with another relative. He doesn't seem to relish seeing his brothers again.

There's a mystery with a capital M going on. People are disappearing. Folks have been found dead and turned inside out. There's a group of folks who seem to be grabbing certain young people and pulling out what looks to be their souls. Ryo keeps things from his own men much to the chagrin of one cop who thinks he's up to something. Ryo, who is as friendly as an iceberg to his siblings and underlings, possesses some sort of power that launches a transparent giant robot thingy that saves one of the kidnapped girls and slashes some giant alien thingy that comes out of the kidnapper.

At his new high school Shin hears about "shadow extraction" and sees students doing such a feat on others. He passes out after a classmate, Takuro Sakakiba, and he managed to pull out these giant robots from each other. It seems these robot things are called Personas.

Interesting that the robots look like the models Shin possesses and even dreams about.

Little Jun is weird in his own right, He keeps a dress of his missing twin with him and behind locked doors, Ryo overhears him talking to a girl.

There's some trouble brewing at a local karaoke bar when Shin and his classmates run into a group of young punks.

The show is interesting so far.

I found this on YouTube courtesy of andylau12345. Thanks dude. Hearing the "Voltes V" theme song brings back fond memories of watching mecha anime while I was growing up in the '70s and early '80s in the Philippines.

There were so many robot shows then, it seemed there was one mecha show every day. There was "Mazinger Z" with its weird villains and "Daimos" with its Richard/Erika love story. But "Voltes V" was my favorite with its tale of orphaned brothers and longing for a missing/dead father. Plus Voltes V usually dispatched the enemies by carving a V in their bodies with a sword. I always thought he did that to make sure the baddies knew who crushed them. That's "V" for Mr. Voltes V. And don't you forget it!

Of course even then I wondered why the evil guys never attacked the heroes as the robot was transforming. It seemed to me the best time to attack since the robot would be at its weakest. But why ask why.

The only other non-robot show I watched faithfully then was "Candy Candy" which dealt with the Cinderella-like life of one orphan girl. I was 9 when I saw the episode where Anthony, her first love, died in a riding accident or something like that. I bawled for an hour then memorized the sappy ending song. I remember sniffling again when I sang the song afterward. Hey, I was young and easily moved then.

Anime isn't restricted to shows about magical pre-teens with pink hair and cutesy sidekicks. It deals with a wide range of subject matter and uses a variety of animation styles. And yes, there are dreck shows as there are gems out there.

Since I burned out on shows featuring giant robots and spaceships as a child, I seldom watch mecha anime or anything that remotely looks mecha. But sometimes I make exceptions especially if the mecha elements do not overwhelm the entire story.

One of my favorite anime guys is Makoto Shinkai who created "Voices of a Distant Star" which every anime fan should see at least once.

It is the story of two young lovers separated literally by time and space. Shinkai used his Macintosh to create the anime. The character designs aren't so hot but the story and the background are wonderful.

Cell phone messages sent between the main characters, Mikako Nagamine and Noboru Terao, play a big role in the story. Yeah, it's a stretch to believe that a cell phone company would have such a coverage plan but let's just go with the flow, shall we?

The two last saw each other in middle school. War breaks out between Earth and a group of aliens called Tarsians. Mikako joins the UN forces and learns to fight the Tarsians using a giant robot. Somehow she still wears the same uniform from school. Whatever. She misses Noboru and experiences these moments where you know she's either dreaming or hallucinating.

Because Mikako is traveling light years away, she ages slower than Noboru and her messages takes years to reach him. He tries to hang on then gives in to the inevitable. He meets a girl called Wakana and it's hinted that he goes out with her in high school. The manga version further elaborates on this relationship.

Then like a bucket of cold water, he receives a message from Mikako who we last see is in a firefight with the enemy. Lysithea, the spaceship that carries her and the others, is damaged. Her last message ends in static.

Noboru drops out of high school and joins the space armada in the hopes of reuniting with Mikako.

The manga's ending is more satisfying since it has Mikako scanning a list of people who joined the armada and seeing Noboru's name.

This is a tear jerker of a show and could be too much of a chick flick for some guys. But give it a try. You might like it. Then give Shinkai's other works a look. The man knows how to tell a story.

In anime, it's a given that only a teen can save the world when it's about to get wiped off the universe. The task usually falls to the most angst-filled or most ordinary teen at the local junior high school. The gender depends on the target audience of the show. Once you get past this convention, just relax and enjoy the series. Unless of course the show stinks.

It is 2356 and the sky is no longer blue but green. The reason for the color change? In 2167, a super nova caused an electromagnetic shockwave that nearly destroyed the Earth. The survivors and their descendants have been preparing since then for the second shockwave expected to hit the planet. There's a subplot involving some alien life forms and their attempts to attack or help humans.

Our heroine is Shima Katase who is a whiz at programming but a dunce at piloting space ships. Her piloting skills improves a great deal later on. We meet her as she is leaving home to enroll at the space program at Stellvia Foundation, one of the floating space stations. She acquires a best friend who christens her "Shipon".

"Stellvia" isn't a bad show. The episode where Shima gets to play a ball game using a space ship was nice. Most of the characters are likeable and the CGI is nothing to sneeze at. The only character that got on my nerves was the heroine and not because of her hairstyle which look like two meatballs got stuck on either side of her head.

The problem with Shima is she doubts herself too much and she's a crybaby. I want so much to shake her and yell: Stop crying. Just stop it! Even one of her friends slaps some sense into her.

Shima and another classmate, Kouta Otoyama, fall in love. His admission that he likes her is followed by a cute kissing scene. The only thing it lacked was a puppy frolicking in the background.

Kouta is the other lead character but we don't really get to know too much about him. He's a C student and he has an older sister who runs an observatory. But he's a special pilot because he's the only one who can see beyond a certain level in space. Or something to that effect. The graphics for the program that allows him and Shima to do that look like some kid's game though.

Shima also has this ability but not at Kouta's level. This sets up some angst-filled moments and yes, more crying on her part. Sigh.

To me, "Stellvia" is like any high school anime out there except it's set in space and the kids are dealing with a major problem rather than just who to take to the dance. If you have time to look it over, feel free to do so. It's available on DVDs.