Anime Bargains

moosey300

my order arrived in full yesterday from adv but it has taken over 2 weeks to come

melissa75_2

moosey300 wrote: »

my order arrived in full yesterday from adv but it has taken over 2 weeks to come

When did you order yours?

silkcutblue

Aha! Thanks for this. I'll grab me some bargains.

Aionic

Akira (Ultimate) - £3.99
Next best: £6.99

Sorry about not posting - I haven't been getting email updates when someone replies ever since a mod badly merged my old anime thread with another.

This was posted elsewhere:

Chris_Jones wrote:

ADV Email wrote:
advfilms.com
Sent: 12 February 2008 12:22:10

We have closed our warehouse and all orders are now being dealt with by head office in London. There is only a handful of staff in the London office and they are trying to process over four hundred orders as quickly as possible, whilst also working on all of the legal and business work required to shut down the company. They have already cleared over a hundred orders, the rest will be sent over the course of next week, as they will know longer have sufficient staff to fulfill the orders after next Friday. Please rest assured that you will get your items soon. Please e-mail your request to [EMAIL="info&#64;advfilms.co.uk"]info@advfilms.co.uk[/EMAIL] <mailto> Sorry for the inconvenience. Chris Jones.A.D.V. Films.

My 2nd order (20 DVD's) FINALLY turned up in 2 packages today. 18 DVD's to go.

Aionic

Gunslinger Girl: Complete Collection - £15.93

There are 3 other stores that dropped their price at the same time - All 4 seem to be one and the same, all with different prices...

I highly recommend buying this - It's an excellent series and the box set is great, with all 3 normal sized cases in a sweet looking cover. I'd order it if I hadn't got Vol. 2 for £2.99 from Play awhile back.

piggsy_2

hi i've always liked anime/manga but get confused with so many titles could you recommend where i would be best to start

braken2000

Where to begin:

It depends what kind you like piggsy, if you like girly girl type or mecha etc etc.

My personal faves are, in no particular order:

Neon Genesis Evangelion: This is my favorite, so it should be at number one! It is a good series with an extremely good plot with lots of twists. It also has a few movies to boot. A good place to start me thinks. It is Mecha based and has some very good relationship story arcs. They dont call it a classic for no reason!

Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040: Another classic, well a remake of a classic. It is another Mecha-ish type anime, although does not have the hughe "robots" associated with it. More of an action series with some comedy as well.

Full-Metal Alchemist: This is a brilliant series based in the past. It has an excellent plot and also a good film. It is based on the personal loss of two brothers. I dont want to give too much away!

Bleach: Very much "in" at the moment. It has over 200 episodes now I think. I stopped watching after 121. It is a good anime to watch with subtitles. Excellent story arcs once again!

Angelic Layer: Just finished this series yesterday. Excellent and relatively relaxed. Not as "action" paced as others. A nice one to watch.

There are litterally hundreds more. But I think these are some of the best!

Aionic

piggsy wrote: »

hi i've always liked anime/manga but get confused with so many titles could you recommend where i would be best to start

My favourite series are...

1: Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
2: Death Note
3: Gungrave
4: Berserk
5: Now and Then, Here and There

Here's a link to my recent Gankutsuou review: http://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?uid=6082

Nilrem

Aionic wrote: »

My favourite series are...
5: Now and Then, Here and There

That is one of the hardest anime I've ever watched in terms of content.
I think it's OOP now in the states

My favourites are in no particular order*

Evangelion

Bubblegum Crisis (original) - right from the opening Scene panning across th city to the strains of "Konya wa hurricane" (tonight a hurricane), showing the high tech new city, the derilict/slums of the old and taking you into the club where one of the main characters is singing the theme, you know you're in for an 80's treat. The one downside is that it's only about 8 episodes long, I wish it went on longer (I've heard that it was meant to, but there was a falling out between the production/money people).
It's heavily influenced in places by Bladerunner, both in style and some of the names (one of the main characters is Priss, and she sings for a band called the Replicants for example).

Gunbuster - worth it even if just for the final scenes (it started as a sort of parady of various other anime to begin, then carried on with a homage to ww2 films etc, the last episode always leaves me with moist eyes).

CardCaptor Sakura - one of the few magical girl animes I can stand,let alone enjoy (although I also enjoy most of the other Clamp stuff, Angelic Layer, Chobits etc).

Patlabor - Police using large robots in a series where they go from Police Squad, to Columbo in stories/feel (the films are good but don't spend enough time on the characters).

Anything Ghibli - i've yet to watch a Ghibli film I didn't like, although my favourites would be Kiki's delivery Service, Porco Russo and Castle in the Sky.

Haibane Renmei (charcoal feathers), a very gentle, fairly slow moving but really enjoyable series, about friendship and life (about the best way to describe that I can think of).

In a long-forgotten walled town, humans coexist with the Haibane, angelic-like beings of unknown origin. Rakka becomes the newest Haibane after she awakens from a strange dream and finds herself hatching from a massive cocoon. With no memories of her previous life, Rakka struggles to adjust to her new surroundings, however, burning questions remain in the back of her mind. What are Haibane and what is their purpose? What lies beyond the huge, forbidden town walls? Thus Rakka begins her wistful journey of self-discovery and wonderment.

Aionic, thanks for that link, I've been meaning to get Gunslinger Girl for a while, especially as they are doing a second season in Japan at the moment

*I find it had to narrow down my selection given how much i've seen/got.

Aionic

I wouldn't get your hopes up about the second season - I watched the first episode and thought it was very poor. All the fans of the original series seem to agree.

The first season was done by Madhouse, the second season by a different studio. Madhouse made Gunslinger Girls greater than it really was with excellent direction, music, art and colours. The second season just doesn't have the same dark feel of the previous series and is most certainly a low budget effort.

About NaTHaT: Yeah, it's OOP. I was too late to order it by the time I watched it.

The series didn't actually disturb me. I'm hard to disturb, even when the story is about children being forced to kill and being raped to breed.

...Anyway, for those interested, here are the thoughts I posted after finishing Gunslinger Girl and NaTHaT:

Myself wrote:

Gunslinger Girl 1-13

In order to remove unwatched anime from my 'unwatched' folder on my HDD and either delete or move it onto my EHDD, I watched Gunslinger Girls.

I didn't go into the series expecting much - The idea of little girls running around with machine guns doesn't appeal to me. You can probably imagine my happiness when I discovered that, rather than focus being on the girls killing 100's of evil terrorists per episode, the show focused on the girls, how they were trained, how the individual handlers (trainers) of the girls coped with turning young girls into killers and how the girls interacted with each other.

An agency called the Social Welfare Agency takes in tragic kids who would die without their help, gives them cybernetic bodies, erases their memories and uses "conditioning" to make them automatically respect their individual handlers (all the girls have one). Since each girl starts with little to no memories, the main focus of most episodes is on how the handlers raised the girls differently, some treating them like their own children and others treating them like machines. This was quite interesting to watch since the personality of each girl reflected how their handlers...well, handled them.

The problem the show has is that it lacks any real main plot. The episodic nature of the show probably helped make it more interesting in truth as we've all seen stories involving secret anti-terrorist units before, but it would've been nice if the girl/handler stories could've been mixed with an interesting main plot.

I enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as the previous 13 episode series I watched (which also dealt with children killing), but it was good enough for me to want to keep watching from start to finish. I'll be getting the box set if it ever drops to £15.

Myself: wrote:

Now and Then, Here and There 1-13

After being disappointed by the light-heartedness and lack of a plot (it was like watching a series made up of filler episodes) on show in Peacemaker, I decided to have a look at a more adult show. Lucky I had just the thing (Now and Then, Here and There) on my EHDD to save the day.

NaTHaT (Nat's hat for the win!) certainly lived up to my expectations, with children being captured in order to be turned into killers and a young girl being repeatedly raped by adults in order to breed more soldiers. It deals with pretty much all the horrors of war, the difference from other war horror stories being that this one is about children and doesn't hold back.

Me being a heartless git, it didn't have much of an emotional impact on me. I was a little shocked to see a TV show deal with child rape - It's something you don't see very often for obvious reasons. It probably would make a fair few people get all emotional.

Outside of a rushed/unclear ending, my main problem with NaTHaT was the main character, who got fairly annoying with his Naruto style personality. Just like your average shounen hero, he's strong, he charges at his enemy, he isn't articulate and simply gets old fast. The darkness of the story and the strength of the supporting cast did make up for the fairly poor lead, though.

I'd recommend people who want something deeper than the average anime series look it up. Are you a fan of stuff like Grave of the Fireflies? This is for you.