Japan

best anime movies ever - absolutely must haves - Page 2

everything Miyazaki : ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki ) I'm watching conan future boy now. great stuff!

pom poko, and princess mononoko are great too.

i'm hooked on the entire fansub series of Naruto through Shippuden, plus all the movies.

definitely prefer the english subtitled fansub versions of anime to english dub.
:Skywriter:

DECUS Member 368596
add 2 more:
Samurai 7
Noein
:Skywriter:

DECUS Member 368596
JacquesT wrote: edit: Forgot the one movie that had me in tears!!! Grave of the Fireflies...


Yeah, no kidding, literally on that one.

A perfect example of "just because it's animated doesn't mean it's for kids"... Not unless you enjoy playing the role of a mental therapist for a month afterward, anyway...


Chris
:O2000R: (<-EMXI/IO6G) :O200: :O200: :O200: (<- quad R12k O200 w/GIGAchannel and ESI+Tex) plus a bunch of assorted standalone workstations...
vvostenak wrote: It is not anime, but as a child I loved cartoons like (the M.A.S.K. (1985)

Yeah, I also enjoyed watching M.A.S.K. (1985) when I was younger.

I thought Macrosss Plus was excellent.
"EV-ERY-ONE!" --Stansfield
Macross Plus should definitely be among the top, but why was Appleseed even mentioned?

Perfect Blue
Makoto Shinkai (everything)
Umi ga Kikoeru
Lupin III - Castle of Cagliostro
Grave of the Fireflies (almost forgot that one, such a long time ago)

Worth mentioning: all GITS movies except Innocence.
Originally Posted by Tommie
Please delete your post. It is an insult to all the hard work society has put into making you an intelligent being.

Like somebody at AMD said about a decade ago: Benchmarking is like sex. Everybody brags about it, everybody loves doing it and nobody can agree on performance.
I think my top Anime would have to be:

1) Akira (I still want Kaneda's bike!) - it's the film that got me into Japanese anime in the first place.

2) Ghost in the Shell

3) Wings of the Honneamise - not technically the best film ever made, but it tries to tell a more emotional story than the usual schoolgirl-in-underwear fare and is almost like a Japanese 1984.

4) Metropolis - ok, maybe not as genre-defining as Fritz Lang's effort, but still a real tour de force.

5) Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind - It's Miyazaki, it's beautiful and it's not as outright moralistic as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away

6) Steamboy - why? because of the way the Japanese view the English is almost as comically sterotyped as the way they're viewed in the West, but also because I love a good Steampunk story and this is definitely one of those. A real rip-roaring old-time adventure.

7) Crying Freeman - a good idea for the central character premise, although the sequels become awful. The live-action film is actually pretty good, too.

8) Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend - because it's the film that (literally) spawned the whole demon/schoolgirl/border-line hentai sterotype that anime is viewed with - not a brilliant story, nor a technical masterpiece, but worth seeing for completeness' sake.

That's my view, anyways... :-)
People, what has it all come to..? ;) I'm grieved by the fact that a classic like Project A-Ko has yet to be mentioned.
And if you like that one, Ultimate Teacher might be fun to watch as well. Both just crazy fun with just a tad of naughty humor.
In case you want more of this kind of nonsense, I'd recommend the Slayers series.

EDIT: bolded Slayers for consistency
Disclaimer: my employer and I never agree.
Some others are great too, but the ones below are sticking out in my mind as some of my favorites.

  • Eden of the East
  • Ghost in the Shell
  • Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
  • Haibane Renmei
  • Kiki's Delivery Service
  • Serial Experiments Lain
  • Whisper of the Heart
Serial Experiments Lain is pretty cool, and would probably be appreciated by some members of this forum. The interesting views on technology, references to things from computing culture (references to Knights of the Lambda Calculus, Lisp and C programming, and obscure Apple stuff), and even having a room full of crazy computer systems, all seem to fit really well with the Nekochan thing (although unfortunately not much in terms of Unix references).

Other than the animes which are kind of about technology and philosophy, I gravitate toward "slice of life" anime. I like good characters and depth, rather than just fast action and stuff like that. Haibane Renmei is an anime that is a little slow moving and quiet, but deep and thoroughly enjoyable. That anime is really special, and has a lot in common with Serial Experiments Lain, despite having a totally different setting and subject matter.
Debian GNU/Linux on a ThinkPad, running a simple setup with FVWM.
Ghost just never clicks with me... I Love Kiki! Tombo is such a flagrant aero-nerd.
:Skywriter:

DECUS Member 368596
Ghost in the shell and Serial Experiments? awesome.

I don't have much to add, just agree with this awesome thread.

My favourites? Most mecha related things, Gundam 0079, 0083, 08th MS Team, Patlabor, Macross* (Robotech*), Trigun, Full Metal Panic, Chobits, soooo many...

Most favourite? Probably Cowboy Bebop. I love both the series and the Movie.

EDIT!: Escaflowne. Feel like an idiot for forgetting it, sooo awesome.

jwp wrote: Some others are great too, but the ones below are sticking out in my mind as some of my favorites.

  • Eden of the East
  • Ghost in the Shell
  • Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
  • Haibane Renmei
  • Kiki's Delivery Service
  • Serial Experiments Lain
  • Whisper of the Heart
Serial Experiments Lain is pretty cool, and would probably be appreciated by some members of this forum. The interesting views on technology, references to things from computing culture (references to Knights of the Lambda Calculus, Lisp and C programming, and obscure Apple stuff), and even having a room full of crazy computer systems, all seem to fit really well with the Nekochan thing (although unfortunately not much in terms of Unix references).

Other than the animes which are kind of about technology and philosophy, I gravitate toward "slice of life" anime. I like good characters and depth, rather than just fast action and stuff like that. Haibane Renmei is an anime that is a little slow moving and quiet, but deep and thoroughly enjoyable. That anime is really special, and has a lot in common with Serial Experiments Lain, despite having a totally different setting and subject matter.
Stuff.
Nobuyuki Yoshigahara [he died in 2004, aged 68] was one of the greatest puzzle inventors the world has ever known. Among his 200+ mechanical puzzles was a series of pieces designed for the Glass Puzzle Collection from Toyo Glass Company. While I do have the "Glass Puzzle Answer Book" [published by Ishi Press in 2011 - in Japanese and English], I would be interested to know whether these puzzles are still available in Japan and how difficult it would be to obtain them nowadays.

BTW, one of his puzzles [among the most popular of all time] is "Rush Hour". I don't know whether it's available under Android - but if you have an iPad/iPhone, get the full version. It costs less than €2.50 and gets you 2500(!) challenges...

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Oskar45 wrote:
BTW, one of his puzzles [among the most popular of all time] is "Rush Hour". I don't know whether it's available under Android - but if you have an iPad/iPhone, get the full version. It costs less than €2.50 and gets you 2500(!) challenges...


I played several variants of Rush Hour and I somehow didn't like it. While I could solve the puzzles through heuristics, it usually boiled down to finding a move you previously haven't seen. The way I solve it is similar to my approach to Sokoban or Vexed - discarding moves which are clearly wrong, imagining the endgame and trying to find the moves in between. On harder levels I add chains of moves which result in certain situation on the board. What's your way of finding a solution to Rush Hour puzzles?

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GL1zdA wrote:
Oskar45 wrote:
BTW, one of his puzzles [among the most popular of all time] is "Rush Hour". I don't know whether it's available under Android - but if you have an iPad/iPhone, get the full version. It costs less than €2.50 and gets you 2500(!) challenges...


I played several variants of Rush Hour and I somehow didn't like it. While I could solve the puzzles through heuristics, it usually boiled down to finding a move you previously haven't seen. The way I solve it is similar to my approach to Sokoban or Vexed - discarding moves which are clearly wrong, imagining the endgame and trying to find the moves in between. On harder levels I add chains of moves which result in certain situation on the board. What's your way of finding a solution to Rush Hour puzzles?
I think you are a bit too optimistic :-)

Rush Hour [and Sokoban] are sliding-block puzzles. More than 45+ years ago, Martin Gardner wrote about such puzzles: "These puzzles are very much in want of a theory. Short of trial and error, no one knows how to determine if a given state is obtainable from another given state, and if it is obtainable, no one knows how to find the minimum chain of moves for achieving the desired state."

Well, even today there is no such theory - and there is a perfectly good reason for this: sliding-block puzzles have been shown to be PSPACE-complete. In particular, 10 years ago it was proved that Rush Hour is PSPACE-complete [that Sokoban is PSPACE-complete was shown in 1998].

HOWEVER, the above concerns only the generalized problems. It might indeed be possible to do better with smaller puzzles. The version I play on my iPad/iPhone [ThinkFun/BinaryArts] has a 6x6 board, the blocks are all 1x2 or 1x3 and each block constraint direction is the same as its lengthwise orientation [either horizontally or vertically]. The crucial block to be moved out of the grid [a red car] is always placed on the third row from top [actually, for the general case, even if the blocks are all just 1x2, Rush Hour is still PSPACE-complete]. The curious thing is that whenever I solve one particular puzzle, I'm always told whether or not I'd done so with *minimal* possible moves. This implies to me these guys indeed have an optimal algorithm at hand - I haven't yet figured it out, though...

So, peruse heuristics... :-)

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All gay cyclists ought to take snuff
GL1zdA wrote:
The way I solve it is similar to my approach to Sokoban or Vexed
Addendum to ^...

As I'd pointed out before, Rush Hour [and Sokoban as well] is PSPACE-complete. Vexed, on the other hand, is not only NP-hard but also in NP itself - so it's NP-complete. If you find a polynomial time algorithm for it, you will get very famous indeed - you'd not only crush SAT but also *every* other problem in NP as well :-)

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All gay cyclists ought to take snuff
Ooo.... I just saw Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , and that was awesome. I'm definitely putting that on my list. It was a truly epic movie, and it kept me interested the whole time. I love movies that seem to create an entire world to learn about as they tell their story -- a little like the way that Lord of the Rings does. Nausicaä was a very likeable character too. It's amazing that it was created back in 1984, and it's so vast in scope and well executed. Very highly recommended.
Debian GNU/Linux on a ThinkPad, running a simple setup with FVWM.
I'm not into what passes for a "supercomputer" these days but that one is notable for being one of the very few using SPARC CPUs. It is nice that Fujitsu are committed to SPARC and too bad their boxes aren't more plentiful/cheap.

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commodorejohn wrote:
Any last outposts of alternative architectures in this era of creeping x86/ARM duoculture are worthy of my respect.


You're the guy running NT on Alpha, aren't you?

Then no. :lol:

In all seriousness, pick an architecture you like and run it. There's nothing new under the Sun. Old stuff is usually better. Except Intel :evil:

How many people actually have any interaction with the hardware? UNIX boxes are 99% C and the rest is assembly wrapped in C. Most UNIX and Windows programmers are completely isolated from the box they're coding on. The API is the machine. Does it really matter what the architecture is as long as it performs as you want?

There are a lot of nice emulators around in case you like hardware you can't get for some reason.

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I 2nd/3rd Jin-Roh and Blue Gender

I also liked Macross Plus and Big Wars, they had a kind of top gun vibe to me.

There was also a cyborg movie that I liked called something like squiggan. Though that isn't quite right.

[EDIT] It was called spriggan
My list:

Memories
REDLINE
Black Rock Shooter ( Really an OVA, but its a movie moreorless )
Howl's Moving Castle
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
Grave of the Fireflies
My Neighbor Totoro
Wolf Children
:fuel: 900MHz 4GB
Mind Game

But its special interest ^^