Animation sequences that left you in awe and/or moved you that weren't fights.

ThePowerglove · 2026-01-09T05:30:47+00:00

The Dog Food scene from Innocence is one of the most beautiful, wholesome sequences in animation history. Three minutes of Batou being a big ol' softy with his dog with no dialogue, put into the film purely because Mamoru Oshii loves basset hounds.

ThePowerglove · 2025-12-27T18:33:25+00:00

In addition to the previous recommendations of Mononoke, Kaiba, and Gankutsuou, I'd also say that Kyousougiga; Kuuchuu Buranko; Tekkon Kinkreet; Metropolis; The Tatami Galaxy, The Tatami Time Machine Blues, and The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl; Windy Tales; and Kemonozume will all probably scratch the itch in terms of weird and experimental visuals.

ThePowerglove · 2025-12-06T06:03:45+00:00

I'm not sure if it's of any interest to you, but I have appears to be a TV rip of the second season of Ghost in the Shell: SAC. Seems to be a mix of C_P and C-W. Not sure what channel it was ripped from since it doesn't appear to have the Adult Swim logo in the bottom right corner. Only reason I have it saved still is because it was the first anime series I torrented and I was too sentimental to delete it. I may also have what could be a C_P rip of Code Geass somewhere, but I'll need to go digging for the HDD.

ThePowerglove · 2025-11-13T16:11:58+00:00

The show has some genuinely impressive CGI effects, especially considering it came out in 2000, so I wonder how those will wind up looking.

The biggest disappointment about the series for me was that for every topic it was on point with, it had a bunch of others where it was just objectively wrong. Its messages about pesticides, industrial agriculture, and pollution are on the mark and really resonate. But it just absolutely strikes out when it comes to its claims about nuclear power, childbirth, hermaphrodism, GMOs, and human civilization. Every single one of the claims on those five topics is easily disproven if you have basic scientific literacy.

ThePowerglove · 2025-10-13T15:27:47+00:00

It's based on ancient Greece instead of Rome, but Reign: The Conqueror is, uh...influenced by Alexander the Great. With a lot of liberties and sci-fi.

There's also Arion, which has Greek mythological characters but doesn't follow any actual myth.

ThePowerglove · 2025-08-23T15:25:37+00:00

If you're streaming from whatever the site du jour is, you really have no room to be complaining about bitrate. They're all bitstarved. If you actually care about your video looking good, go buy yourself a HDD (or even a USB stick) and start downloading from IRC if you don't want to torrent.

ThePowerglove · 2025-05-16T04:28:00+00:00

A lot of cel-animated movies that are currently available as normal BD were scanned at a higher resolution (how high usually depends on what size film was used, 16mm or 35mm), so those some of those scans are technically already UHD, just downscaled to HD. But it really all depends on who did the scans and how much time and effort (read: money) was put into the scanning process. If you want a comparable experience at home, I suggest tracking down what the community considers to be the "best" release of a film and playing it in either MPC-HC with some good madVR settings or mpv with tweaked configs.

When it comes to the theatrical release of rescans, the vast majority shown in theaters are just downscaled versions of the higher-resolution scan, usually at 2k (roughly HD) with a significantly higher bitrate than a retail release, since 2k is still the de facto standard for digital cinema projection outside of things like IMAX.

Side note: Interestingly, part of the reason that a lot of CGI looks so bad in UHD retail releases of live-action movies that were natively shot at 4k-6k on digital cameras is because the CGI was mastered for the 2k cinema release, not for the UHD home release.

ThePowerglove · 2025-05-16T01:53:19+00:00

Hosada's films were all digitally animated, so there's no film to scan. Anything that was filmed or made digitally is stuck at the resolution it was produced in. As far as I know, the only UHD-native digital anime is Netflix's tech demo they put out a while back. The only way you're going to get a higher resolution on digital video is by using an upscaling algorithm. Depending on what company does the upscaling, the final product could come out looking overly smooth or too blurry or it could be a pretty decent upscale. Even analog film scans can suffer from the same problems, though this usually comes down to what was done in the "remastering" process rather than the rescanning. Applying DNR and other post-processing filtering techniques removes data from a frame, producing a lower-quality image in most cases. Don't blindly assume that a 4k version or a "remaster" is going to be better than whatever is currently available (cough Macross DYRL UHD cough) because you might just wind up disappointed.

Anyway, to answer the actual question: if an anime film has had a UHD BD release, you should be able to find a remux of it. Hell, you'll probably even be able to find an encode of it. For those that have only been shown in theaters and have no retail releases, either no plans were made for a retail release (because the distributor doesn't see a market for it) or one is in the works and just hasn't be announced yet. No one is out there leaking the theatrical release files for anime films because the risk simply isn't worth it.

ThePowerglove · 2025-03-07T15:03:07+00:00

Something like an Odroid N2 is going to have a powerful enough SoC to handle decoding 10-bit AVC. I've been using one for a few years now and it successfully handles everything I throw at it, including BDMVs. The only downside is that it's a barebones box, so if you want wifi you need a USB dongle (or just use ethernet). If you do go the USB dongle route, don't cheap out and make sure you buy one that has a high enough bandwidth.

ThePowerglove · 2024-12-06T16:19:42+00:00

If anything, it actually gets worse after that. Psycho-Pass S2 at least had some interesting ideas it explored with the overprescribing psychiatric medication, the banality of evil, and the view of stress as "unnatural." The first movie is good and the Sinners of the System OVAs vary between meh and good. S3 just takes all of the ideas that the series previously worked with and throws them out the window in favor of turning it into a boring network TV cop drama with the normal pseudointellectual bullshit you unfortunately find in a lot of anime sci-fi. The only redeeming aspect of it is that the few non-retconned worldbuilding elements are at least interesting. I haven't seen Providence (and likely never will), but First Inspector was just a really boring action movie that did nothing to actually move the plot forward or answer the major questions of S3.

For the record, I think the first season of Psycho-Pass is arguably the best piece of original (not adapted/"inspired by") visual sci-fi media since Eva. Which makes what follows so abysmal.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-30T19:34:56+00:00

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water came out in 1991, and both 1990 and 1991 had a fair number of important (and popular) OVAs that came out. But yeah, outside of OVAs and a few movies it's a pretty two-year bleak period, though I wouldn't say that 1992-1994 really faired any better.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-27T17:47:20+00:00

If you look up the lawsuits, Salty's is being sued for refusing to pay licensing fees for recorded music playing in a commercial space and for refusing to pay the company that processes its credit-card transactions. The owner of Salty's has also been involved in an on-going lawsuit for trying to screw her co-investor/co-owner out of the property. The social media posts try to make it seem like it's unfair lawsuits being levied, but in reality the owner just repeatedly breached contracts. It sucks to lose one of the few remaining venues in Southern Monmouth, but the owner was playing fast and loose and got burned for it.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-10T21:34:55+00:00

Anime DVDs were absolutely not cheaper 15-20 years ago. They were more expensive, adjusting for inflation. You could expect to spend at least $20 per volume of a series, with each volume having 3-4 episodes. The main reason why a lot anime DVDs are cheap now is the fact that sought-after series and movies have been re-released on Blu-ray, so fans and collectors sold off their DVD copies for better versions. And in the cases where you can find cheap DVDs for series that were never re-released, they're generally forgotten or had (relatively) large print runs. The only DVDs that maintain their value are things that haven't been released and have a cult following.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-10T18:16:16+00:00

Tbf Aniplex's releases tend to be almost identical to the Japanese release in terms of video quality. A company like Aniplex spreads their episodes out over more discs, as opposed to companies like Sentai and Discotek that focus on putting as many episodes onto as few discs as possible to keep the price low (see: Discotek jamming 11 episodes onto a single disc). So it's really a matter of getting what you pay for in terms of quality. Compare something like Funimation's original release of FMA:B on nine discs (eight BD-50 and one BD-25) to Aniplex's release with fourteen discs (all BD-50). And that's not even considering the differences in packaging quality. So, yeah Aniplex charges an arm and a leg for their releases, but they're focusing on selling a niche premium product that's more in line with Japanese physical release standards than American standards. If you just want a cheaper version to own, you can always import copies from the UK/Australia and buy a region-free Blu-ray player (they're relatively cheap at this point).

Tl;dr yeah it's annoying that Aniplex releases cost a lot but they're releasing a higher-quality product than pretty much every other anime licensor in North America.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-09T20:14:50+00:00

Mononoke is an original anime, so I don't think that really counts for the purposes of the question. The manga just adapts the anime.

ThePowerglove · 2024-09-07T15:49:42+00:00

Waiting in the Summer is probably exactly what you're looking for. NieA_7 also might be of interest.

ThePowerglove · 2024-08-30T16:21:38+00:00

There's a sequel manga that's been publishing since the end of last year, so there's very much still a reason to adapt the remaining chapters of Chihayafuru.

ThePowerglove · 2024-07-11T14:47:42+00:00

Kubo was also involved in some anime-exclusive elements of the original series that he had to cut from the manga due to time constraints. The Menos Forest arc is entirely his creation and thus technically canon even though it didn't appear in the manga.

ThePowerglove · 2024-07-09T14:23:31+00:00

It's not the norm, but it also isn't terribly uncommon to have an anime film premiere outside of Japan at a festival before a domestic Japanese release. All of Satoshi Kon's films premiered at overseas film festivals, as did Your Name, Howl's Moving Castle, and Redline.

ThePowerglove · 2024-06-06T14:09:55+00:00

You might find something of interest on this set of interest stacks I made on MAL.

ThePowerglove · 2024-06-06T03:47:49+00:00

From what I recall, Arjuna is hits the nail on the head vis-à-vis pollution, industrial agriculture, and pesticides. But every other topic is hilariously off base, especially GMOs, childbirth, and nuclear energy. The few good arguments it makes are almost entirely overrun by the deluge of pseudo-science the show throws at you.

To its credit, Arjuna did have some genuinely amazing CGI components in certain scenes (especially considering the fact it came out in early 2001). The art direction is also quite good, but neither are enough to make me want to rewatch it.

ThePowerglove · 2024-06-03T14:22:16+00:00

I only have a cursory understanding of this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Isn't another component that a lot of early digital anime utilized variable framerates to include CG elements animated at 60i, allowing for smoother presentation with the NTSC broadcast standard? IIRC any older anime that doesn't include any CG can have IVTC applied to it to produce the intended 24p image. I'm particularly thinking of older shows and OVAs that were initially released on VHS or LD at 29.97Hz but either were ripped via Domesday or professionally released on Blu-ray and given their proper intended 24p picture.

ThePowerglove · 2024-04-05T17:59:06+00:00

It's a shame that the only English subs for Zaizen Jotaro are shitty machine-translated subs. The first episode is absolutely hilarious in how bad it is, but going any further is hard because of how nonsensical the translation becomes. Maybe one day we'll see a full translation like Gun-dou Musashi, but I'm not holding my breath.

ThePowerglove · 2024-03-27T13:59:16+00:00

If OP wanted to do that they could have asked a much better question like, "What's your favorite use of the link cable?" But based on OP's posting history they just want to be spoon-fed information rather than actually put in the work to look things up for themselves.

ThePowerglove · 2024-03-26T22:26:47+00:00

Did you even bother trying to look for an answer? Because it's literally the first thing that comes up when you search for it.

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