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Animators and cartoonists of all sorts have been paid terribly since the very beginning of the industry. The only people who have ever made any sort of mentionable money are those who have made it particularly big, such as Disney. Being underpaid is far from something new.

What everyone else is talking about is nothing more than sturgeons law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap.". This law, as it makes perfectly clear, applies to everything.

Why does old stuff appear so good in comparison to new stuff? Because new stuff is new, and will get at least some amount of attention, no matter what it is. If you turn on the TV, you'll see trailers for movies, both good and bad. A lot of the bad movies, simply because of the advertising, will attract crowds. You realize this because everything, everywhere, is around to remind you of this.

Old things seem so much better, because despite the initial hype that mediocre, but popular things get, it's the good stuff that's remembered. Of course, there will be the occasional piece of crap that sticks in our mind, but usually it's only mentioned again as a joke. It becomes a "Ah, we were silly back in the day!" sort of memory.

Remember Pokemon? Of course you do. Do you treat it seriously now that it's aged? Probably not.

Old stuff isn't better. Our memory just isn't good enough to let us realize that. There was never a time that people didn't milk what was popular for money.

As for piracy, as people have said, piracy does little more than leave a tiny dent in profits. The argument has been brought up plenty of times, and usually people wind up arguing that those who pirate wouldn't have bought the game otherwise, anyways. They're cheap, poor, or lazy, for the most part. Studies have even been done by the industries who could be hurt by the rise of piracy, and most of them turned up with negligibly small drops in profit.

So yes, piracy does something, but it's hardly going to kill an industry. Hell, it can't even hurt it that badly. They could probably make up the profits with little more than a bake sale.

So, the most likely reason for the drop in anime sales in the US? The recession. The same thing that's eating every other company around here. It's not really anything new, or anything we can do anything about.

In other words, if you have the money, buy what anime you do like, and support the businesses that publish them here. Though, to be honest, even if some of the larger companies die out, there will probably be someone else to take their place. Anime isn't exactly a small time genre.

Don't like anything that's being published now? Stop talking about how you're incapable, suck it up, and produce something yourself. Do you really think that the stuff that you think is good was made by demi-gods with a snap of their fingers? They were probably nothing more than you are right now. I mean, come on. I'd think that was the reason that most of us are here: To do something with the ideas that we think are good.

Edit: And for your information, I'm quite fond of mind screws. Evangelion never struck me as amazing, though. There's much better out there.

Then what are they? It's been a long time since I follow the news on anime so I don't know any good anime anymore (I have watched all anime that I considered good).

NOTE: Things that I love the most from EVA was never the story (though that kind of story and plot is quite unique at that time, eg: the depressing, solitude, pessimist protagonist), but rather the EVA itself, the berserk (though Ideon do this much earlier), the concept (Angel, Adam, and so on), the graphics (you must admit that the graphic is very good), the opening song, the action... wait, I guess everything other than the story and the plot ^_^ they come much later... but this means I still love the anime.

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Ergo Proxy is one of my personal favorites as far as Mind Screws go. A lot of Satoshi Kon's movies are also quite good, when it comes to that. Though sometimes they're just more trippy than anything.

蒼穹のファフナー: Dead Aggressor (Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor) is often pegged as an Evangelion clone, but I found it superior in all respects. Not great, but definitely watchable. Unlike Evangelion, I actually enjoyed it. It even had a mythological naming scheme, so it must be deep!



What about the EVA? Giant robots are a dime a dozen, as are machines that are actually alive.

If giant living machines are your thing, check out 鋼殻のレギオス (Chrome Shelled Regios). Not the greatest
anime ever, but a truly epic setting. I enjoyed it, unlike Evangelion.

奏光のストレイン (Strain: Strategic Armored Infantry) takes the "living machines" concept in a completely different direction. It's not anything like Evangelion, but I liked it better than anything that is.



Actually I found the graphics of Evangelion to be utterly mediocre. Not good enough, nor bad enough, nor different enough to merit comment.

Purely in terms of graphics, Guin Saga looks great. I also like the visual style of ネギま!? (Negima!?). 天使のたまご (Angel's Egg) is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. Noir almost looks good enough to make me forgive its boring and repetitive plot. And almost everything that Studio Ghibli produces looks great.

I don't know the others, but Negima is a new anime. Evangelion was made at 1997? That was quite old. To be fair, you should compare it with Gundam Wing (also 1997 if I'm not mistaken) or other anime at that era. Well, if you want to compare Evangelion with new anime, fortunately you can, since there is Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0 (though it's also not fair for the other show since both of these Evangelion are movies, not series, which have huge differences in budget).

When I mean Eva, you guessed it pretty much right. I love giant robot... living machines/mecha... and the most important things about EVA itself is a new kind of giant robot genre... which is real and super at the same time. Before EVA, giant robot genre is pretty much divided into super or real. Gundam (except G Gundam), Macross are real while Godannar, Gravion, Shin Getter are all super. Of course, after Evangelion, there are plenty mecha anime that followed this new genre.

And I've watched Chrome Shelled Regios and enjoy it. The songs are also very cool. When you say living machine, do you mean the machine fairy? Since I don't really see a living machine there... And there is no mecha in this anime, that's for sure.

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When discussing whether old anime is better than old anime, it's entirely fair to compare old anime to new anime. (Also, I'm talking specifically about Negima!? with the !? as part of the title. That's the one by Shaft, not the one by Xebec.)



It had huge mechanical walking cities, which I find infinitely more interesting than humanoid robots. The machine fairies are the souls of the cities; the cities are the true bodies of the machine fairies.

Yeah, I know that, but I'm kinda omitted the !?. But still both are new anime.

And I think it's unfair to compare old and new anime if we're talking about pure graphics, since people developed, technology developed, new technique developed, and so on.

So I'm right your talking about the machine fairy as the living machine. But I'm more interested in seeing traditional mecha rather than machine fairy like in Chrome Shelled Regios. Beside, though it have important role in the story, the living machine there is more like a princess that need to be protected, rather than the fighting machine. So I could say it has less active role in the anime...

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There were a lot of random symbols in Evangelion, and that put me off a bit too. But that's not the bit I was referring to - forget all the religious names and end-of-the-world crap, there's an interesting set of stories about the actual characters underneath it all, which make a comment on the state of society and the problems an individual faces.

The problem with enjoying Eva is that Gainax didn't just want to tell an interesting story, they wanted to tell an interesting story that hooked as many people as possible and sold a lot of merchandise. So the story is mixed in with well-animated giant robots beating the crap out of each other and a lot of pseudish references to judeo-christian myth and a lot of unnecessary fan service.

And since then, it's become pretty trendy to rag on Eva as a backlash to the hordes of obsessive teenagers who claim it's the best thing ever and no other anime could touch it... but all of that, both sides of it, ignores the fact that it had a story underneath the glitzy veneer.



This just makes me think you either watched a different Evangelion or a different Lucky Star to me. Eva had a story, at least! Lucky Star showed its 4-koma origins at every turn, and panders to an anime-obsessed otaku audience just as much as Eva panders to a late-teen symbol-obsessed audience. And hell, even if Eva only made you think "WTF?", it's still making you think a lot more than Lucky Star ever did.

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I don't know whether it's true or not, but I heard that Evangelion story is not what the creator/author is intended to be. The story is so mix and match (on the fly) that they didn't know what story they were going to make for the next episode. Perhaps this was because even Gainax never predict that Evangelion will be a big success (after they utterly failed with Nadia).

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The story I'd heard was that:

a) the station the series was broadcast on moved it to a later slot after the episode in which the school-friend-whose-name-I-forget gets seriously injured, and
b) funding ran out somewhere around episode 22 - 23, and they had to tell the end of the story in a different way than originally intended.

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But I thought Evangelion was only 13 episodes?

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Then you thought wrong; there's 26 episodes in the original anime, then 2 movies (the first mostly a summary of the last few eps of the anime, the second an alternate, more-actiony ending). I seem to recall there's a more-recent 'Rebuild of Evangelion' series of movies, but I've not seen any of them nor have been particularly following news (are they even released?) so I can't comment.

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The first two (of four) have been released. The first is more or less a nicer looking remake of the first six episodes. I haven't seen the second, so I can't comment on that.

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"So what do you think? If my past-self saw me now, would she praise me?" - Megurine Luka, "Double Lariat"

I swear there wasn't a single likable character in the show. Shinji is an intolerably whiny loser, Asuka is an intolerable bitch, Rei is a complete non-person.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I didn't like it. There's no point in arguing about taste, so I'll just stop now.



Evangelion did not have an actual story. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Evangelion had a beginning, a middle, and a non sequitur.

Anyway, it doesn't take a lot to get me to think. I picked Lucky Star as an example precisely because it is a stereotypical shallow schoolgirl show, but it still made me think about philosophy, Japanese culture, relationships, the human condition, etc.. Evangelion mostly made me think about how badly put together it was and how I would rather be watching something else.

I noticed a lot of the time just the normal everyday things are what get ypu to think about the important stuff. And the not so important stuff. I always think when I watch lucky star, and i've seen it plenty of times and it can still get me to laugh.

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International League of Magical Girls
Story: 60%
Script: 15%
Art: 33.33%
Music: 0.002%
Comedy: <9000%