violetraygun:80sanime:Okay, onto the 80s anime!1981/1984 - Urusei Yatsura (TV) & Urusei Yatsura:
violetraygun:80sanime:Okay, onto the 80s anime!1981/1984 - Urusei Yatsura (TV) & Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful DreamerOkay so this should hardly come as a surprise. While Ranma ½ is what I grew up with, Urusei Yatsura is my favorite Rumiko Takahashi property. That said, I much prefer the anime adaption to the original manga; the energy the young staff (including now famous director, Mamoru Oshii) brought to it was amazing, the culmination of which being of course the classic film Beautiful Dreamer which was IMO the best thing to come out of the franchise.Seriously, the movie is genius. I can watch it over and over again. The humor, the strangeness, the music, the atmosphere… Beautiful Dreamer may encapsulate everything I find makes 80s anime so unique. And what can beat that montage of all the characters having fun in the post apocalyptic Tomobiki-cho? In the director commentary on the Central Park Media DVD release, Oshii talks about how the strength of anime is in its ability to appeal to the audience’s fantastic desires; that part of you that longs to have the whole city to yourself for one day of summer vacation. I think part of the problem with anime today is that that appeal has become too streamlined, too base… focused so entirely on sex that even the fantasy that must have once been so appealing to otaku of conquering their dream moe girls now feels mechanical, passionless… but whoops! Let me not make this into (any more of) a rant. Suffice to say that few anime since have had sequences as involving as those two minutes of Beautiful Dreamer.Another reason I prefer the anime is because my FAVORITE character doesn’t even EXIST in the manga! Imagine how shocked I was to learn that the hilarious Megane was only a minor character who completely vanished from the story early on in the original. That’s another thing I like about 80s anime; the manga adaptions weren’t so tediously exact.80sanime touches on the brilliance of Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer and everything I love about Japanese animation and the 1980s creative zeitgeist in general. To paraphrase another auteur of the era, there is real power in images, emotions, memory and energy.Oh wow. I’d completely forgotten I’d written this… thanks for the reblog and the great addition! -- source link