Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 18]
nyan@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks agoThen I sort of steeled my resolve and dove into one that I dropped after a couple of episodes about a year ago, because I could see it was going to be a rough ride, and at the time I wasn’t ready to invest as much energy and attention as it was going to demand - Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the 24 episode run, and it has been very dense and dramatic, and very good. It’s a sort of Evangelion knock-off insofar as it’s in part a complex and vague science fiction/superpower war allegory on coming of age, but without the religious claptrap - it’s instead all built around quantum physics and multiverse theory. The only real downside to it is that the animation is frankly terrible - an awful combination of cheap fuzzy hand drawn and cheap low poly CGI. But the characters and the story make it worth it.
In all fairness, Noein is ~20 years old. The animation was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time, and I remember it drawing praise from a couple of the more jaded members of the Usenet anime crowd. It just hasn’t aged as well as some less-ambitious shows of the same era.
Rottcodd@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Mmm… I can sort of see that. There are some impressive special effects that accompany the future technology that were likely dazxling for the time. And the CGI for the backgrounds likely was state of the art (and certainly better than, for example, Initial D).
Still though - the character animation seems pretty poor regardless of age, and the contrast of rough, fuzzy character art with simple, rigid, entirely rectilinear CGI backdrops is distracting.
All that said though, I don’t want to focus on the art too much. It’s a thing I noticed, so I mentioned it, but more to the point, the story is very good and intriguing and (so far) well plotted and paced, and the characters are well developed, and I’ll forgive pretty much anything for a good story with good characters.