My viewing of Gundam Wing is now complete, as is the second season of Spice and Wolf. Despite what I stated last time, I am in fact going to take a break from watching Gundam series – at least for a short while. I do plan, however, on watching Macross Frontier in its entirety. I watched the first three episodes at Jafax and was very impressed at both the beautiful art style and the variation of perspectives in narration. I also started 009-1 as I thoroughly enjoyed watching Cyborg 009 years ago and 009-1 is a fairly quick watch at only twelve episodes long.
I’m holding off on finishing Zeta Gundam until the Fall, as I plan on picking up the dvd collections when I have some more money to spend (I just spent a decent amount on the dvd box sets for Ergo Proxy, Mushi-Shi, and Samurai Champloo, as Amazon was having a sale and the prices were just too good to pass up). Death Note is also a major series that I want to watch, and I can access it basically anytime since Hulu hosts the complete series. Again, I’m going to wait until the late Summer/early Fall to begin that one. And as awesome as the first season of Full Metal Alchemist was, I don’t want to rush through the series. I’ll get to season two and Conqueror of Shamballa before the end of the year, but I’m not in any hurry at the moment. That said, I likely won’t even scratch the surface of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood until next year.
I figure that I’ll be able to finish season two of Axis Powers: Hetalia soon enough, since Funimation continues to upload episodes to YouTube at a steady rate (and my review of it will follow shortly thereafter). I’ve considered picking up where I left off and starting season two of Sgt. Frog, though – as witty and hilarious as the first season was – I’m not really feeling it right now. I’m more determined to finish Mushi-Shi as of right now (and once the dvds arrive, that’s exactly what I’ll do).
There are also a number of movies that I want to watch at some point, though I have no intention of really planning these out as much as I do with the full series due to the fact that they’re generally rather short time-wise. I’m still a bit behind the times and have not yet seen Ghost in the Shell, Akira, My Neighbor Totoro, or Paprika. There are also a handful of other series that just sound plain different and fairly interesting, such as Paranoia Agent, Eureka Seven, and Eden of the East, each of which I think merits at least a look into on my part.
As is the case with the films, there are also a number of old-school anime series I have not yet completed. The one I’ll most likely pick pack up before the end of the year is Cowboy Bebop. I got two episodes in and then just started watching other series. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those episodes, quite the contrary – I simply kind of forgot about Cowboy Bebop amidst all the other anime I was focusing on at the time. I have been rewatching some of the Dragonball Z films for nostalgic purposes, though I can’t say that they’re the most complex plot-wise. Rurouni Kenshin is another series I missed back in the day, and though it looks very entertaining it’s also ninety-five episodes in length, so there’s no way I’m watching it without splitting the series up into chunks to view over a long-term period.
I’m not so much in an anime viewing slump as I am finished with the majority of the major series I wanted to knock out of the way this year and debating what to start next. I gave Gurren Lagann a try last year and decided it wasn’t for me, and last week I watched the first episode of When They Cry. I’ll more than likely watch another episode or two of When They Cry to get a better feel for the series, but the first episode had a lot of the same flaws that turned me off to Gundam Wing – the story is really interesting and full of suspense, but the characters are so bland and uninteresting that the viewing experience as a whole suffers. Granted, it was only a single episode, so there is plenty of opportunity for When They Cry to turn around in this sense, which I very much hope happens.
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