Is there an anime that is special to you?

[siya]

First off I wana say that I'm sorry if a thread like this already exsits, and if it does then I will be shortly ban. For some reason, I never seem to be able to realize that when I search for a thread to make sure it doesn't exsit, It's acualy there and I don't see it. I searched for this and the only thing that showed up was about special offers. Anywho, getting to the point, Is there an anime that is special to you in some way? For me, Gundam Wing is. WHen I was about 7 or 8, my dad and I used to watch Gundam Wing all the time and what not. Now I hardly ever seen him because of my mother...-_-, anywho. We always watched it and everything. We spent time together doing something we both enjoyed, and that is something I will never forget. So Gundam Wing is probably the most memerable and special anime to me. Howa about anyone else? Do you have an anime that is special to you?

[X10A_Freedom]

When I was living in Tokyo, Sunday evening was family time and the whole family, parents included watched Chibi-Maruko-Chan and Sazae-san from 18:00-19:00.

Special? Well, a person I knew for some years became my best friend because we both watched Gundam SEED and one day, she had a "Haro" on her MSN picture.

Another very close friend of mine was through reading the Ichigo 100% manga (which got turned into an anime).

More recently, I find ARIA to be a very special and unique slice of lifer because it is so healing and uplifting, not to mention Amano art!

[Kyuusai]

When I was a wee lad (a little before I'd reached double digits in age, I believe) my step-mother got some VHS tapes in the mail from her sister that had, among other things, some recordings from a Miyazaki film marathon aired on TV Tokyo.

Nausicaä, Laputa, Totoro, and all but the beginning and end of Kiki's Delivery Service, in the original Japanese--with commercials. It also had a bit of an interview with Miyazaki Hayao, to boot.

They were, and remain, some of the best movies I've ever seen (with some of the most marvelous music), and the commercials were a fantastic bonus. Most importantly, though, seeing these wonderful films was one of the few comforts I had during the hardest time in my life. Watching them over and over again was an almost magical escape that allowed me to cope with the turmoil around me.

There are pretty much two things that can evoke an outward emotional response from me: kittens, and those movies.

In more modern times, although I'm a grown man, I found Gurren Lagann to be inspiring in ways I haven't been inspired by fiction since I was a kid. I was fighting some of life's drudgeries and pondering my accomplishments in life compared to what I expected to have accomplished by my age. There were several things that I drew from to form my renewed sense of personal determination, and though most were more significant than a television show, Gurren Lagann was, indeed, one of them.

[afedaken]

In February 1999, my father had a drug related reaction while at the clinic undergoing a stress test for his recent quadruple bypass. To make a long story short, he ended up in a coma, never to recover. We buried him in 2002, after a long series of treatments, clinics, and hospital stays.

Mom and I aren't great people. Really, we tend to think of ourselves as pretty normal. But she's a nurse, and we're both fiercely loyal, to friends and family. Friends have said that we were crazy to try to take care of him at home, given the coma, and maybe they were right. But putting him in a nursing home simply wasn't an option. There was no way we could have done that to my father.

Truthfully though, we're just human. Taking care of someone day in and day out, is difficult. It's physically difficult. (My father wasn't a small man.) It's mentally difficult. (I do not work in healthcare, and I basically had to learn, on the job, all of the nuances of homecare, while I was trying to hold down a full time job. That didn't work out too well, as my employer soon informed me. After that, I was indeed a fulltime caregiver.)

Most importantly however, it's emotionally difficult. Watching your loved one, unable to move, unable to respond, is devastating. My father was never a particularly energetic man. He was quiet, reserved, and deliberate in manner. But he was ALIVE. Seeing him in this half-live state wrecked my mind.
Sometime mid 2001, I finally got enough cash together (Remember, at this point I'm unemployed...) to replace the video card in the PC that I installed in his room. With one of those nice newfangled S-video out ports, I got the thing up an running on the TV. A few short searches later, (Umm... thank you, Kaaza?) and I was watching an obscure little title called "Angelic Layer", by some group named CLAMP, subbed by some folks calling themselves Anime-Fansubs.

Heck, I didn't even know what a fansub was.

But I knew what Misaki was feeling. Her mother was RIGHT THERE. But not there. Empathy is a powerful thing, ya know?

I also knew that my heart, mind, and spirit were in a very bad place. And that watching Misaki don those goggles, and Hiraku dance across the layer, overcoming all the obstacles put in their path, was an uplifting expereince. "Angelic Layer" was one of the few bright spots in some of the darkest moments of my life, and I'm grateful to CLAMP, and A-F for helping to keep me sane.

[Malintex_Terek]

Monster Rancher. One of the best saturday morning shounen adventure titles I'd ever seen - if more titles like that were around today, I don't think Naruto, One Piece or Bleach would be as big as they are.

[Aoie_Emesai]

Nope ^^, they're are merely entertainment to me in my eyes.

[Terrestrial Dream]

For me it would be Yusha series. While I was growing up I remember watching it with my cousins, and basically Yusha series is reminiscent of my childhood. So to me it's very special, and there is always damn Sailor Moon, my sister would always watch that and I would watch it with her hoping for the bad guys to win. Of course that never happened, though even though I said that I hate the show and only watched so that I could cheer on the bad guys, deep inside I think I liked the show and well when your 4 or 5 boy you can't admit that you like show like Sailor Moon . So yeah I guess Sailor Moon is also somewhat special to me.

[Kyuu]

For Sailor Moon back in 1997. Friend of mine came across an advertising campaign by Pop-Tarts, where sales of Pop Tarts would contribute to the distribution of Sailor Moon. Well, a friend and I went about and printed flyers advertising Sailor Moon and Pop Tarts and posted them throughout the halls of my former high school -- after hours.

However, like a retard -- we were caught by security and I lied to his face; only told him we posted 1 flyer -- as opposed to 40 of 'em. The next day, I was called over and had to sweep the school as punishment.

[Mad Dog]

Sailor Moon had the biggest impact on my life because it was the anime that got me hooked on anime way back in 1993. being 13 at the time i fell head over heels for Amy/Ami. It also what got me hooked on the short blue/purple/green haired girls.

Love Hina - One of the best made animes ever in my opinion. beautiful animation with a great soudtrack, wonderful characters and perfect voice acting (for the Japanese voices that is) and even though it strayed a bit from the manga it was so well made that it just didn't matter. I labu Shinobu. Shinobu is the perfect embodyment of the woman i want as a wife/soulmate.

Figure 17 - Absolutly amazing anime here. 1st anime to have hour long episodes and a great story line that made me laugh, cry, and cheer during the action scenes. a short 13 episodes but it had a huge impact on me. I defenatly recomend this anime to anyone.

Lucky Star - the most recent anime to have a big impact on me. a wonderful little comedy that deals with everyday life. So many of the things they talked about that happend to them i have gone through and knew exactly what they were talking about. And to see how theydeal with those situations was funny. It was like watching a buch of my own friends disscuse the same things.

[Kyuu]

Originally Posted by Mad Dog

Sailor Moon had the biggest impact on my life because it was the anime that got me hooked on anime way back in 1993. being 13 at the time i fell head over heels for Amy/Ami. It also what got me hooked on the short blue/purple/green haired girls.

Man. The SOS Campaign was fun.

[minhtam1638]

I'll have to say Shakugan no Shana, since Shana resembles a Yu-Gi-Oh card that I considered as a lucky charm, and it got me seriously thinking about becoming an otaku.

[Hotaru Suzume]

Special... um, no. None for me.

[Honey_and_Cleaver]

Gungrave, it was during the times where animes got dark and full of action, vampire hunter D,blood last vampire, Appleseed, Armitage, Ghost in the Shell, Hellsing,Madlax 01,ninja scroll,Noir,cowboy bebop,Trigun,Texhnolyze etc all those dark science fiction animes, when i saw Gungrave, i thought it was the peak of all dark gunslinging action, but that anime ended with a tragic end, a hero who is soft,kind and yet full of duty and action, but then that kind of hero never appeared again, and today, all the animes are nothing but for perverts and romance fanatics, even the dark action animes have these lame fan service in them, take for instance, black lagoon, nothing like the old days. But whenever i thought what was the best anime, i always thought Gungrave, nothing like that ever again. As if people lost some sense of direction.

[MGBelfyRogue]

Nothing "special" special. The first anime I ever saw that I actually knew was from Japan was Akira, back in about '91 or '92 after the Sci-Fi channel first came out and showed some anime on Saturday nights. While I did watch Robotech and Voltron religiously as a kid, and maybe a few others, I had no idea that they were from Japan, so they don't count.

The only anime that had any effect on me wasn't in a good way. A single scene in Kimi Nozo wrecked the rest of the otherwise exceptional series to the point that I will never watch it again.

[WanderingKnight]

Definitely, without a shadow of doubt, Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you don't mind, I'm gonna quote what I wrote on my (out-of-date) blog, because I've written extensively about its effects on me and my way of thinking. It's a long post, so sorry if it's too boring or too ramble-some.

Like many kids around these parts, I grew up watching anime series like Saint Seiya and Dragonball Z. Of course, by the time I watched them, I had little knowledge on the origin of such pieces of audiovisual art, probably because I didn’t care. I just liked watching that shiny, moving stuff that, for some reason, seemed different from the regular cartoons I could catch on the TV. It wasn’t until years later (I think I was 11 or something) that I found out the truth about those strange drawings from the faraway land of Japan. I even got past my mom’s attempt to call Satan on anime (mostly after she casually watched some scenes from Ranma ½), and started to harvest an increasing interest on it. One fateful day, my dad brought me home a VHS with the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which, for some strange reason, caught my interest in ways I can’t quite describe. Was it the giant robots? The depiction of a post-apocalyptic Earth? That the hero was the epitome of anti-heroism? The fact that it seemed more serious than any piece of animation I had seen before? I don’t really know. But for some reason, that single episode had managed to fascinate that young and immature me like nothing else in the small world my limited experience had managed to perceive.

For reasons I can’t quite recall right now, I couldn’t get around watching the whole series until several years later. I was 14 when I finally managed to do so, and was beginning to undergo the shades of that teenager depression which, some time or the other, strikes us all. I remember waiting faithfully through every single hot summer day for those episodes that aired at 7:30 PM every afternoon. And those were thirty golden minutes of pure joy. Neon Genesis Evangelion has the honor of having been the first serious work of art, animated or otherwise, to reach and affect my feelings and my way of thinking. I remember standing there, dumbfounded, with my mouth wide open, while the credits for episode 26 rolled on the screen. For a kid my age, that final scene (for everyone who’s watched it, you know what I’m talking about) was as mysterious and ambiguous as it could get, but nevertheless, it managed to make me think in ways I had never ever felt like doing before. Of course, looking back, I’m sure my appreciation of it was quite naïve at the time, but it was an appreciation, a small world that I had created in an attempt to explain those feelings such a piece of art had provoked on me, and it was as valid as any other.

Later, steadily approaching the rock bottom of my depression, came The End of Evangelion, the final piece of the mindblowing puzzle that NGE represented to me. But instead of solving the puzzle for me, the avid viewer, it rearranged the pieces in such a way that, in the end, there was no solution at all. The blank spaces were still there, and I stared at them with awe, almost with fear. What could I do? I had to get some sense out of it. Asking other people that had watched the series was of no use, the pieces they provided me didn’t really appeal me. Almost with desperation, I began to seek explanations anywhere I could find them, but none of them suited my perception of the series.

It’s funny how, sometimes, the way out of your life issues can be found in the strangest of mediums, and by the strangest of situations. By the time I was 16, I was beginning to pull out of my teenager depression, which was mainly linked to the lack of a proper identity, a way of telling others who I was and what I was doing there. Never forgetting the blank space NGE had left on my mind (and, at the same time, the deep mark it had carved), I became an avid anime watcher, and I managed to start using it as a way of identifying myself, of telling myself, “This is who I am, and no one else”. Nothing else managed to do that for me. My love of the Japanese language stemmed from anime, and with that, the kind of purpose or goal I needed to go on with my life in a more relaxed, optimistic manner finally arrived.

Why am I talking about this? Because last weekend, after a marathonic rewatching of NGE (finally in Japanese!), I found the last piece of the puzzle I was missing. And that final piece is the viewer’s own perception (something which, by the way, Hideaki Anno seems to agree with). The viewer has the duty of completing the picture, of finding a meaning in it, and such meaning is personal and unmovable, uncriticizable. And, in my opinion, the fact that NGE is both the most loved and hated anime series of all time makes it even more outstanding. Something capable of generating such strong, diametrically opposed reactions has to be onto something. It must have hit something in order to provoke such strong feelings on so many viewers. And that’s exactly the reason why it stands over every other piece of art I have seen in my entire life, and the reason why nothing else will ever stand above it in my mind.

But it’s my perception of it, and of course, you’re free to think whatever you want about it. Evangelion has left a mark in my way of perceiving art and the world, and it also helped, some way or the other, in pulling me out of my teenager depression. And that’s the main reason why I still am an anime fanboy today. I’m sure that no other anime will ever be what NGE was, and I’m sure many, if not most, people don’t consider it to be a particularly appealing field of human endeavor. But it’s my particularly appealing field of human endeavor, and that’s what matters to me, because it brings me something to identify myself with, some sort of purpose, just like studying Japanese in Japan itself is a purpose that brings meaning to my existence. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s my own missing piece, and no one else’s.

[Shadow Raven 91]

Tenchi Muyo was special to me. It wasn't my first anime but the one that brought me into anime fandom. I bought the manga and VHS. I still have my little Washu key chain i carry with me.

Trigun was special because i was too young to stay up and watch it on cartoon network during the week. Every now and then i would see an episode of this mysterious anime. eventually I got to see all of it and loved it.

[foreverdissevered]

Elfen Lied- Given me perception and reasons to admire someone( Kouta).

[Hammy]

Lucky Star--it turned me into a slice-of-life anime otaku

[HashiriyaR32]

Initial D. First decent auto-racing anime I've seen.

[Spectacular_Insanity]

These all are animes that have turned me into an anime addict:
Princess Mononoke, Ah! My Goddess, Full Metal Alchemist, Full metal Panic, Rurouni Kenshin (the OVA's were especially good), X, Monster Rancher (I agree with Malintex Terik on this one), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Spirited Away, more recently Utawarerumono.... there are many others as well that have greatly affected me in some way, either being emotional experiences for me, changed the way I look at the world, or are so damn addicting I want another season, even if there is no longer a viable storyline.