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Mononoke
モノノ怪
2007 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationMysteryScience FictionFantasy
The Medicine Seller is a deadly and mysterious master of the occult who travels across feudal Japan in search of malevolent spirits called mononoke to slay. When he locates one of these spirits, he cannot simply kill it; he must first learn its Form, its Truth, and its Reason in order to wield the mighty Exorcism Sword and fight against it. He must begin his strange exorcisms with intense psychological analysis and careful investigative work—an extremely dangerous step, as he must first confront and learn about the mononoke before he even has the means to defeat it.
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2 comments on Hacker News
There's not a lot else like them in anime, so none of the shows I'm about to list are good for the same reasons that those two were good.
Shinsekai Yori was great, and a rare case of high-effort worldbuilding that actually delivers on its premise. Highly spoilable.
If Akiba Maid Sensou is not my anime-of-the-decade for this decade, I will be very surprised, but it assumes you understand both yakuza culture and maid cafe culture and I'm not sure what someone who doesn't would get out of it.
Hana to Alice, Satsujin Jiken might not even be anime, since it relies extremely heavily on 1:1 rotoscoping, but it is short and doesn't really look like anything else.
Gankutsuou also gets a ton of points for being visually distinctive, and (at least at the time of release, maybe that's not true anymore) being the most faithful adaptation of Dumas' original to video despite casting a blue-skinned space vampire as the Count.
Princess Tutu is a fantastic use of popular ballet as a framing device that was doing the whole 'meta-narrative' thing long before it was cool.
Mononoke (not the Ghibli film Mononoke-hime) is a good-looking take on the classic supernatural detective genre.
Id:Invaded is also a supernatural detective story, which manages to be entertainingly audacious without ever really feeling like it was just going for cheap shock value.
The problem with forums about anime or manga is that they self-select for people who have been rejected from every other community. A solid science-fiction or horror story can find discussion in the appropriate forums, but nobody normal is interested in some high-school student's harem of magical girls.
Here are some manga / anime recommendations. Some have not been licensed for distribution in the US, or have been only partially released here, so you will need to hunt a bit for fansubs. I watch only the animated adaptations, as they're easier to hide, but feel free to order the original manga versions if you don't feel ashamed about reading comic books. Not all are adaptations -- the movies, and a few television series, are original animations.
- Monster < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29 >
- Planetes < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes >
- Mushishi < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushishi >
- Mononoke < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononoke_%28TV_series%29 >
- Tokyo Godfathers < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Godfathers >
If you're willing to relax your standards a bit, there are many outstanding series aimed at younger viewers.
- Denno Coil < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil >
- Yokohama Shopping Trip < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D >
- Kino's Journey < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino%27s_Journey >
- Cromartie High School < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromartie_High_School >
- My Neighbor Totoro < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro > , or almost anything else by Studio Ghibli < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli >
- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time >
- Yotsuba&! < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsuba&! >