Japanese Anime

Here I will submit to you some of the greatest Japanese anime films of all time.

To begin with it can be no other than Parasyte - The Maxim which, other than being a top-notch anime series on all standards of measure, is also a very good study in the principle of self-valuing in all its complexity and possible forms:












This show is available streaming on Crunchyroll, without commercials for a membership of $6.99 a month, along with plenty of other great anime. I highly recommend it.

Anime is a style that dares to go beyond heartache, beyond fear. Those deep phenomena that rule man come from below like an echo
out of a dark pond and streamline the pride of the present in haunting, unfathomable romance. But it is evil, in the old sense, it has not
risen beyond good and/or evil, as these terms are the essence of narrative - even if evil has come to mean simply repulsive -
a narrative still relies on taking one side and not the other. Time unfolds that way, partially, against itself, like the vortex underneath
a waterfall.

From the fornix to the pons.

Every great anime is always beyond good and evil, I think; but this doesn't mean it leaves humanity and good/evil behind, rather it does what good art and literature should do, namely take good and evil and reimagine each in terms of the other, within a more severe delimitation and against the backdrop of a greater necessity and daemonism. Revaluation in my view isn't about leaving good/evil behind, as if to become some kind of sociopath or something, but is about more active and deep engagement between values, between goods and evils, producing further iterations of being.

Another fantastic and very entertaining anime series, Claymore.



















This show is about self-valuing in the extreme. What is "a self", what are its limits, what are values and why, and how far can values conflict each other and remain what they are? Also part of this show's appeal is the top-notch animation, and including the artwork in general and the fight scenes. Nice opening and ending scenes and theme music as well. I would say the show's drawbacks are that the plot tends to drag on in the middle, and the main two characters do not evolve enough at the personal level from start to finish; also since this show was following the manga but ended up outpacing it, the ending is a little forced and imperfect... that tends to happen when they rush the anime to production while the manga is still ongoing. But I'm a severe critic of endings, so it might just because me.

Overall a very good series and highly recommended.

Death Note.

Easily one of the best anime series ever made. And my personal favorite.

Brief summary: a 16 or 17 year old kid named Light finds a notebook one day at school, the notebook was dropped there by a "Shinigami" (a god of death), because the Shinigami was bored and wanted to see what would happen. The notebook is a "death note", and if you write someone's name in the notebook they will die of a heart attack in 40 seconds.

The kid decides to use the death note to rid the world of the worst criminals, and he ends up seeing himself as God passing judgment on evil. He wants to make the world a perfect utopia by removing evil. So he makes a fake name "Kira" and announces himself to the world, and says from now on he will guide the world to a perfect utopia by single-handedly removing evil people. Of course the police try to catch him, and the worlds best detective "L", who has kept his real identity secret, decides to catch him too.

For the death note to work you need to know someone's real name and visualize their face as you write their name down. Thus Kira tries to kill L because he sees L as trying to stop his plan of ridding the world of evil; you have two people trying to discover each other through their false identities, and a very psychological and complex game ensues, very much based on deduction and is quite Sherlock Holmes-ish. Of course Kira starts to get corrupted with his power, and uses it to kill innocent people if they are trying to stop him, justifying this that they are evil for trying to oppose him.

It's a very interesting and I would say philosophical-psychological series. Also very realistic; the series is based in the real world with no fantastical elements at all except for the Shinigami and the death note, which no one knows about except Light.

The show is also done in a nice combination of some humor/lightness and real darkness with a lot of suspense. Incidentally the communist government of China banned this show, along with Parasyte and some others, for having "bad values". Lol.

God Eater: