No Right Answer: Best/Worst Anime Ever

[Ohlookit'sMatty]

I love me some Dragon Ball Z but I think I only love it because of Dragon Ball Z Abridged & we use to watch it after gaming on Mondays just to torture ourselves cos it was so long & everything was so drawn out

Ah good times

-M

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Is Dragonball Z the best or worst anime ever? I say it's among the most overrated, personally.

Search your feelings, all you nostalgia-blinded fanboys, you know it to be true.

It's pretty much the same plot over and over and over again with multiple episodes dedicated to one... damn... fight... while Goku is the only character who seems to beat the bad guys, and everyone else is unable to catch up.

That's why I refer Dragonball Z Abridged, at least it pokes fun at the show's stupider aspects.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I would agree that it is overrated, I would describe it as below average at best.

A moment for context...

I watched the complete Cell and most of the Buu series. And some of the original. Initially Goku was an interesting character, but after a few episodes it was apparent he is the Fan Bay Mary Sue. Still, I was committed to learning why people liked this series so much. The fight scenes were entertaining, but it took too long to get there. While I acknowledge that Japanese pacing is different, I don't care for it. The Cell story had an interesting idea behind it, and for the most part, was well executed. However, the series suffered due to it's length. If they cut the uninteresting filler, it would have been a tighter show, yet still maintained the traditional Japanese pacing. The fight scenes were also less than expected, again pacing played a serious role here. The fights were either super sonic blurs or staying still for five minutes to power up an attack that could destroy a planet yet moved slower than the series itself did.

So while some parts were interesting to watch, as a whole, it rarely held my attention for any great length of time.

 

[Simple logic]

Please explain to me how a word whose definition is "cartoon made in Japan by the Japanese" can be used to accurately describe an American cartoon, excepting when it's preceded by the words "is not".

Anime is not about who made it or what nationality it is meant for. It is a question of style! If a Japanese composer wrote a classical composition on par with Mozart would we say "That is not classical music! That man ain't a white European! That is some other type of music!". No that would be silly annnnnnnnddddd a bit racist. If a couple of white dudes want to make an anime then they are making an anime if they follow the same style.
To link an art style to only one set of people has a WHOLE set of problems to it that is not topical to this discussion and therefor I will not go into it. If you would like a small lecture on it ccggenius12 I would be happy to provide one some time.

Always in the write,
Simple logic

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Steins;Gate is my favorite anime of all time.

Dragon Ball Z was good..sometimes even great (Frieza arc) and the father of Shonen genre, but I wouldn't call it the best of all time.

 

[SilverStuddedSquirre]

I...But....you're right....but you're also right.....it's...fuck it, its both.

I got the over, over, edited Canadia YTV version. Which by the way, took so long to edit it would start over after each new season. so I watched the Saiyan saga one summer , then next summer the Namek saga. then they played BOTH sagas again from the start, and we got the Frieza saga. Then ALL of hehm again, before the Androids an so on and such.

Happy birthday, and Thanks-giving and Fun episode!


editedted for bad splling after teh fact, oops

 

[coheedswicked]

Happy Birthday Chris!

OT: Hmmmm.... it's definitely both

 

[Fiairflair]

DBZ is nothing to write home about. I can certainly understand the nostalgic value it holds for a lot of viewers, but there are simply too many others that out-perform it on good points and skip the bad points. Anyone looking get into anime would be better off checking out Cowboy Bebop, Baccano!, or GITS: Stand Alone Complex.

 

[Something Amyss]

Chris, buddy, watching you argue with yourself worries me. Is this healthy?

No, but seriously, this was entertaining as hell.

In any event, what can I say about DBZ? Well, if it was my first exposure to anime, I probably wouldn't have watched anything more. Thankfully, in the 80s, I watched a bunch of bastardised anime cut up and remixed and broadcast as American cartoons. And a few years later, people were like "hey, did you know these cartoons were broadcast in Japan and treated differently?" Except not as eloquent, because still in grade school. And later, I went looking for the source material. By the time DBZ was out, I'd been exposed to edited anime and unedited anime. Not to mention, by the time it actually got popular, I had an anime collection going on, even if it was only a couple dozen titles. So I watched this big thing everyone I knew was excited about, and was like, "meh."

DBZ seems like it is itself filler. I'm not going to say people are worse off for liking it, and I appreciate that it helped popularise anime in a new way and brought other stuff to our shores, and my DVD anime collection might owe a lot to that because anime was no longer as niche (as niche, people, don't jump on me!). But it's filler. I don't hate it. I don't think it's the worst ever. But it's not the best, and I don't think it's anywhere close.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

I love Dragon Ball Z in all it's cheesy glory; and without it, we would never have had Dragon Ball Z Abridged, which is the funniest thing ever.

 

[Dimitriov]

It is the best.

All the criticisms of it are true, but I still love every minute of it. I have watched every episode of Dragon Ball Z straight through at least five times. Yep, that's all nine seasons, and every episode. Filler included. And damn it I enjoy the filler!

So if all those criticisms of it (the silliness, the power creep, the abrupt tonal shifts, the filler content, etc.) are true and I can still just enjoy it so much then it clearly must be the best anime ever.

Not on artistic merits. God no. But just on pure fun.

 

[Yosato]

As with most people here I watched DBZ very young so it'll always be sacred in a way. I like the main cast, Freeza and Cell were great, the fight scenes were awesome and the music rocks in most versions. But yeah it is absolutely marred by filler from a time where I don't think the studios were as good at handling it as they are today. Due to the constant up-scaling of power it also makes certain characters (and the Super Saiyan itself by the Buu saga) completely trivialised.

Although on the other hand the abundance of filler is mitigated by Kai - a much better viewing experience. The English dub voices in Z are iconic (if not always amazingly acted). And I really like the quirky randomness of the art style that it gets from starting as a family series. It's the stuff that most shonen today wouldn't attempt because it's 'too cool' - like talking animals here and there and a magic carpet riding genie.

 

[Tojumaru]

I remember hating it as a child, even though it was the only half-decent cartoon on TV(post-communist Central Europe in the '90s, no cable, you know). "Brevity is the soul of wit" said... William Shatner i think. Well, this has neither brevity nor wit. Every loooooong introspective scene while floating during a fight I found myself going like Graham Chapman: All right, this is getting silly. Get on with it. GET ON WITH IT!!! And they never did. It is the worst in the sense that it's boring, unlike other shows at the time that were baffling, dumb or just plain crazy, but entertaining in their cookiness.

 

[Simple logic]

Heres simple logic. Anime isn't an art style as shitloads of animes have unique art styles and almost none share the exact same drawing style. Its not even a genre, as there is many different types. Its a categorical system used to separate the much stronger eastern animation with the episodic crap of the western one, and the vastly different views on pacing, structure and construction between the two, something YES, Avatar The Last Airbender was entirely western about.

Anime is not comparable to JRPGs like idiots keep making it. JRPGs are a genre because they have vastly different ideologies about pacing, gameplay, structure, storytelling and many other things compared to Western RPGs. Anime was a term specifically referring to Japanese animation, and even if you were to start calling it a genre, which as said before, is like meshing FPS, TPS, Fighting, Hack n' Slash, Action Adventure, Spectacle Fighters, Stealth Action and Sandbox games as the 'Killing Genre', the only cartoon that would be validly called an anime is Code Lyoko, which actually did structure episodes similar to episodic anime.

Alright, alright, alright, alright.... Let me get this strait. Because there are MANY different styles of anime through pacing, art, and topics we can not say anime is a "style". I am going to have to disagree with you as well on that point. Take classical music again for an example. All the giants in that genre had different ideas on pacing, theme, and composition of instruments, yet we do not separate them. We call them all classical music.
If you don't want that explanation lets go to video games. Where ever it comes from, if the main character has a gun in the first person and is mowing down a ton of bad guys with tons of ammo at his/her disposal we call that a "First person shooter". If we have a game where there is a story and the character has to figure out puzzles to advance the story with a smattering of combat or excitement in it then we call that an "Action adventure". NEVER do we say oh, that is a "Russian action adventure", nor do I hear the term "Canadian first person shooter".
We organize things on style here not on where it comes from or what people made it. To do that implies that only one set of people can do something and another can't, which has been disproven MANY times over.
Hope this answers your implied question.

Always in the write,
Simple logic

 

[Ikajo]

Alright, alright, alright, alright.... Let me get this strait. Because there are MANY different styles of anime through pacing, art, and topics we can not say anime is a "style". I am going to have to disagree with you as well on that point. Take classical music again for an example. All the giants in that genre had different ideas on pacing, theme, and composition of instruments, yet we do not separate them. We call them all classical music.

But we do separate classic music in to further categories. Usually based on the time period when the pieces were created. We also separate symphonies from concertos, operas, ballets, sonatas, nocturnes and so on. We separate pieces written for piano and pieces written for the violin. It all boils down to whatever or not the people discussion are knowledgeable about the topic at hand. Someone who do not know a lot about classic music might look upon it as you do, a whole genre on it's own. However, someone who has knowledge and interest would know to tell the differences and separate classical music in to many more categories than you do. As an example, Baroque music is not the same as the renaissance music and none of them is the same as pieces written during the 1900. There are a lot of differences.

In Japanese the word "anime" is an abbreviation of the word "Animation" which is pronounced "animeshon". So everything in animated in Japan is called anime. But just because they share the word it is not automatically decided that they share common elements. Just like Bach doesn't share common elements with Tchaikovsky despite the fact that both are called classical music. Oh sure, some instrument used is surely the same but a guitar is used in many different genres, so are drums and keyboards. The paint and brushes doesn't define the painting.

There are some very big differences between anime and Americans cartoons. The series that have come closest to cross this gap is Avatar:TLA, the only reason for that is because the creators listened to people who knew more about east Asian cultures then themselves. The very basic difference is that an episode in an American cartoon can stand for itself an episode in anime tells a continuous story where you as a viewer is dependent on having seen earlier episodes. This is also the reason why some American cartoons run forever while anime usually ends at one point or another. Some animes ends after 25 episodes, some end after 12.
On a much deeper level there are some great differences in storytelling between America and Japan. This isn't strange, it is the result of a difference in storytelling culture. While the western culture is based of the old Greek storytelling, the Japanese storytelling developed in accordance to their culture. You can as an example find great resemblance between anime and Kabuki-theatre. Another big difference is that western culture is much more dependent on dialogue to tell a story than eastern culture is. Manga and anime is often capable of letting the story tell it self trough imagery and the characters expression, while comics and cartoons tend to have explanatory narration. This sometimes shine through when anime gets dubbed, excess dialogue and explanatory narration is added.

 

[Nazulu]

There's no fast and slow paced moments, it was mostly predictable, and those slow moments me and friends liked to call filler in filler. It's very tedious now. The 'Japan has different pacing' excuse doesn't hold any water at all to me, especially when I've seen other anime feel so tight the whole way through.

I was watching it when I was young in the morning before I went to school, kind of hyped for it originally, but then it started pissing me off when we saw many episodes in a row that felt like nothing happened. Completely ruined my day.

I have to say this a terrible anime to call the best. I don't mean that it's terrible (I call it average), but it uses the same bloody build ups all the way through, the fight scenes aren't really creative, there isn't any clever survival strategy's, it's not particularly funny, and as you said, it could draaaaaaaaaaaag out scenes for ages. Don't really want to inspire this repetitive shallowness.

I reckon the abridged version by Team Fourstar is a hell of a lot better, but even then there are still anime I prefer a lot more than that too.

 

[Something Amyss]

In Japanese the word "anime" is an abbreviation of the word "Animation" which is pronounced "animeshon".

That's why this fails in two languages.

In Japan, anime is defined as animation, and is a catch-all term. In the US, it's generally defined as being from or of the style of Japanese animation. Which would actually, yes, make ATLA Anime in the same sense we wouldn't disqualify a symphony by a Japanese composer as "not classical" simply because it wasn't done by a European. Simple Logic's right here. People try and add to the definition to preclude things, but that's not how the term is generally used.

The very basic difference is that an episode in an American cartoon can stand for itself an episode in anime tells a continuous story where you as a viewer is dependent on having seen earlier episodes.

Untrue.

This is also the reason why some American cartoons run forever while anime usually ends at one point or another. Some animes ends after 25 episodes, some end after 12.

Some anime run "forever," while some western cartoons get a 13 episode run. So while this is technically true, it's also worthless.

Another big difference is that western culture is much more dependent on dialogue to tell a story than eastern culture is.

Wow, I must be watching the wrong anime, then. Because the stuff I watch, characters often pause in the middle of a fight to exposit soliloquies that would have Shakepseare going "fuck's sake, man, get on with it!"

And keep in mind this is in a thread about Dragon Ball Z, a show which ran well over 200 episodes and was massively guilty of monologuing. I suppose exposition diarrhea could be symbolic of something, but really.

 

[Dollabillyall]

The thing about DBZ is that it is the perfect example of everything that is good and bad about anime. It has all things that anyone has ever said they like or dislike about anime in general except gratuitous sexual fanservice.
On the one hand you have the great things of anime like complex plots, eastern styles, fast action interspersed with personal and interpersonal drama, the ramping up of epicness...
Then on the other hand you have the worst things that happen in anime like extreme amounts of BS filler, "moments" that go on for three episodes, convoluted ways to deal with lengthening the series, the breaking of any and every boundary ever previously set as "unbreakable" and a never-ending list of episodes.

I think that the reason why DBZ cannot ever be considered the best anime is because it exactly does those typical anime fudge-ups. It feels like a story that is first stretched out too far to make episodes worth watching and then gets arbitrary nonsense tacked onto it because IT STILL MAKES MONEYS. That makes things like "going super saiyan" absolutely uneventful... because what was once the ultimate power and therefore the reason why a story can be concluded is later considered barely powerful enough to fry an egg. The ramping up of power levels just so the money can keep flowing is ridiculous and it completely mitigates any sense of character progression throughout the series.

I think if you would watch the series up until the end of the Frieza saga and just conclude it there.. you have some sort of story that makes sense as a narrative. Watching anything after that not only adds nothing NEW (super saiyin 2,3,4 is not *NEW* but a rehash of the same things over and over again) it actually takes value OUT of the earlier series.
Add to this that the investment of time (the most precious resource known to man)is incredibly high at almost 300 episodes... I would deem this series not worth watching. Dragon Ball Kai actually supports this view, as they cut 200 episodes out of the original work and still are able to put the entire thing to screen.

Actually, the ammount of episodes to me is probably the biggest sin committed by animes. I started watching Naruto but quit around episode 20 because I then learned there where about 400 episodes and no conclusion of the story was in sight. I could spend that same time enjoying 10 other stories of 40 episodes, learning a skill, making sweet sweet love, travelling, working or whatever. That makes a series like that unwatchable and inherently not worth the time you have to put in. A good story ends and does not ask from it's audience that they sit through 200 hours of telling before getting to the point, or at least that is my view.

 

[jhoroz]

when i saw the title of best/worst anime ever i assumed they would talk about the best anime ever which is Bleach and the worst anime ever, Attack on titan.. but dragon ball z? it's not very good from what little I've seen.. maybe you can call it average at best

In what bizarro world do we exist where a shitshow like Bleach can even be considered to be anything but mediocre shounen dreck?

 

[Ikajo]

In Japanese the word "anime" is an abbreviation of the word "Animation" which is pronounced "animeshon".

That's why this fails in two languages.

In Japan, anime is defined as animation, and is a catch-all term. In the US, it's generally defined as being from or of the style of Japanese animation. Which would actually, yes, make ATLA Anime in the same sense we wouldn't disqualify a symphony by a Japanese composer as "not classical" simply because it wasn't done by a European. Simple Logic's right here. People try and add to the definition to preclude things, but that's not how the term is generally used.

I don't really understand what you are trying to say. It feels like you are not contradicting me while trying to do so.

The very basic difference is that an episode in an American cartoon can stand for itself an episode in anime tells a continuous story where you as a viewer is dependent on having seen earlier episodes.

Untrue.

This is also the reason why some American cartoons run forever while anime usually ends at one point or another. Some animes ends after 25 episodes, some end after 12.

Some anime run "forever," while some western cartoons get a 13 episode run. So while this is technically true, it's also worthless.

...I do say "some American cartoons", if I'm not wrong that is a a way of saying "not all". I also do say "usually" which, as far as I know, that there exist exemptions. I do believe my English is good enough to use both those correctly, which would mean you didn't really read my post. Because yet again, you are not contradicting me while not actually doing so.

Another big difference is that western culture is much more dependent on dialogue to tell a story than eastern culture is.

Wow, I must be watching the wrong anime, then. Because the stuff I watch, characters often pause in the middle of a fight to exposit soliloquies that would have Shakepseare going "fuck's sake, man, get on with it!"

And keep in mind this is in a thread about Dragon Ball Z, a show which ran well over 200 episodes and was massively guilty of monologuing. I suppose exposition diarrhea could be symbolic of something, but really.

You don't know Shakespeare very well it seems... Anyway, in anime this occur much more often then in manga, true. It also occur much more often in dubbed anime then in the original. Take DBZ, some of the things the dub did is just stupid. In one episode more then a third of the dialogue would be added and if not added, changed in weird ways.

I'm actually very familiar with Dragonball, the anime has a lot of fillers. Meaning that the actual storyline is different in the manga. Even things such as exposition. However, it's only in comics I have seen narration boxes telling me stuff I'm able to discern from just looking at the panels. In manga, I never have to be told what a character feels. In comics, this is part of the narration.
Yes, the Dragonball Z anime added a lot of things, including a whole story arc. This was very common at the time, Bleach added four or five extra seasons. Newer anime does this differently.
Even then I will still hold that there is a difference in how western culture and eastern culture tell a story. A story that know how to breath and doesn't depend on a lots of fights to move forward is something quite good. There are plenty manga and anime that isn't shounen. People should check it out.