June 2014 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Note for this month's thread: As per comment in last month's 'meta' subthread, the "Television and Movies" subthread has been split into two: "TV and Movies (Animation)" and "TV and Movies (Live Action)"

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

To expand a bit, Kill la Kill feels very self-consciously retro, an homage to a very '90s style of anime that's much more cartoony than today (it owes something to Needless which I looked up and found to be more recent than I expected - I can only assume that was itself a retro effort?). There're a lot of exaggerated visual effects (think heads expanding to 10x usual size), limited animation tricks (cyclic eating motion, speed lines); a few of the visual touches are quite clever clever (using a square aspect ratio for the sepia-tinted flashbacks) and it obviously looks a lot better than the animation of the era it's echoing, but I'm not sure how it objectively stacks up against modern style. The plot is deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top, and the show's pretty heavy on fanservice (admittedly integrated closely into the plot, but it still feels like a lot of gratuitous nudity). As well as Gurren Lagann it reminded me of Mysterious Girlfriend X - different genre, but the same retro fanservice style.

The overall impression was reminiscent of Grindhouse - "ok, you've crafted an excellent pastiche of this old style - but actually we abandoned that old style for a reason". I found Kill la Kill very fun to watch at the time, but it hasn't stayed with me since.