What was your first anime show or film?
For me? The first anime related thing I saw as a kid was Spirited Away on VHS, I was awestruck from the animation and quality of the film.
For shows it would’ve been the usual Pokemon and DBZ. As I grew older I suppose my first proper anime show was watching streams of Neon Genesis Evangelion due to people talking about it at school.
So what about you? What did you see first?
I first saw Saint Seiya in Mexico in the early 90s. Being a young kid I didn’t know it was anime at the time but remembered it being special compared to cartoons of the day.
Neon Genesis Evangelion. I had such high hopes…
Edit: autocorrect put evangelism…of course.
It was the year of our lord 1990, I was 5 years old, and the time was somewhere after midnight. I had snuck out of my room and into my grandparents basement to sneak some late night tv.
The original Vampire Hunter D was playing and I had no idea what it was, but it was amazing. The guy had a hand that ATE things!!!
I didn’t realize what it was until around 8th grade when I started getting into the standards of DBZ and Sailor Moon… I expanded drastically from there once I realized I could, spent around $4000 on manga throughout highschool and found a little hole in the wall DVD rental shop on the local college campus with a wall of anime DVDs and VHS tapes.
I think my first late night tv adventure was seeing Akira and having absolutely no idea what was going on.
Dude, you could relive that, watch it TODAY, and still have no idea what was going on.
Almost like watching it for the first time again.
I also watched Pokemon and DBZ when I was young, not even knowing about anime.
In highschool I thought “What is anime? Let’s give it a shot”. I opened up Hulu and somehow picked out Non Non Biyori. Looking back, it was a banger choice.
Chobits
Oh man, I haven’t heard that word in awhile. Chobits was a fun one.
I’m surprised only a handful of people have mentioned Ghibli movies. For me it was Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, it’s probably one of the first movies I remember watching in general. Still my favorite Ghibli movie and I must have watched it dozens of times as a kid.
The source material for it is a manga by Miyazaki himself and it’s much longer and deeper (the movie only covers about 1.5 out of 7 volumes, and changes a lot of details). Highly recommended.