What are the pre-requisites to liking old anime?

If you want be a reviewer you need to watch old anime because you need a point of view, it is important to what is life in the old days example like the 80s many directory and animator are more on political Mecha and wars that most of 80s were many adult anime like Votom and Mellowlink or some political Mecha like Ideon and Taiyou no Kiba Dagram(One of my favorite political anime is better than Gundam in my opinion).

Well as usual if tips are helpful as for myself I need to study about modern anime I'm the opposite I need to feel about young generations anime which I will watching I kind of excited about my project.

I think the most damaging thing here appears to be perfectionism or failure of not doing things right, from what your threads tell me. Reading this post, I thought "who cares about whatever these pre-requisites are". Can you just not go in an enjoy older works? Surely that requires no special or estoeric knowledge. The idea of seeking an external structure or curriculum makes some sense in light of all the obscure and older works out there, but I think you should be more willing to use your own judgement for something such as this. There is no wrong way to experience the media of yesteryear if you ask me.

Sure, we will recommend The Legend of the Galactic Heroes or The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, but very few people here qualify as anime historians, and those who do should be scrutinized. That, and I think trying to do it for any purpose, such as, expanding your anime intellect credentials, is a worthless pursuit. I think it is healthier to pursue media for the sake of curiousity and entertainment.

if you're going to appreciate old anime, you need an open mind for those vintage vibes, have patience for those slow-burn plots, some knowledge of historical context to savor the Japanese cultural richness, a taste for details and storytelling, and an appreciation for the hand-drawn artistry that makes these retro anime style timeless.

It's just stories, are there pre-requisites for older books? Older movies?
The only thing I can think of is that knowing background for the specific show you watch can enhance the experience (Gundam is a masterpiece by itself, but you can't watch it without crying learning about the story of Tomino)

old films are the way to go if you dislike older, heavily episodic anime, i think.

watched Aim for the Ace this year and like, good lord, having a sense of style does not age at all

>it's just stories bro
>let's forget about animation, artstyle, voice acting, bgm, characters and their designs, all of which have changed drastically over the decades
Kek. I always pity people who watch anime "only for the story". They're incapable of appreciating everything else that makes anime special. Go read a book if you want a good story. Anime is never good because of stories, but because of delivery that's carried by audiovisual presentation.

I assume you've watched the original Ghost in the Shell, Outlaw Star, Evangelion things like that?
If not, then those are good places to start. I would say actually to watch movies and OVAs from that era, since they're a lot shorter and if they turn out bad at least you didn't lose much time. I would NOT try getting into massive franchises like Gundam... sorry Gundam fans, but it's a dedication all by itself, and asking people who want to watch an older show to learn ages worth of lore and commit to hundreds of episodes really isn't the way. The risk of 'starting' with long franchises is, if you don't like it after a couple episodes, with 78 to go or something, you'll just drop it and come away with impression that older anime is boring and sucks.

Dirty Pair Project Eden- now there's one I couldn't stop recommending. It's dumb as hell, but if that doesn't entertain you in an hour then the issue isn't the anime it's just you, and your tastes.

I'd say first of all you'd have to "forget" the terms "old" and "new" and start thinking to yourself that whether it came out in the 21st or 20th century, anime is just anime. Secondly I'd probably ask why do they feel mid to you, in what ways for example.

Chances are unless you hunt down Anime released before the turn of the century on quality Official Physical copies, your experience will likely be subpar at best. Yes some Retro Anime gets remastered over the years on Blu-ray but even modern re-releases of "old" anime sometimes don't do them justice. Where the methods use to clean up media that was never intended to be digitally converted just ends up turning out looking like shit sometimes.

Reminds me of a copy of "Slayers" that an acquaintance of mine ripped off the internet and told me they didn't enjoy the Anime at all. I got a preview of the series he ripped off the internet and it was dogshit quality and completely unacceptable for a person like me to even sit down and torture myself to watch.

His opinion of the Anime changed dramatically once I let him borrow some Official DVD copies of the series and they ended up really loving it. Then later on I once invited him over to watch a few episodes on Japanese Laserdisc while we played a few games a pool, He found the Anime to look Amazing even if he couldn't understand what the characters were saying because the series on Japanese Laserdiscs does not include English subtitles.

Also most Anime released before the turn of the century doesn't look good at all on modern HDTVs or above. There have been on occasions I had to whip out an old 50" bulky CRT monitor just to fully enjoy an Anime the way it was meant to be. This was mostly due to only owning VHS copies of an Anime that were still in modestly decent condition considering they were all over 3 decades old and a few laserdiscs released in the 80s on the older Laserdisc formats due to their extremely limited video quality capabilities back then.

Though it could just be me. I tend to not waste my time on watching Anime at all if it's not in it's highest fidelity possible. Some people are obviously fine to waste their time just to try to experience retro Anime ripped off the internet. Makes me wonder how much people would still enjoy watching and praise modern Anime if it was all produced in standard definition and only ever released on analog formats. lol

I have the opposite problem, but
" Maybe I'm just being unlucky with my picks? Still, I just feel that post-2000's stuff just "grabs me easier", as if it's somehow an unfair competition."
that sounds right.
I THINK I can help you with that, but you have to say what you watched and didn't like, and what exactly resonates with you.
the 80s was more positive, the 90s was hardcore, 2000s is more melancholic, then after 2010 it's mostly lightnovel adaptations, and since 2020 it's isekai out of the ass.
it's not a perfect summary but you get the idea.

This isn't about in you in specific, but I find a bit surprising that on a lot of threads I've been seeing lately, very few people seem to check the other's people's lists.

Here are the 80's/90's anime I watched and didn't like much (Most are around a 4-6/10):
Terra e
Kidou Senshi Gundam I
Kidou Senshi Gundam II: Ai Senshi-hen
Kidou Senshi Gundam III: Meguriai Sora-hen
Kidou Senshi Zeta Gundam
Tatakae Iczer-1 (Dropped on episode 1, might've liked the other episodes, IDK)
Dream Hunter Rem
Tenshi no Tamago
Outlanders
Kidou Senshi Gundam Gyakushuu no Char
Akira
Five Star Stories
Kidou Senshi Gundam 0080: Pocket no Naka no Sensou
Chika Gentou Gekiga: Shoujo Tsubaki
Iria: Zeiram The Animation
Macross 7 (Dropped at episode 1)
Key the Metal Idol
Cowboy Bebop
Serial Experiments Lain
Change Getter Robo Sekai Saigo no Hi (Dropped around 2-3 episodes in)
Turn A Gundam
1001 Nights
Mugen no Ryvius (Dropped on episode 14)

I omitted those I consider "Strong 6's" such as Vampire Hunter D, Mahoutsukai Tai and Ao no 6-gou.


In general or specifically in old anime that I managed to like?

@thewiru I think you should just give up the way your mind set isn't gonna work, open minded is the key here and forcing yourself to watch is really not gonna work here maybe old anime isn't for you,I see your list and score is seem that you don't see the angle like I told before there certain anime you need to watch in different angle. if your watching the same angle, you don't get the whole picture and appeal.

If you have favorite 80s or 90s movie the see the reflect of the anime in Japan I mean most anime are inspired by the western movies during that time period before the opposite, example like Gunsmith Cats inspired some gun action movie from Hollywood.

I'm saying that you need open mind to watch the retro anime maybe in ten years of your taste will change maybe that time you appreciated old anime.

I knew a guy that intentionally chose to watch G Gundam like this:

Instead of like this:

Chances are unless you hunt down Anime released before the turn of the century on quality Official Physical copies, your experience will likely be subpar at best. Yes some Retro Anime gets remastered over the years on Blu-ray but even modern re-releases of "old" anime sometimes don't do them justice. Where the methods use to clean up media that was never intended to be digitally converted just ends up turning out looking like shit sometimes.

Reminds me of a copy of "Slayers" that an acquaintance of mine ripped off the internet and told me they didn't enjoy the Anime at all. I got a preview of the series he ripped off the internet and it was dogshit quality and completely unacceptable for a person like me to even sit down and torture myself to watch.

His opinion of the Anime changed dramatically once I let him borrow some Official DVD copies of the series and they ended up really loving it. Then later on I once invited him over to watch a few episodes on Japanese Laserdisc while we played a few games a pool, He found the Anime to look Amazing even if he couldn't understand what the characters were saying because the series on Japanese Laserdiscs does not include English subtitles.

Also most Anime released before the turn of the century doesn't look good at all on modern HDTVs or above. There have been on occasions I had to whip out an old 50" bulky CRT monitor just to fully enjoy an Anime the way it was meant to be. This was mostly due to only owning VHS copies of an Anime that were still in modestly decent condition considering they were all over 3 decades old and a few laserdiscs released in the 80s on the older Laserdisc formats due to their extremely limited video quality capabilities back then.

Though it could just be me. I tend to not waste my time on watching Anime at all if it's not in it's highest fidelity possible. Some people are obviously fine to waste their time just to try to experience retro Anime ripped off the internet. Makes me wonder how much people would still enjoy watching and praise modern Anime if it was all produced in standard definition and only ever released on analog formats. lol

Well I WAS ABLE to do that with Macross in specific.
Maybe perhaps because years before watching it, it's premise "broke" my expectations of what an old anime was: Back then I thought that older stuff simply had simpler, direct stories, whereas "mix and match" was a thing of modern ones (Hence I wouldn't expect a mix of mecha and idols in the 80's).

Now I know I was wrong about that, but it didn't make my luck any better, it seems.


Well, that depends which: The rule of thumb is that most simply don't elicit any emotions from me. They don't make me hate them, they just don't make me... feel anything.
Many of them seem to rely on "Hey, look at this cool idea" rather than making anything with it.
That maybe for old viewers simply seeing a cool fight scene in Tatakae Iczer-1, the monster designs in Dream Hunter Rem, the ships in Outlanders, the fantasy costumes in Five Star Stories or the sci-fi guns in Iria Zeiram The Animation was "already enough to justify their buying".

Well, for me it isn't, and I just don't see much to those other than those things.
Yet I refuse to believe that older anime are just "less evolved modern anime", THERE MUST BE SOMETHING THAT I'M MISSING HERE.

Zeta Gundam is likely an exception, but that anime embodies the antithesis of everything I like in an anime (With the exception of a single episode, episode 39):
It has 50 episodes, but doesn't do things with those 50 episodes.

• It wastes a lot of time doing nothing
  
• Villains are moustache-twirling ones without any good motivations... actually, most of them don't seem to have any motivations at all
  
• Protagonists have no personality
  
• Characters act in nonsensical ways
  
• Interesting plot happens off-screen, what we just see are pointless, repetitive battles (No, seriously, at some point there's 4 episodes in a row where it's just the protagonist taking a beating the entire episode, finally landing a hit, and then his enemy fleeing).
  
• A fight is supposed to be "a form of dialogue", but since neither side has personal motivations here, they just fight "because the plot demands it"
  
• Way too episodical, which isn't a problem in itself, I like episodical anime such as Kaiba, the difference being that in the latter, there's still a sense of progression in every episode.
  

That might just be Tomino thing, though, since while watching Turn A Gundam it had many of those same issues, just to a MUCH LESSER extent.

Let's compare this to some more modern anime I watched recently and managed to like:
Gleipnir has an ever-expanding scope in a in media res story.
16bit Sensation: Another Layer feels like it has an entire anime worth of content every episode with an ever-changing story.

Since I previously mentioned Turn A Gundam, it's good episodes (Which were "different episodes", such as the one Loran grabs a cow, or the one Diana becomes a nurse, or the one they go to that meso-american civilization) just made me realize how bad the rest of the anime was. I first went to watch it because I saw a clip of the episode that Diana becomes a nurse (And also a clip of the episode were Loran grabs a cow), but most of the episodes before that made me think "Is that even the same anime?" because most of Turn A is just the plot being interrupted to give place to contractually mandated pointless fights in green prairies.
I mean, sure, Macross also had a contractually mandated fight in every episode, but you never FELT that because they all flowed so seamlessly with it's episodic plot (Or, at the very least, they never wasted their time with them). I never had to ask "when is the story going to happen?" with Macross because THAT WAS THE STORY.

Well, how do I do that? How do I watch in a different angle?

I don't understand what you mean by this.
I've already opened my mind, that's why I made this thread.

I don't watch movies.

I will concede that is the appeal of some older anime, but new anime do that too. Do you at least like the setting of 5 Star Stories?


It's possible you wouldn't enjoy very many retro anime. I've enjoyed only a small portion of the oldest series I've tried to watch, but it's always nice to find a show that exceeds my expectations as Gundam ZZ did.


I'm glad you felt that way about Macross. I did not.

I did, I absolutely loved many of those designs, costumes, ideas, mechanical designs, etc.
My problem is that those are mostly there as eye-candy and not much is done with them.

Ah I see probably S video too but that was commonly underutilized where hardly anyone used it it seems.


Is that that difficult to swap out all that and put it back together? I have some old tech Id probably want to repair laying around somewhere. Usually it's just the electrolytic capacitors that go most often since the electrolyte dries up. I have an emergency weather radio from the 70s that still works with all it's original parts though.


Well there was a golden record put on a satellite so space aliens can know about us. Maybe anime needs stored on golden records lolol

@thewiru try to rewatch them again there anime you will understand when you rewatch second or third time and you see the layers mostly like think of as abstract painting.

The different angle that I mention I called it simply pov: for example the critic point of view the angle was how well written story, how's the animation was and there casual watcher who just watch for entertainment and there also other type edgy watcher who watch what relate to there edgy phase to them I myself my point of angle is cross between a artistic and Historian I really like the classic from movies cartoons and anime the history value itself how made it or how they put there passion that alone is enough for me to watch it and study of there project. I guess I will give you the angle of simple just enjoy anime without nitpicking anything like the story is bad the pacing is bad the character are bad just ignore all that and watch it without overthinking anything and enjoy it, even not. Then rewatch it again with your overthinking it and compare it you got both good and bad.

It okay if don't understand what I saying I also not good at English I guess my short answer just watch more old anime and get use the way they tell the story after all the medium meant to rewatch again to understand there story

If need of old anime suggestions I can recommend if your interested.