20 Anime Movies Even Non-Anime Fans Will Love

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4 EVANGELION 1.0: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE (2007)

It’s not “anime”, it’s… Godzilla , but with jawdropping special effects and giant cyborgs instead of the giant lizard

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The original series of Neon Genesis Evangelion is considered to be both one of the finest examples of the mecha genre, and one of the most confusing (and/or pretentious, depending on your viewpoint) anime series ever. There are various stories about what led to the series ending the way it did, but none of them matter in the face of the four-part movie series. Writer and director Hideaki Anno returned to the project, but this time he had a bigger budget and better special effects available to let him tell his story about the monstrous invading “Angels” and the teenagers charged with destroying them. The end result is a thing of beauty: it trims all the fat from the original series for a punchy, to-the-point retelling, and not only is it exciting and accessible, it looks better than any anime movie we’ve seen so far.

3 HIGHLANDER: THE SEARCH FOR VENGEANCE (2007)

It’s not “anime”, it’s… a Highlander sequel that quietly and sensibly ignores all the crap bits of the franchise

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An example of the Japanese doing rather well with a Western property, The Search For Vengeance was produced by the acclaimed Madhouse Studio (who’ve had their hands in just under half the films on this list) and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, who also delivered the Animatrix short “Program”. Set far in the future, it pretends all that stuff about aliens never happened and instead concentrates on its own Immortal, Colin MacLeod, and his 2,000-year struggle against the villainous Immortal Marcus Octavius. Kawajiri’s distinctive aesthetic means that it’s a stylish movie, making effective use of flashbacks to flesh out its characters and tell a story that is true to the spirit of its source material. It also has a very clever conceit for the flashback sequences, reverting to an old-fashioned style of anime animation.

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