Old Anime VS New Anime
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Daishikaze
- Posts: 51
- Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2012 9:49 am
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Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
Ignoring them is all anyone can do, they're winning and there is nothing we can do about it. Progress is a double edged sword sometimes....
Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
I'm also noticing an increasing divide between my tastes and the taste of the current "mainstream" anime fans on the whole, so it's increasingly hard for me to judge whether I want to try a series based on majority opinion. A lot of people think Ghibli hasn't been good since Spirited Away, but I find their more recent films more interesting on several levels than their late 90s-early 2000s stuff (although their late 80s/early 90s stuff is obviously still untouchable) Experimental or avant-garde anime is no longer welcome but frowned upon as "pretentious" and "WTF" by most people. If Ghost in the Shell or Neon Genesis Evangelion the TV series hit the U.S. today, I think the majority of current anime fans would have ignored them. Too slow. Too pretentious. Too crazy. I get that we have more fans now with more mainstream tastes, that's what naturally happens when a fanbase gets bigger, but it's pretty dismaying that anime is no longer something people go to for something different or provocative, but rather for most fans it's just another medium to get the comfort food they already get in Hollywood movies. Heck, the only way Evangelion has been relevant for younger fans is through the new Rebuild movies, which are far more "polished" and less "eccentric" than the TV series. The characters are more "likable", Shinji is less "annoying." In short, it's Evangelion with a side of comfort food.
I'm by no means slagging "comfort food". I can and do enjoy them as much as anyone. It's just that it's pretty hard to strike up conversations with people about challenging anime series or movies because few fans want to talk about shows on an in-depth level anymore. I feel like that when anime in North America was in its infancy, people deliberate seeked them out *because* they were looking for something different. Whether it be something more edgy, more extreme, more cerebral or more avant-garde, fans in the pre-boom era were looking to try something new.
I don't get the sense that younger anime fans fell into the hobby this way. For a lot of them, anime simply fell into their laps. Anime became plentiful in the early 2000s, so you could simply bump into anime while walking down the street at one point during the height of the boom. They didn't have to really seek it out, so their motivations are a bit different. Shonen Jump style anime became especially popular--anime with lots of action and ongoing storylines but never too extreme with either the violence, sexuality, or experimentation. There are people in their early 20s today who still gravitate towards Shonen Jump style anime, and find some of the more eccentric, graphic, cerebral or slower paced anime too off-putting. (For the record, I do enjoy some popular shonen anime, like One Piece. So I'm not slagging it, I'm just saying that for many anime fans, their tastes are *limited* to Shonen Jump type anime)
I can accept that. I really can. Times change, and you change with it. But I do sometimes miss those days when discussion threads about, say, Evangelion or Gundam would be wide ranging and provocative, with posters who had knowledge of film and literature outside of just anime. And they could discuss things without degenerating into a flame war about who is more or less "annoying", Shinji or Asuka (which is how Eva threads typically play out with younger anime fans today).
I guess this is more a post about old anime fans vs new anime fans, rather than old anime vs new anime, though. For the most part I don't have any huge problems with new anime. I'm just feeling increasingly disconnected with the tastes of current fans.
I'm by no means slagging "comfort food". I can and do enjoy them as much as anyone. It's just that it's pretty hard to strike up conversations with people about challenging anime series or movies because few fans want to talk about shows on an in-depth level anymore. I feel like that when anime in North America was in its infancy, people deliberate seeked them out *because* they were looking for something different. Whether it be something more edgy, more extreme, more cerebral or more avant-garde, fans in the pre-boom era were looking to try something new.
I don't get the sense that younger anime fans fell into the hobby this way. For a lot of them, anime simply fell into their laps. Anime became plentiful in the early 2000s, so you could simply bump into anime while walking down the street at one point during the height of the boom. They didn't have to really seek it out, so their motivations are a bit different. Shonen Jump style anime became especially popular--anime with lots of action and ongoing storylines but never too extreme with either the violence, sexuality, or experimentation. There are people in their early 20s today who still gravitate towards Shonen Jump style anime, and find some of the more eccentric, graphic, cerebral or slower paced anime too off-putting. (For the record, I do enjoy some popular shonen anime, like One Piece. So I'm not slagging it, I'm just saying that for many anime fans, their tastes are *limited* to Shonen Jump type anime)
I can accept that. I really can. Times change, and you change with it. But I do sometimes miss those days when discussion threads about, say, Evangelion or Gundam would be wide ranging and provocative, with posters who had knowledge of film and literature outside of just anime. And they could discuss things without degenerating into a flame war about who is more or less "annoying", Shinji or Asuka (which is how Eva threads typically play out with younger anime fans today).
I guess this is more a post about old anime fans vs new anime fans, rather than old anime vs new anime, though. For the most part I don't have any huge problems with new anime. I'm just feeling increasingly disconnected with the tastes of current fans.
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greg
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Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
It's interesting you mentioned Evangelion. While I thought the premise was cool, and placing limitations on the mecha was very intriguing (they can only run for 5 minutes when detached from the power hose), the show just didn't really explain itself well at all. I've watched it twice through, even. The second time, I was thinking, "Well, maybe I'll like it more the second time around," but it was just as psychotic watching it for a second time and just as baffling, despite being more prepared for it. OK, I get that the robots are actually women and that Shinji's robot is actually his own mom. But I still couldn't understand what was going on with that underground city, and oh, by the way, here's Lilith hanging on a cross we like to keep around... wait, who's Lilith? The whole First Impact and so on was still unclear, and the bizarre religious overtones were annoying. The End of Evangelion movie tried to be experimental and esoteric, but it falls short, in my opinion. Anno tried to make it end similar to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, trying to make it "open to interpretation." However, it just felt hollow. I think that this sort of wannabe pseudo-intellectualism is ridiculous and pretentious, but Anno thought it was his ticket.
The character designs are great, but their personalities are pretty annoying. In isolation, Evangelion isn't too bad. However, it's the fact that many anime started aping Evangelion is why the show annoys me. I loved playing the Sakura Taisen games on the Sega Saturn, and when they announced a TV series, I was thrilled. But it turned out rather different from the games, and it gained the nickname "Sakurangelion" among fans in Japan. Putting a bunch of annoying characters together and making them hate each other for no compelling reasons other than over-the-top drama became a staple in anime for a while. Also as a result, Shinji's character seemed to damage the role of anime protagonists, because an annoying, whiny kid became more than just an Evangelion thing. The religious crap would have actually made more sense if Anno didn't just randomly pick names and stuff from the bible at random, and have it make more sense.
But anyhow, that's just my Evangelion rant. I love Anno's Nadia & The Secret of Blue Water. There were a lot of elements in Nadia that also resurfaced in Evangelion, but it just worked much better in Nadia. Plus, the characters were great and the plot was understandable.
I do completely agree with you about current anime viewers vs. the older crowd. Anime was something that we had to search out to find. It wasn't just dropped on our laps. Once upon a time, animation was allowed to be edgy and experimental. Although I don't care much for Bakshi, Wizards was very different. So was The Last Unicorn. The Heavy Metal movie was out there too, although I personally couldn't force myself to watch it. The Secret of Nimh was excellent, and the DVD cover for the movie looks disgusting because it's cuteness is a betrayal to Bluth's dark message of the film. Sometime in the '80s, animation all became Smurfs and Muppet Babies. And although I love Muppet Babies, everything turned towards being so sweet and cute and animation stopped being serious. Nowadays, traditional animation in the West is dead, replaced by annoying CG movies (although Pixar remains excellent as always).
So anyhow, against the backdrop of nothing but sweetness, so many of us were seeking out something else, something more elusive to satisfy our cravings for science fiction and fantasy. Most of us had to find it ourselves. Oh wow, here's something called Vampire Hunter D! Akira! Even the Warriors of the Wind was awesome, until we watched fansubs of Nausicaa and realized what a terrible abomination it was. I was an anime fan in high school, and I was pretty much isolated and alone. Others only had a passing interest in anime.
So I think typical anime fans these days wouldn't even bother watching Robot Carnival. They just wouldn't get it. Then again, they wouldn't even really bother with Disney's Fantasia or The Black Cauldron either. I think it took a certain type of person to become an anime fan back then. These days, it's no big deal to find anime.
The character designs are great, but their personalities are pretty annoying. In isolation, Evangelion isn't too bad. However, it's the fact that many anime started aping Evangelion is why the show annoys me. I loved playing the Sakura Taisen games on the Sega Saturn, and when they announced a TV series, I was thrilled. But it turned out rather different from the games, and it gained the nickname "Sakurangelion" among fans in Japan. Putting a bunch of annoying characters together and making them hate each other for no compelling reasons other than over-the-top drama became a staple in anime for a while. Also as a result, Shinji's character seemed to damage the role of anime protagonists, because an annoying, whiny kid became more than just an Evangelion thing. The religious crap would have actually made more sense if Anno didn't just randomly pick names and stuff from the bible at random, and have it make more sense.
But anyhow, that's just my Evangelion rant. I love Anno's Nadia & The Secret of Blue Water. There were a lot of elements in Nadia that also resurfaced in Evangelion, but it just worked much better in Nadia. Plus, the characters were great and the plot was understandable.
I do completely agree with you about current anime viewers vs. the older crowd. Anime was something that we had to search out to find. It wasn't just dropped on our laps. Once upon a time, animation was allowed to be edgy and experimental. Although I don't care much for Bakshi, Wizards was very different. So was The Last Unicorn. The Heavy Metal movie was out there too, although I personally couldn't force myself to watch it. The Secret of Nimh was excellent, and the DVD cover for the movie looks disgusting because it's cuteness is a betrayal to Bluth's dark message of the film. Sometime in the '80s, animation all became Smurfs and Muppet Babies. And although I love Muppet Babies, everything turned towards being so sweet and cute and animation stopped being serious. Nowadays, traditional animation in the West is dead, replaced by annoying CG movies (although Pixar remains excellent as always).
So anyhow, against the backdrop of nothing but sweetness, so many of us were seeking out something else, something more elusive to satisfy our cravings for science fiction and fantasy. Most of us had to find it ourselves. Oh wow, here's something called Vampire Hunter D! Akira! Even the Warriors of the Wind was awesome, until we watched fansubs of Nausicaa and realized what a terrible abomination it was. I was an anime fan in high school, and I was pretty much isolated and alone. Others only had a passing interest in anime.
So I think typical anime fans these days wouldn't even bother watching Robot Carnival. They just wouldn't get it. Then again, they wouldn't even really bother with Disney's Fantasia or The Black Cauldron either. I think it took a certain type of person to become an anime fan back then. These days, it's no big deal to find anime.
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Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
The original Evangelion TV series was basically something personal and intimate. Yeah, the characters were screwed up, but Anno was putting a lot of himself into it and working through his own issues. I appreciated that, I like it when an anime has a personal quality to it. Even if the series was extremely flawed, it felt immediate and raw. It did an excellent job at portraying, through a variety of animation and editing techniques, what it was like to be emotionally and mentally vulnerable. Those long sequences where the characters would go into their monologues and talk about little details like the weather, and tactile sensations...I felt Anno really nailed how an emotionally vulnerable person would behave and think about when depressed, having worked with the same kind of people myself. I didn't think the plot was the point, so I didn't really key in on the geek aspects of the show--like bible stuff, the conspiracies, the Angels, the mecha, etc,. That was more like window dressing to me.
Later on, of course, the franchise proved to be a moneymaker, and then they started playing up the more marketable aspects of the show. The window dressing became the main event and the "psychotic" aspects of the show were played down. But I'm of the opinion that the original show is pretty special in its emotional rawness. It may have been annoying, but people with mood disorders are pretty annoying, quite honestly.
Later on, of course, the franchise proved to be a moneymaker, and then they started playing up the more marketable aspects of the show. The window dressing became the main event and the "psychotic" aspects of the show were played down. But I'm of the opinion that the original show is pretty special in its emotional rawness. It may have been annoying, but people with mood disorders are pretty annoying, quite honestly.
Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
I don't think I agree with this. I mean, yes, there are large numbers of anime fans who are only interested in the next cookie-cutter shonen or moe tripe that comes along... but there are still PLENTY of newer fans who are eager for quality programs, at the very least. (Whether they are provocative "enough" to really be "worth" their attention is going to vary depending on personal preference.) I mean, look at the popularity of Madoka Magica. In some ways, Madoka is to magical girl shows what Eva was to the giant robot genre... taking the tropes and re-examining them from a darker, more thought-provoking angle. And people have embraced it like crazy. There's an audience out there for that sort of thing... they just don't get the opportunity to show it very often.llj wrote:I get that we have more fans now with more mainstream tastes, that's what naturally happens when a fanbase gets bigger, but it's pretty dismaying that anime is no longer something people go to for something different or provocative, but rather for most fans it's just another medium to get the comfort food they already get in Hollywood movies.
And looking at that from the flip-side, when I got into anime, there were just as many forum threads about Ah!My Goddess or Ranma as their was appreciation for the "deeper" titles. Fandom-at-large has never been immune to the fluffier side of the anime spectrum.
Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
Based on sales, a lot of the stuff that used to be popular-- the darker or more seinen-action stuff that populated much of the OVA scene in the 80s and 90s--generally don't sell as well today. Sci-fi used to be the most popular genre in anime. Nowadays, sci-fi anime are consistenly among the lowest sellers (and before people say there have been no good sci-fi titles, I say hogwash. There have been a number of good ones in the past 5 years) YES, there are shows that get a lot of acclaim and deservedly so...but they end up selling very poorly or mediocre at best. There is one big difference between today and previous decades--the Shonen Jump anime scene. In the 90s, you had Dragon Ball Z, but there was often a separation between younger and older audiences when it came to that title. And people who watched Dragon Ball Z weren't necessarily anime fans. Today, you have hardcore anime fans who basically watch nothing but the "cookie-cutter" shonen you refer to. The "tournament fight" style of Shonen Jump anime was a big part of the anime boom of the 2000s. So it would be logical to conclude that those fans raised on that type of anime would carry it over into adulthood--after all, don't most of today's older fans generally have similar tastes as the type of anime they were raised on? I bet a vast majority of them.
If you check out FUNimation's "S.A.V.E" editions, which basically is their cheapo re-release line that tries to squeeze some profit out of their worst-selling titles on initial release, almost 50% of their licenses appeared on that line. A lot of them really good anime, too. The only ones that didn't appear on that line? Most of the cookie cutter shonen anime they acquired. In fact, there's a joke that goes around that NONE of the FUNimation titles sell well except Dragon Ball Z and perhaps One Piece, and that DBZ is basically the franchise holding up FUNimation's house of cards. I don't totally agree with that, but you get where this is going.
And look at Viz. They used to release all sorts of variety, now they basically live on Naruto and Bleach and Pokemon, along with a bunch of solid-selling 2nd tier shonen anime. Only occasionally now they get cute and release a Monster or NANA just for kicks. Fans hate them now, but business wise, they know where the money is in today's market.
I don't think Madoka is quite as popular as you think in North America. It's popular on the internet, but I don't sense it being on the radar of the mainstream anime fan. In fact, a lot of the "buzz" or "acclaimed" titles rarely are as popular as they are represented online. Haruhi was supposed to be the next BIG THING, garnering online threads that ran around the block, but it ended up as just a decent seller at best. Azumanga Daioh got a TON of buzz prior to hitting North America--the "Seinfeld" of anime, some critics called it--it ended up being a disappointment for ADV. And let's not get into the Gundam franchise. It has a HUGE online presence, with Gundam nerds devoting pages and pages of threads to each Gundam series, but in reality it has been pretty much a big flop in the west--aside from Gundam Wing, which was in the 90s anyway.
Granted, I'm not taking into account the streaming/downloading scene, but generally, the highest selling DVDs/BDs tend to be representative of the "real" popularity of said titles among the anime community. After all, if they like something that much, they're still gonna buy it, right?
If you check out FUNimation's "S.A.V.E" editions, which basically is their cheapo re-release line that tries to squeeze some profit out of their worst-selling titles on initial release, almost 50% of their licenses appeared on that line. A lot of them really good anime, too. The only ones that didn't appear on that line? Most of the cookie cutter shonen anime they acquired. In fact, there's a joke that goes around that NONE of the FUNimation titles sell well except Dragon Ball Z and perhaps One Piece, and that DBZ is basically the franchise holding up FUNimation's house of cards. I don't totally agree with that, but you get where this is going.
And look at Viz. They used to release all sorts of variety, now they basically live on Naruto and Bleach and Pokemon, along with a bunch of solid-selling 2nd tier shonen anime. Only occasionally now they get cute and release a Monster or NANA just for kicks. Fans hate them now, but business wise, they know where the money is in today's market.
I don't think Madoka is quite as popular as you think in North America. It's popular on the internet, but I don't sense it being on the radar of the mainstream anime fan. In fact, a lot of the "buzz" or "acclaimed" titles rarely are as popular as they are represented online. Haruhi was supposed to be the next BIG THING, garnering online threads that ran around the block, but it ended up as just a decent seller at best. Azumanga Daioh got a TON of buzz prior to hitting North America--the "Seinfeld" of anime, some critics called it--it ended up being a disappointment for ADV. And let's not get into the Gundam franchise. It has a HUGE online presence, with Gundam nerds devoting pages and pages of threads to each Gundam series, but in reality it has been pretty much a big flop in the west--aside from Gundam Wing, which was in the 90s anyway.
Granted, I'm not taking into account the streaming/downloading scene, but generally, the highest selling DVDs/BDs tend to be representative of the "real" popularity of said titles among the anime community. After all, if they like something that much, they're still gonna buy it, right?
Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
I guess we're talking about two different anime communities, then.
DBZ and Naruto and the like are big sellers because they have brand recognition outside of what I would consider the "anime community" thanks to U.S. TV broadcasts. Has that popularity transferred over to other shonen series that HAVEN'T aired on TV? (I honestly can't think of any big shonen series that haven't aired on U.S. tv, so not sure.)
I guess to my mind, the anime community *IS* the online community, because those are the people that I have a chance to talk to and have some concept of their tastes and interests. Some high school kid who just bought the latest Bleach DVD never intersects with my life in any way, so there's no reason for me to bemoan his poor choices.
DBZ and Naruto and the like are big sellers because they have brand recognition outside of what I would consider the "anime community" thanks to U.S. TV broadcasts. Has that popularity transferred over to other shonen series that HAVEN'T aired on TV? (I honestly can't think of any big shonen series that haven't aired on U.S. tv, so not sure.)
I guess to my mind, the anime community *IS* the online community, because those are the people that I have a chance to talk to and have some concept of their tastes and interests. Some high school kid who just bought the latest Bleach DVD never intersects with my life in any way, so there's no reason for me to bemoan his poor choices.
Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
The question you have to ask is if shonen series are popular because they're on TV or that they're on TV because they're already popular with anime fans.
If you're talking about what is representative of the general anime community, then probably the Animenewsnetwork forum is the closest one. Even there, the most active threads tend to be the Shonen Jump anime, or at least the anime targeted at a mainstream teen crowd. And also Gundam.
I have to stress here that I have nothing against shonen anime or the sappy teen-romance-visual-novel stuff that seems so popular with anime fans these days (Clannad topped many hardcore fans' "Best of 2000s" lists). I won't say that people who like them have poor taste, because everyone's different. I can enjoy those stuff, but these really aren't the kind of genres I immediately gravitate towards.
It's not just about "good" anime either. There are a lot of flawed anime I like, but they tend to fall under categories that are not of the "popular" flawed anime. I remember one time I was asking around for some current seinen action, and I never got much feedback. I basically had to just hold my breath and dive into shows like CANAAN and Phantom-Requiem for the Phantom because while they looked like the type of shows I prefer genre-wise, they got mixed reviews with the mainstream anime crowd. In the end, I really liked them despite their flaws, but the current anime community was no help at all to me because those genres are not in vogue today. You can see 100 page threads devoted to griping about how the latest GAINAX mecha anime or Type-Moon fantasy show sucks, but a piddling 8 reply thread devoted to some seinen action show. This probably wouldn't have been the case in previous eras, where seinen action was more popular.
It seems to me the pattern is that most people initially hop on the most popular titles early on, and only later do they catch up with the rest of the less initially buzz-worthy. The problem is that I tend to hop on the less initially buzz-worthy first, and the popular titles later. So a lot of the titles that I thought would have been more popular didn't get popular (or only popular years later) which makes it tricky for me when asking people about recommendations because they always give me the most initially popular choices, and often the most popular ones end up not being the ones I gravitate towards. What were the most buzz-worthy non-shonen anime of the past decade or so? I'd list Azumanga Daioh, Clannad, Haruhi Suzumiya, and Gurren Lagann off the top of my head. While I enjoyed all of them, none of them would be the type of anime I generally prefer personally. And with the exception of Gurren Lagann, I'm not sure most of these titles would have been the type of anime older fans used to watch either.
So that's the kind of divide I'm talking about when it comes to older fans and current fans.
If you're talking about what is representative of the general anime community, then probably the Animenewsnetwork forum is the closest one. Even there, the most active threads tend to be the Shonen Jump anime, or at least the anime targeted at a mainstream teen crowd. And also Gundam.
I have to stress here that I have nothing against shonen anime or the sappy teen-romance-visual-novel stuff that seems so popular with anime fans these days (Clannad topped many hardcore fans' "Best of 2000s" lists). I won't say that people who like them have poor taste, because everyone's different. I can enjoy those stuff, but these really aren't the kind of genres I immediately gravitate towards.
It's not just about "good" anime either. There are a lot of flawed anime I like, but they tend to fall under categories that are not of the "popular" flawed anime. I remember one time I was asking around for some current seinen action, and I never got much feedback. I basically had to just hold my breath and dive into shows like CANAAN and Phantom-Requiem for the Phantom because while they looked like the type of shows I prefer genre-wise, they got mixed reviews with the mainstream anime crowd. In the end, I really liked them despite their flaws, but the current anime community was no help at all to me because those genres are not in vogue today. You can see 100 page threads devoted to griping about how the latest GAINAX mecha anime or Type-Moon fantasy show sucks, but a piddling 8 reply thread devoted to some seinen action show. This probably wouldn't have been the case in previous eras, where seinen action was more popular.
It seems to me the pattern is that most people initially hop on the most popular titles early on, and only later do they catch up with the rest of the less initially buzz-worthy. The problem is that I tend to hop on the less initially buzz-worthy first, and the popular titles later. So a lot of the titles that I thought would have been more popular didn't get popular (or only popular years later) which makes it tricky for me when asking people about recommendations because they always give me the most initially popular choices, and often the most popular ones end up not being the ones I gravitate towards. What were the most buzz-worthy non-shonen anime of the past decade or so? I'd list Azumanga Daioh, Clannad, Haruhi Suzumiya, and Gurren Lagann off the top of my head. While I enjoyed all of them, none of them would be the type of anime I generally prefer personally. And with the exception of Gurren Lagann, I'm not sure most of these titles would have been the type of anime older fans used to watch either.
So that's the kind of divide I'm talking about when it comes to older fans and current fans.
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greg
- Posts: 2159
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Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
Well, I know I complain about this a lot. I know that there are some great SF shows that have come out in recent years---namely Planetes and Moonlight Mile---but the level just isn't where it used to be. You're probably right that it's because the genre just isn't as popular anymore, so I just need to wait for the pendulum to swing back that way again. Macross F was just a rehash of the original Macross show (from what I have gathered---I haven't seen it), the new Yamato series is basically a re-make, and some newer Space Adventure Cobra episodes I have yet to watch. Not only in anime, but SF is just not as big as it once was. Authors like William Gibson and Orson Scott Card have shied away from writing the type of stuff they are most well-known for, the Sci Fi Channel (or <shudder> SyFy as it is now called) doesn't even bother with SF anymore it seems, and there isn't a whole lot of SF TV shows elsewhere on TV (aside from Falling Skies). In the West, everyone is in love with vampires and werewolves. In anime, I guess there will always be mecha shows, but those hardly count as true SF in my book (although Universal Century Gundam shows fit into true SF though, I think).llj wrote:Sci-fi used to be the most popular genre in anime. Nowadays, sci-fi anime are consistenly among the lowest sellers (and before people say there have been no good sci-fi titles, I say hogwash. There have been a number of good ones in the past 5 years)
There's not a whole lot of truly new SF that I know of; it seems that it's mostly a rehash of older shows like Yamato and Gundam (a new retelling of the 0079 war called Gundam Origins will be coming out). If there are, I'd welcome anybody to please enlighten me on what I am missing out on.
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Re: Old Anime VS New Anime
That's ... MOSTLY unfair. To be fair to Macross F, it is in the same universe as all other Macross but brings in new characters and settings. That said, I think it is "rehash of original Macross" in a way similar to "all Gundams are re-hash of original Gundam". I think there's variations on the base and in Macross F, the Zentraedi are part of the society, but that said:greg wrote:Macross F was just a rehash of the original Macross show (from what I have gathered---I haven't seen it)
-Boy who happens to be genius pilot
-Young naive girl that wants to be an idol
-Older more worldly girl
-Both girls form love triangle with boy
-Boy has a friend that is a more veteran military member
-Transforming mecha
-Aliens attacking the protagonist's society for reasons that are initially vague
-A somewhat plucky, rebellious military crew leading the defense against the aliens
are all elements of Macross F. There are some other points two that would be spoilers, but point being, no it's not "new" in terms of plot, but it has a nice presentation and isn't any more derivative than any of the other anime franchises.
If you want a more adult SCIENCE fiction show, I have heard nothing but raves for "Space Brothers", which is about a pair of brothers who aim to be astronauts. (only watched the first episode, it has a slow pace, but like I said, I've heard nothing but good things about it)