Trailers for anime series seem somewhat moot these days. When most of the people who would be interested in buying a series have likely already seen the entire show it's hardly necessary to make a trailer trying to convince them that the show is good. That doesn't stop companies from making them though, and to a certain extent they can help drum up some excitement for a series, especially if it happens to be a really amazing trailer. That's what this post is about: trailers that I personally like, plus one or two that I don't really like. For the record, my definition of a good trailer is one that makes me excited about watching a series. A really great trailer would make me excited about watching a series I hate, but I haven't found any trailers like that.
So let's start with some not so great ones. First up is Bandai's trailer for the AKIRA Blu-Ray release.
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This trailer doesn't really make me excited to watch AKIRA in glorious HD. Which is pretty amazing in its own right, because I love AKIRA and watching it in HD was probably the best two hours of my life. It's also a little odd that this trailer only has resolution settings of 360p and 480p. Since this is supposed to be a trailer for the Blu-Ray you would expect a 1080p setting, or at least 720p. Neither one is there though.
Next up is FUNimation's trailer for Samurai 7, another underwhelming trailer for a series I like.
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Samurai 7 is based off of the well known Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai, in which a group of samurai are hired to protect a village from bandits. Except in Samurai 7 the bandits are giant mechs. That means this series has normal little human samurai slicing giant mechs in half. Apparently that wasn't worth putting in the trailer.
Let's move onto some good trailers. First up is a trailer for an older series, Berserk from Media Blasters/Anime Works. This trailer contains some spoiler-ish shots, but without context you can't fully understand what's going on so it should be fine.
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I don't have much else to say about this one. It's just a really great trailer.
Next we have FUNimation's trailer for Soul Eater.
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For a series that is overflowing with amazing fight scenes, a trailer that contains almost nothing but clips of those fights is a perfect match. This was my first exposure to Soul Eater, and if the series hadn't already been recommended to me this would have been enough to make me watch it.
These next two trailers are a little different. Once upon time ADV had the license for Gurren Lagann but never managed to release it. It was instead picked up by Bandai, who eventually put it out. ADV did, however, make a trailer for Gurren Lagann. I though the trailer had just vanished into the ether. My searches always brought me to blog posts with an embedded video that had been taken down. I did manage to learn a few things about what was in the trailer though. One day when making another attempt to find it I did a YouTube search for “tengen toppa gurren lagann trailer”. It was right there, on the first god damn page. I could never find it because I always included ADV in my searches and the video didn't have ADV in the title. So here it is, ADV's trailer for Gurren Lagann.
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From what I gather people didn't really like the trailer because it didn't really give a good idea of what Gurren Lagann was. Let's compare it to Bandai's trailer.
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ADV's may not have been shown what Gurren Lagann was really about, but at least it wasn't as subdued as Bandai's trailer. Gurren Lagann is a show that has a reputation for being over the top and completely ludicrous. This trailer doesn't express that at all, but I'll give it points for including, “Just who the hell do you think I am?!” ADV's at least managed to somewhat capture the crazy, over-the-top nature of the series. If nothing else we can see how different companies can approach the same material in completely different ways.
Regardless of their usefulness trailers are a nice thing to have. They can get us excited for a new series, remind us how great a series we love is, or even trick us into thinking a terrible series is good. I personally like them, so I hope they never go away and that companies can continue making trailers as awesome as that old Berserk one.
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