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Reviews
Hunter x Hunter (1999)
Fighting scenes: awesome!
Although a fan of HxH manga, I used to have no interest in watching the anime at all because of its dark color tone. But after seeing people praising how "epic" this anime is on forums about Hunter X Hunter, I decided to "bear" the colors and watched it, and it was so much better than I have expected!
Very different from most of the animes now, the color tone of HxH often looks kind of gloomy and dark. But this effect really strengthens the tense atmosphere when characters encounter dangerous enemies or that when they need to solve very complicated problems in very limited time. So, I found that the dark color used in fact suits the original manga very well.
There is another feature that is often praised by HxH fans(at least in Taiwan) which I also loved it: the motion and the camera angles in the anime. What makes an anime and a comic book different is that anime moves and pictures on manga don't. And HxH anime has surely made use of this vantage to a very thorough extent. Some classic fight scenes like Kurapica vs. Ubogin, Gon vs. Hisoka, or Kuroro vs. The Zoldyck assassins are so outstanding that it's impossible I am going to forget. The movement, timing(or tempo?), and camera angles, together they create very tight and tense feeling in every battles, make me hold my breath, eyes fixed on the screen until our protagonists are safe again.
Classic as this anime is in the aspect of "movements", this anime in my humble opinion, still has some flaws. There are always original events created by manga-based animes, and HxH also has its own new stories which are not on the manga. I'm not saying that animes shouldn't create new stories, but they need to make sure the new stories do not violate what the manga's style. One example I really don't like is the girl examinee who tried to kill Killua. In HxH the manga, all of the important female characters are either powerful or intelligent; they all unique and fascinating features. The girl examinee to me however, is just a reckless girl; plus, this kind of "revenging for family no matter how much weaker you are than your foe and how much mess you're going to cause for everybody" character is just too cliché, disturbing the flow of HxH. But not all of the anime's original addings are lousy, like, sometiems the anime adds brief inferences in the characters mind before they do some decisions, addings like these extend and enrich HxH's character's personality well.
The overall of the anime is pretty impressive, the dynamic and lively motions, and color tone chosen to go with the story which matched pretty well, and some original little settings enriching the important characters, and the already exciting and witty plot from manga; these features altogether have made Hunter X Hunter indeed a must watch anime. To people who haven't watched Hunter X Hunter the anime, I recommend you go watch it and appreciate the imaginative stories and super cool fight scenes in this anime.