Multi-Generational Anime Series

[EventualDay]

Just wondering if you've all seen any anime that cross generational gaps. For instance, maybe both the parents and the children are equally important main characters.

For me, Avatar: The Last Airbender and it's sequel series Legend of Korra was a good example of this. (Yes I know it's an American cartoon and not anime at all ) The only actual anime I can think of is Allison and Lillia.

Personally I enjoy shows like this because I'm always interested to see where my main characters are 'after the story;' I like to know that their lives are continuing on somewhere even as the world continues to change around them. Also, I don't think in America we often put much emphasis on history--we're very future-oriented--and I like watching shows that counter that.


Thoughts? Are you familiar with other anime like this? Does it annoy you to have too many spinoffs, or do you like this kind of thing?

[Rusty Claymore]

CLANNAD and CLANNAD:After Story.

I enjoy "prequel" series, especially when they aren't blatant about it. i.e. Fate/Zero I found to be a great stand alone, and really enriched my experience of Fate/Stay Night (I may have mixed that order up...)

As far as histories, I love when the main story is about something that happened in the past. Natsume's Book of Friends has that element, where Natsume is trying to find out what kind of person his grandmother was.

Not sure if these count, and some are manga, but stories like Usagi Drop, Sweetness & Lightening, and Yotsuba&! are about family in general, where the parent is just about as much a main character as the child.

Sometimes I don't like "pass the torch" shows because a character I like is no longer there.

[MomentOfInertia]

Dragonball Z comes to mind.

[skreyola]

The MCs from Last Exile appear in Fam: the Silver Wing, slightly older. Not sure if that counts.

[Davidizer13]

It takes a while to get there, but Jojo's Bizarre Adventure builds itself around a generational story - the villain is an immortal vampire who declares war on the heroes' family, so they're fighting over multiple generations.

An interesting case is Zeta Gundam, where instead of blood generations, the characters from the first series (Mobile Suit Gundam, aka 0079) and the new ones are put alongside each other. The 0079 characters are older and wiser than in the first series, they have families and the last war changed them.

[Kaori]

Wolf Children. The movie is very much both about the single mother and about her children, and you see the story of the family from when the children's parents meet for the first time through the children becoming adolescents.

Summer Wars. The whole movie revolves around a multi-generation family all gathering together in the main house to celebrate the great-grandmother's ninetieth birthday, and aside from the male lead pretty much all of the characters are members of that large family.

Millennium Actress is one that doesn't so much have characters from multiple generations (it sort of does, though the age gap isn't huge, maybe 20 years at most) but follows one character's life from childhood to old age. Also, some characters from earlier in her life come back later on, so you can see how those characters changed from youth to adult or adult to elderly.

Roujin-Z, by the same director (Satoshi Kon) is about an elderly and bedridden man getting caught up in a company's scheme to create a sort of robot bed that provides comprehensive care for the bedridden; he himself does not do much, but there are also several nursing home residents who play a role in the movie, and the main character is a young nursing student who is responsible for caring for the elderly man, so the generations involved are young adult + elderly.

Mihciko to Hatchin is about a single mother and her daughter. You also at the end see what the daughter's life is like after she grows up.

If you have any interest in manga you might want to consider checking out the works of Naoki Urasawa (if you haven't yet). I've only read Pluto, not his more famous works, but it had a very good range of ages in its characters from children to older adults, and my impression is that his other works also have a similar age range.

[EventualDay]

Mihciko to Hatchin is about a single mother and her daughter. You also at the end see what the daughter's life is like after she grows up.

If you have any interest in manga you might want to consider checking out the works of Naoki Urasawa (if you haven't yet). I've only read Pluto, not his more famous works, but it had a very good range of ages in its characters from children to older adults, and my impression is that his other works also have a similar age range.

I think I've heard about Michiko to Hatchin before and really wanted to see it, but it seemed a little... mature for me at the time. I'll have to give it another shot. I think mother-daughter relationships are really fascinating and not often explored well/with enough depth, so I'll be interested in seeing how this one is. Also never heard of Naoki Urasawa, so I'll have to look him up.

Not sure if these count, and some are manga, but stories like Usagi Drop, Sweetness & Lightening, and Yotsuba&! are about family in general, where the parent is just about as much a main character as the child.

Sometimes I don't like "pass the torch" shows because a character I like is no longer there.

Just saw that Sweetness and Lightning is getting an anime soon, so there's another one to add. I also get a little sad sometimes when a main character I loved disappears in the sequel series. As nice as it is when they play minor roles, it's really sad if they're dead



Also I love all the suggestions you guys came up with. The series are so long though, haha. No wonder I'm not familiar with them... I haven't found it in myself yet to sit through the entirety of Dragonball or the Gundam series, for example. Well, I guess if multi-generational stuff is done well, it probably needs to be a decent amount of seasons to make sense.


>>Another question: do you guys like time skips in series?

[LecktheTech]

I can't think of anything, but I've not been watching anime that long.

>>Another question: do you guys like time skips in series?

If done correctly, yes. If done like SAO, no.

[Davidizer13]

Naoki Urasawa got mentioned up thread, so I have to recommend 20th Century Boys, which has great time skips throughout, usually as flashbacks. The story is about a bunch of kids in 1969, who spend the summer making comics and stories about a coming catastrophe and how they will save the world from it. 25 years later, one of them dies in mysterious circumstances. Then the symbols and events they made up as kids start happening in real life. And one of their group is missing...

The plot hops between 1969, 1994, and a couple places in between, with a solid multi-generational theme, dealing with the kids' lives as grown ups and being pulled back into their young fantasies.

[crusader88]

At first I thought you meant something like Da Capo. The premise is similar in each season, but the passage of generations leaves a big mark on the new protagonists each time, and sometimes their forebears appear again as elders.

[Rusty Claymore]

Just one more plug for a multi-generation show: Utawarerumono (2007) and the recent Utawarerumono: the False Faces. It's sort of a complex generational relation, but I found both shows very enjoyable.

As far as time skips, I only like them when they skip lulls. Nothing really pivotal happened for a few years, so we skipped them. Basically, they're only ok when I don't feel like I've missed valuable time I could have had with the characters. If that makes any sense.