Magicmew

I know that it's great! I've read a few chapters/pages and they were stellar. I'm saving it for one day when I want to revisit HxH though, as I've already seen it twice in a short span of time.

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As an aside: I really dislike the "Togashi is lazy" discourse. Shonen Jump mangaka work under terrible conditions, and when he was writing YYH Togashi overworked himself to the point of damaging his health (http://www.reddit.com/r/HunterXHunter/comments/2ga6as/togashis_long_written_piece_found_in_the_yyh/). If he didn't take the amount of hiatuses he takes, he probably wouldn't even be drawing manga anymore. The reason Jump allows him to do this is because a) they don't want to lose one of their most talented and important mangaka b) HxH is a bestseller (on average, a HxH tankobon volume sells as much as a Naruto one).

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As for his art being lazy: read the tankobon instead

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HxH 1999 was directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi, the director responsible for the original Rurouni Kenshin TV show and its amazing OVA Trust & Betrayal. And Furuhashi is a very good director with a ton of artistic vision; he actually seeks to explore the possibilites of the medium of animation to tell his stories instead of just doing a panel-by-panel adaptation of the manga. (In fact, he was one of Mamoru Hosoda's main influences). HxH99 has gorgeous cinematography; to give an example, one frequently-used technique is to superimpose two images in order to create meaning (see the image I attached for an example). The art direction, lighting and coloring are also very interesting, and always set the tones of the show really well. While the animation is pretty limited most of the time, the character art is usually very detailed and expressive, and there are several stand-out episodes/scenes in terms of sakuga. (Notably, Norio Matsumoto's Gon x Hanzo fight is incredible. Almost all of the major battles are pretty great, and the tower arc has fluid animation throughout). Combined with the great material that is Hunter x Hunter, I'd say this one is easily one of the best shonen anime I've seen.

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HxH 2011, in contrast, plays it a lot safer. It starts off very bland, and only really finds itself about forty episodes in. While the animation is really good for a 150-ep series and there are a few quite well-directed episodes, it lacks the 'auteur' feeling of 1999; it's mostly a straight adaptation of the manga, albeit without Togashi's very expressive art. That's not bad at all, because HxH is a great manga - HxH11 is by no means a bad anime, but it suffers a lot by comparison with Nippon Animation's version. I feel it's also noteworthy to say that it goes past where 99 left off and adapts three more arcs of the manga; one of which, the Chimera Ants arc, lasts for almost half of the anime's duration (61 episodes). This arc has proved to be controversial, but in my opinion it's the best (or at least one of the bests) part of HxH and certainly worth a watch or a read. I haven't read the arc in the manga, so I won't compare it to the anime, but definitely give it a try.

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If you're new to the franchise, I'd suggest you watch the 1999 anime until the end of the first OVA, then switch over to either the 2011 anime (at episode 58) or the manga (at chapter 120); or just read the manga all the way through, and then come back to the 1999 anime later.

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Bashing Catholicism seems indeed to be its whole schtick, so if that turns you off I don't recommend it. The writing is somewhat subpar so far, that's for sure, and I don't know if that's Kurata's or the mangaka's fault. The show is very dialogue-heavy, but the dialogue fails to be engaging a good amount of the time. It also doesn't display a deeper understanding of medieval politics, religion and mores than your average History textbook, and that's a big minus for any work in such a setting. The sex jokes are occasionally funny, but they're are getting kinda repetitive and some of them are in pretty bad taste. That's a lot of bad points but Maria is not unwatchably bad, really; it's still entertaining enough and the animation and backgrounds are above-par. Overall I wouldn't expect much from it, though.

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No questions asked, Adventure 21. Kind of obvious given that it's by Mamoru Hosoda but it's far above any other episode in the franchise in terms of direction.

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Other episodes I really like: for Adventure, 3 (Garurumon's debut, first episode more focused on the children, one of Reiko Yoshida's first scripts too), 35-39 (the finale to the Odaiba arc, great at weaving the stories of all the children), 48-49 (Mugendoramon arc, develops Taichi and Hikari in interesting ways, great final battle), 52 (Piedmon vs. HolyAngemon, better than the actual final battle!).

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For 02, 23 (Ken's past, somewhat moving) and 43-45 (Daemon Corps, one of the few good parts of the show)

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For Tamers, 1 (really involving first episode), 9 (Growlmon can't unevolve, captures Takato's character very well), 24 (kids leave for the Digital World, nice focus on the kids' relationships with their families), 25 (first Digital World episode, shows how unearthly and alien it is), 33 (Shiuchon meets Lopmon, really cute!) and 35 (Megidoramon, better than Skullgreymon himself).

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Nothing in Frontier impressed me and as far as I'm concerned the franchise ended there until Tri

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