So the creator of KonoSuba has a spin-off manga focusing on Megumin in the works, wonderfully titled Gifting this wonderful world with explosions! and it's pretty adorable. Also a second season of KonoSuba will be coming out, eventually.
And to properly talk about anime: The more I think about these 9 episodes of Mayoiga, the less I actually like it (rather neutral on it now), and that makes me sad.
Which reminds me, of how I sincerely wish MAL and other platforms like it had either a separate category for how much you personally enjoyed a show, and what you thought of its actual "quality" or whatever, since I'm feeling pretty mixed on it as a whole. Although that could get a bit cumbersome, but like, it does bug me how e.g. MAL only has you necessarily talking about The Worth Of A Show (via scoring, and that's another thing I won't even bother to discuss in this comment), and I find that to be needlessly narrow and not always that interesting. Just a little more nuance, you know?
Alright, so this article is a good summary of why good anime doesn't really make it in the market, but it seems nostalgia-tinted all the same. Good anime hasn't become rarer - it's simply become easier to make bad anime, because 1. it's become easier to make anime and 2. bad anime, like most bad things, is easier to make than good anime.
Digibro really nailed it when he discussed why good, original anime is hard to make. The anime industry is not inherently different from any media industry: it is a business like the rest of them. And a relatively new one, at that. It's safer to make things that pander to the audience because that's what sells, and at this early of a stage (recall, even manga only arose around the 40s-50s) it's not wise to play risky with your money because the losses are much bigger in this playing field.
This combined with computer technology making it easier than ever to produce anime leads to an influx of shitty cliched shows, with the real gems buried deep underneath.
He does sort of gloss over the fact that there has always been cheap and/or bad anime; it's just that a lot of it never saw export because there was no demand, or *was* brought over here but has largely been forgotten for good reason. I mean, the late '80s and early '90s are still notorious in some parts of the fandom for the fact that much of the OVA boom took the form of ultraviolent schlock and hentai (or near-hentai) and all manner of nasty things between the two.
On the other hand, I do think that the "average great show" might be less exceptional and the "average bad show" might be less technically janky and more common for those reasons, so I don't entirely disagree. However, I do think that the net effect on more experimental works (successful or otherwise) has ultimately been neutral, because the increase in quality even on a low budget makes investing in that sort of material a less risky proposition. However, if the market's in a downturn... the studios will tend to play it safe. Unless we're talking Madhouse or 4ºC or something, in which case you can just toss most of those assumptions out the window because their producers don't seem to think that way.
That was very long-winded but it seems to be summarizable (albeit with some loss of detail) by classic American animation (i.e. old Disney stuff like the famous movies, not like newer Cartoon Network stuff such as PPG or Dexter's Lab) is animated with a focus on making the animation show off the character's individuality and personality, with the animator/animation taking the role of the character's actor, while Japanese animation puts more emphasis on presenting an entire scene and making various details equally important from a visual perspective (as well as an eye for more verisimilitude in each scene it seems).
or am I missing something?
Animation isn't usually something I pay that much attention to, admittedly, though yeah, the really fluid classic American style is quite a contrast to the more limited modern Japanese style.
^^ It's about a bit more than that. The Western examples also extend to a decent amount of television animation up to a certain point; consider how Ren and Stimpy looks from an animation perspective, and contrast it with something equally garish in the Japanese tradition. To whit, it's as much about how the respective approaches reflect ideas about film-making as a whole: The theatrical approach versus the "camera-eye," as a certain late Russian theorist would have it.
the technical stuff about frames and the 12 basic principles was interesting, and something that i hadn't really considered (but having had it pointed out, it's completely obvious)
i think the situation described in the article explains, to some extent, why there seems to be such a disconnect between 'animation fans' and anime fans, which i had found puzzling, but which makes perfect sense if there's a fundamental disagreement about what the medium should aspire to be
also the comment about East Coast/West Coast animation drew my attention to something which i'd never really considered, which is that a lot of the time when people say "American animation", or even "Western animation", they really only seem to be considering studios based in California
i think those tend to be grouped with Western animation, but they do not seem to be what people have most in mind when they make general pronouncements about 'how Western animators do things', and nor does animation from e.g. New York
^^ It's about a bit more than that. The Western examples also extend to a decent amount of television animation up to a certain point; consider how Ren and Stimpy looks from an animation perspective, and contrast it with something equally garish in the Japanese tradition. To whit, it's as much about how the respective approaches reflect ideas about film-making as a whole: The theatrical approach versus the "camera-eye," as a certain late Russian theorist would have it.
I feel like I kinda understand where this is going, but I also feel like I don't.
i think those tend to be grouped with Western animation, but they do not seem to be what people have most in mind when they make general pronouncements about 'how Western animators do things', and nor does animation from e.g. New York
Generally, but the author of the article seems to be speaking a little more broadly while acknowledging this issue.
^^ It's about a bit more than that. The Western examples also extend to a decent amount of television animation up to a certain point; consider how Ren and Stimpy looks from an animation perspective, and contrast it with something equally garish in the Japanese tradition. To whit, it's as much about how the respective approaches reflect ideas about film-making as a whole: The theatrical approach versus the "camera-eye," as a certain late Russian theorist would have it.
I feel like I kinda understand where this is going, but I also feel like I don't.
In an upscale American cartoon, you're watching characters acting as you would were they on a stage; in an anime, you're looking through the eye of the camera, observing rather than spectating. It's almost like the difference between first and third person in prose.
i think those tend to be grouped with Western animation, but they do not seem to be what people have most in mind when they make general pronouncements about 'how Western animators do things', and nor does animation from e.g. New York
Generally, but the author of the article seems to be speaking a little more broadly while acknowledging this issue.
^^ It's about a bit more than that. The Western examples also extend to a decent amount of television animation up to a certain point; consider how Ren and Stimpy looks from an animation perspective, and contrast it with something equally garish in the Japanese tradition. To whit, it's as much about how the respective approaches reflect ideas about film-making as a whole: The theatrical approach versus the "camera-eye," as a certain late Russian theorist would have it.
I feel like I kinda understand where this is going, but I also feel like I don't.
In an upscale American cartoon, you're watching characters acting as you would were they on a stage; in an anime, you're looking through the eye of the camera, observing rather than spectating. It's almost like the difference between first and third person in prose.
I think I understand that comparison, but I'm still not sure what it means. Does it just mean character-centric vs. story/setting-centric? or does it mean something else, such as American animation is conceived with more creative liberty the way a stage performance requires more of that from an audience?
Though now I'm starting to wonder if there's something wrong with me conceiving of theater works by imagining them in their settings?
Sorry if ai'm kinda noobish to this; I find the article intriguing but a bit hard to decipher in terms I'm familiar with, that's all.
it doesn't *just* mean character-centric, it's more about a different ethos which resulted in the two developing in different directions, the specifics of which the article details, e.g. the characters-as-celebrities thing in American cartoons, in anime the breaking away from the sets of codified principles found in American animation
(i don't think it's really anything to do with the 'creative liberty the stage performance requires of the audience', where did you get that out of it? i'm summarizing from memory having read it last night so maybe i overlooked that part)
it doesn't *just* mean character-centric, it's more about a different ethos which resulted in the two developing in different directions, the specifics of which the article details, e.g. the characters-as-celebrities thing in American cartoons, in anime the breaking away from the sets of codified principles found in American animation
I got that much, but I feel like there's something else there that I'm missing, because I feel like I can't quite seem to make the comparison on the same basis. I see what you mean by "characters as celebrities", but I guess the contrast is "characters as just a part of the events and cinematography"?
(i don't think it's really anything to do with the 'creative liberty the stage performance requires of the audience', where did you get that out of it? i'm summarizing from memory having read it last night so maybe i overlooked that part)
That was me just reaching to try to make more sense of Sredni's comparison, sorry.
Just watching the OP for Sakamoto desu ga? has confirmed to me that it isn't my show, at least now for this season, and that's nice. Maybe the manga will be more fun, when I get to it.
I misjudged myself yet again! It's actually fairly pleasant, and while it's not AOTY material for me, there's something worth checking out for me. It's got some flash, ridiculous gags, and Sakamoto desu ga ends up portraying compassion as Cool, so that's a nice change of pace. Also he is regularly loving to birds so that's nice.
Comments
I don't mind either way
five minutes straight of fuck you
what even
weird hair dude fucked things up so incredibly, and yet so subtly
this is like a joke in... whatever healthy people watch, about office work
plus
or am I missing something?
Animation isn't usually something I pay that much attention to, admittedly, though yeah, the really fluid classic American style is quite a contrast to the more limited modern Japanese style.
i think the situation described in the article explains, to some extent, why there seems to be such a disconnect between 'animation fans' and anime fans, which i had found puzzling, but which makes perfect sense if there's a fundamental disagreement about what the medium should aspire to be
also the comment about East Coast/West Coast animation drew my attention to something which i'd never really considered, which is that a lot of the time when people say "American animation", or even "Western animation", they really only seem to be considering studios based in California
Though now I'm starting to wonder if there's something wrong with me conceiving of theater works by imagining them in their settings?
Sorry if ai'm kinda noobish to this; I find the article intriguing but a bit hard to decipher in terms I'm familiar with, that's all.
(i don't think it's really anything to do with the 'creative liberty the stage performance requires of the audience', where did you get that out of it? i'm summarizing from memory having read it last night so maybe i overlooked that part)
but this voice actor thing holy shit
A, someone has a grudge, B, hoooooly shit
though it does have Kanno Mitsuaki, the director of Neon Generation Avangaldon, as a side character
this was disturbingly easy to run into
im crey
:3
So i wasn't exactly taken with Elsa, but Rem & Ram are basically perfect.
and also, fucking dead. even in the OP
(laughing at over justice's funeral chant)