Category Archives: industry

Saying Farewell to the 90s

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You may be looking at the title of this post, and figuring that I’m somehow a decade or so off. Perhaps you assume I’ve hit my head and am living a part of my youth vicariously once more. But no, what I’m referring to is the spiritual death of the 90s, particularly when it comes to nerdish entertainment.

You have the End of Geocities approaching.

Central Park Media, one of the most significant anime companies of the 90s, while already in its death throes for years now, is now truly finished, its properties scattered to the winds of which one is named ADV.

And now there is talk of 3DRealms, creators of the Duke Nukem series, shutting down with perennial vaporware Duke Nukem Forever potentially gone for good. In other words, forever. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Ha.

Oh, and this doesn’t really count but baggy pants have had a continuous decline for a while now too.

And yes, a lot of Central Park Media’s properties were from the 80s, and Duke Nukem is a throwback to the 80s too, but they’re also very much symbols of the 90s and a time when games and anime targeted a very different audience than it does today, when Final Fantasy VII was only just beginning to attract a large audience of girls to video games and by extension them Japanese cartoons.

Oh yeah, and Mortal Kombat’s kind of in trouble too what with Midway trying to sell the property.

And sure there are 90s properties still alive, like Street Fighter 2, but SF2 always felt more timeless to me, with its wacky stereotypes and solid gameplay and the fact that it says Zangief is from the USSR.

Wait a second-

Recent times and movies and remakes have shown this point to be much more of an 80s revival than anything else, so it’s possibly that 10 years from now we’ll be seeing the nostalgic return to the good ol’ 1990s when cartoons were good and video games knew how to be fun.*

*Like every other decade which features both

Let’s Play a Game Using GONZO’s Woes

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The animation studio GONZO, unable to make up for much of its losses over the past few yaers, recently cut most of its staff and is planning on reducing their output by 50%, down to four shows a year instead of eight. As GONZO marches forward, trying to do what it can to survive (which includes big steps into streaming video online), I feel it might be fun to figure out who these remaining creative staff members are.

I haven’t done any work on it at this point, but I figure there’s only 30 of them left, down from 130. By cross-checking the names that appear at the end of all of their shows, a comprehensive list could be formed.

That said, I wonder if any cut staff members are perhaps planning on forming their own companies.

Time Warner Warned, Sane People Win

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In a previous post, I talked about how Time Warner was experimenting with tiered pricing plans, and the impact this could have on anime fans if it was approved for all Time Warner services across the United States.

Thankfully however, the plan has had such a negative reaction with consumers in test markets that it’s back to the drawing board for the folks at Time Warner. Full-out rejection. The movement to stop the tiered price plan scheme was headed by the website Stop the Cap, which even got New York’s Senator Chuck “The Deadliest Barbarian” Schumer to give Time Warner a stern talking to.

So for anime fans, the fear of having our ability to watch anime the way we want to has subsided, at least for now. This will not be the last time Time Warner tries something, but I can only hope the next time will be more sensible.  If not, this’ll probably happen again.

Examples of Anime’s Cel to Digital Conversion

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Though much less frequent these days as the anime industry has all but completely converted to using digital means to animate shows (Sazae-san I believe is an exception which still uses cels), it wasn’t so long ago that debates about the merits of cel animation vs digital animation were a common sight among certain groups of otaku. Those on the side of cels would accuse digital animation of lacking life and energy, those on the side of digital would ask the cel supporters why they liked having dust on their animation frames so much. These days, I think it’s fair to say that much like 2d vs 3d animation, or drawing with paper vs drawing with a tablet, each has its own merits.

It can be difficult to compare digital to cel in the sense that usually entire shows have been done one way or the other, but there are a few which were made during that transitional period between cel and digital, and so they too are transitional. A brief list follows, if you want to take a closer look.

1) The Big O

Season 1 was done with cel animation, the Cartoon Network-sponsored Season 2 was done entirely digitally. Some will say that the second season lacked something the first had in terms of visuals, possibly that everything feels too “clean.” Judge for yourself.

2) Galaxy Angel

Again, Season 1 was all cel while for Season 2 Broccoli decided to go digital. They also decided to cover up Forte Stollen’s cleavage but that’s a discussion for another time.

3) JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (Stardust Crusaders)

In an odd twist, the later parts of the manga were animated in the 90s while the earlier parts were animated in the 2000s. Watching this show in chronological order can be very unusual.

4) Gaogaigar Final

Now this was really meant to be a big budget OVA and it shows. Gaogaigar Final began production in 1999 (with the first episode out in 2000), and ended in 2003. Being an OVA, there was a long period between each episode, so the jump to digital is rather sudden when watched side to side. This is probably the one that best exemplifies the power of both cel and digital animation.

The Mean Among Ends

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Looking back at the anime that concluded in Winter of 2009, I have to say that I was quite satisfied with how all of the shows I watched had finished. I did not watch every anime that came out, but out of those I did, I felt there was a general trend of decent to great endings.

A funny thing about anime is that it has the reputation of giving the viewer incredibly good endings and incredibly bad ones, and often times fans can’t even agree on which endings are which. I could come up with a variety of hypotheses as to why people so vehemently disagree on the quality of certain conclusions (or lack thereof), but it really all comes down to personal experience, personal experience that says, for example, whether wrapping everything up by the end is a Good Thing, or if it would be better to leave some things open or to the imagination.

I think the mixed reputation for Anime Endings has very much to do with anime shows actually ending in the first place. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, but one of the oft-touted qualities of anime that got fans choosing it over cartoons and TV shows in their own countries was that anime tended to have endings which built upon events which occurred in previous episodes. Of course, as the general level of writing in TV shows has improved over the years there’s less of a discrepancy, but anime seems to rarely get canned outright with no warning to the writers and staff the way American TV shows do. The trend instead seems to be that if a show is getting canceled, the anime staff is told in advance so that they may try to cobble together something to finish the series off with, be it a cliffhanger ending or even the Ideon TV series’ Narrator Exposition Ending (it has to be seen to truly be experienced).

What makes a good ending? Something that says your viewing experience was worthwhile.

The False Decline

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The new anime season’s gotten off to an excellent start. From Basquash!, a rare international collaboration basketball-robot-themed anime created by Kawamori Shouji (Macross, Aquarion), and Thomas Romain (Oban Star Racers), to celebrations of anime’s history with shows such as Shin Mazinger and Before Green Gables, I’m finding this batch of Japan cartoons to be really fun and varied and imaginitive, just like last season’s. And the season before that, too. And so on.

As always, there are naysayers who will point out how once again the new shows are proof that anime has been on a decline and that it needs to capture the glory days of when anime was good. However, you might notice that the people who talk about anime’s golden days of quality are not all talking about the same period of anime, and begin to realize that anime has never hit some horrible slump no matter how much some would want you to believe.

Budget allotments may rise and fall, the economy may see dark times and periods of prosperity, and old staff may die or retire while new blood replaces them, but I feel like there are constants, such as the desire to succeed and the desire to express an idea, that make it so that there is always something to hope for with anime.

It’s one thing to be saddened that the types of shows you like are no longer being made. I for one sometimes wish that we would get more bad 80s OVAs and good 70s-style ultra-melodramatic shoujo, but I understand that this is just a preference, and I can appreciate every new anime that comes out and know that as a collective whole the anime industry does not want to fail. Yes, there are shows that are not good at all, and others that cater to niche audiences, but even within those shows and genres that are criticized as being vapid or devoid of content, progress is still being made. It might be the case that the popular shows are overshadowing the better ones, but this doesn’t stop the good shows from being good, and it certainly doesn’t mean popular show can’t be good either.

Criticism is necessary, as is discourse, as is the ability to express one’s opinions on shows and how the industry is doing. However, anime does not need doom and gloom, nor does it ever actually invite such a mindset when you look at it as a whole.

Time Warner Cable Hates Your Anime

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Recently it’s been revealed that Time Warner Cable plans to start implementing bandwidth caps, and is trying this strategy in select areas of the United States. If you go over these (very low) caps, you have to pay $1 per GB. You might be thinking that oh, all you have to do is just not use bittorrent so much, but even if we factor bittorrent AND all downloaded anime out of the equation, this is still a problem for fans because of the increase in websites dedicated to streaming anime online legally and how this bandwidth capping will affect even people who want to support the shows they love.

Think of the very likely scenario that you’re watching a show, and it doesn’t load properly, so you have to refresh the page a few times. If you’re under Time Warner’s plan, you’ve just eaten up a good portion of the bandwidth you’ve been allotted that month. Of course, anime is still a niche market, but this also affects regular non-anime viewers who simply prefer to watch their shows online and not on the tv.

What we have here is an attempt by Time Warner to pull people from their computers and put them back in front of their TVs so they can buy on-demand from Time Warner directly and make you go back to viewing long commercials (provided you don’t own a Tivo). And while I understand that Time Warner does not want to lose profit, I can’t help but see this as nothing but a defensive turtling with fingers plugged into ears, ignoring the progress that is happening to visual entertainment.

Guilty Over My Gear (or lack thereof)

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Sometimes I feel as if anime companies are trying to guilt trip me into buying their products. Now, I will say that I download anime and manga. I also buy anime and manga, but it’s usually of series I already know are good or tend to be inexpensive purchases or both. The sheer amount of series which I think are good and worth my time are far greater than my income. I still get series, but as anime companies struggle to keep up, the feeling I occasionally get from interviews and such is that I am not doing enough. It’s really uncomfortable.

This is especially true of series which I think are quite good and even somewhat affordable but simply am unable to purchase in the near future. Should I be getting it in lieu of others simply for the sake of “supporting?” If I buy a series from one licensing company but not the other, is it all right for me to be supporting the anime industry as a whole but not helping out all the companies which put the shows I like?

“She’s So Developed!”

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There’s something about a lot of anime and manga that I think lends them much of the praise and criticism they receive from people, fans or otherwise. I wouldn’t call it a unique or exclusive property of anime, but it’s something that I believe recurs more often when compared to other mediums. What I am talking about is the ability for a character to both be sexualized and objectified by its audience while still being able to move the audience with a well-developed personality.

Sheryl Nome. Arika Yumemiya. Kawashima Ami. Practically the entire female cast of Gundam 00. Every girl in Godannar. All these and more are designed on some level to explicitly titillate, but I would not call any of their characters excessively shallow or designed purely with fanservice in mind. Nor would I say that pure fanservice characters do not exist at all, but I feel like more often than not in anime and manga, blatant, in-your-face sexual attractiveness does not come at the expense of strong characterization or at the very least attempts at strong characterization. Much of the eroge and visual novel industry is built on this premise.

I do not see this happening as often in other mediums. Of course sex appeal still exists in them, but very rarely do they try to turn both dials up to max, rarely do they say, “Hey we want to basically tell the audience outright to fantasize indecently about this character while still showing the strength of their personality.” Hayden Panettiere (Claire Bennet) on Heroes is clearly meant to invoke a reaction from male viewers with her attractiveness, official assignment as “cheerleader,” her clothes, and pretty much everything about her, but there’s some attempt at keeping the character Claire’s “fanservice” somewhat implicit. The DC Comics character Power Girl, known for her super strength and her enormous chest, seems to go through constant subtle shifts in characterization as writers and artists seem unsure how to balance the development of her character with a design clearly meant to get guys’ mojos going. Fans of DC Comics run into a similar problem. In other cases, a character who is obviously sexually attractive while possessing good characterization will have their sexuality incorporated into their personality and character.

Meanwhile, many anime fans embrace this double threat. Others do not of course, and I think this causes some of the conflict as to whether or not a character is “good” or not. Does being explicitly sexual in design and presentation work with characterization, or against it? Or do they perhaps run parallel to each other? Wherever you fall, if you meet someone who thinks otherwise, there’s a chance that, because your approach to characters is so different, arguments will arise. This is probably where arguments about moe find most of their ammo, no matter which side fans are on.

As a final note, keep in mind I used female examples because that’s what gets me. Feel free to replace all examples with male equivalents if that’s your thing.

Watchmen is/isn’t Watchmen Enough

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In discussing the Watchmen movie, I  feel that I should first describe my own personal situation with Watchmen, as I’ve seen how a person’s level of exposure to the original comic can really color the way a person sees the movie. I read the comic once a year or two ago, and enjoyed it, but never really re-read it or looked at it again between then and the time I saw the Watchmen movie. So I am familiar with the story, and the characters, and I know how it all goes down, but particulars and small details and possibly even visual cues are things I don’t remember particularly well.

The strongest impressions I had of Watchmen were its pacing and its visual style. For the pacing, I noticed somewhere in the middle of watching that it did not feel like it had a typical three-act movie structure.  Does this mean the movie had poor pacing, if it didn’t follow what movies are “supposed to do?” I’m not sure myself, but what it boils down to is that this is definitely the result of converting a comic book directly into a movie, instead of just converting the general theme as they did with Iron Man for example.

As for the visual style, 300 already established Zack Snyder as having a keen sense of action and the glorification of violence, though it’s debatable whether or not it was appropriate for Watchmen. Many I think wanted Watchmen to stick close to the visual style of the comic, which is this sort of ugly and dirty look where characters are all pathetic in their own way, but I don’t know how well the audience would have reacted to such. We’ve seen how viewers and critics react negatively to the very blatant anime-esque feel of Speed Racer, often seemingly not even noticing it was supposed to be like pages from a manga but with real people and bright colors. I personally think the violence was just a tad overdone, but the striking and brutal nature of the fights while perhaps overly stylish I think were good for establishing how the characters were, even if it was different from the comic.

I enjoyed Watchmen, though even now I can’t get a firm grasp on my feelings on it. It was at the very least not boring, and half the actors were fantastic, especially Billy Crudup with his serene  Doctor Manhattan voice, Patrick Wilson playing up the middle-aged and insecure Nite Owl, and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorshach who captured the character to a tee. No money was wasted in seeing this movie.

Ultimately, what I feel people’s views, including my own, boil down to in regards to the Watchmen is how do you adapt a work like Watchmen? It does not have an extensive history like Spider-Man or Batman from which you could cherry pick while keeping a basic sense of what makes them effective stories. Watchmen is just one book, and its strength lies in how every part comes together from the writing to the art to the characters and their motivations to the little bits here and there and everywhere. Something has to be lost in the transition to the big screen, and there will be endless debates as to whether the choices were right, especially as people themselves prioritize different parts of the comic. And then you have those who didn’t read the comic at all, and then the debates as to whether that makes for a “better” viewing experience or not, to not be chained by the original.

Adaptations are a funny thing going from any medium to the other, and it can be difficult to tell what is a “smart” change that will help unfamiliar people get into a story, or what will be a “stupid” change that is robbing the work of its core and dumbing it down. I’m sure the people working on Dragonball Evolution didn’t go in intentionally sabotaging it. They probably thought that the parts of the manga and anime they changed were changed for the better. Who wants to see a weak girl who can’t fight in Bulma? Give her guns! Who wants an ugly old man playing Shang Tsung the Turtle Hermit? No appeal!

The funny thing about the Watchmen movie is that you have people now complaining that a superhero movie stuck too close to the original source. Years ago, people would have dreamed of being able to have a misgiving like that. The fact that we now have a Hollywood that can produce honestly decent superhero movies on a somewhat regular basis is testament to true change.