Category Archives: industry

There’s an Elephant in the Corner and Her Name is Haruhi

Posted on by

So they tried to sneak an ALL-NEW episode of the Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu into the season 1 re-airing, but tripped up in the end and left people anticipating its arrival. No more tricks, no more magazine covers to mock the fans. The episode’s come and gone, and fun was had by all. Of course, there’s nothing to stop them from doing this over and over with anything Suzumiya Haruhi-related, and the fans will gladly punch themselves in the stomach for it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the makers and distributors of Haruhi have a unique relationship with their fans.

We saw it with Lucky Star and its meta-self-referential humor which knocks down not just the 4th wall but keeps charging and makes a gigantic hole in the wall behind you as well. Kadokawa even licensed and created a mini-series out of the hit doujinshi series Nyoro~n Churuya-san. They are so aware of their fanbase that they might as well be standing on a pedestal dangling Haruhi merchandise and offering goods in exchange for your undying love and devotion and fan-generated content. It’s kind of like Gainax, but only a step further as Gainax has at the very least presented an air of distance, unlike Kyoto Animation which is right there in the thick of things high-fiving the audience and taking photos with them. And yes, I know my two metaphors just contradicted each other. Let’s just say that they decide to occasionally jump down from that pedestal.

And this newfangled Haruhi has something else to say:

“Enough with the DANCE openings and endings. We are laying to rest the beast we created. Move on, anime! Move on, fans! Well not too much, we still want you to do our Haruhi and Lucky Star dances.”

Will anyone heed their advice? Only time will tell.

Give it let’s say… about 16 years.

Understanding the Girls of K-On!, Instantly!

Posted on by

Now this is an interesting shot from episode 6 of K-On!

All four characters are in the same place, and just from this one still you can get a basic idea of their personalities. On the flipside, if you already know the characters then you can definitely see that this is instantly accurate.

In general, K-On! pays a good amount of attention to these sort of things, and I think it’s characteristic of Kyoto Animation in general. Some wonder why others are so fond of Kyoto Animation’s various works, from Haruhi to Lucky Star to various Key adaptations, and the answer is care. These are not just moe blob shows with no real content, they’re visually rich with a good sense of timing and comedy (or tragedy as the case may be). K-On! is no exception.

Bad Writing vs Bad Translation

Posted on by

The Eureka Seven manga was released by Bandai Entertainment alongside their anime release. For those of you who haven’t read the manga but have seen the anime, it’s a different take on things with I think less solid storytelling but still has its good points. However, the dialogue in the English language version was often very awkward-sounding. It didn’t sound like people actually talking. Lines which were supposed to be “cool” or “dramatic” ended up landing with wet thuds. I had read a bit of the manga in Japanese prior, but as I finished it up with the English release, the flow of language in it continued to bother me. I had to wonder then, was it the translation, or was the original writing simply that stilted and it was my lack of complete Japanese fluency that didn’t notice it originally?

Whenever I read a translated manga where the dialogue seems off or unusually poor, I have to wonder where the blame lies, seeing as how there are so many people and factors involved. You have the original writer, writing in their native language, coming from their own culture, and then you have the translator, adapting to their own native language, keeping their own culture and readership in mind for just how much they change or allow to remain “as is.”

Is it that the translation is bad? Or is it that the writing wasn’t so great in the first place? And if the writing is bad, do you massage it until it becomes fine and readable English prose? It sort of goes beyond the literal accuracy vs spiritual accuracy argument when you have to factor in a source which may not be regarded as the pinnacle of literary talent. And it’s something that without proper research can be difficult to detect, aside from a few obvious examples where you can just tell the translator was struggling with a very Japanese-sounding sentence. “The burning passionately me now challenges you to a duel!” That sort of thing.

And then you throw money into the mix.

Let’s say that you’re a translator (and who knows, maybe you are!), and you’re giving the script to some work with achingly bad dialogue, like say, Government Crime Investigation Agent Zaizen Jotaro, and as much as you think there are definitely better works out there, you’ve been handed this and your company’s supposed to make a profit off of it. Do you try your best to salvage the bad writing and make it presentable? Or do you show it for what it is? And if so, are you prepared for idiots like me to accuse you of doing a poor translation?

Vertical Vednesday Vhen and Vhere

Posted on by

Ed Chavez from the MangaCast is now the marketing director for the New York City-based Vertical Press, home of titles such as Black Jack and To Terra. As such, he is holding the first of what looks to be a series of “Vertical Vednesdays,” the contents of which I have no clue about. However, seeing as I’m in New York, I’ll be joining the crowd so that we may bathe in chocolate and deliver manga to orphans.

Everyone will be meeting TODAY at 6:30pm in front of Kinokuniya on 6th ave and 41st street in Manhattan. If I see you there, and I know who you are, I’ll say hi. Maybe I’ll give a firm handshake. Really, I’ll play it by ear.

“Vogiue.”

Pokemon Reflects the Changing Times

Posted on by

The Pokemon anime is making the transition to digital broadcast in the coming months in Japan, and I think it more than anything else marks the beginning of the end for standard television.

The Pokemon anime is older than some of the kids who are fans of the show in the first place. It’s seen some of the most significant changes in animation and entertainment in our time. The anime started in 1998 with cel animation and a somewhat limited budget resulting in somewhat limited animation. As Pokemon reached international success, the show clearly improved, and by the time the 2000s rolled around it was starting to go into digital animation, eventually converting over completely. Along the way there’s been multiple movies done in both cel and digital, and now we have a new era upon us of widescreen, high-definition, digitally animated, digitally broadcasted Pokemon. And that’s not even talking about the basic changes in episode styles and themes that are the result of starting with a primarily Japanese audience and moving into an international one.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Very few anime can say they’ve seen the world change around them as it has with Pokemon.

Saying Farewell to the 90s

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.