Category Archives: thought exercise

A Dance Opening is More Than Just a Dance: Haruhi 1 vs Haruhi 2

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Yamamoto “Yamakan” Yutaka tends to divide the anime community with the anime he’s worked on, especially with his reluctant reputation as the most well-known creator of “dance segments” for anime openings and endings. Think Haruhi, Lucky Star, Kannagi, and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about. Now there are those among us, including myself, who have decried the overuse of dances in anime intros and outros, criticizing them as being too much of a fad, a gimmick which other anime are trying to latch onto in order to give themselves more otaku cred.

And they’d be right, except it doesn’t disqualify any of the above-mentioned Yamakan shows from being catchy bookends to each episode. Simply put, they’re quite good and they deserve to be catchy.

What actually made me newly appreciate Yamakan’s work was the second season of Haruhi. Watching the new ED, it just did not have any of the pop or style of the first series’ infamous “Hare Hare Yukai.”

Haruhi Season 1 ED

Haruhi Season 2 ED

It’s not like I’m criticizing the level of animation in the new ED; in many ways the animation in the new ED is better than the old one. And I’m not comparing the full Hare Hare Yukai dance itself to the new ED either. However, I really feel that the new ED’s sense of timing is a little lacking compared to the original, and that it overuses certain visual elements (a problem that goes double for the new OP). It was a pretty good idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

I’m not promoting the proliferation of even more dance numbers in anime, but rather just pointing out an example in which we have to look beyond the fad and into the core of what makes an opening catchy or memorable. I think that if you gave Yamakan an opening to storyboard and told him “no dancing,” he’d still be able to create something just as visually engaging.

Reductive Production

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As of late, I’ve felt that quite a few anime creators have been taking a reductive approach to determining what is necessary for a piece of fiction to actually work. They’re examining the innards of animation as a story-telling device, and removing seemingly vital organs in order to determine whether it was a heart or if it was just the tonsils. The three most prominent examples I can think of are Miyazaki, Oshii, and Kyoto Animation.

Miyazaki asks, “Do I really need a cohesive narrative when I just want to illustrate a series of events in animation?” and then creates Ponyo.

Oshii asks, “Does my movie really need to be actively engaging when I want to make a movie entirely about tedium?” and then creates Sky Crawlers.

Kyoto Animation asks, “Can a work be considered ‘new’ if everything BUT the story itself is entirely redone?” and then creates the Endless Eight portion of Haruhi.

In every instance here, creators are using their reputations to put surprisingly experimental animations in a public setting for mass consumption. In the case of Oshii and Miyazaki, it’s in the theater, and for Kyoto Animation it’s on TV in the form of one of the most popular anime in recent years. And with these experiments, they are asking a rather weighty question: what exactly is fiction? They’re asking themselves, asking the audience, asking the industry, and depending on the answer they receive, we may see more works like this or less.

How do you feel about this? Should creators be using such public settings to experiment to such an extent?

I feel like in every instance here, creators are using their reputations to put surprisingly experimental animations in a public setting for mass consumption. In the case of Oshii and Miyazaki, it’s in the theater, and for Kyoto Animation it’s on TV in the form of one of the most popular anime in recent years.

Aim for the Ace Anime Adaptations Analysis

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The year was 1973, and a young anime studio named Madhouse began work on its first big series, an adaptation of a popular tennis manga called Ace o Nerae! or Aim for the Ace! as it translates in English. Running 26 episodes, it was directed by Dezaki Osamu and had character designs by Sugino Akio, a duo that continues to work together even to this day, including Rose of Versailles, the 90s Black Jack OVAs, and Space Adventure Cobra. They also worked together on every other anime adaptation of Aim for the Ace!

With that in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to just put the openings of each of the Ace series next to each other, if only to see how time, money, and experience have affected the same series over the course of two decades.

1973’s Ace o Nerae!

1978s Shin Ace o Nerae!

1988’s Ace o Nerae 2!

It might be a little unfair to compare openings, but I feel that doing so is a good indicator for seeing how an anime series wishes to be first seen. When you look at the 1973 opening vs the 1978 opening though, you can already see a world of difference. Character designs in Shin Ace are cleaner and more consistent, perhaps at the expense of some of the wild and untamed artwork that characterizes the original. Everything is also much-better animated, with fewer visible shortcuts being taken. Fast forward to 1988 and of course you can see a huge change, brought on by overall progress in anime, an OVA-level budget and changing visual trends in anime (and in real-world fashion). Keep in mind though that unlike, say, Cutie Honey, where each incarnation is done by a different studio and different people at the helm, Ace 2 has the same core team as the first Ace, and what you’re seeing here is direct evidence of how they changed over the course of 15 years.

I think the biggest difference between the original and the later series is that by the time of Shin Ace, the anime is actively trying to portray human figures in a three-dimensional space, and Ace 2 even moreso. If you look at the original TV series, even in the opening it never wants to tell you exactly where the characters are in any given moment. It feels closer to a manga brought to life, for better or worse. In that regard, I feel that the original has a certain charm that the others lack, the kind of appeal that comes from seeing just how much people could do with so little.

Really though, I just think they should have kept the hair from the first TV series throughout each incarnation. That includes the live-action series from a few years ago.

“Liking Less” vs “Disliking”

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While not something I see as often as of late, I remember for a while noticing how people’s tastes in anime shift, particularly in their transition from new fan to fairly hardcore. What may sometimes accompany this transition is a desire to do away with the past and to deny how one used to be, specifically by ridiculing one’s former self for liking certain specific anime titles. The most common form of this is, “I used to like Anime X, but now I like Anime Y, and so Anime X sucks.” It’s that mindset I want to specifically address.

Obviously people’s tastes change over time, and the things you may have been in love with at one point may not hold your fancy years down the line. This applies to many things beyond anime, from food to relationships. I just find it funny though that people, in this case anime fans, would be so quick to divorce themselves from their pasts, to say that liking certain titles is not something they should be doing once they’ve discovered finer entertainment. Again, I’m not saying you can’t end up disliking something you used to like, but that to do so actively only leads to an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.

To this end, I was considering the life of a manga artist. Manga artists in general get better over time. Their art and their ability to tell a story via visuals improve or at the very least might change. Sometimes the shift is so subtle that you don’t notice how different the artwork’s become until you compare Volume 1 with Volume 20. Now let’s say a person fell in love with a manga at Volume 1 and kept reading throughout, and arrived at Volume 20 and then looked at the artwork in both. To his surprise, Volume 20 looks much, much better and by comparison Volume 1 looks unrefined, perhaps almost amateurish.

Then let’s say the fan, having been exposed to the quality of Volume 20, went and read another manga with art on the level of Volume 1, he would reject it because his tastes have become “better.” Which is all well and good, but what happens when he reaches the superior artwork of Volume 40? Or Volume 60? Does Volume 20 no longer meet his or her criteria? When will this ever end?

I’d like to believe that there’s a distinct difference between liking something less and disliking it altogether, but I know that people’s emotions, even my own, are not so easy to bottle and tame and act as if everything and everyone can get along. Even one of my heroes, Megaman creator Inafune Keiji, said that if one of his artists today brought artwork on the level of what he himself drew for Megaman 1, Inafune would call it terrible and reject it immediately. That’s the way it goes.

Slap a Teenager: Maturation of the Creative Process

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawing lately, and it’s gotten me thinking about the whole creative process, and the influence of one’s own age.

Recently, an old friend of mine found material for a video game we were creating back in elementary school. It had everything kids (or rather, we specifically) wanted in video games: tons of levels, tons of bosses, tons of neat gadgets and enemies. It was a game we’d spend time on nearly every day during lunch, thinking up new ideas for it. Honestly, looking at the stuff we came up with, I’m a little jealous of what we created back then. These were the unfettered mindsets of a pair of 10 year olds, where anything was possible as long as it made video game sense, and back then video game sense wasn’t very sensible.

Then one day something happened: we started to become teenagers. Now, when we looked back at our materials, everything seemed so kiddy. We thought, if our game was to go anywhere, we’d have to update it to make sure it didn’t look like the game was only for kids! Keep in mind we were like 13 or 14, and of course the hilarity of kids trying to make a game not for kids practically writes itself. This was the age of people accusing Nintendo of not appealing to the older demographics enough, and when Rare decided to revamp Jet Force Gemini and slap a few extra years onto its characters. So we made the characters cooler and tougher. We tried to give the bosses more realistic proportions, closer to Dragon Ball Z than Dragons of Blue Land. It wasn’t exactly 90s extreme, but it was something close to it.

Eventually high school came and we worked on it less and less until it dropped off entirely until more recently when we began to uncover our old materials. Now of course, looking at the things we came up with early on, and then how we tried to change it as we got older, I sort of want to slap my teenage self for accidentally trying to ruin a good thing. Not that I think my ideas as a teenager were all that bad either, but in this one case that teenage mentality was trouble.

I truly think that what we were thinking up at the lunch table back then could still appeal to kids today, though we’d have to apply a more cohesive design philosophy to everything. The goal would shift from trying to replace the products of our childish maginations with something more “mature,” to trying to refining or childhood imaginations and keeping it from exploding out the sides.

Then I hear people say, “Why do you watch an anime that’s meant for KIDS?” and the answer is obvious.

I Am/Am Not an Otaku: The Reverse Thieves’ Otaku Diaries and the Definition of Otaku

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After an initial introduction of the demographics of those who chose to partake in the Otaku Diaries, the Reverse Thieves have released the second part of their study. This time around, the discussion centers around the word “otaku” and what it means to anime fans.

A large number of their results showed that many anime fans consider the word “otaku” to have negative connotations and may even be upset if someone referred to them as an otaku. It is, in other words, an insult. Sometimes, the negative connotations come from wanting to distance oneself from the “other” anime fans, e.g. socially inept naruto fans, and other times they stem from wanting to use the word as the Japanese use it. Of course, I can’t be the only one to see the irony in a person denying that they’re an otaku while also championing the true, JAPANESE definition of the word, or at least their interpretation of the Japanese definition.

I remember years ago when I was part of a Pokemon community on the internet (the Team Rocket Headquarters if you want to know), where one of the site owners got very upset whenever someone called him an otaku, insisting that the term was in reality extremely derogatory and that it should only be used for the most extreme cases of anime fandom. It was around that time that I began developing my hypothesis on the Path of  Otaku Self-Acceptance, or the path the typical anime fan takes when confronted with the term “otaku.”

Phase 1) I Want to Be an Otaku!

This phase is usually the first one that new anime fans feel. Anime is fresh and exciting, and they want to see more and more of it. They consider the status of “otaku” to be a goal to strive for. However, if they start to sour towards the anime community they may enter…

Phase 2) Don’t Call Me an Otaku!

This is the point at which you find many of the subjects of the Otaku Diaries, as well as many anime fans you know. Sometimes they genuinely are just not that into anime and don’t want to be considered hardcore fans, but often times you see that many of the people who fall into this category are simply in denial. They hide their anime fandom from others as hard as they can, and they will put on airs so that no one can discover their terrible, terrible secret. Eventually, some of them pretend not to be otaku so hard that they permanently make the switch. Others, however, may grow tired of the charade and come to acceptance. That is what leads them to…

Phase 3) I am an Otaku

This is the point at which people realize that “Otaku” is just a descriptor. It is no more a self-inherent badge of shame or badge of pride than any other part of a person’s life, like saying “I am short” or “I work in construction.” It’s where I hope to see more anime fans, and I believe it’s the key to becoming true to oneself, provided you actually are an otaku.

I am an Otaku. Are you?

The Trickiness of Taste

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Discussing artistic taste is always a mine field no matter the subject, and anime and manga are no exception. People can have very different backgrounds, mindsets, and approaches to anime and manga, and when there is a rift separating two people on many levels, misunderstandings occur. When you have a common point of interest such as anime, people may feel united by that common interest only to realize (or not realize) that it is very possible for people to enjoy anime differently.

That is not to say that arguments about such topics are meaningless, even on the internet as some might claim. It is an opportunity to listen to another point of view and to learn from it with an open mind. Now, an open mind doesn’t mean that you accept everything and let your opinion be bent by every little comment by a strong-voiced individual, but what it does mean is that you engage the other person’s opinion and if they’re wrong you show why you feel they’re wrong without having it descend into a shouting match.

I think one of the main reasons internet arguments are so prone to going nowhere is that they are not based on debate, but rather pride. “I am right, you are wrong.” This happens so much that it ended up creating a countermeasure, “We’re all right, so let’s stop arguing.” One is a statement which bolsters pride, the other is a statement that preserves pride. Neither is correct, but neither is wrong, and what I feel to be the real key to enjoying art, enjoying anime and manga, is to never stand at the absolutes. You can stand very close to them, but once you arrive at an absolute, no matter how right it feels, you’ve now cut yourself off from growth and change.

I hope that more and more people will desire internet debate about their hobbies not to assert their sense of righteousness but to learn and to inform. If you liked this post, I would also recommend reading my post on the Geek Logical Fallacy, which warns of the dangers of applying a “logical” mind to everything in life.

What Could Afro Samurai’s Emmy Nomination Mean For GONZO?

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In case you haven’t heard, the GONZO-produced, Samuel L. Jackson-backed made-for-tv animated movie, Afro Samurai: Resurrection, has been nominated for an Emmy in the category of “Outstanding Animated Program (for programming one hour or more.” Granted, there isn’t a lot of competition in the first place (the Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends movie is the only other show nominated) so Afro Samurai may have simply gotten in by default, but that doesn’t make the MARKETING potential Afro Samurai and by extension GONZO may have now any less significant. After all, the legendary 100% viewership of Goldorak (Grendizer) in France had much to do with how boring the rest of TV was at that time. Even if it doesn’t win, it can still plaster EMMY-NOMINATED on the cover and GONZO will forever have something of official merit.

GONZO, as you might know, is in dire straits at the moment, having cut its staff by about 70% and being removed from the commander’s chair for the mahjong anime Saki. I don’t think GONZO is quite dead though, and I believe that if they utilize this sort of thing correctly they can gain sponsorship from companies they didn’t have previously, companies you might not even expect to sponsor anime.

If I had it my way, I’d have GONZO produce an animated soap opera for the daytime Emmys. Who the hell is going to compete with that?

Ruminations on Harem Anime, Part 1: Responsibility

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I’ve been doing some thinking about the concept and tropes of harem anime recently. Here is Part 1 out of I don’t know how many parts but expect at least one more. Today’s topic is the concept of responsibility in harem anime.

The basic concept of a harem show is that it involves one guy surrounded by multiple gorgeous women who are all either vying for his affection, or could be conceived as such. As such, it tends to be a rather divisive genre among fans. Some of the more controversial topics in anime spring to mind, such as sexualization of anime characters, arguments about whether or not harem shows hurt or help anime, what makes a “good” anime character, or whether or not the fans of such shows are just perverts with no taste. One common criticism of harem anime is that they tend to feature a do-nothing protagonist who sits around and lets his gorgeous harem girls sexually tease and prompt him without himself applying any sort of initiative. However, what I have come to realize is that harem anime, with very few exceptions, requires a certain level of passivity from its male protagonist, without which the “harem” concept would weaken and crumble.

The “Arms’ Length Harem” as I have dubbed it is a simple concept. It is where, as stated before, a male protagonist in a harem anime never actively makes a move on any of the girls until perhaps the very end when the story is nearing its conclusion. The reason for its existence is also quite simple: as long as the protagonist is at “arms’ length,” he is absolved of responsibility. What this means is that as long as the male protagonist does not make an active effort to start a relationship with a female character, he is in a sense still “innocent” and can maintain the harem illusion. It doesn’t matter how many times he accidentally walks in on girls taking a bath or how many times their breasts fall on his face because he is not the initiator and thus it is never actually his fault.

As soon as he makes a move, he must take responsibility, and if he tries to maintain the harem while also in a relationship with a girl, he loses the support of the male viewers who want the benefits of being considered a good and pure man at heart who is surrounded by beautiful women who tend to be in various states of undress at any given moment. The male protagonist cannot be an uncaring, unfeeling womanizer if he wishes to keep the support of the men viewing him.

Even in erotic games and dating sims, this sense of innocence and responsibility is maintained. In games where you pursue only one girl per story path, while you can sleep with all of them eventually, in the specific plotline the player is pursuing there is only one “true” girl. In games where you have sex with multiple partners, sometimes simultaneously, the girls are usually the ones to initiate. And in games where the hero is actively trying to have sex with multiple women, at the very least this is displayed front and center and the main character is given a predatory personality to match his actions, i.e. making it not an Arms’ Length Harem at all.

An interesting case study is Itou Makoto from the School Days anime, who is a male harem protagonist who goes against this “unwritten” rule of harem protagonists. Makoto starts off just like any other harem protagonist, being a nice if innocuous guy who finds himself in a situation where multiple girls are interested in him. However, unlike most protagonists, Makoto gains an extreme amount of confidence from the knowledge that girls can find him attractive, and it transforms his personality from a caring individual to a player who manipulates girls so he can sleep with them. As one might expect, Makoto does not have many fans in the anime community beyond those whose who like him in an ironic sense. However, it’s not just his sleeping with multiple women that garners him hatred, it’s the way in which he does it, as well as how his sense of responsibility is entirely lacking.

Makoto tries to do exactly what I said is death for the male harem protagonist: he attempts to maintain the harem while actively pursuing girls, but on top of that he tries to act as if  he is still an innocent protagonist along the lines of Negi Springfield from Negima. It is Makoto’s two-faced dichotomy and his active deception of the girls he pursues that makes him such an unlikable character.

Makoto’s situation is different from heroes who sleep with multiple women such as Golgo 13 or even Minase from Bible Black because they do not hide this facet of their personality. Characters such as those are sexual dynamos who act as they truly are and accept responsibility for their actions, something Makoto never manages to do.

Makoto eventually finds his extensive harem crumbling, with girls blocking his phone number and refusing all contact. In this situation, where Makoto basically manipulated countless girls into having sex with him by being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, h reacts poorly to the sudden change in his daily life, from constant sex to no sex whatsoever. However, the thoughts that spring to Makoto’s mind are all along the lines of, “Why did this happen to me?” and “I don’t deserve this!” With this mindset, where no matter what he does or which people he hurts he still considers himself the “nice guy,” he completely alienates the male viewers who might be supporting him otherwise.

No matter how the real world is, an Arms’ Length Harem must have a male protagonist who is essentially pure of heart, even if his libido rages with the power of a million exploding suns. While the girls are important for any harem, it is actually the main character that is necessary in order to keep the harem in its ideal state. What can be said about this mindset, then? Is it just a symptom of otaku being unable to handle women in real life? I would not simply say “yes” to that. What I think is important in this subject is that there are certain contradictions which cannot be reconciled because they violate how the target male viewer perceives himself and others. This viewer, whether he truly exists or not or is simply a fabricated “ideal viewer” by the show itself, sees himself as a person who would not betray his responsibilities. However, if responsibility can be avoided then there is no need to take it.

Another Review Grading System

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Anime World Order every so often will talk about how Letter and Star-based grading systems are a waste and don’t explain anything. For example, what’s the difference between a 4 star and a 5 star in animation quality? How can a show have like C’s in multiple categories but end up with an A rating overall? It’s generally better to just write something out, but what if you really don’t want to? In that case, let me propose some ideas for new grading systems.

1) The Descriptive Letter Grade System

I want to ask you, why should A be considered better than B? What if, instead of having your letter grades be ranked, you instead had letter grades which actually represent aspects of the anime beyond saying “this is good” or “this is bad?” What if, for example, if we were grading animation quality, A stood for high-budget high-quality animation, while R stood for “good use of a low budget” and Y stood for “often inconsistent?” You could have multiple letter grades per category, or you could choose the one that stands out the most. If everyone can agree on what all the letters mean for every category, we can then have a consistent rating system that anyone can use (provided they learn the system)!

2) Elaborate Star Ratings

The problem with star ratings or such is that they tend to be used in the most general sense. 5 stars for story, 3 stars for music, who is to say just what consistutes a 5-star story, aside from Nagano Mamoru? What if, then, stars were a quantitative rating given out for more specific categories, ones that can be seen clearly, where a 1-star is not inherently worse than a 5-star?

Possible categories:

Cast Size
Plot Consistency
Plot Arc Size
Recurring Villains
Amount of Stock Footage
Melodrama

These are not objective ratings now, but no review is every objective. Instead, what these categories tell you is that if you start watching the shows, these are things you might expect. Want to watch a show with a ridiculous-size cast? Go for a 5-star Cast Size show. Prefer something more episodic? Go for a 1-star Plot Arc Size show. The ratings will not tell you that show A is better than show B, but rather, just what A and B have that differentiate one from the other in a way which may or may not indicate that A is better than B.

Conclusion
On second thought, just write out your damn reviews.