Category Archives: thought exercise

The Target Audience is Me

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Recently when in the manga section of a bookstore, be it Japanese or English, I find myself gravitating towards the seinen series. “This isn’t so unusual,” I think to myself, seeing as I am exactly in the target age for seinen, but what alarms me is that I seem to be checking out shounen and shoujo less than I used to. I don’t think this has much to do with my tastes in manga changing; many shounen and perhaps many more shoujo titles still rank as among my absolute favorites. So what’s the deal?

I considered that perhaps what’s holding me back is a lack of desire to start new series, especially long ones. Once I buy a first volume, there tends to be a strong desire to keep getting them if only to quench the completionist fire within me. The fact that my most recent truly blind purchase was La Sommelière Volume 1 may be what gets me to approach the seinen section in Kinokuniya, which inevitably leads me to the Monthly Afternoon titles situated nearby. I have a fondness for Afternoon, as it’s where Genshiken was published.

Shounen series, especially successful ones, tend to go on for very long, riding their success as hard as possible, and understandably so. Shoujo series can be similar, though they tend not to be as crazy long as the most popular shounen series. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m ultimately a guy and while I enjoy shoujo immensely it might be always as a guy. Who has the hots for Oscar.

Dragon Ball Kai and the “Sacred Original”

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Dragon Ball Kai, if you haven’t heard, is the newly redone, newly voiced, high-definition re-airing of the Dragon Ball Z anime starting April 5, 2009. And this time, according to Toei, they’re going to cut out the filler to make it more like the original manga.

There’s a certain level of importance placed on the “original” in anime, manga, and of course art and entertainment in general. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” discussed the changes mass production could influence upon art and the concept and authenticity of an “original.”Star Wars is already a massed-produced work, but fans cry foul whenever George Lucas decides to revise the original trilogy, whether it’s deciding who shot who first, who appears in the sky as a ghost, or whether the Death Star should meet its end with many tiny explosions or one giant shock wave. Fans will argue that the plastic, rubbery look and the decisions made then, seen perhaps as weaknesses by some, are actually strengths of the movie. Originals, for better or worse, are often considered to be “sacred.” But what does one consider the “original?”

I bet a lot of people are fine with editing down Dragon Ball Z to remove a lot of the filler which bogged down the pacing of the series, and I am among them. In one sense, it is not the “original” because there’s a manga to base it on, a vision of what should have been. But what if Dragon Ball Kai was not a revision of Dragon Ball Z but the entire original manga retraced and made to look better than ever with “unnecessary filler” cut out? We know that Toriyama originally wanted to end the series at multiple junctures: the defeat of Piccolo, Jr. at the Tenkaichi Budokai; the death of Freeza; the death of Cell. Is the original his intended plan which never was carried out due to Shounen Jump editors wanting to keep making money hand over fist? If so, then surely the manga would have a huge chunk of its content cut out.

Now I’m not arguing against the concept of Dragon Ball Kai and its desire to tighten up the anime and remove the excess. I’ve established myself as being in support of the idea. However, when you sit down and try to consider what the “original” could be, it opens up a whole can of worms.

Today’s homework assignment is that I want you to think over the following two things. First, is the idea that the original creator(s) may not necessarily know what’s best for his own story, and that external factors which seem like limitations may sometimes produce better results (see First Gundam). Second, is taking the concept of “cutting out the boring and unncessary” parts and comparing it to dubbing practices of the 80s and 90s.

Have fun, though. That’s what’s most important.

Emotional Investment: An Introspective Un-Rant

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Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Maybe from even your own mouth.

“Yeah the show seemed like it was well done, but I didn’t feel emotionally invested in it.”

Emotional investment, by nature of the words used in it, should be and is always a very personal thing, and yet the entertainment we read is supposed to do this for not just one person but many people.

This isn’t a topic that is terribly complex, the idea that people will enjoy shows that resonate with them better, but it always feels like such a dangerous thing to say that a show lacks that emotional connection. Is it your fault? Is it the fault of the show? Is it a fault at all? If not, how can any production compensate for something like this? Is this why in the end, art is art and science is science, and while there’s plenty of overlap some things are “just because?”

And then you have the other side, where people feel emotionally invested in a story. The setting, the characters, something about this piece of fiction you’re looking at strikes a chord deep down inside of you and you wonder how anyone could not like it. So when that story is attacked or trivialized by another, it feels like a personal slight, and saying that a show was unable to pull you in emotionally can sometimes sound like the ultimate insult to a show even if it isn’t meant to be.

There’s no real conclusion to this, no grand point I’m trying to make, I’m just using this post to collect my thoughts and record them as they are.

And Then Emperor Palpatine Fell Into an Explanation

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The other day I went to see the movie Fanboys, about a group of Star Wars fan one year before the release of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. I won’t say much about the movie itself except that I thought it was hilarious, but it reminded me that there’s a lot of Star Wars “lore” out there. I had borrowed a Star Wars character guide from a friend long ago, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, so I decided to hop online and take a look at the compiled information on the universe that is Star Wars. Upon reading I began to feel this sense of dread.

One of the very important lessons then Western Art took from Eastern Art was the concept of negative space, that leaving spaces blank can be just as effective a tool as filling in every detail. Essentially, it means less can be more. When applied to storytelling, it means that not every detail has to be explained and that in many cases the more explanation that arises the less effective the storytelling becomes. This is what I saw with the information on the  Star Wars Universe. I saw unnecessary explanation after unnecessary explanation, as if making sense of the world and filling in the gaps is far more important than maintaining the feel of the story and characters.

The idea of fans filling in the gaps is not something that’s necessarily bad. In fact many times I consider it to be a good thing as I feel it’s a very important foundation of fandom, whether it’s imagining stories in between major events, inventing new characters, or even fleshing out one-dimensional characters. One can argue that having these complex technical explanations is one type of fan’s way of exploring the universe of the story, but once it reaches a point where it becomes some kind of hybrid canon/fanon that influences or restructures the original story, I can’t help but feel that it is done at the detriment of core vital elements of a story. Obi-Wan and Yoda learned how to maintain their identity in the Force. Why does this need an explanation? Obi-Wan is a magical old man, and Yoda is an even more magical and even older man. There, that’s your explanation.

I think one of the many reasons why I like anime so much is that it seems to understand this idea of effectively using the gaps in storytelling. It’s not just about fueling imagination so that we the viewer may fill in the blanks, but using that sense of ambiguity to excite and drive us forward. Gurren-Lagann is an excellent example, because the characters utilize this vague, ill-defined power to achieve victory after victory. They are literally powered by a lack of common sense that keeps them from questioning if anything they’re doing is truly possible. “Do the impossible, see the invisible,” as the saying goes. One does not need to explain what doing the impossible entails or how it works other than that it was driven by the hero’s desire and the support of his friends.

A more apt comparison might be Star Wars and Gundam especially given the way they’ve influenced each other, but for all of the detailed explanations and added material that has been placed into the Gundam Universe, I feel that Gundam has handled it far better than Star Wars. What even its most hardcore fans ultimately enjoy appears to be more the story and the characters and the way great tales are told, rather than little details.

Wasn’t Star Wars once in its own in a way similar to Gurren-Lagann? There was the Force as a vaguely defined aspect of the universe with vaguely defined skill sets available to its users. What’s the difference between a normal man and a Jedi? That one is a Jedi and one is a man.

What to Do Against the Superior Race?

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Anime and manga that focus on competition often have a far-away goal for their protagonists, and in many cases that final obstacle is something or someone foreign to Japan. In American football, it’s African-Americans. In Go it’s Koreans. And in multiple instances of boxing, it’s  guys from Latin American countries.

Takamura in Ippo and Yamato Takeru in Eyeshield 21 are both said to be unusually large for Japanese men, as if to use the exception to make the rule. According to Hikaru no Go, Go is treated much more seriously in Korea than Japan. Like in the case of Starcraft, Korea apparently has a more robust infrastructure which allows it to create superior players. While not always strictly a matter of genetics, these masters are often portrayed as having some sort of amazing inherent advantage over their Japanese counterparts. The Japanese characters often have to either realize their disadvantage or use something inherently “Japanese” in them to try and make up for the skill gap, though keep in mind again that Japanese-ness is usually not genetic but rather a learned trait from growing up in Japanese society. At times the Japanese X-Factor will be family, friends, perseverence, hard work, all things that probably anyone Japanese or otherwise can relate to, though they seem to have a strong place in Asian cultures in general.

Rooting for the underdog is something that’s been spoken about by countless people since long before any of us were born, and I think that certainly plays a factor, but I get the feeling that this specific method of portrayal of an underdog while not strictly Japanese is also something that is not surprisingly a product of Japanese entertainment, especially Japanese entertainment geared towards boys. While I do not think Japan as a society enjoys being the victim, would it be a stretch to say that Japan has wanted these stories since Commodore Perry arrived and perhaps even before?

Move Over, Music

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There was a time when I would download any and every anime song I could find, and scour P2P programs to find the most obscure songs possible, but at some point I fell off that wagon. Maybe it was that eventually songs became so easy to find that downloading individual songs made way for downloading entire soundtracks, and the fear that music would eat up hard drive space left me hesitant to just grab them all willy-nilly.

What ended up happening was that I felt there were giant holes in my song collection, and after a few years of this I decided yesterday that I should start to make up for it. So there I went getting songs old and new, trying to make up for lost time, and feeling out of place with people who download music like they drink water and don’t really have to think about it. It’s also then that I noticed something: silence. The funny thing about this silence is that once upon a time I’d have anime music playing whenever I was at the computer. It was a constant of my internet and anime experience, with Hayashibara Megumi never far away in the song list. What changed? It can’t be that I got tired of it, as I bring my mp3 player everywhere I go. At some point though, j-pop made way for the click-clacking of the keyboard. It sort of reminds me of a change I went through in regards to what I liked to draw on. Before college, I hated using sketchbooks but in college it became all that I used to the point that I even took class notes in sketchbooks.

I’m sure it’s all tied together. Most likely, the more new music I wanted to get, the more music I had, and thus the more I had to simply listen to, but I feel like I can’t really explain why the change occurred.

Fear, Hesitation, and the Creative Process

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I was recently overcome with the desire to start drawing a multi-page comic, something I haven’t really done in three years. It’s a little too early to talk about what the comic is about specifically, especially because the concepts and characters are still swimming around in my head and anything and everything is subject to change.

What I want to talk about is fear. It’s a specific kind of fear, and I don’t know to what extent it applies to others. At the beginning of the creative process, I get an idea, and occasionally it turns out to be a good one. But then fear sets in. What this fear says is, “I’m not good enough to do this. I shouldn’t be doing this at all. I should improve my basic skills before I even consider doing something.” Improving one’s skills separate from the project at hand is not something I believe as necessary, but it’s in that moment of fear and hesitation that it seems to resonate and overwhelm other thoughts.

Ultimately, it comes down to the (unreasonable) idea that the mistakes might tarnish the eternal soul of the creative work. If I release it to the wild that consists of the eyes of others, calling it a final product, and it’s not good enough, then there won’t be a second chance. That’s the sort of thinking that is so threatening to the life of a project. It really is dangerous thinking, too. This poison concocted from the fear of consequence, fear of failure, and fear of the unknown can paralyze body and spirit, and make any goal seem unattainable. Again, it’s not something that holds up when I’m able to distance myself, but when caught up in the middle it can take a toll on my confidence if only for the briefest of moments.

I tend to eventually overcome these mental roadblocks, though the more I think about it, the more I see that this doesn’t only apply to the creative process. There are many aspects of life where fear is the ball and hesitation is the chain, and I’ve yet to unshackle. Maybe if I can think of it this way, I can move forward.

Otacrates

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Based on a number of factors, from columns in anime magazines to forum posts, from knowing people both online to talking offline, I realize that when it comes to understand the larger trends at work in something we might call “anime fandom,” all I know is that I know nothing.

There may have been a time when those willing to discuss anime are the ones driving the industry, but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. That’s just how it is: the casual will always outnumber the hardcore, and there’s nothing wrong with this. I have a relative who reads manga and watches anime with some frequency, but I doubt I would ever see him discuss it on a forum or go to an anime chatroom. When you go to a con, what you’re seeing are those who are dedicated enough to make the trip, and it’s not even necessarily a dedication to anime so much as it is to the trip and the event itself.

To understand what anime fandom as a whole is like is probably the key to success for anime companies in the US, so I’m not going to even pretend to answer when many others with more information have probably tried. This is more a personal reminder that as much as I study and discuss and enjoy anime and its fandom in one or two or even a thousand directions, there’s still infinite angles.

Inconsistency in Iconographic Character Design and the Aging Audience Mind

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It was winter, around New Year’s one year when the Naruto anime in Japan aired an episode that acted as a set up to the long-anticipated Sasuke vs Gaara fight in the Chuunin exams. During this episode the characters were all terribly off-model, and not just for a few frames as the internet so likes to point out, but throughout the entire show. Taking a gander at the ending credits, it was very clear that this was some animation studio’s E team working on it. It was New Year’s after all and the New Year is a big deal in both Japan and Korea.

As a college-age student, I was not the primary audience for Naruto, as much as all college-age fans of Naruto might like to believe. Now, thinking back to my own childhood and knowing some of the things I’ve learned about animation, I have to wonder if I would have been so keen to pick up on inconsistency in character design, and if it would have mattered to me at all.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to watch many episodes of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the one that began in the 80s and ran for close to a decade, and it was then that I realized that for the Shredder, nothing was ever actually consistent. There was the helmet, the claws, the cape, the overall outfit, but from one shot to the next the thickness and curvature of the helmet would change, the arm guards would just do whatever, and it looked like each scene was drawn by a different person. And they probably were! But I didn’t really notice, or at least not that I can recall. I remember sometimes the Shredder looking more awesome than other times, but that’s about it.

World Events licensed the Japanese robot anime King of Beasts Golion and Space Musketeer Bismarck, and transformed them into Voltron: Defender of the Universe and Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs respectively. Both shows were popular enough with kids that they ended up creating extra episodes from scratch. Without the guiding hand of the original Japanese companies though, the shows just did not end up looking the same.

If you look at a lot of cartoons animated in Japan in the 80s for American audiences, such as Bionic Six or Galaxy Rangers, many of the openings are much more visually impressive than the actual episodes. Of course, openings being superior in quality to the show they precede should not be unfamiliar territory to anime fans.

Decades before Voltron and Bionic Six, the anime 8-Man was brought to America as 8th Man. At Otakon 2008, Mike Toole in his panel “Dubs That Time Forgot” pointed out that in the custom American intro for 8th Man, the character design used for the titular character didn’t even resemble the original Japanese design beyond a basic level.

Now, I watched both Voltron and Saber Rider as a kid but as I was very young at the time I barely remember anything about them, aside from the fact that smaller robots combining into a single mighty robot was the best idea ever (see also: Transformers, Gobots). Did I catch any of these extra episodes? I really don’t know. As for 8th Man, I wasn’t even born yet. But somehow I don’t think most kids were angry that the show tried to trick them into believing two different designs were the same character.

Kids need only a few iconic things to identify the character. With Shredder, it’s a mean-looking metal helmet ninja guy (something you can also see in the more recent TV series). With Voltron, it’s some people in color-coded outfits and a robot with lion heads for limbs and a sword that blazes. With 8th Man it’s a giant 8 on his chest.

I’m not asking whether companies right or wrong to rely on these aspects and hoping kids wouldn’t notice the difference, or whether or not they insult children’s intelligence by doing so. And I am not defending inconsistency in animation or saying that it is totally okay to just forget what your own characters look like. At the end of the day, Yashigani doesn’t help anyone, and there are times when characters are so off-model that they break even the important iconic features of a character. What I am asking instead is, what is and should be prioritized when it comes to presenting a character to children? And then, how does this affect media for older people that grows out of these preconceptions?

American superhero comics were once the domain of children, and it’s there that you see the strength of symbols and in characters. An S on the chest, a blue outfit with red cape, and a confident stance, and you’ve got Superman. Individual artist differences don’t matter as much as getting the basics of Kal-El down. But then over the years superhero comics became more and more geared towards adult readers, as they are today. Since then, the practice of having different artists and writers on the same character has become a staple of the genre, but now with this older readership this practice is celebrated. It is touted as one of the unique features of comics, where for better or for worse an Alan Moore Swamp Thing-level revamp can be conceived and then taken away months later, but with the record that the same character has many different approaches both in terms of story and subtle visual changes.

And now we have anime which, like comics, started off in the realm of children and grew to encompass adults, adults who were once those very same children. And then when watching anime for at least a certain subset of adults (otaku) became more commonplace, anime started gearing towards them to a certain degree, and with every passing year we see more of this. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics talks about how he considers of the great strengths of manga to be its use of characters as iconography, which I’m extending towards anime as well. But how has icon usage in character design changed if at all in this journey towards adulthood?  One of the long-standing strengths of anime I feel is the way in which it provides material for adults to enjoy even within children’s shows. Is more consciously consistent (or intentionally inconsistent) character design a higher necessity when the target audience is older? Is an older audience what’s needed to truly appreciate a Shinbo-style unorthodox approach to a show? These questions don’t necessarily need answering, but I feel they may lead to finding out parts of the truth about how anime and its audience interact.

The Viewing Format of the Future, TODAY (Not Really)

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Movies, television shows, anime, etc. from the past are being placed onto these newfangled formats, with words like Blu-Ray and High-Definition. These formats boast greater clarity than ever before, and letting you see things you never could before, or in some cases things you were never intended to see in the first place.

Watch a cel animation in Blu-Ray and you’ll see the dust and scratches. Watch movies from a few years back and it potentially becomes blindingly obvious what is real and what is not, what is CG, what is a matte painting. How much better-looking will video get in the future? How can creators prepare for this? They can’t, but they’re probably aware that in a number of years when the VHS is a distant memory they’ll have to deal with the fact that customers will be able to see more than they should. At the same time, there might be cases where a creator wishes he could show more but he’s limited by the film and video quality of his time.

So what if there was a way for the viewer could control the level of quality personally? You would be able to customize just how clear the image could be. Just like a program used with scanners, you’d be able to reduce dust and scratches, or leave them in. And creators can “recommend” certain settings which they feel are best for their works. Watch movies and anime as the creators intended, or simply ignore their suggestions and play by your own rules.

Controllable visual quality on the viewer’s end is something works both new and old would benefit from.