Category Archives: trends

Riding Forward

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7 episodes in, Rideback has so far been a very enjoyable experience. There’s many reasons for this, but I want to talk about one in particular: unpredictability. As someone who has not read the manga (and is not planning to in the near future), I have very little idea about where the story is headed, and that’s a quality I admire a lot.

I think it has to do with how difficult it is to peg Rideback in any sort of genre. It has a lot of elements people might associate with anime, associations that can be both positive and negative, but it never feels bound by them. Is it a political story? Is it about a girl’s new lease on life? Is it about the use of robot-like machinery in war and in daily life? It’s all of this and none of this, and the result is that I am unable to get a feel for what will happen to Ogata Rin.

The story is not entirely unpredictable. I do not expect them to break Rin’s legs, for example, as they put so much effort into showing her talents. However, everything else is up in the air, doing a grand jeté.

Hey Ladies, Check Me Out I’m the Pitcher

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So ladies who read Ogiue Maniax, I have a question for you: Has the One Outs opening worked on any of you or any girls you know?

So we have this show whose full title is One Outs – Nobody wins, but I! It is, to sum it up, “Akagi + Baseball.” And it’s a rad show full of tests of will and strategy with an indomitable central character. It’s the kind of show made for guys.

But try to convince someone to watch the show based on the opening, and some people, generally the kind that are weak to the girlier aspects of anime, are likely to shy away. A similar thing happens with Ouran High School Host Club.

Clearly the opening to One Outs – Nobody wins, but I! (it entertains me to use the full title) is some kind of girl or fujoshi eye candy designed to draw them into watching a show they might normally avoid.

So once again I ask, any girls who’ve been taken in by Tokuchi Toua’s smooth abs and beady eyes?

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.

It’s All in How You Look At It

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The 2000s have been an unusual time in anime fandom. It’s achieved greater popularity and notoriety than ever before, but it’s also been characterized by  claims that the people who create anime have lost their adventurous spirit, that shows are too dumb, creators are too cynical, and that what made anime great isn’t there or isn’t there in sufficient amounts.  I don’t believe this to be the case, but I occasionally have trouble convincing naysayers otherwise. How can you talk about the subtleties of experimentation within genres that people refuse to watch in the first place?

The other day I was reading the animation blog AniPages Daily when his post on what makes animation interesting caught my eye.

“Five or six years ago, I discovered something that kind of renewed the waning spark of my enthusiasm for anime: a set of Japanese animators creating flamboyantly stylish animation that was exciting like no animation I’d ever seen. It was the discovery of the existence within the anime industry of a coterie of animators with a deeply creative spark like Masaaki Yuasa, Shinya Ohira, Satoru Utsunomiya, Atsuko Fukushima, Yoshinori Kanada and Takeshi Koike – each working within the industry, yet managing to carve out a stylistic niche of the kind that elsewhere might only be attainable in the capacity of an independent animator – that renewed my faith in the power of animation, and showed me that some of the most exciting animation being made today was being made by these people in Japan. These animators heightened my awareness of the animated element in animation, and expanded my appreciation of the importance of movement in animation. But more than that, the sheer audacity and brashness of their individuality opened my eyes to a rich vein of creativity in the Japanese animation industry. There have been many great animators over the decades in Japan, and these animators continuing that tradition opened my eyes to a hidden narrative of anime history that broadened my appreciation of anime and renewed my faith in its potential.”

This post was written November 7, 2008.

Now, the man behind AniPages Daily is not your typical blogger. When I say it’s an animation blog, I mean it’s an animation blog. AniPages Daily is concerned with quality of animation above all else, and he’ll seemingly watch any show for it, from Naruto to Tiger Mask. He doesn’t talk about character designs, writing, story, giant robots, or fanservice, unless it concerns how a scene was animated. I really don’t watch animation like he does, and I’m not sure if I could completely agree with the idea of watching animation for the animation. However, I can appreciate his approach and the fact that it’s different from mine, and it left an impression on me that he could look at today’s anime, often criticized for lack of experimentation, and from his relatively unusual perspective see ideas and techniques being pushed towards greater heights.

It makes me wonder if it’s actually possible for anime to truly stagnate. Yes, there are disappointing shows, and ones that you could call better than others, but even in those shows which do not manage to succeed artistically or financially there are hands at work, and they may be achieving something special, just in an area that you or I don’t expect or pay any attention to. Maybe it’s in the soundtrack or even the use of the soundtrack relative to the animation. Maybe it’s daring risk-taking with forms of storytelling. Maybe it’s highly unorthodox mecha designs. And all of this is within the confines of an industry which is concerned with appealing to larger audiences.

There’s Something “Different” About These Voice Actors…

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Back when the Soul Eater anime began airing, one of the big topics going around was Maka Albarn’s voice actor. Maka was Omigawa Chiaki’s first role in anime and it showed. Some called her voice work terrible or amateurish, I referred to it as a very natural-sounding voice. For those who haven’t heard it, when Maka speaks it sounds more like a young, soft-spoken narrator than it does a character in a show. However you judge it though, no one can deny that Maka’s voice was different from the usual.

At some point I decided to listen to the Soul Eater Web Radio Show (Maka Side), half curious, half wanting to practice listening comprehension for the JLPT2, and I was surprised to find out that Chiaki’s Maka voice is quite different from her everyday speaking voice. This meant that as natural and realistic-sounding as Maka’s voice is, it’s not just Chiaki speaking normally. I was impressed, but then I thought about how I wasn’t the best judge of Japanese voice acting, and a lot of the Maka voice’s detractors were Japanese people posting on 2ch and what-not. I’ve made progress over the years, but to really tell who’s good and who’s bad, I can’t do so with complete confidence still.

It was a few weeks after that when Anime World Order posted its review of Bubblegum Crisis. I had seen the show long ago, back when I barely knew anything about anime and my older brother knew guys in his high school who were willing to copy tapes for him, but it had been so long I barely remembered anything. I decided to re-watch the original Bubblegum Crisis, all of it, knowing that there was some bias for BGC among the AWO crew and not wanting to be too influenced by it.

Throughout the OVA series one voice really stood out among the rest: that of main character and most prominent Knight Saber Priss Asagiri. There was something about the way she intoned words, it almost reminded me of Jack King from Shin Getter Robo vs Neo Getter Robo. It sounded, felt different from the other voices which were all clearly talented but sort of blended together in the area known as “good,” like how Henri Cartier-Bresson may be one of the most talented photographers ever but his photographs were all good in the same exact way. It could be awkward at times, but Priss’s voice would always jump out. Then I looked up her voice actor, Oomori Kinuko and listened to the AWO episode (Part A) and found out that it was her one and only voice role, Kinuko being primarily a singer. “Oh,” I thought. And then I remembered Maka.

Maka and Priss’s voices are similar in many ways. Both are very noticeable when placed among their fellow cast members, and both have this style that really takes over a scene, for better or worse. When they talk, you notice. As such, both have this strange voiceover feel to them, where it sounds like they’re speaking directly to the audience rather than to other characters in their shows. Is this merely a product of lack of experience in voice acting? Did anime fans in 80s Japan have a field day with Kinuko’s voice work the way they do with Chiaki’s now? If more seiyuu sounded like Priss or Maka, would their lack of experience and/or talent stand out even more?

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.

It’s Fresh Precure, and it Finally Has Character Designs

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The fine folks over at Toei Animation have recently revealed that their newest Precure series, Fresh Precure, is more than just Very Orange as its official website used to indicate.

We’ve got some main characters now. Momozono Love is Cure Peach. She’s a dancer! Aono Miki is Cure Berry. She’s athletic and wants to be a fashion model. Yamabuki Inori is Cure Pine. She loves animals! All of them are 14 years old, in their second year of Junior High where almost all Precure girls start.

If you’ve ever wondered why I take an interest in Precure, it partly has to do with the way it’s alchemically fused girls’ anime and boys’ anime and otaku anime into a golem of profit and merchandising, all while still being reasonably enjoyable. What steps has Toei taken to continue to ensure profitability? Well, the new costumes seem to have a sort of maid theme, and I have to wonder if that delicate balance of fanbases is leaning ever-so-slightly towards the “otaku” side. The girls are leggier, look older than previous Cures despite being roughly the same age, and even appear to be bustier.

It might not be easy to notice the disparity off-hand, so I’ve provided a comparison image below.

The Precure girls post-transformation have always had more athletic builds, so the disparity between regular Nagisa and regular Love is even more pronounced.

Is it a new character designer or is it the same character designer with some modifications to her art style? Is this a reflection of the increasing average height of Japanese people? Or is it just part of a greater strategy to target people who have a thing for legs?

We’ll find out February 1st, 2009.

There Are Still Ogiue Doujinshi at Comic Market

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Yes, despite Ogiue and Genshiken having nothing new to offer otaku this year, at least a few faithful acolytes are still keeping the dream alive.

Ogiue is a bit of an anomaly in regards to doujinshi. If you’ve ever kept up with that scene, you’d notice that an increase of character-specific doujinshi tends to occur when a manga gets adapted for animation. There might be a few doujinshi out there beforehand, but it’s the anime which brings the pencil to paper. Not so with Ogiue; her doujin heyday was shortly after the climax of Genshiken’s story. Powered by love, care, and perhaps other things, by comparison the amount of Ogiue doujinshi when Genshiken 2 came out was rather sparse. Makes sense though, seeing as the anime never even got to that climax.

Comic Market 75 is to be held this year from Sunday, December 28 to Tuesday, December 30 at Tokyo Big Sight. Don’t forget that there’s something special happening with the Eureka Seven movie too.

The Fun of Collaborative Top 10 Lists

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Or Top 20, 50, 100, etc.

Anime and manga are full of these things. There’s lists in Shounen Jump series ranking the popularity of their characters. There’s Saimoe, which is essentially one giant list. Every forum in every language devotes some time to getting together to compile a list of most (and occasionally least) favorites. I like looking at these things, but it’s not just to see how high my favorites place, though I’m always pleased to see them do well. The real point of looking at lists is to observe any trends that may be happening, even if it’s trends simply among a very vocal minority.

You can infer all sorts of information from ranking lists. Take a look at the Top Anime list on My Anime List. It says a lot about the people who bother to participate in My Anime List. Gurren-Lagann right now enjoys the #1 spot with a lot of people having viewed it. When you remember that not only was it well-regarded during its fansub days but that it also recently finished airing on Sci-Fi Network it makes a lot of sense. By comparison, when you look at the high ranking from Legend of the Galactic Heroes in contrast with its relatively low number of viewers, you know it has a loyal fanbase. Those who bother to watch it at all come away astounded. When a very old work or character places high on a list, you know that something is up and this one is probably going to be fondly remembered for a long time.

The real fun though is from the inherent drama that comes from trying to make lists. There’s always tons of passionate arguing as people defend their characters with sweat and tears. Even if you don’t look at the arguments which precede or follow the list, the list iself is like a condensed summary of all the debate and hair-pulling that may have happened.