K-On and On and On!!

Posted on by

In college, a teacher gave me some good advice on animation. He was a 3-D animation teacher, and he knew full well how time-consuming it could be, and how rewarding it was to make something really impressive. His advice, however, was a message of artistic prudence. I don’t remember the exact words, but the message was basically, “Don’t get so attached to a bit of strong animation that you reuse it to excess.” I was reminded of his words while watching K-On!! (the second season of K-On!).

In the new opening, there’s a very distinct part where the camera pans around the five girls of Houkago Tea Time, and it’s really some impressive animation, especially because while the background of the clubroom is 2-D, the girls themselves are still animated in 2-D, and overall it looks pretty natural.

So it looks really nice. But then they use the effect again. And then a third time. At that point, I think it’s just excess.

The opening for the first season also had something similar, a shot where all the girls are playing together that gets reused about three times total. However, in my opinion the recycling isn’t as jarring for a number of reasons. First, it doesn’t have that three-dimensional rotation effect going on like the new opening, where that piece is so different from the rest of the opening that you notice it immediately. The shot in K-On!! sticks out like a really nice-looking sore thumb, and it becomes all the more obvious when they use it another two times. Second, the first opening changes the background between usages of the stock animation, and while this can be seen as simply being lazy, the change in scenery makes the reuse more comfortable to the viewer.

If they really, really wanted to use the revolving camera effect that much, I think a good solution would have been to put more camera movement in the scenes right before that animation to ease the transition into it.

Not that Kyoto Animation is reading this blog, of course.

I Actually Woke Up Thinking About This

Posted on by

Poketousen
Dragonair Destiny Bond
Growth Gardevoir
Extremespeed Exeggutor

Yes, I know they’re all illegal moves.

Turds Smell Like Crap! Again!

Posted on by

So Anime News Network is previewing the new season of anime, as they always do. Some shows get positive ratings, some get negative, it’s the same old game. However, it’s gotten me thinking about just how often we go back to something even though it’s resulted in agony and torment in the past.

Among the new shows this season is Ikkitousen: Xtreme Xecutor, about Three Kingdoms-era figures reincarnated as fighting high school students where panty shots and exploding shirts are as plentiful as the air we breathe. The series is completely vapid fanservice and an exercise in selling lewd PVC figures. As expected, a number of ANN’s reviewers are rating the show pretty poorly. I don’t find anything wrong with that. What I do find wrong is that Xtreme Xecutor is the fourth season of Ikkitousen. By this point, the content of the series should be surprising to no one. Was it really that necessary to review?

I understand giving something a second chance and being burned twice over. I thought the first live-action Transformers movie could have been good if only a few tweaks were made, so I expected the sequel to be better. Boy was I wrong. I’ve also tried again and again to watch high level Warcraft III matches, thinking that this time I’ll be able to follow it! No such luck. And I’m not the only one who’s fallen into the shounen trap of waiting for a series to get “good again” while still following it regularly. This Ikkitousen thing however seems more like an exercise in futility.

I know it’s important for an operation like ANN to be thorough, and I can appreciate it on that level. Everyone’s putting on their best critic hats and trying to push something of value out. They’re talking about how the animation has changed, to what extent the series can draw in new fans, injecting song and dance and razzmatazz to their reviews, like the challenge is to write anything of value at all.

Actually, now that I think about it, that sounds like a pretty fun writing exercise.

The Otaku Diaries Hint at the Secretive Triumvirate of Hugpillow Enthusiasts

Posted on by

Now that the Otaku Diaries main events are over, the Reverse Thieves have seen it fit to hit us with all sorts of tidbits, from the number of people who were officers in anime clubs (13) to the number of man-crushes on Daryl Surat (greater than 0) to the number of people who own hugpillows.

Some of the trivia also sounds like it came straight out of anime. And assuming that everyone told the truth as they were expected to, that’s amazing. For example, the person who broke up with his girlfriend after canceling a date to watch Yu Yu Hakusho reminds me of a manga, Fujoshi no Honkai, where a closet fujoshi breaks up with her boyfriend by telling him that she’s “spending time with another man,” when in reality she bought a cake to celebrate the birthday of her favorite character. And when you realize that something like a manga based on the daily lives of otaku is trying to mirror the reality of the fandom, it’s almost like the beast feeding itself.

But really, looking at this trivia hodgepodge, I think it hits me harder than any of the previous Otaku Diaries posts just how similar/dissimilar we all are as fans of anime and manga. We are all united under the banner of Japanese comics and cartoons, but that sturdy felt cloth hanging high above us belies the sheer variety of places we come from. Gone are the days that anime fans all came from a single nerdy source of science fiction fandom or from watching the Pokemon on the TV. And though I use the term “anime fan” to encompass both those who watch anime and those who read manga, there are even people who almost exclusively focus on one or the other. All of it is surprising and yet none of it is.

Neither Generically Exceptional Nor Exceptionally Generic

Posted on by

See if the following descriptions sound familiar to you:

1) A young boy uses his mysterious abilities to fight against the forces of darkness alongside his close friends. Though he’s short on brains, he’s long on potential, and as the series progresses you see him gaining more and more power at incredible rates.

2) When a young girl meets an adorable magical creature, she is transformed into a beautiful and striking figure. Together with her friends, she fights the forces of darkness while still finding time to have fun with her friends and care for her parents’ shop.

Most likely, the two images that popped into your head were the most generic shounen fighting anime and generic mahou shoujo anime ever , respectively. However, the two shows I was actually describing are Kekkaishi and Heartcatch Precure.

Kekkaishi and Heartcatch Precure are both series that are firmly rooted in all the tropes one expects out of them. Kekkaishi involves fighting progressively more powerful opponents as our heroes improve their abilities to keep up. The male main character has a lot of “power” while the female protagonist has “finesse.” In Heartcatch, there’s bright pastels and an entire flower motif and transformation sequences. Both series involve Monsters of the Week. But while they are definitely “generic” in a sense, I really believe both to be pretty exceptional, and it mainly has to do with the way both series approach characterization.

In both cases, the strength of the characterization stems from the interaction between the central characters. For Kekkaishi, it’s the subdued and yet progressive romance of Yoshimori and Tokine. For Heartcatch, it’s the budding friendship between Tsubomi and Erika.  And when you look at both, you see just how well one character complements the other, the way their similarities and differences provide sparks of clever interaction. It’s what sets them apart from other series in their respective genres; the characters feel significantly more fleshed out and three-dimensional than the usual fare, and in a way that I think people who don’t religiously follow shounen fighting or mahou shoujo can appreciate.

At the same time however, I think that for people who don’t really look for that sort of thing, both series can still come across as incredibly generic. And for people who outright despise the genres of shounen fighting and mahou shoujo, no amount of smart writing in these shows can make up for the fact that what aggravates them about shows like these are still present in full force. That is, unless the thing that aggravates them is a lack of good characterization.

The Elite Fourdinators: Pokemon Contest and What Could Have Been

Posted on by

Ever since the first games, the Pokemon franchise has tried to include side quests and activities, things that change the game from the classic “beat 8 gym leaders and fight the Elite Four.” There’s the “end of game” content that only happens once you become champion. There have been ideas like the Safari Zone and the Bug-Catching Contest, which were alternative methods of catching Pokemon, as well as alternate venues for battling such as the Battle Tower and Battle Frontier, both of which function as a sort of arena for “advanced” players. But it was in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald that they introduced a concept which came the closest to being a true alternative from the gym badge system: Pokemon Contests.

In Pokemon Contests, elemental types don’t really matter. Nor do things like attack power and hit points. Unlike the Safari Zone, the Battle Frontier, and all of those other extra features, the Pokemon Contest system is the only competitive activity which was so different from the rest of the game that almost none of the traditional rules applied to the way contests worked.

The goal of a Pokemon Contest is to win the votes of a panel of judges in a specific category, such as “Beauty” or “Intelligence,” and in order to do so you must have your Pokemon be more appealing than the others. To this end, every attack has its own unique features and functions entirely separate from battling and trying to KO your opponent. For instance, the attack “Flamethrower,” which is a Fire-type attack in battles, is a move which shows off “Beauty” in a Pokemon Contest. Contest Pokemon have to be fed strict diets and be groomed properly to win the visual portion of the competitions. They eventually even included dancing.

It might sound pretty boring compared to the intensity of taking on your rival in a flurry of lightning and sandstorms, and this might even be the reason that Pokemon Contests are non-existent in Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver, but the big thing that Contests had that previous side games in Pokemon didn’t was 1) rewards and 2) increasing levels of difficulty. Instead of getting Gym Badges, you get Contest Ribbons, and as you go from city to city, the Contests get more challenging. In a way, it could be seen as an alternate path to the Gym system, something that wasn’t so much a game within a game as it was another activity entirely. It might even be perceived as something on par with battling. In fact, the anime tried to push this idea, by having characters like Haruka (May) and Hikari (Dawn) decide to forego the path of collecting Gym Badges and have them focus on obtaining Ribbons. The only problem is that in the anime, Contests resemble battling with a somewhat different flair, and the games themselves don’t give any rewards other than the Ribbons, essentially meaning that it’s still considered “inferior” to hitting the Gyms.

I think that Pokemon Contests could have become a really viable alternative to Gym Battles, and that it should be an option at the start of games to go on the path of a “Pokemon Coordinator,” the term the series uses to denote people who have devoted themselves to Pokemon Contests. There should be personalities you get to know and the opportunity to practice against opponents. Perhaps winning should net you TMs that are rare and powerful within the context of Contests. There should be an equivalent of the Elite Four to take down, and when you win over them, there should be an ending. Most importantly, you should be able to play against your friends.

I understand that it might be virtually impossible to try and balance two completely disparate systems running off the same basics in the same game. I also think the concept of the Pokemon Contest could stand to have some tweaking, such as making Type matter more, or perhaps even taking a cue from the anime and having it come down to battles where you’re judged on not only your ability to take down your opponent but to look good doing so. But I really believe that, done properly, Pokemon Contests could truly add another layer to the world of Pokemon by giving kids a different kind of opportunity to go off on an adventure.

Here’s hoping to their return in Generation V.

Pokemon types don’t really matter. Nor do things like attack power and hit points.

Do You Truly Know What It Means to Draw the Right Card?

Posted on by

Last week while taking the train home, I saw a kid with his head buried in some kind of Bakugan guide, and it got me thinking. The first thing was that it reminded me of when I used to sit on the same train with a printed Pokemon pokedex, poring over move lists and trying to imagine new movesets and strategies. It filled me with a sense of nostalgia. The second thing was that it got me thinking about the future of anime.

Bakugan, one of those collecting and battling game franchises designed to separate kids from their money, has an anime to act as a half-hour commercial for the product. It’s one of the latest in a long line of merchandising engines, from Pokemon to Digimon to Yugioh to Beyblade and so on. The shows can still be pretty decent; there’s no illusion about their true purpose, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be entertaining.

That said, what if someone made a collecting and battling anime that wasn’t there primarily to push a product? “Impossible!” you might say. And to some extent you’d be right. Shows are made because they have some kind of chance at making money. But my response is, give it a decade.

In those ten years, the kids who grew up with those trading card games and battle tops will be getting older and older. They’ll be adults working full-time jobs and looking back fondly on their childhoods. It would mirror the progression mecha anime has had, with shows now being made for adults and having more advanced and mature concepts. In this situation, a collecting and battling anime which really takes an artistic and philosophical look at the nature of collecting and battling anime would be perfect.

It could look at the nature of probability and psychology. Perhaps it would ask what it means to play a game where you must collect to improve your chances of winning. There could be legitimately well-written characters and a skeptical eye, but still a love letter to the genres of TCGs and monster battles. It would really master and perfect the sense of timing and tension that would make the heroes’ actions seem all the more worthwhile. Actual rules to the game are optional.

It would be the Gurren-Lagann of collecting and battling anime.

Ka-Chinka

Posted on by

Danny Choo, that most famous of bloggers who has managed to turn wacky articles about Japan and PVC figures into a stable career, has announced the formation of his own animation studio, “Mirai Studios.” Their first planned work is an explicitly moe show drawn from the same vein as K-On! or Ichigo Mashimaro or So Ra No Wo To, about a squad of cute female firefighters called Chinka. There’s even a preview trailer out for your convenience.

Potentially this could be a good thing. Danny Choo has money, the anime industry needs money, maybe he can pump some much-needed capital into the system.

On the other hand, I see a big problem with the whole Chinka thing: the whole production seems practically insulting to moe fans. When you take in the basic concept, the character designs, the presentation, it all leads to the idea that moe fans are easy to manipulate, that all you have to do is push the right buttons and they’ll come flocking to you, ready to buy whatever merchandise you throw out. And I’m not saying that merchandising a popular show or having a show built on merchandising is wrong either, but with Chinka you can almost see the piano wires and checklists that are the backbone of this whole concept. They have merchandise available for the show before it even begins, and the trailer is actually rubbing your face in the fact that it has some kind of tsundere or yandere-type. It doesn’t even need to say anything else about the character, as if all you need is the switch and fans will step right up. It knows you want more, and is glad to give it, for the right price.

With shows like Hidamari Sketch, K-On!, and Lucky Star, even if they are designed to appeal to a moe audience and have shameless promotion sewn directly into their very souls, the initial impression these shows gave even before episode 1 hit was that people who worked on these series were trying to entertain and not just fall exactly into what moe fans think of as “moe anime” and doing so on the most shallow of levels.

That all said, I of course have yet to actually see Chinka beyond the aforementioned preview. If it turns out to be a good show, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. Please prove me wrong, Danny Choo, for everyone’s sake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjxmFZC-5Y&feature=player_embedded

The Threat of Emasculation in the World of Fictional Icons Beyond Manga

Posted on by

For many years now, manga has undergone a curious transformation. Where once comic magazines devoted space to stories which taught boys how to be men and provided ample role models for how to live, that innocent desire has been corrupted by a display of weak-willed, wobbly-kneed pretty boys who fight not to save the world but to draw power away from men and place their entertainment in the hands of the opposite sex.

Originally, even though I could only shake my head at the manga aisle at the Barnes and Noble, I at least was confident in the knowledge that this breakdown of integrity in fiction was limited to what we’d call “entertainment.” Manga, television shows, books, it was as if the ovarial agenda was happy to willfully quarantine itself to the realm of fictional tales. But I realize now that I was simply too naive, and that the attack goes well into the realm of iconic figures who exist in our daily imaginations.

Look at this man here. You might think he’s the main character in the newest Jump comic, or perhaps his clean-shaven look and gentle eyes mean he’s the latest teen heartthrob. But sadly, truly sadly, you are incorrect. This is the Brawny Man.

Looking back, the clues were obvious. Paper towels absorb the messes of kitchens and bathrooms and store a record of human activity. Likewise, manga pages absorb the ink from the artists’ pens, also resulting in a similar record of human activity. Paper towel rolls and manga magazines are essentially cousins, and if the integrity of one can be damaged, the other is just as vulnerable.

It’s a likely possibility your mind blocked out the first image I showed you. For your benefit I have included a picture of the previous Brawny Man to help transition your mind into the harsh reality of the present. Comparing the two, it is clear that at some point  the powers that be decided that the Brawny Man was too great a symbol of all that is good and decent in the world, and so took steps to correct this “error.” They were threatened by his full mustache and his rugged looks, and concluded that the only solution was to begin depriving him of the very essence of his influence.

The new Brawny Man is still fairly masculine, but the fact that he escaped still well on the side of the Y-chromosome is attributed more to his inherent fortitude than anything else. A lesser male character would have transformed into a female baboon. A visual kei member would have found new life as a sentient petticoat. It is an ordeal few can survive even once.

Let us pray for the Brawny Man. Though he may now be too malformed and misshapen to ever inspire a generation of true men, we must still accept and forgive him.

Twitter and the Control of Conversation Space

Posted on by

I’m sure that tons of people have commented on the idea of Twitter, what makes it unique, why it has been embraced where other forms of social media have failed. I, however, have not read any of those comments, and so everything I say is my own thought, even if it overlaps immensely with common knowledge.

When Twitter first started getting popular, many others including myself questioned the usefulness of it. We already had IMs, chatrooms, blogs, messageboards, maybe Usenet, and dozens of other ways to communicate with others and do that “online social networking” thing if need be. And when I first got my Twitter account, I did so because I was tired of not being able to read interesting conversations that were happening on it. Inevitably however, I started to participate as well. Not greatly, mind you. I still don’t tweet nearly as much as some of my contemporaries, but it’s more than I expected I would, kind of like how I didn’t expect myself to still be blogging after all this time. There’s a niche Twitter fulfills, and I think I know what it is.

Twitter’s most defining characteristic is likely its 140-character limit, which depending on your language can mean a lot of space (Japanese) or very little (English). This makes it a perfect match for cell phone texting and its usual 160-character limit and is part of why it is used by those who are a little less tech-savvy, but I think the 140-character limit is only a piece of why Twitter has caught on. The real appeal of Twitter in my opinion is that it is easy to control the space of conversation while leaving it open for others to jump in.

With Twitter, you follow who you want to by saying that you will follow them. It is an active choice to see the remarks of others. However, it is not in your control for other people to see your comments unless you purposely make your account private. However, not being the default choice means a lot here. Twitter can be both public and private at the same time, and it is up to the user to determine the boundaries of each. And by doing so, you have a situation where a conversation can begin one-on-one, but then another person can interject and deliver his or her point, and then another, and then another. But to those first two people engaging in that dialogue, it can still exist as a one-on-one conversation. What is being said and the scope of the discussion changes depending on who is reading and who is participating and who wishes to see the participation of others.

This is where the 140-character limit really comes in. It makes everything you say on Twitter bite-sized and easier to digest. While discussions can go on for a while, the point at which a person chooses to step in is in reply to one of those 140-word tweets, as opposed to say, a five-paragraph-long comment. Your words are already broken down into specific chunks, and so another person on Twitter can zero in on that, and while their reply can be in response to everything you’ve said so far, they have chosen to reply to that specific tweet and bring emphasis to it.

So basically, Twitter conversations can exist at multiple sizes simultaneously due to the brevity in encourages and the way the users can determine in their own space the number of participants. It is both a closed discussion and an open one, and yet your choices also do not impact the choices of others for the most part. There is near-total control, but that powerlessness over others is also what allows it to expand. And unlike chatrooms or forums you do not have to opt to ignore the words of another, as it is the default. Twitter is as comfortable as you make it.