Make Way for the New with Super Robot Wars K AND GODANNAR SERIOUSLY WHOA

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Super Robot War K has been announced for the Nintendo DS, and the lineup consists almost entirely of shows that have aired in recent years. While it’s kind of sad to not see some of the old guard there, it’s also a big deal that they would include shows like Koutetsushin Jeeg, Gaiking: Legend of Daiku-Maryu and even SHINKON GATTAI GODANNAR.

Those of you who know me might know that there have been two series I’ve really wanted to get into SRW: Eureka Seven and Godannar. Eureka Seven made it in with Z, now Godannar has its chance to shine.

Godannar is a seriously good show to put in SRW due to the fact that all of its robots are AWESOME. You won’t run into the problem of having useless units from the series taking up space or having missions where you’re forced to use them be unpleasant. Every single one is supposed to be able to carry its weight.

The list so far (who knows they might reveal more later)

Mazinger Z
Gaiking: Legend of Daiku-Maryu-
Koutetsushin Jeeg
Zoids Genesis
Shinkon Gattai Godannar!!
Shinkon Gattai Godannar!! Second Season
Gun x Sword
Haja Taisei Dangaioh
Overman King Gainer
Soukyuu no Fafner
Cyber Troopers Virtual On Marz
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED C.E.73-Stargazer-

SHINKON GATTAI GO

GO GO GO

-ING TO CHINATOWN TO BUY THIIIIIS

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.

I Am Grateful for These Abunai Sisters

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Grateful indeed, that in 2009 we can still manage to achieve such an amazingly bad anime release.

The 80s and 90s were a time when bad OVAs were everywhere and being put in Blockbusters across America, but I thought that time had passed. We may have gotten true winners such as Musashi Gundoh and Zaizen Joutarou, but I was always sad that the era of BAD anime, the kind of bad so terrible that it causes five different forms of Space Cancer, seemed to be over.

“Not so!” say Kano Mika and Kano Kyoko, two women known collectively as the “Kano Sisters” who appeared at Otakon 2008 alongside JAM Project and other guests to announce their new anime: an anime about them. And apparently, all they had at the time were some drawings of them as characters by a guy who makes Japanese baseball team mascots, which they just used over and over.

It appeared to be the kind of project destined to fall over and die. Lucky for us, it looks like the Grim Reaper won’t swing its ironic comedy scythe at this production until after the DVD release. And now it’s your chance to see the first episode for free(!!!) on Anime News Network. The title is Abunai Sisters. Abunai means “dangerous.” Sisters means “my eyes appear to have spontaneously imploded.”

Abunai Sisters is a 90-minute DVD release with 30 3-minute episodes. It’s being made by Production I.G. Yes, PRODUCTION I.G. You like Ghost in the Shell? How about Innocence? Stand Alone Complex? That’s all Production I.G and so is ABUNAI SISTERS. It also has the most hilarious pricing scheme ever, one which lowers the cost of each individual DVD if more people end up buying it overall. The lowest it goes is $65, the highest $340. $65 minimum for 90 minutes of bad tits jokes and an English-with-Japanese-subtitles-only release. At least Bandai Visual had good properties! So if you run any sort of bad anime panel at a convention, this should probably be on your list.

A new form of Space Cancer is out, and boy does it feel…something.

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.

Oshii Mamoru… and a Play About Tetsujin 28???

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Below is an article from the Mainichi Daily News’ website, translated for your convenience.

Actually it’s for my convenience as it lets me practice my Japanese, but we’ll leave that aside.

Tetsujin 28: A 500kg Iron Man Stands Tall! Minami Kaho Claims the Robot “Has a Life of Its Own” at Public Dress Rehearsal.

The robot manga Tetsujin 28 [Originally brought to America as Gigantor] by Yokoyama Mitsuteru (deceased) has been transformed into a play by Oshii Mamoru of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence fame. During the public dress rehearsal on the 9th, viewers witnessed the roughly six-meter-tall [approx. 19.7 ft], 500 kg [approx. 1102.3 lbs.] Tetsujin. They also showed the climax where main character Kaneda Shoutarou (played by Minami Kaho) rides in Tetsujin’s hand as the robot itself stands up.

For the theater edition of Tetsujin 28, Oshii Mamoru helped with both the script and production. Originally known as “Prototype 28,” the giant robot emerged towards the end of the Pacific War as a decisive weapon of the Japanese Army and is later revived in 1964 around the time of the Tokyo Olympics. The story tells of boy detective Kaneda Shoutarou, who takes control of the Prototype 28 in order to fight against a terrorist organization. After the dress rehearsal ended, Minami Kaho remarked that to her surprise she was able to sense life in the robot, claiming, “It feels as if it has a life of its own.”

The performance will be open to the public in Tokyo at the Galaxy Theater  from January 10 – 25. In Osaka, the performance will be at Umeda  Arts Theater’s “Drama City” from February 5 – 8. S-rank seats go for ¥11,000 [$121 US] while A-rank seats go for ¥8000 [$88 US].

Writer: Kawamura Naruhiro (I don’t actually know how you’re supposed to pronounce this name. If anyone could help that’d be great)

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?

What do you call George W. Bush in cat ears?

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Answer: A Neko-Conservative.

(Alternate Answer: A Pussy)

Speaking Japanese Sure is Tough (Not Sarcastic)

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I’ve been learning Japanese for a number of years but I rarely get to hear myself actually speak the language. Recently I picked up a mic and decide to see how it sounds and well, it sounds like an American speaking Japanese. Practicing and practicing, I can’t get over this, and I doubt I ever will.

I see all these people who came to America and studied hard to learn the language. People take accent reduction courses to try and fit in better, and putting in only a fraction of the work they did to try and make their speech in a foreign language more natural gives me some additional newfound respect for them.

A Compromise of Visual Design: Watching Minami-ke Okaeri Episode 1

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I normally don’t like to do  “episode 1 posts” of any series, but I felt that I needed to respond immediately to Minami-ke Okaeri while my reaction and feelings towards it and its visuals are still fresh in my mind.

The show is done by the same company that did Okawari (asread) as opposed to the first season (Doumu), which is generally considered the “worse” Minami-ke show, but I read that asread was bringing some of the original staff along to work on this new season. Whether that’s true or not, it’s clear that Minami-ke Okawari is trying to be more like Season 1.

The visuals end up being a mix of the two seasons, with what feels like an overall lower budget. That sounds like an insult, but it really isn’t. I have no proof, but seeing as almost everything is suffering these days I’m almost certain anime is getting less funding too. The show tries to adhere more to the visual style of Season 1 with its sparse shading, but the highly saturated colors resemble Okawari a lot more, especially in the backgrounds. More than the differences in style and animation, the color scheme was what I think really set apart the first two seasons.

Some of the animation does seem stiff and not up to the level of the stuff in Season 1, but I think that’s also because I’d gotten acclimated to Season 1’s style. Watching Season 1 after watching Okawari, it took time for my eyes to readjust, and now watching Okaeri after not having watched any Minami-ke for a while, it might be simply a case of my eyes needing to adjust once more.

Even if their attempt to mix the look of Season 1 and Okawari doesn’t succeed in the end, I’ll at least know that they tried.

If they give more Minami Touma scenes, then that’d also be just dandy.

And joy.

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.