I like that the gundam franchise even tried adopting Asimov and Clarke's ideas into the franchise. Too bad the attempt turned to shit.
Anime is dying
- Thread starter Whofan
- Start date
Gundam 00 was my favorite of the Gundam shows. Season 1 was complex philosophically, politically and very different from any American animation. Its a recent example of "good" anime.
Not surprising, Star Wars was still big, SW was Lensmen personified to many people within the genre, they fed off each other. Not saying the attempt was good, but I didn't see any Americans brave enough to dabble with Doc Smith.
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Indeed.
I really appreciated how much was based on O'Neill's High Frontier, but not the slapdash approach--in Wing there are colonies all over the place (including the three metastable Lagrange points completely unsuitable for permanent stations), but no reason why they should be there, or why the Earth should give a crap that they were; in 00, there are solar power satellites, providing rationale for habitation of space and need to control space on the part of Earth, but few colonies.
I don't remember enough about MSG's technology to opine on it one way or another.
The biggest barrier Japanese animation faces in the west is the culture barrier. People tend to be overly sensitive and judgmental towards different cultural mores. You don't have to go to Japan to find dramatic culture clashes with America. Go look at European popular culture and television, and you'll find in many places, that the wanton violence and male testosterone exploitation take for granted in America is frowned upon, but topics like sexuality and displays of sensuality are far more accepted than in the sexually immature, neo-puritan North America.
A problem Japanese animation faces in western translation is what Carl Macek, pioneer of localizing Japanese content in the US, called "ethnic gesture". Japanese animation is full of specific iconic cues, expressions, body language, that means a lot to Japanese audiences but can seem like random jerky nonsense to Americans. Japanese stuff tends to be super punchy, hyper active, and absurdest. Partly in response to overly dapper, restrained, polite Japanese culture.
Japanese animators have also traditionally used these tricks and techniques to get around limited budgets while still having characters with a lot of expressiveness. Americans may appreciate only what they see as technical quality - animation with a steady amount of consistent frames per second of action, never deviating. Japanese animators throw that to the wind and do whatever it takes to achieve a certain effect, and save time and budget for where it's really needed. This makes low-to-medium budget animation from the east look inconsistent to western viewers.
One thing that many don't realize in America is that much, or most, Japanese animation is adapted directly from Japanese comics and graphic novels. The printed material acts as the initial guide; relatively few series are entirely original, starting as animation first, or are created without a companion comic series. Truthfully, this has an advantage - with the entire world of Japanese comics to call upon, there's a much wider and more eclectic variety of source material to call upon.
Westerners have narrow stereotypes of what "all that anime crap" is, because of a handful of genres and even specific titles that were the most exposed during the original western anime boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In western animation, there's a very narrow range of genres that ever get approved for creation. Even today, there's a big invisible wall around American animation for first-run television. If it's not a cheaply animated sitcom, comedy variety act, or a super hero action adventure either for kids, or straddling the line of kid-adult... there's no place for it. There's certainly no place for shows that practically have no genre (as often seen in Japanese animation.)
I suppose as well, another reason that Japanese stuff doesn't sit well with some Americans is that different cultures have different basic philosophical underpinnings. This affects small details that can make anime seem "wrong" - things like the way people phrase things, basic manners, even basic logic in how expressions and thoughts connect together. It all becomes odd when run through a layer of translation, like dubbing or sub titles. Most foreign media that Americans are used to watching via translation is still of western origin - be it french, italian, or even latin america. To American eyes, a dubbed french film is merely different enough to be charming. But making the jump to an asian culture is much bigger.
A problem Japanese animation faces in western translation is what Carl Macek, pioneer of localizing Japanese content in the US, called "ethnic gesture". Japanese animation is full of specific iconic cues, expressions, body language, that means a lot to Japanese audiences but can seem like random jerky nonsense to Americans. Japanese stuff tends to be super punchy, hyper active, and absurdest. Partly in response to overly dapper, restrained, polite Japanese culture.
Japanese animators have also traditionally used these tricks and techniques to get around limited budgets while still having characters with a lot of expressiveness. Americans may appreciate only what they see as technical quality - animation with a steady amount of consistent frames per second of action, never deviating. Japanese animators throw that to the wind and do whatever it takes to achieve a certain effect, and save time and budget for where it's really needed. This makes low-to-medium budget animation from the east look inconsistent to western viewers.
One thing that many don't realize in America is that much, or most, Japanese animation is adapted directly from Japanese comics and graphic novels. The printed material acts as the initial guide; relatively few series are entirely original, starting as animation first, or are created without a companion comic series. Truthfully, this has an advantage - with the entire world of Japanese comics to call upon, there's a much wider and more eclectic variety of source material to call upon.
Westerners have narrow stereotypes of what "all that anime crap" is, because of a handful of genres and even specific titles that were the most exposed during the original western anime boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In western animation, there's a very narrow range of genres that ever get approved for creation. Even today, there's a big invisible wall around American animation for first-run television. If it's not a cheaply animated sitcom, comedy variety act, or a super hero action adventure either for kids, or straddling the line of kid-adult... there's no place for it. There's certainly no place for shows that practically have no genre (as often seen in Japanese animation.)
I suppose as well, another reason that Japanese stuff doesn't sit well with some Americans is that different cultures have different basic philosophical underpinnings. This affects small details that can make anime seem "wrong" - things like the way people phrase things, basic manners, even basic logic in how expressions and thoughts connect together. It all becomes odd when run through a layer of translation, like dubbing or sub titles. Most foreign media that Americans are used to watching via translation is still of western origin - be it french, italian, or even latin america. To American eyes, a dubbed french film is merely different enough to be charming. But making the jump to an asian culture is much bigger.
Kajima said:
Venture Bros. does all right.
I understand what you mean, American sexual mores for public display are generally different(I stress generally) than many countries, but if you think the US is puritan you haven't been looking around. I also think this sort of public display is even more frowned upon in Japan than here if I am not mistaken, and often leads to sub-genres in anime for Japanese males to relieve some "stress".
RAMA
In a time slot on a cable network set aside specifically for animation that goes against the grain of what Americans generally think of cartoons. (It's called "Adult Swim" for a reason). Kajima has a point.
My problem with the use of these "ethnic gestures" in Japanese animation is how ubiquitous they are. They'll appear in an otherwise fairly sober science fiction or fantasy scenario out of nowhere. Not all anime use this repertoire of exaggerated body language antics, but most do it seems like from my limited experience of the genre.
The reliance many Japanese cartoons have on this type of cheap humor is reminiscent of the bawdy comedy of medieval theater. It's an interesting cultural idiom, but it's primitive and a mark of laziness that animators are still perpetuating it.
Cmdr_Blop
Lieutenant Commander
I cannot stand 99.9% of anime, but I have very specific reasons. For me, the most prevalent is that EVERY SINGLE anime out there just HAS to have the absolute most annoying high-pitched and shrill female voices for the female characters... I cannot stand the female voices in anime... they sound so gratingly childish and shrill... and loudly so.
The second reason is that again, no matter how "serious" the mood or story of a given anime, EVERY SINGLE frakking one has to have some super-childish and uber-"cutesy" little creature or robot with nothing but a pair of eyes that's meant to convey a feeling of such sweetness and uber-cuteness that one look can induce a diabetic coma. Such creatures or robots usually only communicate in equally demure and "cute" beeps, whines, or squeaks. Hell, I saw one anime where the freaking A.I. of a damn starship was one of these cuddly-wuddly fuzzballs with eyes... are you frakking kidding me?
So yeah, those are the main reasons I do not like anime and cannot stand it. Those two elements most of all not only irritate me to no end, but prevent me from being able to enjoy the actual story, and take me out of the mood... especially the cutesy creature stuff... ugh.
The second reason is that again, no matter how "serious" the mood or story of a given anime, EVERY SINGLE frakking one has to have some super-childish and uber-"cutesy" little creature or robot with nothing but a pair of eyes that's meant to convey a feeling of such sweetness and uber-cuteness that one look can induce a diabetic coma. Such creatures or robots usually only communicate in equally demure and "cute" beeps, whines, or squeaks. Hell, I saw one anime where the freaking A.I. of a damn starship was one of these cuddly-wuddly fuzzballs with eyes... are you frakking kidding me?
So yeah, those are the main reasons I do not like anime and cannot stand it. Those two elements most of all not only irritate me to no end, but prevent me from being able to enjoy the actual story, and take me out of the mood... especially the cutesy creature stuff... ugh.
I consider "Heroic Age" to be brilliant, hard SF. But even though I think they idea of a personal, always present computer assistant is likely and a great idea for the future, the fact that this otherwise great series had these very same shrill hovering computer "fur balls" irritated me to no end.
1) It's interesting that France is the world's biggest market for manga outside of Japan. Pretty much every manga gets officially translated into French (whereas English-readers have to rely on less legal methods).
2) Strangely, audiences were/are willing to ignore that for kid's fair. Nowadays there are still "tie-in" animes that air for children (Pokemon and YuGiOh) and the random anime based on western nostalgia (the Marvel animes on G4, the new Thundercats "anime"), so there's no dissonance. Of course, everyone loves Transformers and that's anime.
I don't think that the new Thundercats really has any of the odd ethnic stuff, but that's because the Japanese are just animating the episodes IIRC, not directing them. It does have some absurd elements, but that's because it's set in a weird magi-tech speculative fiction setting (and the writers are cramming tons of stuff into 13 episode seasons because they are afraid of getting cancelled).
As for why the kids shows can get away with it, it probably has to do with lowered expectations for material aimed at kids, primarily the fact that there's not much of an expectation that the material will be grounded in reality to some degree.
I actually meant to add that it was, to a degree, an exception proving the rule. But I forgot.
Puritanism has a dark side. America is often a schizophrenic mix of industrial-strength sleaze and apparent "puritanism" at the same time. Consider the relative disappearance of full frontal nudity in film, the hyperbolic overreaction to the Watchmen penis, and the campaign against smoking ( on screen and off ).
Cmdr_Blop said:
GITS has a female protagonist with a deep, adult voice.
But then again there are the Tachikomas...
The Tachikomas are the cutest things ever conceived, is why.
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