Why Did I Think Sayaka Ohara Retired?
Because Sayaka Ohara didn’t. She did announce that she is getting married/is married, late last year.
The equally-fab-but-less-historied, yet-also-35-year-old Erino Hazuki plays Yamamoto-sensei in Hanamaru Youchien. As you may notice, Hazuki is not a frequently-heard voice in the sort of anime we watch. Her voice is somewhat distinctive, and it is not hard to pick her out if she has any notable roles. I mention this because it makes the handful of main/secondary character roles she plays notable.
The thing is, in Hanamaru Youchien, Hazuki plays an ara-ara onee-san/okaa-san type, Hanako Yamamoto. Yamamoto-sensei is also the type of character you typically find Sayaka Ohara doing.
So if you’ve watched Aria, you might recall the ending of season 3. Now read j1m0ne’s splendid spoiler.
I am sure what I am pointing out is a coincidence. But it makes the mind wonder, doesn’t it?!
Archetecture x Character Design: Sora no Woto, Qwaser
I wish I can show you pictures, because then I wouldn’t have to try to explain it with only words. Then again it might be easier to just be vague and simple. It’s the strongest!
It occurred to me when Ben over at Anipages mentioned SoraOto, and how the character animation and art “get in the way” of the background animation, that he might have meant it in a literal sense–like subtitles getting in the way of the OP or something. Further on he iterates the same complain you’ve probably heard several times by now about Sora no Woto.
While my position on the complain and the show is “wait and see, I think they’re setting us up,” that sort of first impression shared by Ben has run rampant. It’s gotten to a point where I think the anime is giving off those vibes as designed, and not because they are trying to force some moe down something or another. Why else could so many people agree on this? They are doing it on purpose; the show is setting up some kind of expectation.
It just doesn’t make any sense to think that a high profile Production A-1 production would get “how to do moe” wrong. Consider their prior works. I mean, if you want to do a moe show, you pick the source material that fits. You might also want to use a director who fits the job. Consider both the source material and the director. If we just look at the circumstantial evidence and also the story elements so far, it is almost obvious that Sora no Woto is going to pivot somewhere and “get serious.”
But it goes back to Ben’s point about something getting in the way. I feel that the generic-feeling characters and the character designs, while evoking probably the sort of feeling they were designed to do, makes difficult for people to enjoy the other aspects of the show. Part of it, perhaps, is out of the biases of those who would use the word moe or moeblob as a negative signifier. But at the same time it is a clashing aesthetics, against SoraOto’s beautiful, if lonely background art and setting.
This is where my experience with Seikon no Qwaser kind of make me take a second look. Qwaser is a visually modern and gothic affair. The opening may look generic shounen but the ending took a page out of Don’t Be Lazy with its senseless, music video inspired choreography (not to mention the seiyuu ensemble). The source material itself is dark, brooding, and (non)sensibly Japanese all the while. The character art is arguably moe-inspired, especially in Tomo’s case and the super-deformed segments. Ironically, the fact that it can afford that visual contrast between “normal” and “SD” suggests that there’s some kind of gap between serious and the not-quite-so.
I think the K-ON complaint goes to that point, perhaps unfairly: K-ON has SD mode and normal mode too, but it’s fairly hard to tell between the two. Sora no Woto, however, doesn’t go SD, yet it has all those SD signifier from Shuko the Owl to Kureha’s moments of tsun and dere. The end result, rather than something easy to understand viscerally, we get something that is off our expectation. In contrast, something like Qwaser is totally what we expect, and more.
This is really why I have a tough time faulting SoraOto, simply because as much of the baggage comes from us as it is from the show going against the grain on some of these expected visual cues. On top of the harsh contrast behind its luscious, highly-detailed background and the simple, if overly cute foreground character animation, the end result is probably too jarring for the casual Judge Judys out there.
And lastly, I used the word architecture although I didn’t really talk about it, but I think that is probably a better term than “background design.”
Anitations for Phonies: J.D. Salinger
Straight from the depths of Google Reader Shared Items:
Under entry titled: “Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source”
[omitted content]
Jacob @ Aspergers: I did a post on this and the link between Salinger and anime. They’re closer related than you think!
me: yotsubato is basically catcher in the rye.
lelangir: strawberry panic is basically catcher in the rye
JP Meyer: cobra is basically catcher in the rye
Ghostlightning: zz gundam is basically catcher in the rye
TheBigN: true tears is basically catcher in the rye
otou-san: urotsukidoji is basically catcher in the rye
Owen S: bible black is basically catcher in the rye
JP Meyer: do you know the milfing man is basically catcher in the rye
CCY: clearly, GRSI is basically catcher in the rye
CCY: you phonies.
[omitted content]
Rally for the Anime Chara Grand Prix, 2010 Edition
Do you want to win a bunch of useless loot? You do? This is how you do it.
Unlike 2ch’s Saimoe or the International Saimoe League, the by-fan-for-fan Megatokyo Forums Anime Character Grand Prix has a March Madness-style loot pool as part of its allure. Now granted most people play it for fun only; the prizes are not serious business and you get a lot more out of it by seeing the creative campaigns people come up with, being it is a community event and not an all-internet invitational. The loot themselves are just your usual pile of new and used goods: R2 and R1 DVDs, CDs, figures, posters, doujinshi, artbooks, and other trinkets. It is also open to the international members, despite being an American-based operation.
To participate, simply make an account on the MT forums, make familiar of the forum rules, and head over to the AGP sub-forum and read the sticky threads, starting from the “forum rule” one and the “AGP rules” one. Once you figured out what’s going on (and if you have question you can ask by posting in one of the threads), read the bracketology thread and put in your guesses…
Yeah, there is a certain level of inaccessibility due to how involved most of the players are, and the games have been around for a while now (I think the first time we ran this was back in ‘00 or ‘01). But at the same time it would be great if more people would join in. If the loot is incentive, that is fine by me.
I wish I could show you what we had to give away, but it was really just a smorgasbord of random things that are related to anime in some way and I’m too lazy to dig out the pictures. I think I gave away a (new) copy of Nana Mizuki’s The Museum one time, and that was the farthest removed item from being directly an anime…thing that I gave away. Or was it some Masami Okui single? I don’t remember anymore. In years past, generally we give away a minimum of $100 USD worth of things. Certainly beats trying to sell them on my blog or on eBay as far as de-cluttering the house goes!
The loot pool entry period ends this week, so if that’s your thing, it’s time to take your pick as soon as you can.
The Nutbladder Ranking: 2010-01
I always wanted to do some kind of ranking thing, because it’s fun to express what you feel about the stuff you like (ie., anime) in new ways, and ranking provides an overt framework to express yourself. It’s like a game where you roleplay some nutty critic. Unfortunately I also despise the trapping that any ranking system comes with. I always thought to myself (usually after feeling the want-of-rank) that I could just personify the anime or whatever in Pani Poni Dash (or for the newfags among us, Bakatest) with a short list of arbitrary stats. Kanokon could be something like “Breasts: 4, Trope subversion: 3, Licensed dub possibility: 2″ or something. For another example, Tsukihime anime could be “Existence: 0, Faithfulness to source: 2, Moon Princess: 4.”
Isn’t this fun? (Possibly NSFW pic after the jump.)
