Category Archives: Franchises

September 28, 2016

Naria Girls; Or about Anime

By omo

What is anime? This is the kind of semantic game that stopped bothering me. Usually going on to talk about the label and its context, at best, is an exercise in flaunting one’s ignorance, so I have no interest in it on any given day. However I am pretty ignorant to the category of late-night animated features involving improvisational motion-capture and dubbing, as pioneered by this guy.

What I do know is I dearly enjoyed gdgd fairies (esp. season 1), and many of Ishidate’s handiwork. I still didn’t get to Tesabu, but as of this writing I’m within 12 hours of marathoning all of Naria Girls, so I have a slight bone to grind.

On an average internet season of anime, the average anime scoring aggregators are entirely going to malign two things: comedies and animated shorts (although this is not an inclusive list of things the internet do injustice to). Naria Girls is both. I think it’s enlightening to read the reviews on, say, Crunchyroll, and note that about half of them are written by people who have nary a clue. One review kind of turned on its head and the reviewer was too stubborn to backpeddle, and yet too honest to want to correct his or her own mistake. There are two troll reviews. About 7 of them are actually reviews on the merit of the show, and it comes to about a 4-star.

I guess this is a real life example of people not getting it. Which is fine; anime fans in the west don’t get anime, they only get some kind of culturally appropriated regurgitation of what they think anime is.

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Mahou Shoujo? Naria☆Girls

September 27, 2016

Sakugabooru Blog

By omo

In case you didn’t know, there is a booru where the focus is on Japanese animators and their handicraft in terms of clips from TV (and other) anime. If you want to revisit a scene for the visuals, it’s a good place to start looking. There are no audio in any of the clips though. To foster the community for sakuga fans overseas, they’ve started a blog and started to ask for money to host their booru better.

My problem about sakuga fandom overseas so far is that it celebrates, typically, in a very simple kind of way. It’s literally about the animation, and by that I mean the way images shifts from one frame to the next. There’s also a sense of understanding in contextualizing the careers of various animators, both veterans and neophytes.

But to me that’s not enough. My sense of animation enjoyment extends to not just animation, and specifically, the “sakuga.” Direction, storyboarding and layout, for example, are super-duper important things that I dig even more (arguably). I can understand separating the use of audio (SFX and music) from this fandom but a cohesive narrative has to have all these elements work in harmony, if one can even dare to further a narrative argument about sakuga alone.

I suppose this is kind of the strangeness about sakuga as a fandom vertical, and why it takes some focus-minded fostering. It really is something worthy of study, but also at the same time not really something to put on a pedestal. It is one part of anime that maps well to the Japanese sense of artisan craftsmanship, but it also gets lost inside the reality that it takes a large team to make an anime. And this is all underneath the ever-confusing and ever-prevalent relationship between art and entertainment.

Since I couldn’t find a place on Patreon to voice this, and I pledged a few bucks to Sakugabooru this coming month, I figured it’s worth a shoutout here and I just want to say I pledged because of all the Cinderella Girls translation. For fans of the franchise, the animator relationship between these shows is an added layer of eye-opening relationships and contexts for us to enjoy and understand the source material. It’s not vital but definitely enriching my experience as a viewer of Dereani. It’s always great to see that the key animators from the scenes/cuts you enjoyed are also fans of the material much like we are, so check the below links out:

PS. This passive-aggressive rant is brought to you by my continued indifference to the Mob Psycho 100 sakugablog posts. I enjoyed the anime a lot (one of my favs this season) but I can’t bring myself to read the blog posts on it… It just doesn’t engage me.

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Idolmaster

September 12, 2016

Kimi no Riajuu

By omo

I’m glad Shinkai Makoto’s latest theatrical work grossed 6 billion  yen in just 17 days. That beat not only the estimate commercial distribution outlet, Toho, but the commercial success beyond most’s expectation somewhat validates the movie. Critics like Yamakan and Azuma have already weighed in, among others.

I don’t think it’s a fluke. He was honing on the formula from the very beginning. The real question, I thought, was similar to the one Azuma posited.

kimi-no-na-wa

The cultural trend has been long going that route. If the soccer-bu star can moonlight as an otaku, there’s no stopping it. In a society where animated mascots and cartoons surround its inhabitants daily, where manga is consumed with typically zero stigma attached, you’d think it is normal for animated movies to get such hits. In fact, isn’t this what Studio Ghibli have been doing in the past couple decades? To me that was kind of the line of thought, until I realized who Kimi no Na wa is about: the riajuu.

This movie is fueled by sales of couples going to theaters. This, I think, is what Azuma is on about. To be clear, plenty of romantic stories dotted Studio Ghibli’s output, but those always served mainly as backdrops to epicly for-the-children narratives. The ones where the romance poked its head forward tend to do worse, as they often eyed a more mature audience. Kimi no Na wa is not such a thing. I make the assertion about riajuu only via second-hand observations and some personal observation, so I could be wrong, but that is the vibe and reports I have gotten.

If you’re one of those people who have enjoyed anime because, at times, some story/aspect of a show jumped out at you, and you think it has mainstream appeal because it’s so good, then I think you should cheer for Shinkai and what he’s doing. Otaku media or not, its evolution is contingent on hanging on to these sorts of valuable things about the medium.

3 comments | posted in Kimi no Na wa

August 22, 2016

The Best Idolm@ster Panel Material

By omo

There have been a splatter of fan panels in North American anime cons on the IDOLM@STER franchise. Of the few that I have attended over the past few years none of them were as good as NHK’s take. Granted it’s a bit cringe-y but it’s not like some of these panels aren’t either…

You can watch it here for the next few hours or see it ripped on youtube.

KutapP's underling huh

Here’s why I think it’s the best take so far:

  • It’s meant for a general audience. Different panelists may disagree and I would agree why their takes meant for a con audience is sometimes superior, but a general critique I have is that most of those takes are still too “general.” Why not this one?
  • It’s really concise and to the point. This earned massive prop from my end.
  • For the most part it is also very accurate. It’s not 100.00% spot on but more so than pretty much any other panel (except maybe Chuck’s).
  • It even talks about the seiyuu stuff.
  • Of course it’s also unfair that it has interviews with key creative people behind the scenes.

But just for the lead-in portion of the video where they go over the history and some of the well-known aspects of the franchise it’s such a precise and to-the-point thing that I wish all panels covered this much material, this closely, in this little time.

I had a similar problem, if you recall, doing the IM@S 10th panel. Because the 10th documentary in the Blu-ray was pretty much the same thing…

Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Idolmaster

August 2, 2016

Sword Art Online TV Thing

By omo

Lizbeth & Silica

So today the news of a SAO TV adaption by a US media company was out, which I am sure is not coincidental to the fact that last week was SDCC. Or this/these kinds of things are happening out there. In search of media gold, Hollywood is asking people to ship them their mines. Japan happens to be actually pretty good at doing exactly this, so why not pick through their trash for some variety for a change?

And why not? I think it’s a good fit. Fire up that Ouroboros!

Leave a comment | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Sword Art Online