Category Archives: Modern Visual Culture

April 21, 2014

Sakura-Con 2014: Wrap

By omo

It came and went, never overstayed its welcome in my attention span/brain-space or whatever that keeps me focused. Just like a nice, well-rounded, colorful single origin roast. Also kind of regretting not buying all these coffee/chocolate while I was at those shops on Thursday. Because, man, it’s not like NYC doesn’t have great coffee or chocolate, but it’s different than what Seattle has to offer.

And that’s kind of like Sakura-Con in a nutshell. It’s a great con, I think, and I kind of like it. The guests are what they are, but the crowd has a nice positive buzz, it’s both laid back and yet pretty focused. It feels so funny seeing the people going around asking for autographs at the Guest Dinner because it feels so unnatural, and it’s probably the weirdest moment for me at the con.

The 4chan im@s panel is second. Clearly animeweedlord loves his idols and when I spotted him walking down the street in his casual Yayoi cosplay on Sunday it kind of sums up Sakura-Cn for me in a nutshell. Again.

Of course, the guests do make a big dent on my enjoyment. Having four A-1 animators means invariably some of them are going to be involved in Anim@s, and in this case we have the talented Akai Toshifumi. Masunari Kouji is there too, but I like him more for other stuff, like Welcome to the Space Show or Read or Die and the like. But he also did anim@s.  Adachi Shingo is great sport for hanging out along with Akai, I guess the two are real life friends while at it.

The Guest Dinner is also a big deal in my overall experience in that I was able to talk to people like Ishikawa Yui, the Pony Canon producer, or the Fuji TV producer outside of a panel, because catching panels for a dozen JP guests is such a pain. I even sat down for Ohata Koichi as he talked shop about Hayao Miyazaki. It was interesting. And I got to pester Nagahama again! Totally asking for a sketch of Iron Man next time I get the opportunity LOL.

The fellowship of fellow nerds is also a big deal. Saw Ally & Sally again. Most of the West Coast gang. Some East Coast guys. Great food and great company make a great time, as you would expect. Still I missed out a chance to catch Sixten! That’s the only guy missing out.

To that end, there’s also great music. Elisa has some pretty solid singing going on for her, despite this whole “English-exotic” imagery they have. She’s very warm and personable, if a tad “on her own pace.” Very cool customer.

I wish I have the set list but it’s something like:

  1. ebullient future
  2. Realism
  3. World God Only Knows
  4. Soba ni iru yo
  5. Wonder Wind
  6. Millenario
  7. HIKARI
  8. Mononoke Hime (a capella short version)
  9. euphoric field
  10. (encore?) Do You Remember Love

This is a really vague guess based on old memory so LOL. [Updated via animate.tv]

eleee-saaa

Her rendition of Mononoke Hime is great. The story goes that it’s her first anime that her grandmother got her, and she loves this song.

Her MCs are also really long. I guess that’s just how it is.

Sakura-con is also kind of like my blog the past six months–it’s awfully like IM@S. The two IM@S panels aside, because when you bring over like four people who works with A-1 and Aniplex, one or more is bound to have worked on their anim@s product. So the end result is my loot pile.

真命 indeed.

loot sidewaps

  • BTW “Yuiberries” LOL
  • BTW #2: Anyone wants those GSC exclusive Cinderella Girls petit nendo + stage set? Turns out I have it after all! Now I have 2. [Update: A Digi Kerot has claimed it]
  • Not included is the Sakura-Con x ELISA t-shirt, which I got as a “con” memento. The con tees are all pretty nice actually, but meh.
  • And because I rotated the image, upside-down Yamada is just horizontal.

Cosplay: A little better than average East Coast but surprisingly not so different in both quality and type. There were a few more “otaku” characters. Like an Anzu. And team weedlord. Otherwise nothing really too special as far as what I can tell. The Anime Boston Mako bancho was better than the Sakura-Con Mako bancho, if it means anything. Both are still awesome.

Back to more IM@S. I think Adachi is kind of a closet uhhhh let’s just say he really likes Yamada and not so much Asuna, and is an IoriP. I asked him during the “live sketch” panel. Akai said “DD” but I think in Ogistar he puts down Miki/Kotori. So whatever; Akai’s workspace has a Nishigori movie visual posted. And he did go to both days at SSA. So if anything I know he knows “the feels.” (You can kind of see it in the full size picture.)

20140419_164159

There’s even a follow-up on the Ogi-star Memories/Backstage M@ster story. So there were actually several print mistakes between the first run and the current run, including Masunari’s profile being the wrong one? I forgot exactly what Masunari said but his profile got switched with someone else’s, and the new one is missing something from Nishigori’s page. I don’t know if he remembered the specifics but he said something to that extent.

There was a charity auction. There was Range Murata–I attended both of his panels in part, but he’s his usual self, just like how I remembered it from AX 2004. As usual Murata’s pieces fetched real high prices, although this time I think Titan did pretty well too. I don’t know because I only heard second-handedly as I traveled back home.

Koyama Mami is a nice older lady with a stamp! If you do stamps with your shikishi, you are instantly awesome in my book. Also, her lines are tiny. :(

I talked with producer Kinoshita at the guest dinner. He did a study abroad program with… I want to say LIU? So he was in NY and that’s when he first saw anime as sort of a thing he could do. I guess someone showed Akira in class, and that was the trigger.

It’s a similar story with the noitanimA guy, who spoke really good English. He talked about how he feels about working on the various Leiji Matsumoto shows as a 30-40something growing up. Really touching story about how Yamato 2199 was for him.

Anyway, I think I want this con wrap-up to be short. So let’s finish with Ms. Yuiberries. Ishikawa is pretty much as you expect, except I think unlike many other seiyuu of her age (early 20s) she’s a little more “alive.” Fairly talkative and approachable, she’s probably in a crossroad place in her career but that Titan thing is pushing things along? I have hopes for her. And yeah, she’s very cute, in a Japanese next-door-girl kind of way, and yet really distinctive looking. Hard to put my fingers on it.

PS. Yui Ishikawa’s photos here.

PPS. Here’s a quote from a happy customer about the Elisa photograph session “Line was kind of long, but they were really pushing people through. You got to sit in a chair next to her and she held my arm and leaned in for when they took the pic. []I’m sure she’s pretty tired, but she was really warm and friendly the whole time.”

2 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture

April 11, 2014

A Down Side to Easy-to-Access Anime

By omo

Let’s say, if you went to a typical sit-down restaurant in America and order some food. The waiter provides your table with a basket of bread as per custom at the establishment, and seeing you are very hungry the waiter decides to give you extra bread. Is this appropriate? I would think so, and most people probably wouldn’t even bat an eye.

Let’s say, if you spend a few hundred bucks and bought some late-night anime. The anime provides you with the content you thought you were getting. And seeing that this is the home video BD that you now own after parting a few hundred USDs or whatever currency, it provides some bonus material with extra T&A. Is this appropriate? I would think so, but some people calls this pandering.

Actually, it is pandering. But isn’t this wanted? Wouldn’t it be better to have this than not have this?

Hello again, old flame

This kind of made me think, in an orthogonal way, about the price of anime and the nature of its target audience. I am sort of pro-cheap anime in the sense that it makes access easy. And more access is better for access-starved international audience of anime, it’s hand-in-hand with marketing, as far as major areas of improvement for the state of the “anime industry” overseas. It’s more democratic. But I guess as with many things, there are down sides or unintended negative consequences to that. Well, maybe it’s not a negative consequence, but it’s naturally what happens when the signal-to-noise ratio drops.

There’s a fair amount of academic literature on the effects of internet and mass media and “noise” in terms of how to make the internet useful. I think we can apply the same idea to anime in that anime for the masses should be cheap and easy to reach. But anime for specific, intended small groups should be harder. And it is; in that naturally the marketing dollar isn’t there, fewer people care about it and fewer people talk about it.  But when what represents anime overseas is this small sample, what then? Cool Japan is not about Doreamon or Sanae-san but Evangelion or Pokemon right? I guess Pokemon is mainstream in that sense. But people don’t pass judgment on anime because they are in that niche. Anime is a marketing word, but that is probably a bad thing for the medium/genre in the long run, if you want to capture its diversity. Or rather, if you want to capture what passes for anime in the 21st century. Of course, the problem is also kind of the fact that there aren’t many anime titles that fits the Dragon Ball Z kind of profile in the 21st century; as in there hasn’t been more exceptions to the rule for companies like FUNimation to profit on. And all the anime-cancer sentiments is really built on this kind of mentality.

There’s this zone in oversea criticism that this is missed. It’s like all the people who think about anime in the framework of Mamoru Oshii’s works. Like, com’on. Maybe you’ll be more credible from Hayao Miyazaki’s framework. Can you just stick to Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer? Is this even relevant in the 21st Century beyond as a curiosity? Is Tezuka relevant beyond just his influence? Hasn’t anime changed enough in the last 50 years to, you know, come up with something new?

In other words, are people even watching the right anime? Is it because “anime” is too accessible, too plentiful, that people don’t even know what they really shouldn’t be watching? If the only way to watch anime is pony up some $50 or $100 to catch 1-2 cours of it, you probably would really want to know what it is before putting down the money. It makes people care. A lot more.

It also highlights the problem with marketing of anime overseas. There are little ways to “send signals” about shows as to who should watch what, from the homeland. And it’s full of lost-in-translation perils. If we have to rely on the likes of blogs that do season previews, then we are hopeless. I mean at least back in the days, people just hyped specific shows because they knew it was going to be something interesting as a reflection of Japan’s internal marketing and the buzz from its domestic fanbase. Now we just have people writing about every which thing, and it’s hard to say who knows enough or do enough homework to sift through the 50+ shows every season–if to just not get any one of them wrong, let alone more than a few of them right.

Maybe this is a call to people to watch anime in a way that treats it right–not just as disposable internet butt-wipe, a passing joke. Not every show is shovelware, not every show deserves your attention. But do enough to gain the appreciation for those the anime that you will fall in love with, before it happens. Maybe both you and the shows you watch will be better off as a result.

But I realize, the problem is also the general lack of easy-to-use tools. Which makes me think the Real Problem of Anime(tm) is still marketing. Which is odd/ironic, because most anime are just advertisement for something else. But it also makes sense if you think about it, and do more research. If people gets the right idea from marketing material on the get go, they wouldn’t even bother with a lot of the anime out there. But without the societal attitudes and otaku groups that form naturally to lay down the rules for people to watch whatever it is, what passes for marketing in Japan might not even work as is. Instead, oversea fans gets just piecemeal of all of this and who knows how effective that is.

4 comments | posted in English Language Modern Visual Fandom, Modern Visual Culture

April 1, 2014

Does Good Writing in Anime Matter?

By omo

It’s hard to say.

Aila

I personally enjoy good writing, especially when its the simple, subtle, clever and not outstanding. I also like it when it’s all over the top and you know what they’re doing a mile away. I also like it when in general it displays competence.

In that sense, most anime are written pretty well, but very few are great, and fewer still outstanding. If I want to nitpick from this season’s shows, it might be something like NagiAsu as a good example, and Wizard Barristers as one that could use a lot of work.

On that level, it does seem writing makes a difference. But I’m not sure if it goes any further than the extremes. In the middle,  you have a sea of adaptations of varying quality, and the execution matters a lot more than what the script says. On the other hand, original works tend to vary greatly. Zvezda, for example, is a really high concept but if the execution was not even 80% of what we had, it would have been a very hard sell. WUG is the opposite case, where the writing is clean and simple but it’s got all these difficulties in executing it.

If we bypass all these nuances and just look at their MAL ranking or some silly nonsense, it might paint a different picture. It’s partly why I said it doesn’t matter a whole lot in the middle. I suspect this is also a big reason why people complain about the overabundance of moe-type anime, or anime that relies heavily on canned, episodic slicing of some sort of atmospheric depiction of a scene. Because those shows do just fine. It’s kind of like when you read Ben from Anipages on Telecom animator’s layouts or some such. Because that stuff, when it’s well-executed, is beautiful. The writing can be just icing on the cake.

In that sense, writing is like playing a strategy game: there’s micro and there’s macro. With this artificial distinction, I think strong macro will typically lead to success, but of course all I’ve been saying just now is that the trend has been the opposite.

I wonder if it’s just an otaku thing? Is this why Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere has fans?

But to circle back, if we look at a straightforward kiddy show like Gundam BF, it’s got that same rhyme and reason, that smart macro formula for success. Even if the writing is just sort of average. So I guess there’s not much conclusive that we can say about writing other than that even before you start laying words on paper, you need to know what you’re doing already.

Leave a comment | posted in Modern Visual Culture

March 28, 2014

Kill la Kill

By omo

Spoilers. Spoilers everywhere.

Continue reading

Leave a comment | posted in Kill La Kill, Modern Visual Culture

March 18, 2014

Idol of Character

By omo

"Special feeling"? Sure Danbooru taggers.

Writing about WUG over here got me thinking. In episode 10, the Wake Up Girls encounter a variety of other idol groups from the Tohoku region, including a gag style group that goes by the name of Demons of Oga. It reminds me of Babymetal a lot. In the usual “wheel of morality” way there’s a deeper message about WUG and idol groups in that week’s episode, which is about some kind of trait or essence of an idol group.

I’ve been thinking about this as it applies to not only actual idol groups like AKB48, Perfume or Momoclo and the like, but also groups like μ’s or 765Pro. What is special about each of them? And if the fans and the public ultimately define what these essences are for the group, how would I define it?

[It also makes me think, a lot, about the concert report I’m writing. I fear it’s going to get to ~14000 words at the end and I’m going to tack on another 5000 or something just for concluding thoughts. It’s safe to say my vacation to Japan may have exhausted me mentally and physically but it’s energized me in some other ways. So this post might be a bit like a safety valve in that sense.]

Getting existential about idols is sort of how I do idols. [This is also probably why I don’t do much idols, at all.] It’s like seeing those images of HK or SG Lovelivers bowing down before their goddesses and it makes you think. It’s like making a joke about the Ten Commandments. I’m not so sure if it is more appropriate to quote Key the Metal Idol or quote, I don’t know, Nietzsche. But it never really occurs to me to look at it from the opposite side of the poster wall–how does Bushiroad or Lantis or Bandai-Namco think about it? How does Gami-P feel when he has to put together an agenda for “third vision” planning meeting? Likewise, how does Eriko Nakamura feels when she shares a stage with her new-ish coworkers like Hasshi or Koroazu? Maybe that is something we can think about. Sure beats trying to get into Yamakan’s shoes–are we making gods or what?

The way I define 2.5D is probably different than how you define it. It’s definitely something I realize on my trip, and on twitter, and from all the Ps and Lovelivers and Oukokumin that I met. And it’s very interesting and mind-broadening, I guess. We definitely express our affection for these idols in very different ways. We not only internalize it differently (I wonder how do these companies internalize the idols they produce) but we might even perceive them differently. Kind of like how I still don’t appreciate Asami Imai nearly as much as the next guy. I mean I like her a lot more now that I’ve seen how she sets her presence on stage, in the flesh, but it’s… well, let’s just say she is a part of what makes IM@S very special to me. And it’s people like her that I think the idol world will not be able to reproduce. It’s the Mingosu and the Chiaking of the idol worlds that makes IM@S special. It’s why Nakamura is great. It’s people like Shikaco that adds a flair to seiyuu-idolness that gives it a sort of levity that isn’t so much manufactured as much as “oi we let you do this because I think nobody else is gonna.” And then you have people that falls in the gap, like Kido Ibuki. It’s these little things, to me, that defines the essence of these idol groups, even the fake ones like ClariS because at the very least they’re still brands.

Ultimately it’s the WUG-chans that will inherit the earth. They are true everyday girls. It’s like the chika idols that bust their butts on a daily basis trying to make it. But otaku like me just can’t be settled with that, can’t we? I need this artifice. It is to no disrespect, but such is the 2.5D way, where it’s not just a personal god, but an international, mixed-media intellectual property-based venture that revenue-shares, whose avatars can optionally be hand-drawn or fully computer-generated. You know, when it just takes too much time and resources to animate the old fashion way.

This is the Yamakan spirit. It’s a Sony. And to circle back to WUG, it’s a pretty nice artifice…and it’s not a Sony, go figure.

2 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Seiyuu, Idol, Pop