Category Archives: Modern Visual Culture

May 30, 2012

Digital Composition, Fate/Zero

By omo

I think the best live example of digital composition that I’ve seen recently was on the bonus video clips from Infinite Stratos. Sentai’s BD release has one of the bonus feature in which the viewers are given an example of how it’s done in the typical 3DCG merge scene. For IS, that means flight mecha designs with 2D face and body parts plastered into the mecha.

In light of digital animation and its proliferation and increasing sophistication, this is a no-brainer category in which anime can expand, grow, explore, and create new stuff. A while ago Raito-kun mentioned this, and it makes sense:

Really, the secret star of F/Z is Yuichi Terao, the director of photography. F/Z is no ‘sakuga anime’, but a ‘satsuei anime’.

In relation to that, duckroll posted a bunch of translation (on NeoGAF) from the recent interviews on Mynavi, all about Fate/Zero & ufotable.

There’s a good blurb about background art in the show featuring Terao and Kim (BG artist). Click on and read it~ Some notable blurbs:

– Terao joined Ufotable in Dec 2003. At the time he was hoping to apply for a job in production, but he was instead put into the newly formed Photography Department (Digital Compositing). He knew almost nothing about animation photography back then, but now he is the head of the department and the director of photography for Fate/Zero.

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– For Terao, one of the most important aspects of the show is the sky. He uses a “Type-Moon Blue” to characterize the sky in the show because it is a color that works well with Type-Moon characters, and serves as a motif in all their original artwork. He tries to bring this out in the sky backgrounds as much as possible.

– To illustrate an example of the type of sky he is talking about, he shared a reference photo he took for Garden of Sinners on the studio roof. Incidentally, the studio roof is also the reference setting for the stand off between Tokiomi and Kariya in episodes 14 and 15.

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4 comments | posted in Fate, Modern Visual Culture

May 26, 2012

Music May Be a Thing

By omo

There are some spoilers, however light, in this post.

Some opinions for you to consider:

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4 comments | posted in AKB48, Beck, Hikaru no Go, Honey And Clover, Idolmaster, K-ON, Macross, Modern Visual Culture, Nodame Cantabile, Piano no Mori, Sakamichi no Apollon

May 22, 2012

Seraphim Call

By omo

There is this 1999 Sunrise moe anime about 11 girls and a Christmas holiday celebration on an island made of academic studies and science. All it needed was X-men-style superpower heroines and trashy light novel origin in order to become something just a passing curiosity. It probably isn’t one of my all-time favorite anime, but it’s a show that I have a hard time forgetting. I blame it on Mochizuki Tomomi, but I eventually fessed up and decided to just say “I like it.” The show is Seraphim Call, just in case you were wondering.

During the days of the moe and Akiba boom, this was just one of the many projects created to cash in. In some ways it might be just too early for its time; we were not ready. The word moe hasn’t really reached its status at the time. Seraphim Call combined romance and that lonely, chilly, heart-warming (and occasionally heart-rending) package into 1-episode chunks. Mochizuki is a pretty creative cinematographer and he applied these tropes, in good 80s-extravagant-OVA-era ways, to the series. The end result is unconventional but also very memorable for me. I think it’s fair to say that this show was at least a little experimental.

I didn’t like the way the marketing for the show worked; it was pretty extreme, selling DVDs (and LDs!) of each episode individually. There was a CD single for each episode, as each episode focused on one girl and that girl fronted the ED theme for that week. Yuko Sasaki’s moe voice rolled in the OP very nicely and I didn’t think I had a similar reaction until Yakushimaru Etsuko got into anime.

I think the problem with this show was that the franchise has nothing to hook itself on. It was not consistently executed; there needed be something–idols, games, whatever–beyond just the anime and its characters. Kita E was a notably better example, but that also didn’t go very far. It is also a better example because it was dated actually after the year 2000, but hey. To be clear, this has not much to do with the experimental nature of the anime and franchise; I suppose looking back, it was one of those things that taught some people a lesson on what to do and what not to do, when they create projects like this.

One thing that bothered me about Seraphim Call was how it appealed to a set of characteristics that bothered me but yet appealed to me. It’s kind of like the irrational dislike I have for furries, but yet I can engage those tropes on some level in the mind and analyze it. Seraphim Call taps into the “Asian winged sad female[also male variant available] in piles of airborne white particles” set of tropes. It’s like games with the word “Valk-” in it. These things have this…stench. It was massively popular in Asia in the late 90s and early 00s. Thankfully for Seraphim Call, it steered mostly clear of the adhered tropes until the very last episode. I am also not particularly adverse to it, although in general I avoided those kind of things. (Valkyria Chronicles seem to be my only other vice in this category.)

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8 comments | posted in Modern Visual Culture, Sengoku Collection, Seraphim Call

May 21, 2012

A Week of Many Cons and Ds

By omo

Just another post of random notes.

That “Girls und Panzer” anime so reminds me of this:

What a surprise! Takaaki Suzuki is behind this thing. By surprise I mean OMG OPPOSITE MEANING. The man is a bro though, so I’d like to support his efforts.

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Sayonara Ponytail is the weird kind of band with a weird presence. Weird because they were an indie cartoon band and now a major-label cartoon band. It’s just three girls, but it seems one of them is responsible for most of the creative direction of the group.  They debuted for the major label last year, but I read about it back when j1m0ne was just starting to post about indie stuff she found. You can hear them cover Spitz’s Sora mo Taberu Hazu in Tsuritama at the usual places. (Scroll to the bottom of the tag listing to see j1m0ne’s post lol.) Well, if she found it in Tower Record, just how indie was it??

Anyway, you know me and 2.5D, and Sayonara Ponytail are very much so. Think of it as the pickup of the week, as their Tsuritama single comes out this week. There are three versions of this crap:

The double-sided poster that comes with the single features the Tsuritama boys on one side and the witches on the other. The LE version and the Anime version come with a bonus CD. But I guess you might have to shop elsewhere to get that poster as CDJ is out of it.

Actually I have sort of an opinion on Sayonara Ponytail, and it’s mostly made of ambivalence. That said I haven’t listened to their album from last year, which probably means my opinion doesn’t count. I sure don’t count it myself. Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff to be unsure about, but you can read about some of that here.

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In the US, Memorial Day Weekend marks not only the start of Anime Con season, but also of Summer vacationing among people who have PTOs, rather than mandatory school closures (though the period largely overlap). This year’s lineup are the three usual familiars: Anime North (most notable for English-language-tweeting Asakawa Yuu along with Sasanuma, also a p. cool DJ), FanimeCon (Aizawa Mai, the usual Yamaga crew, Kia Asamiya, Koyama Shigeto), and Animazement.

I’m going to Animazement. See you there? And if I make it to Kotoko’s concert alive that would make her one of my most-attended Anison artists at 3 concerts! Well, not counting Yoko Kanno. The three big Memorial Day weekend cons have pretty good guests as usual, but I think Fanime had some problems this year so all their announcements were pretty late. On the other hand Animazement called it out, well, when Mr. Ishiguro was still with us. Besides that, the usual old crew of voice actors and directors and producers will be there, specifically Itano (the circus man), Nagahama (director of Mushishi), Orikasa Fumiko, Kaikan Phrase mangaka, and lots of others.

I wonder if any of the cons are going to move their dates next year… Please peruse the links to the respective sites for the detail guest list!

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There’s that anime power ranking thing and I guess I’m suppose to vote for shows every week–makes sense if/when I am able to watch that week’s anime that week–just wanted to point out Tsuritama was great this past week. It’s a good week for the show too this week come to think of it…

I thought Sencolle, too, was quality this week. Tho I’m a sucker.

What’s more I didn’t even vote this week, because I was too busy partying! Perhaps fortunately this non-voting doesn’t happen all the time (translation: it happens way too often). If I had my way with Kevo, I’d retool it with a lag period–you rank the shows from Saturday to Friday, but make the ballot due like, Monday or something. Also if he’s good with spreadsheets, explore the wonders of Google Docs to automate polling and results? A resounding yes.

4 comments | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Modern Visual Culture, Seiyuu, Idol, Pop

May 19, 2012

Space Brothers Episode 7 And Narrative Parallels

By omo

Is it fair to say that Space Brothers makes a statement about the spacefaring nature of man through Mutta’s struggles?

Let’s take Gundam 00 as an example. It has this rather cliche Hollywood theme that pits man’s unity towards an external harm as a survival instinct, a rational course of action that brings the world together in order to survive in the harsh deep space. Kuroda’s “Celestial Beings” is that artificial, external factor, that leads to the corny plot factor we discover in the Gundam 00 Movie. What goes around comes around in full circle!

A united world is hardly something unusual; Star Trek made it a known backdrop, and I think SF-attuned minds world-wide took it to heart since decades ago. But as we continue towards the future, and actually trying to go to space or make the world a better place, we experience and see first-hand the true problem with humanity’s hangups. It’s no longer fiction if we have to live it, right?

And I think Space Brothers subtly explores this “true problem.” It uses this kind-of hamfisted sort of framing around Mutta’s struggles to contrast it with his youthful past about going into space. (Well, maybe it was better in the manga.) If we take a look at Mutta and his turmoils do we see the real hurdle between man and the infinite? Does his pride issues and tendency for violence (however justifiable) reduces his chances to go to space? Do our pride issues and tendency for violence reduce the same?

This is pretty classy. But also really shallow in a way.

What’s kind of amusing is that it’s also an irrational perspective. Mutta is sympathetic and he is a protagonist you can easily root for. I think it would be great if he can fulfill his dreams of being a space dude along with his brother. But it certainly doesn’t have to happen in order for the future to continue to progress. The plot takes its cues through Mutta, but the world does not revolve around any one person. In fact that is the, like, satori, to overcome Mutta’s problems. And I think he knows this; it’s just that he cannot live with it (yet). The world may be a better place if Mutta fulfill his deepest wishes, but we aren’t presented with an equal or better alternative unlike how it is in non-fiction.

I wonder if Space Brothers will explore that theme. It has tried in a way, but it could be more honest. If JAXA and NASA can cooperate, will there ever be space for the rest of us?

2 comments | posted in Gundam, Modern Visual Culture