The Yard Sale
Just going through the thousands of things in my various feeds and ran across this on Pikasha’s blog post:
At the guest reception at Sakuracon, we saw this adoring Nagahama’s table. He said it’s a hand-made gift from a fan. I hope you realize this, fan person!
Chocolates makes a great treat and souvenir in Seattle. I should’ve brought home some.
Let’s talk about Rin and Nico.
I really enjoyed episode 5. It struck me as the first episode this season that actually took a moment and gave a character some time to think about and make a change. Let’s just say that after episode 5 some people thought Hanayo might start wearing girlier clothes.
I want to bring in episode 4 as a point to compare. Episode is the Nico episode where we learn about her family situation and the various circumstances she has to struggle with. We got some nice back story going there too, along with her adorable younger sisters and brother (all voiced by Nico’s seiyuu too). But in the end, was Nico a reformed woman? Nope.jpg. She might be just too tsun to quit, so her μ’s friends gave her an out and helped her out.
I think the comparison only make sense because how the story play out so similarly between the two episodes. Both focuses on a girl in such a way that puts the spotlight/pressure on her in order to reveal some newly discovered issue, in which the team helps to resolve. And it’s done so in this weird surprise to the audience, kind of like a surprise happy birthday party minus the awkward secret sharing that the girl-of-the-week get suspicious on.
But the key here is just to highlight that Nico smoothed out her issues in terms of lying to both her group mates and her siblings by making this fairy tale transition that’s kind of an allegory of the idol identity versus the personal identity. Versus Rin having actual character development.
Com’on man.
Not that is particularly problematic; I am no Love Liver but I do like Nico more than most out of the cast (favorite is by far Alisa, partly because she has more of a concentrated dose of Nishida Asako’s flairs), and it isn’t the first time I’ve called upon Yukarin as “sekai iichi kawaii” so Nico’s tropes are all too welcomed. I’m just not sure how possibly this shallow shell of modern amusement can compare to what simple coming-of-age maiden problem that Rin has overcome, along with her dozens of other anime heroines, no less than every magical girl since…ever. The fact that Nico’s episode is composed so similarly to Rin’s just cracks me up every time thinking about it.
I thought the way the camera framed Hanayo at the end was brilliant; it’s like those “maidenly” shots of Haruka Amami where you see her slender but subtly remarkable body in motion, her head above her chin out of frame, for less than a second. Great way to cap off an heartful Love Live episode.
And I don’t know where to go with this post–I can conclude a half dozen different ways. Let’s just say that for those of you who think anime is primarily entertainment, just be aware that when you posit this philosophically, it is, to say the least, shallow? We can do better than that.
To make up my inability to understand Japanese, hopefully, watching the same film five times (well, more like four and change, because I kind of walked out of the fifth one because I had to be somewhere) hopefully will mitigate some of it. In reality there are a lot of theme and plot hooks that a better understanding of the language will shed light more immediately, but I guess there’s something to be said of a film that generally lines up with modern understanding of complexities in TV anime.
This is the spoiler-free version of the movie overview. It’s also one diluted with sufficient amount of distance–it was really hard to write this back when the memory was fresh. I was way, way too emotionally affected by the material to make any useful observation other than to describe what was happening to me. But that’s the trade-off. Someone just asked me recently about the order of certain scenes during a part of the movie and I can only confirm what corresponded to what I remembered, but not tell him what happened in the gap he forgot. Such is how it goes.
Then again, I still see the IM@S in everything even today so maybe this distance or somewhat more objective perspective means nothing anyways in those terms. It just helps me to write it in a way that isn’t 10000+ words because I can start with a perspective that’s easier to handle, and later on go on from there. [Don’t be surprised there’s a second post on this, that said.]
Anyway, the Idolm@ster feature film celebrates the series in the most meaningful way in that for those people who would honestly go “IM@S LIFE” it will upgrade from zero to one single hankie. The familiar message about overcoming self-doubt and finding encouragement in fellowship, and overcoming life obstacles together is always going to be moving when translated well. It’s stories like these that move us, the otaku. How much access we have to that source of never-ending FEELS simply depends on how deep you are in the IM@S fan pit, in this case.
I’ll save that stuff later, although that seems to be the things people always want to talk about…
Visually, the IM@S movie is all over the place. I mean that in a very basic way–it simply gives you a lot of different looks, and at times it’s enough to jar some people out of their suspension of belief. Depends on how you take your regular dose of cartoon, that might be a thing you like or a thing you dislike, but from a “looks per paid/obtained content” ratio perspective there’s a lot to it. It’s good value.
There’s also these 2 cuts where Haruka and Kana are animated like… different. Like Bahi JD different. I’m not sure who and how that came about, but that might be the biggest case where things look nicely but in a jarring way. It’s not like how I can nitpick endlessly on the way 3D animated backgrounds are composed beneath 2D character animation that makes the final concert scene a little janky too, but that’s a little farther along into the nitpickery than a legitimate concern. It’s just another perspective.
Other visual things…I really like a lot of the design elements in the movie, from the promo poster for the in-show live (which is sold as a separate thing at the theaters) to the way various Sony products are placed in the movie. It’s like everything I like about the TV anime, but better. I can go on here some more but it’s no fun without visual references.
My main criticism to the IM@S movie, perhaps slightly biased here, is that there’s too much of it. The movie can easily be shortened to about a buck and forty-five if they were a little more merciless in the editing room. The middle section drags a little, but that isn’t the problem–it’s the beginning of the middle and the post-resolution bits (before the main climax).
Actually, that’s the thing about this movie that is tough to talk about. In a way the movie feels “all over the place” because it’s kind of two things bounded together. On one end you have the “sparkling” side of things, with the film kicking off with that Nemurihime trailer that you will hear me talk about all the freaking time if you are in an earshot of me speaking about the movie. On the other side of the wire is the concert scene. There are some pretty exciting parts of the film that I would sit up for every time, too.
On the other end, you have this thoughtful, contemplative story about Haruka and Kana. Since I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible, I’m just going to say that when I was watching it the third time, I started to think about the Bible and how the true turning point of the Crucifixion story actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. The IM@S movie made it kind of obvious what was happening but it wouldn’t be obvious until you started to watch it with everything you know about Anim@s on the line. Admittedly that is more a handicap on my end because of the language processing issues I had to struggle with, but once I put it all together, the result was that now I have a definite favorite scene from the film.
To that end, let me share this piece of meta with you. Many of the popular Second Vision songs get some playtime in the movie. If you haven’t seen the film yet, play this game–look for the song Jibun Res@art in the movie. That song is pretty much the number one favorite (or second, depends on how you count The IDOLM@STER) among fans. One somewhat remarkable point on IM@S music is that a lot of the songs in the game is vaguely about the game, so this one kind of finds itself in a precious part of the film while others just… Well, I hope we can watch the film and talk more about it, when it gets that home video release.
In other words, it’s about the front-end and the back-end of the idol concept, where in IM@S it comes in terms of the video game concept. (Why are so many IM@S songs about idoling? That’s just way meta.) In episode one of Anim@s we were asked this question. Now we have just the Million Live version of the same answer, from the other side of the shininess.
[And that’s about 5-10% of the thoughts I have on the movie! You see how bad this is…]
In the mid to late 00s there has been an anison boom. The question is has it cooled since 2010? With the 8th Animax Anison Grand Prix canned this year, what do we make of it? How about Love Live S2 OP sales breaking records? Or the way different anison artists “being dropped” by different things? It’s intriguing.
Thankfully, someone already wrote it up, so I don’t have to.
My own opinion of this is that, like all musical artists, the way people make a living vary depending on where you are at on the chain. As a “live lover” I appreciate solid acts and people who can put on a good show. Thing is, a lot of anison artists during the boom are hardly that different than the seiyuu idols themselves that are now replacing them, in terms of exactly that–their live abilities. Then there are those who are notably better, invariably because that’s their bag to begin with; they are the Angela’s and LiSA’s of the bunch; the super robot singers (because seiyuu are not quite there yet?); and the singer-song-writers (which includes bands like Angela too, but also Nano.ripe, Ali Project and Yousei Teitoku. And the occasional ZAQ).
I’m not sure if we can make a distinction between the seiyuu idols who are now more like regular artists versus “idols” who are seiyuu, like StylipS or Sphere for example. I mean I enjoy all their shows, but the way I enjoy say a Nana Mizuki live is not going to be the same as how I enjoy IM@S. It’s harder to get that drooling, wallet-opening fanbase going if you are Maaya Sakamoto versus the newly debuting Azusa Tadakoro. You know?
But I’m not really worried. I think anison is no different than other categories of music as far as market and culture is concerned. It might contract or expand in cycles like everything else, and we’re probably just seeing that play out. Maybe this is why when JAM Project tours the world, their message to us is that they want the anison base to expand. So it can accommodate more artists?
So. How about that I’VE SOUND 15th Anniversary?
Maybe meg rock should tweet more in English…
What’s amazing about Niconico Chokaigi is that it isn’t just “Japanese internet vomited into one place” (Makuhari Messe being the barf bag), even if that in itself is a big deal in a “this is why you can’t have nice things” kind of way that I can write a lot on its own, but that someone overseas can “catch” the vision of it and live it up as if I was there. It is truly a wondrous application of the internet where joy can be spread across the world in real time.
So rather than just watching Chokaigi at home this year, I decided to get a couple friends together and watch it at the guy’s house whose most capable of doing it. This just means good internet setup, a good multimedia set up (he’s got a big TV and easy hook-up to his network), lots of power plugs, what have you. In the end we still needed a few things–more HDMI plugs would be nice, or some way to play R2 DVDs, or a better HTPC solution, but it turned out really well. You can watch the streams you all care about and talk about it, rather than let your English language comments lament in the sea of Nico memes, or make a mess of your twitter time line. Or private chat rooms wherever, which seemed to be the better venue in retrospect.
I thought Chokaigi is possibly the closest thing to an “anime con” in the sense that while it is an industry event, it dips its feet in fan culture much more so than most other industry events. It’s hard to explain or describe this gap and oddly enough we talked about it this weekend. Just what makes an AFA or an AX versus AnimeJapan? It’s hard to explain, I think, maybe because I haven’t been to all of those events, but it’s also the sort of content you promote at those venues. Maybe it’s more a SDCC or NYCC?
At any rate, through the myriad numbers of region-unlocked live streams, we were able to watch a ton of streams on Nico over the weekend and live it up real-time. This means watching that awesome anison concert on Saturday night/Sunday afternoon featuring IVE Special Unit. Takase Kazuya doing backup dancing with Maon for Ray is just amazing. In fact that whole IVE set is amazing. But what’s also amazing is to go on twitter and see the JP feeds I follow respond to the events I watch on the streams, and other non-JPers watching the same.
The number says Chokaigi 3, this year being the third Chokaigi, has about 7.6 million viewers across all its official feeds (and there were a bunch of those), which is just to say that’s only like, two thirds of total Chokaigi streams, if we go by streams not on its schedules as not official.
???????????????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/TlLb4n8Ux8
— ?????????? (@chiaking58) April 26, 2014
Anyway, just saying you can live up Chokaigi if the technology is there, the infrastructure is there. I didn’t pay the 2500 yen or whatever for Cho Party, but at that 525y entry price for premium, this is the cheapest way to brighten up a weekend. That and a VPN. And having the image of Mocho eating a Lawson generic pastry in your retina.
Update: Say hello to some Ps that we met earlier in the year:
