Most of the time I fall decidedly into the camp of “serious business” anime viewers, the sort who would list Miyazaki, Kon, and Oshii in top ten lists, attend pretentious film festival screenings of various animated works, and wax eloquent on the stylistic affectations taken by various directors (all while swirling around a pinot noir or some other high-class alcoholic beverage. Unfortunately, anime of the “srs bzns” sort is decidedly rarer compared to say – K-ON, Saki, Lucky Star, Miname-ke, Hidamari Sketch, etc., etc. – essentially, the formula “Group of girls engage in loveable hijinks based around a certain activity/school”
Certainly I would not call them bad, but as my taste in anime goes I’m positively diabetic (In particular, this makes me somewhat unique compared to the other authors on this blog). Sure, I can watch a show here and there but inevitably moe fatigue seems to develop. Character types and designs feel like they start to blend together, and for some series more than others every move seems positively calculated for the maximum pandering value (K-ON feels particularly guilty of this). Consequently, it’s a genre I rarely appreciate.
It’s interesting then that I’ve recently picked up a couple of exemplars that have melted my heart, or at least the cold barrier of cynicism regarding this genre.
Out of the other bloggers here I am decidedly grognardly when it comes to certain sorts of anime – I have a soft spot for a particular aesthetic style that I find is exceedingly rare in the medium – anime that seems to want to pass itself off as a live-action show. One particular irony i derive from this categorization is that I really don’t prefer to watch live action, being more an animation buff than anything.
What do I mean by this “live-action paradigm”? Well, “live-action” anime exhibit a few characteristics:
-slow pacing; generally brief bursts of action, if any at all
-no special attack fetishism (a shounen trope)
-traditional live action pacing (discrete unrelated episodes connected by a meta-narrative, often climaxing in some sort of finale)
-heavy emphasis on dialogue and character interaction regardless of the genre
-some element of moral ambiguity (at the very least, more than a typical “good guy vs. bad guy” scenario)
-particular style of character design with emphasis on realism, often utilizing a 1:7 head ratio, sometimes with pronounced differences in character race and ethnicity
The essential conceit behind this grouping is that these shows would work equally if made in a live action format: there’s no sort of moe appeal completely based on the design of the characters (that could not be reproduced to the same degree with a live actor), or reliance on special effects that would look campy in a live action format. As an animation fan, the fact that these shows are done with animation (and with good animation, to boot) tickles me immensely. Almost all of shows that slot into this paradigm end up as favourites in my book.
Here’s the catch – as a category, I’m not really sure if this is all that distinctive. I mean, you could easily conflate this group as “good anime”, yet I am hesistant to do so. I’ll offer the following selections (that I have watched beginning to end) that I believe exemplify this particular “type”.
This episode made me realize that Hanekawa is voiced by Horie Yui. HNNNNNNG.
Obligatory aneurysm aside, as usual I’ll skip the commentary on the character development since others more than adroitly cover it, and instead focus on digging into the supernatural nature of the plot…
First Note: Shinto is an animistic religion, based around the worship of kami – often translated as “gods” but can also be thought of as “spirits”. Essentially, natural objects have supernatural deities of a sort that watch over them – so one has kami for trees, kami for snakes, kami for birds, and so on and so forth. Consequently there are many hundreds of different kami, and plenty of temples dedicated to obscure kami to go around – giving us the starting scenario in Nadeko Snake 1.
Here is the text from the opening flash of Nadeko Snake #1 (brought to you by Zetsubou-honed pausing reflexes!), which I feel reveals HUGE amounts of what is to come.
Various collected clippings from Ghostlightning’s episodic coverage of Bakemonogatari. To be cleaned up and made presentable in a future post. I present them here in mostly raw format, just cut and pasted so I won’t have to go digging later. Eventually I’d like to compile a sort of viewer’s guide for the show.
So, for those of you who, for one reason or another, are suddenly hit by a pang of guilt for watching ‘illegal’ subs, you can, if you want to, consult this regularly updated legal streaming list. Now admittedly, I’m not the ‘legal anime watcher saint’, as I watched R2, After Story and a few others, but maybe this list is good for those who are just starting anime, there are really a few good ones listed there, such as:
Code Geass (Season 1)
Death Note (Entire Season)
Eureka Seven (Subbed, the entire thing may be uploaded soon)
Gankutsuou (I just started–amazing!)
Shangri-La
And much more (probably), can anyone else pick out good animé from that list. This list really is regularly updated, as Gankutsuou was just added maybe 2 weeks ago, while the list has existed since maybe January.
I recently went to watch Les Miserables with Vendredi (yeah, Vendredi was nice enough to forfeit a true animé moment by going with a girl and decided to gow ith me instead :/ ). It was an amazing musical, and the songs were really catchy, especially this one:
Vendredi commented that Enjolras reminded him of Lelouch; I guess its appropriate, not only for the French-ish names, but because of their drive to make a “new world” by violently opposing the current government.
Recently, I was talking with fisharson and Phazys about upcoming shows, and Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, the English title of which translates to “When Seagulls Cry”. Both noted that the title certainly didn’t seem quite as sinister as it’s predecessor, Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni (lit. “When Cicadas Cry”). I pointed out that, being a coastal city dweller myself, the long and somewhat mournful call of a seagull was incredibly evocative and very closely associated with the location, and I felt it was plenty appropriate. Still, fisharson wasn’t quite impressed – the most recent seagulls that featured prominently in animated media after all are the button-eyed sort in Pixar’s Finding Nemo. While certainly menacing to the fish, their design is such to elicit amusement from the viewer – certainly, couldn’t a better choice have been made for a horror anime been made?
I’ve been trying to work on implementing an atmospheric scattering model for a while. Originally, I went with the ATI paper by Hoffman and Preetham, but I didn’t like the results. Or rather, I couldn’t get the right scattering coefficients to get it to work nicely. I then considered Sean O’Neil’s article on GPU Gems 2, but I felt it was a little over my head. I ended up using Ralf Nielsen’s thesis. I don’t intend to talk about the techniques used, you can just read the papers if you’re interested.
It took me a month to get this far. Since I don’t really know what to say, I’ll just put some pictures.
Sword of the Stranger is very much a homage to the whole period samurai flick, or jidaigeki. All the affectations are here: the nameless ronin, copious violence and gore, initial reluctance to drawn steel, vicious enemy/rival seeking a worthy opponent, etc. etc. It’s certainly not what I would call incredibly ambitious, but it’s excellence is found not so much in originality but rather in how perfect the execution is. It is the attention paid to a lot of subtle details – no frame is ever really wasted. Rarou’s fighting style, for example, is noticeably “Chinese” in some aspects (these come through more in his final duel) and would not feel terribly out of place in a wuxia film. Some spoilers to follow after the break.
