Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Wake Me Up Before You Shojo
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GATSU
Posts: 15550 |
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I haven't seen the other titles, but I think Utena stands out in its efforts to analyze and deconstruct shoujo tropes, maybe even more than Eva did with the mecha genre. Plus, it has a sense of awareness and identity that other series do not. It doesn't fall into traps or pander like its target audience wants it to.
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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I've never seen any large number of complaints against anime aimed at teenage and preteen girls that have cute girls as protagonists. And there certainly is never so much shojo produced that people would complain about it dominating the total number of anime produced. Perhaps you are lumping shojo anime with young female protagonists aimed at young females and seinen anime with young female protagonists aimed at middle aged men in the same boat? |
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Parse Error
 Posts: 592 |
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Like the ones who grew up watching, say, Princess Yukiko in Enma-kun and eventually ended up creating such tasteful projects of their own as O-Parts Oman, and buying Lolita Anime and the Cream Lemon OVAs? Surely the pantyshots and nudity involving very young girls in seventies and eighties shoujo anime weren't meant to appeal to other little girls, or even boys at an age where many aren't interested in girls yet and the ones who are would prefer to see the fully-developed variety.
First off, please don't claim to speak for all "older" fans, as though they are some monolithic group with a single opinion and set of interests, which of course are exactly the same as your own. Second, to some degree, it is all in your head, as is the opposite perspective in the heads of others. Since it's pretty difficult to watch every anime ever made while taking detailed notes on their contents, there's always some confirmation bias making the things we choose to seek out seem more common than they really are, in whichever era we choose to look for those types of shows from, whether we're looking to praise or criticize that era. Even if one attempts an analysis using the various anime databases or encyclopedias in order to avoid this, the further back one goes the less complete and accurate the information is. Many of those anime aren't easily accessible for the contributors, and even when they are, there's a tendency for eyes accustomed to seeing camel toe in high definition to regard vintage fanservice as inherently innocent. Hence, we end up with some people who have difficulty accepting that pre-2000 anime was more than just space operas and giant robots, and that does tend to be very frustrating. It's also not accurate to say that contemporary, seinen-oriented and moe-centric slice-of-life and similar anime are identical to their shoujo forerunners. The escapist, late-night anime of that type are the result of refinement and distillation of those elements with appeal to the otaku market. It is quite fair to say they retain little more than the cute girls while discarding most if not all of the actual substance, such as life lessons and powerful emotional moments, but that doesn't mean the two things are completely unrelated. To illustrate the concept, let's say we had a magic button to wipe out anime history up to a few months ago, along with all current late-night anime. After a while, certain daytime anime like Smile PreCure would rebuild their secondary audience of perverted menchildren. Some time after that, an enterprising executive or two would come to notice them snatching up the merchandise and realize this could be an attractive market in its own right. When they tried to figure out how to best appeal to that audience almost exclusively, they'd stumble on the creepy fanart and realize the vital importance of cute girls and their interactions, and we'd soon end up with anime very much like what tends to be strongly associated with the moe appeal phenomenon. It's a natural and inevitable progression. To be fair to those kinds of shows, there's nothing wrong with having some lighthearted fluff to pass the time with or to cheer you up. What I don't understand is this supposed "moe dominance." If one uses it in the pejorative, colloquial sense of "cute girls doing cute things," then what percentage of anime right now actually fits that definition? If one simply means something closer to just the cute girls part, then what's the problem? Anime has indeed featured cute girls for a very long time, and having a cute girl shouldn't automatically make something terrible. If people use the term to summarily dismiss anything that doesn't have enough musclebound men, blood, guts, spaceships, and giant robots to satisfy them, then it all makes perfect sense except for the notion that there haven't been other kinds of anime all along. Which is supposed to be the real issue here? |
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dandelion_rose
 Posts: 657 Location: Kuala Lumpur |
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If you read a few posts back I mentioned the progression of cross-gender (and cross-genre) appeal in shoujo happening eventually -- Sailormoon being a possible breakthrough series. I'm certainly not denying that eventually, the appeal spread across genders and age groups, and I'm not sure where people got the impression that I was. If you observe my original exchange with walw6pK4Alo (damn, that's a really tough name to type from memory), my objection to him is him using the existence of doe-eyed cute girls in the 1960s /70s as a method of invalidating the arguments of people who have issues with 'cute girl anime' of 2002 and beyond. I pointed out the obvious: some of them are explicitly shounen. The sheer ridiculousness of trying to 'justify' or 'validify' recent trends in anime fandom when the very fans themselves know that their objections are untrue, annoys me. It's a pattern that I simply do not understand -- essentially, I don't understand the underlying sentiment that responds to a statement like "Man, I don't like this" with "I will argue my way through you so that you like this". And part of that argument (elsewhere, not just here) is an attempt to convince the person complaining that their personal experiences were false. As for PreCure, I have no interest in the series and I'm not sure why I should. If the producers feel like aiming for two demographics at the same time, that's to their interest, but I'm not sure how that changes what I said. It still doesn't mean that you can go back to the 1970s and say that the same fan subcultures are in existence (or, in this case, validated -- although I'm not sure exactly why people would feel a need for validation when they're already the biggest money-making demographic) just because of some character designs look similar. As I mentioned in another comment, that's like saying that Disney's Bambi and the girls from Kore wa Zombie signify the same things simply because the big-eyed character design is a descendant of Disney character designs. I've not encountered anyone complaining about modern anime who sincerely believes that all anime of the 80s were spaceships and angsty space pirates. I do encounter people complaining that it's harder to look for anime about spaceships and angsty space pirates after the 80s. I've often made comparisons of anime consumption to other media consumption. Does anyone seriously answer to "Urgh, today's music is full of dance music these days" with "No, have you heard of this thing called African drumbeats"?
In all my years reading and watching Doraemon, I've heard plenty of things about Shizuka's frequent bath scenes, but never have I heard it interpreted a direct attempt to pander to lolicon. There was a very long discussion about this sometime ago, but probably what a lot of viewers may see as something overtly sexual may simply be cheeky humour in a different culture. And by this I don't mean that the society is more liberal, but that it simply has different concepts of what sexual taboos are. |
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belvadeer
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Honey Honey is definitely familiar to me. I've heard both the English and French dubs of it. Sadly I never watched all of it, and I know it was airing somewhat recently on one of the cable networks I get (along with Little Women, which is still airing on Smile). I don't recall where I saw the French dub (probably overseas).
Speaking of magical girl, how about Sally the Witch? Now there's a classic if I've ever seen one. South Korea still airs that surprisingly and their version of the opening theme sounds better than the original Japanese (mainly because they slap some electric guitar into it, though it might make you think it's an entirely different show). |
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Graceful Nanami
Posts: 303 Location: United States |
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Cipher is one of the best SOL manga ever written. Period. God damn it is so good. Narita portrays 1980s America quite well in the manga, actually. I lived it myself so I should know.
Cipher is so amazing. Everyone should read it. Just... everyone who reads manga needs to read it. It's so unique and mostly real. Mostly. Haha. One of the few manga that has actually made me start sobbing, too. And the main girl's name is Anise, not Ellie. Ellie is Cipher and Siva's pet cat!  I also wish CMX had tried to licsense Alex's spinoff manga, Alexandrite, but alas. Alex is such a wonderful character.
And yeah, I wish I could watch all these shows. I've seen a few like some eps of Candy Candy but damn. The old good stuff is so hard to find now. Pretty much impossible. Of course Oniisama E... was ALMOST an 80s shoujo anime (1991) and that's pretty much the best pure shoujo drama ever animated (yes, including Glass no Kamen; don't hurt me). Seriously. Crap. Damn this article. it made me want to watch all of this. I feel like crying. |
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Parse Error
Posts: 592 |
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The statement you quoted at first was:
How do target demographics render such an objection untrue when shows fitting the stated description did, in fact, exist? For instance, if a shounen show from 1972 had a giant robot, and a seinen show from 1999 had a giant robot, to me it is absolutely true to say both shows had a giant robot in them, even though otherwise they're different things meant for different audiences. Why should completely different logic apply when we're talking about cute girls and a shift from predominantly female to predominantly male audiences? For that matter, if we disregard a similar focus on characters as a requirement, in order to look beyond what were at that time predominantly shoujo-oriented genres in the first place, then there were shounen shows with cute girls as well, a very notable one of which you already mentioned. I too get tired of people trying to convince me that my personal experiences were false, but it is sadly quite common for me to run into younger people who believe what they've seen on cable anime blocks is a representative selection of what anime "used to be like back in the day." They struggle to cope with the higher end of late nineties animation, so there's no way for them to know any better if nobody challenges that idea. I honestly don't really care what you or they like or dislike aside from hoping that you're all able at some point in the near future to find more anime that you can enjoy, because everyone deserves that.
That was just a general, hypothetical example, but as you said you already covered the same concept yourself. I would say it was getting underway quite a bit earlier, but that and some other issues are probably something better suited to a different thread on another day. |
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phoenixalia
Posts: 1408 |
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seeing all these anime make me feel like a real little kid. D: I wasn't even born when these anime were airing! I think maybe even when some of these titles were airing in the States, I must have been just born or not born yet....and in my place we didn't have any anime channels till I was 12. am I like the youngest person here? O_O
with the crappy stuff I'm seeing for the summer line up except a few titles, I'll have lots of time.... sigh, it really saddens me that more shoujo can't be animated now due to the fans not being hardcore enough to buy DVDs...:'( while(I'm not blaming) moe or harem animes...loads of em in the summer season! :/ only one real shoujo(natsuyuki rendezevous) and there's not much hype on the net about it at all....sigh. I do miss the old days. |
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kgw
 Posts: 1179 Location: Spain, EU |
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This article brings back the "Anime golden Age" in Europe, since most of the shows were broadcasted in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal... (Creamy Mamy, Pelshia, Magical Emi, Eriko, Sally, Onii-sama e, Aishite Knigh -wasn't it "Night"?-, Hikari no Densetsu...)
Fond memories, even if many of the shows were not exactly made for male teens. 
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EireformContinent
 Posts: 977 Location: Łódź/Poland (The Promised Land) |
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Oniisama E was a funny example- French edition was cut to 26 episodes, but Arabian wersion is nearly uncensored.
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cl-shojo
Posts: 70 Location: New York |
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Loved this article!
I would love to read or watch Aishite Knight since it's by Kaoru Tada, and Itazura na Kiss is one of my favorite series. And speaking of Itazura na Kiss, it's a shame the anime hasn't been licensed yet. When I was looking at 80s shojo anime that have been licensed in the U.S; it's a really low number - off the top of my head I can't even think of any. Manga isn't much better, and a lot of what we've gotten has been sci-fi/strange manga like Please Save My Earth - I'd love to older romantic comedy or slice-of-life shojo like Hoshi no Hitomi no Silhouette, which I'm curious about. CMX was pretty much the only company that was willing to take a chance on older shojo, and I can't see anyone else doing so, unfortunately. Heck, I'm still waiting for plenty of 90s series - where are Tenshi Nanka Ja Nai and Gokinjo Monogatori? And I'm glad Tokimeki Tonight was mentioned - I keep hearing so many great things about it that I'd love to read or watch it. Oh, and Hime-chan no Ribbon, which looks really cute...I'm gonna stop now. And as an aside, I wouldn't necessarily say shojo isn't getting much attention because girls are reading Shonen Jump (though that's true too) - but rather, many shojo manga are being adapted into live-action dramas instead of anime (just look at Hana-Kimi, which hasn't been animated but has several drama adaptations). |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2652 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I think this every time I read a volume of the manga and remember that the author's intended ending is only available in the anime. 
Do you read French or Italian? Gokinjyo is in French and Tokimeki Tonight is in Italian, both the original and the later re-do, and both languages have the manga of Aishite Knight available. In fact, the Italian market has a pretty large amount of older shoujo titles, one of my favorites being Niji no Densetsu or "La Leggenda dall'Arcobaleno" as they translate it. (Legend of the Rainbow in English. I should probably mention that...)
That's an interesting point, and one I at least hadn't thought of. Hana Yori Dango, although it did get an anime, certainly has far more drama series, as does ItaKiss. Josei titles seem to get the drama treatment more as well - Kimi wa Pet is a good example. Do you think it's because of the appeal these stories have for older women? Or is it easier to get a female audience at the broadcast time for a drama than an anime? |
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Snomaster1
 SubscriberPosts: 2906 |
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I remember running into the manga version of "Cipher" some years ago. It wasn't too bad. I'd never seen the anime version of this. But I did hear that it was done with English speaking actors. I have a question to ask,why wasn't the anime version brought over here? I'd have loved to see it.
[EDIT: Needless tags removed. And for everyone else's edification, no further post by this poster which adds in the needless tags will be allowed to clear. (He is being moderated now.) - Key] |
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Petrea Mitchell
Posts: 438 Location: Near Portland, OR |
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I haven't watched a single one of those, although Minky Momo has been fluttering at the edge of my consciousness since at least sometime in the 1990s and it's on my "really need to watch some time, but no immediate hurry" list.
If I'm thinking 1980s and shojo, the overwhelming recollection is of Mai the Psychic Girl, which was the first actual manga from Japan I ever read. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14886 |
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Yep, anime is still primarily (some would say now even more so) a male/otaku/fujoshi diversion in Japan. It's harder to crack for regular J-birds. |
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