Forum - View topicNo more creativity in anime?
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Otaku-Sensei
 Posts: 54 |
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I don't know if it's just me, but is anyone else getting tired of the same old anime stories? I've lost count on how many animes I have watched that have the same old hero defeating evil or saving the earth from an apocalypse or something around that line. For example Dai-Guard to me was like a toned down, more humorous version of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Now don't get me wrong nothing is bad about embellishing on something that was great, but to me it gets a little...well... predictable. I find out that the anime I tend to like more are the ones that have a new and more original idea. Animes like Genshiken, Haruhi, and Fruits Basket just to name a few, have a certain kind of "simplicity" that draws me in. Now I know there are alot of people out there that really don't care about the story of an anime and just like action and badassness and thats fine. But for those of you who are tired of the same old story I have a remedy(or I hope so). The next time you go out to buy a new anime, try buying one that goes totally outside the box of the standard good vs. evil. Animes like Paranoia Agent and Gankutsuo are all great picks, and personally just by their uniqueness alone have won me over as one of the best anime titles I have ever seen. What are your thoughts? |
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Azathrael
 Posts: 745 |
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I'm watching Blood+ and it's the most generic introduction ever. If this show is as good as the ratings say, then it better get interesting FAST because the first 10 episodes are the same crap I've seen in a countless number of other anime.
Unique-themed anime definitely have an advantage over the typical vampire anime. But it's not just that, unique-themed anime are also good in every other aspect too. Unfortunately, "unique-themed" these days mean novel-made-anime a lot of the times. :( |
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selenta
 Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Well, I'd hardly say there's no more 'creativity', there's no less creativity now than there was 20 years ago; if anything, there's more. Now... if you want to get into the "why aren't there more unique shows out there?" question... that's not really just an issue of "creativity".
The thing to remember is how long people have been telling stories. I don't know how long people have been telling stories, but I can tell you that it has been a lot longer than the earliest written records, which date from around 4000 years ago. If people have been telling stories and writing them down for 4000 years, I'm sure you can imagine how many of them resembled each other. What's that saying? "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" The truth is, even something that may seem revolutionary or 'unique' to you, is probably just a story very similar to something someone else has told in the past with different wording. The author may not have ever read the original, but there's only so many ideas and concepts out there. Yeah, each story has its own little twists and concepts and takes on ideas, but they all share many of the same elements. Just as I'm sure you would find a number of near carbon copies of anime, you'd find the same thing if you read fantasy books (like I did for a number of years), or watched every episode of 3 Star Trek shows, as much as they try to vary it up, the vast majority of the shows are carbon copies of each other: "[insert name of officer] gets in trouble during away mission. This forces [insert name of their commanding officer] to attempt to go down and negotiate with the aliens, when this fails due to unreasonable demands, the [insert name of applicable starship] crew is forced to break in and shut down the transporter inhibiters or w/e to beam the prisoner out." Real creativity is either coming up with an interesting new concept (which is far far more difficult) or, more commonly, coming up with an intersting new twist on an older idea. While there are some new (or at least rarely used) ideas used in anime like Mushishi and Haruhi, the vast majority of them rely on tried and true methods and concepts. What's the difference then you ask? The approach and the twist. FMA was brilliant in my mind because it took an otherwise benign shounen show and forced some really mature and difficult ethical problems on a pair of innocent kids, and the show was about how they dealt with them; all while taking place in a world that was fascinating in and of itself. The other thing it did right in my mind was the twist, it didn't just give the main characters "magical powers" and make them magicians; it tried to make them scientists that used an otherworldly force but thought about it as rationally as possible. So... I really don't think that is has anything to do with creativity "disppearing" or anything, but rather that as you get older and have more experiences in a subject, you start to recognize more. |
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Azathrael
Posts: 745 |
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And yet it is. Who calls Evangelion a mecha anime? Nobody. It was made from the same old mecha-theme and it was creativity that diverged it from every other mecha anime out there. It's not impossible to take an existing concept or an idea and make it into something unique through creativity. That's how they reinvented the wheel a billion times over. Just because all the concepts or ideas have been "laid out" doesn't mean they're not interesting anymore. If there's a lack of unique shows, it means there aren't any creative authors who can use the existing concepts and ideas to create something new and different. There's no way you can "dry out" the story of vampires or heroes with magical powers. And it is exactly those authors that fail to create something new and different that I have a problem against. They take the existing idea, such as vampires, and take the exact same character and plot and change minor factors like settings in an attempt to make easy profit. If I felt like it, I probably won't find it impossible to take the first 5 episodes of Blood+, take the first 5 episodes of some other anime, and compare it scene by scene to show how formulaic it all is. And you might want to fix your post a little, because you first state,
Then end up focusing only on "real" creativity as the primary factor that makes anime new and interesting. My response disregards anything you said after the first paragraph. |
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selenta
Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I DID... you just seem to obviously ignore the entire point and argument of my post. Perhaps I should have stated it better, perhaps you should just read better. I said that a completely unique world and concept is extremely difficult to come up with (and for the record, NGE is far from revolutionary in any particular concept). I also said that in reality, people tend to show their creativity by doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING THAT YOU SAID: Taking an existing concept and adding a twist to it. Eureka 7 - a mecha that's not even really about the mechs, it's an angsty shounen romance NGE - A mecha that's about psychology, the mechs are basically just plot devices Saikano - A war drama without any real war scenes despite the fact that one of the characters is a doomsday device? I agree that Blood+ is generic and extremely formulaic, that's why I initially gave it a 70/100 and I'm thinking of rating it lower. Why? Because they didn't give it a twist, it wasn't very creative. I don't know how much more explicit I need to be to get my point across sometimes. EDIT: perhaps you got distracted by my long rational on why it is hard to come up with a truly unique idea, I guess I kind distracted myself when I was writing it. Then again, I probably used mildly ambiguous language in my "why aren't there more unique shows out there?"... I probably should have said: "why aren't there more completely unique shows in every way out there?" Last edited by selenta on Thu Sep 28, 2006 9:58 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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jaybug39
 Posts: 552 Location: Oregon, Is it FOOTBALL yet? |
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I am so glad I am still catching up to y'all. That and by not having a computer to download the latest and greatest, I haven't reached that point yet. More or less.
It seems to me that what we really have to worry about is having creativity crushed by marketing. Like "Hair Metal" bands of the 80s all had to have the second song released be a power ballad. Where the art becomes strictly fomulaic. This is like having Pokemon be the basis for all anime, not just run itself into the ground, by doing the same things every episode. I think there is a huge potential to have unique and creative anime, but the desire to have a sure fire hit is what may spell the death knell of the art form. But if we just give up, well, we won't get jack. |
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godakame
 Posts: 112 Location: Disney World |
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You take the good with the bad. There is a ton of garabage out there, fewer "creative" titles, and even fewer good "creative" titles (relatively speaking of course, though everything is relative...). Some of the more "creative" stories that I have checked out have been too convoluted in terms of storytelling and just plain pretentious (Texhnolyze anyone? It gave me a headache). Though I'm still a but iffy as to the defenition of a "creative" story. What? You mean originality. But overall, the stories I've read/seen in manga and anime far surpass any story in film/book/whatever media-- not to mention, it's much more enjoyable.
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Ragg
Posts: 144 |
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These types of threads make me afraid of what I'm going to watch when i watch more of the generalized anime...
Really though I think that the feeling an anime releases is more important than the creativity. Of course blatant rip offs are not acceptable, but if the anime can give me a different feeling from a previous similar one, I don't classify it as a complete waste of time. I mean Hunter X Hunter and Naruto are very similar.. Naruto gains griends.. Gon gains friends... Naruto takes the Chuunin Exams... Gon takes the Hunter Exams... Both go through near death situations, and I found these animes really similar. Even though I watched Naruto before Hunter X Hunter, I noticed the similarity, but still continued on HXH, just because I thought that the feel of the anime was a lot different than Naruto... THat's just me |
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adonais
Posts: 302 |
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That's exactly the material point - it's not that creativity has gone down, but rather that the means of producing and distributing crap have become cheap and ubiquitous (what's even more scary to my mind is that there is obviously a huge market for said crap). This is true not just for anime, but most everything nowadays. Just take musc as an example: only two decades ago it was a major undertaking becoming a published musician, while today pretty much anybody with a computer and a SoundClick account is considered a musician. In all this noise it is becoming increasingly hard to find the really good titles, the truly talented and creative artists. Anime output I'm sure is no exception to this trend, although the scope and scale of the effect is surely different from the music industry example. But still, there it is. 
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jousha
 Posts: 205 Location: the floating world |
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I've never dealt with that, but maybe it's because I'm not a fan of mecha anime altogether--not that I wouldn't watch an anime just because it's mecha, but I never grab an anime for that reason (unlike other genres like samurai, epic, or medieval)--people controlling huge robots doesn't interest me. |
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Azathrael
Posts: 745 |
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Yes, I ignored your entire argument because:
That sentence implies that whatever you're going to talk about next isn't about creativity, but something else in regards to answering the question, "why aren't there more unique shows out there?" It doesn't take more than high school English to figure that out, genius. Now do you understand why I so completely and "obviously" ignored the rest of your post or do I need to clarify even further? Try putting an adjective better than "obviously" next time (or none at all) when I explicitly stated in my own post that I disregarded everything else. |
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selenta
Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Very very true. This is probably the other main rational behind the OP's post. Even if that 'unique' stuff does exist in the same amount, it's very difficult to find it sometimes. |
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Cloe
Moderator
 Posts: 2728 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Meh, I'd have to disagree with the opening post; I think there's still plenty of creativity floating around in the anime industry. (Shocking, I know, coming from the person who thought The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was formulaic, right?) I'll agree that the majority of the series being produced are rather dry and too reliant on formulas and stereotypes, but there are still some gems sneaking out, just like there always have been. I agree with the sentiment that creativity is derived more from the way storytelling is approached than the story itself. Take a look at Masaaki Yuasa's Kemonozume, for example, which just began airing in August. The concept of forbidden love is no stranger to any film medium, but the way it's handled here is anything but stale.
That's why I love Studio 4°C so much. They've always been the guys taking wild chances and producing title after title that strays away from the mainstream. Nothing they've ever done has been a huge commercial success, but I get the feeling that Koji Morimoto and co. could care less about that. So, yay for Studio 4°C! |
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pknecron
 Posts: 41 Location: Victoria, BC. Canada |
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Frankly, I don't mind if I see something that has a plot device or story that I have seen before. As long as whomever produces it does a good job in the telling of the story, and I am entertained, I am happy.
There are a finite number of stories to tell, and most have already been told. Even ones that many say are unique or creative, have been seen before. In the end they all boil down to some well-used arch-types: Good VS Evil, Boy meets/loses/gets Girl etc. It's only really the worlds that the stories are set in that change, not the stories themselves. I watch anime to be entertained, and if that's achieved, then the rest is just window dressing. Just my 0.02 on the subject. |
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DuelLadyS
 Posts: 1705 Location: WA state |
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I'm not really sure if it's a lack of creativity/originality in anime... it's a simple matter of we can watch faster than they can make. Taking the shows listed in this thread as being unqiue/creative, we've got:
Eva, circa 1995 Saikano, circa 2002 Eureka 7, circa 2005 That's a fair amount of years in-between shows there. But with a lil' money or a fast computer, I could watch all 3 by the end of the week. There simply aren't that many storytellers left who can think of ways to tweak the old stories and make them fresh. Most are quite content to tell their version of the same old tale- especially since most people don't mind hearing it again (otherwise, i wouldn't be pre-ordering Elemental Gelade.) It doesn't take long for us, as we enter/move through the anime fandom, to watch all the 'good stuff' released so far. Then, we we get forced to wait the 2, 3+ year gaps between the innovative stuff do really notice how much different it was. Let's face it, if every show out right now were unqiue, then none would be- there has to be a 'pack' before you can stand out from it. Just be paitent, something will come along... I suspect soon. (Considering that the previously mentioned Eureka 7, Gankutsuou, and Haruhi are all from sucessive years, one might be more accurate in saying we're seeing an increase of creative anime.) |
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