Forum - View topicAnswerman - Jiggly Puffs
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Ghost in the Shell? Cowboy Bebop? I'm lucky if I meet someone familiar with those shows. To most people, their knowledge of anime is limited to Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, and among those, DBZ is still a hot thing to talk about among people who grew up in the late 90's and early 00's. I mean, look at how packed screenings were for Battle of Gods.
If there's any one anime franchise westerners cannot let go of, it's Dragon Ball. (I am a Dragon Ball fan myself, but I don't really get why people latch onto it, particularly DBZ, so tightly.)
Most often, among young people, I run into either DBZ junkies who stopped watching anime entirely when DBZ was taken off the air; or people who don't watch any anime at all and would rather not talk about it. It depends on which circles I find myself in. I can say that in non-localization American entertainment, the people there just tend to ignore anime and pretend it doesn't exist.
I am jealous. I'm still stuck with the anime-is-for-kids mindset everywhere I go. I went to a class at UC Santa Cruz that had a screening of Cowboy Bebop. (It was the episode "Speak Like a Child.") Most of the class, except for me and two other classmates, were shocked that stuff like this existed. Not the bad kind of shocked, but just the neutral kind, that it was so unexpected to them to see a well-written anime program geared towards adults with a strong emotional core that most of them were speechless--usually, the screening ended with a lot of chattering.
Cel animation has become expensive and environmentally wasteful. It also doesn't appeal as much to kids (and I'd bet most of the mainstream) as digital animation, which is solid and clean. It's become difficult to obtain materials for cel animation, to where the best way to approach it is to get equipment to make cels yourself. The Simpsons was one of the last holdouts for cel animation; it changed to digital sometime around Season 15 because they couldn't find cheap and reliable suppliers anymore, and because none of the outsourced animation studios wanted to work with cels anymore. Renderman is the program Pixar uses, so I really don't see much bad about it, considering Pixar is always pushing the envelope and staying one step ahead of Dreamworks and Blue Sky as to what can be done with 3-D CGI. As for Flash, it is by far the cheapest and fastest animation tool to use (though not necessarily the cheapest to obtain). I personally believe it to be the animation equivalent to the microwave oven: It's new and very different, and purists will hate it with a fiery passion. Give it some time, and you'll see stuff done with Flash that cannot be easily done with anything else. Even if there's not much else you might like about the show (I like it), My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic does some visually impressive parallax effects that would be hideously expensive with anything else, let alone for a low-budget TV show. I think there will be absolutely breathtaking things done with Flash, just as how chefs of the 2010s now make extensive use of the microwave oven--just as they now treat the microwave as just another cooking tool out of many, I think Flash, and Flash knockoffs, will be used as just another option among many.
You know, I never even thought about it until now, but the mere presence of doujinshi may have a hand at increased sex appeal in anime too. Most major studios allow fans to freely make and distribute doujinshi, some of which are borderline pornographic, and they don't seem to care. That, and some of the professionals in the business got started on doujinshi, sometimes erotic, and had to clean themselves up, but they can't let go of sexy-fying their material.
I'm reminded of all the shameless Scarlett Johannson butt shots in The Avengers. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Some mangaka still make doujinshi, and not "borderline" but full on pornographic, like Black Lagoon's Rei Hiroe. You're really downplaying how involvement and crossover the doujinshi community has with crossed over with professional publications, erotic or not aside. I seriously doubt when they draw breasts with such care and focus that they're being browbeaten to that end by their editors. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13589 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Justin, I love your title you gave to this week's Answerman.
What I hate, other than the loli/skinship fan service, is the censoring that the fan service simulcast versions get since not all will get disk releases here. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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Shows that focus mainly on fan-service aside, for me, if it doesn't harm or take away from whatever the show is trying to achieve, what's wrong with a little fan-service here and there? Those who hate it can ignore it and those who like it can enjoy it.
Regarding the difference in terms of accepting issues of sex in Japanese versus the US, from what I've read, it could also have something to do with the fact that Japan embraces Shintoism whereas the US is mostly a Cristian country. Also, I don't really understand why issues of sex and the body are so taboo in many modern cultures today. It seems that as we focus more and more on developing our intellect, we deny our own animalistic tendencies. As humans, we are animals and we need to reproduce. It's something that is practically universal when talking about us as a species. Is it an issue that really needs to be demonized?
The fallacy that you're making is that you think there's some hard and fast rule of what defines moral and immoral. Unfortunately, morals differ from individual to individual and while you're free to have your own morals, you can't definitively say if something is immoral or not. |
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SquadmemberRitsu
 Posts: 1391 |
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I was interested in getting into anime when I used to watch Dragonball Z and have always been fascinated with Japanese pop culture. But when Dragonball Z stopped and shows like Naruto and Bleach started coming through I very quickly lost interest in anime. Back then I was under the assumption that anime was pretty much just battle shonens that never quite got what made DBZ so good, Ghibli, kid's toy commercials and of course porn. And none of that interested me.
I bought a special issue of games magazine which focused exclusively on Japanese games and it came with an anime preview disc that had the first episodes of a few shows. Some of the shows looked interesting so I got curious and decided to watch a few of them. I was completely apathetic towards Black Butler, absolutely despised Highschool of the Dead (Although my opinion has changed now that I'm much better at tolerating ecchi) and got bored watching Rideback. And then I got to K-ON. I ended up watching that first episode about three more times before I realised that it was exactly the sort of show I was looking for. Which led to me buying the entire series on DVD not long after. $30 per volume was barely anything considering that was when new video games were still $100+ each here in Australia (Of course people the US still complained way louder about having to pay $60 for them but I digress) The problem lies within the shows that the western anime community likes to give the most attention. They're always talking about how great battle shonen A is and complaining about ecchi so that's basically all people outside of the fanbase hear about. Ghibli is great and all but it's become so popular outside of the anime community that most 'normals' barely even see it as anime. After all, why lump a beautiful film like Kiki's Delivery Service in the same category as those dumb hyperviolent action shows? I'm perfectly fine with Attack on Titan being popular and honestly I think it's probably the best show to gain such a significant amount of popularity in a long time. What I don't like seeing is Attack on Titan being the single most popular show at every single anime convention two years in a row even when the show finished airing over a year ago and won't be getting a second season for ages. Instead of just latching onto that one show for so long why not give some other show the spotlight while Titan is MIA? |
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TheLevi4000
Posts: 2 |
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What series is the picture/link from?
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CoreSignal
 Posts: 727 Location: California, USA |
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To add to Justin's reply about the mainstream question, I don't see how talking a lot about mainstream anime is a bad thing at all. A lot of mainstream anime often serve as gateway anime for many people. And thats a good thing, IMO. Mainstream shows will always take attention away from good or better, less-popular shows, but once you're an anime fan you'll inevitably look for the more under-the-radar stuff. That benefits everyone.
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SquadmemberRitsu
Posts: 1391 |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I was actually curious about that too. I'm not going to lie, those are some very attractive character designs. 
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Why thank you! I've heard very mediocre things about it. I might just watch it for that art though. |
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SquadmemberRitsu
Posts: 1391 |
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TheLevi4000
Posts: 2 |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Heh, at this year's Anime Expo, I found three Miis whose last-played game was Senran Kagura Burst. I had never heard of it prior to then, and since it was somewhat popular at Anime Expo, I decided to look up what it was about.
All the girls have bust sizes around that size or larger, if that's what you're into. (Well, there are a few exceptions, but even then, everything's relative...)
That sounds really progressive...and at the same time not. I would've imagined it'd be PR suicide for a publication company that produces family-friendly entertainment to be deeply involved with pornographic doujinshi authors, and hence why I wasn't sure if pornographic doujinshi existed or not.
The concern is over what other people will think of said work, and if they're loud and/or numerous enough, they can ruin the reputation of an individual, a company, a genre, or even an entire concept. While the Comics Code Authority, for example, had political motivations, their rulings against Halloween creatures and monsters was not without public support: Comic books about vampires, werewolves, and such often had gory violence and thinly-disguised sex scenes (with a few having nudity outright), and there was substantial movement to get ALL horror comics removed from existence. The Comics Code Authority not only removed these so-called obscene comics from store shelves, they also got rid of the G- and PG-rated ones because they were associated with the more explicit ones. (This is why American comic books are predominantly about superheroes: Most other genres were taken out by the Comics Code Authority for similar reasons--though Archie was untouchable.) That's the sort of concern anime's association with fanservice would have. That's why there was the fear behind Kodomo no Jikan a few years back: If the American moral guardians found out about it and raised a stink on TV, radio, and print, it could have wiped out the entire manga business in the west. The reason the United States is so shy about sex is because of the country's Puritan roots. The Puritans believed that most things that provide pleasure in life will increase your chances of going to Hell upon death and that the most surefire way to get into Heaven is a lifetime of labor, not standing out, and keeping lewd thoughts to a minimum. Sexual content in the media is a great deal freer in Europe, especially in central Europe--in Germany, anything sexual on TV is okay even for children short of people having sex, though they are very strict on violent content. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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I don't think anyone would care. Why did you doubt the existence of explicitly pornographic doujinshi? They've been around since at least the 70s. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6893 Location: Kazune City |
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Or how about Game of Thrones? Plenty of skimpy female outfits, nudity, and rape that gets re-branded as "pre-consensual sex" -- a concept quite familiar to readers and viewers of hentai -- going on there. Not to mention the very recognizable "twincest" fetish. Combine that with evening/latenight timeslots on premium networks, and GoT starts to look more and more like a live-action fanservice anime with a more sprawling story and of course more violence. |
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