Forum - View topicANNCast - From The New World
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
|
|||||||
Yep, and I never got around to it. Glad I finally did! And I'm glad this podcast is giving me a great reason to go back and finally get to all those shows I always meant to. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
grooven
Posts: 1426 Location: Canada |
|
|||||||
|
Awesome podcast. Thanks guys! I loved how both Zac, Jake, and Max really enjoyed the show as much as I did. Glad both Jake and Zac got to watching such an excellent anime.
I too remember I started watching and then dropped it and came back. Glad I did. The ending really made the anime for me along with the art style. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Gewürtztraminer
 Posts: 1028 Location: Texas - Its like whole other country. |
|
|||||||
|
A GREAT show.
My take on the tale: the Queer rats are the future. Humanity is doomed. Take the survival rate of the class shown, 2 out of 40? And one of failures(successes) almost spelled doom for all. Repairing RNA aside, that is not viable as a propagation method. I view the series as the swan song of 'humanity', what comes next will be even more brutal. No other anime has provoked more thought in me than this one. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
kpk
 Posts: 484 |
|
|||||||
|
You know, I really feel like with this show there are just SO much stuff, it is such a complex and complicated show that I feel like you've barely scratched the surface with it. I would love to see you talk about it more maybe in the future. The love stuff, for example. Love plays a big part in this show and you've didn't touch on it.
Like the irony that Saki and Shun who were the only ones with mutual feelings for each other, in a "free love society" were the only ones who never even kissed. And the fact Saki and Saturo's love for Shun is the only reason they're still going forward. The hope to just remeber him (God this show is so sad) it's the main thing that drives them and make them want to keep living after all the shit they've been through. Did you know that in the book, when Saki and Saturo had sex after Maria and Mamuru where gone they were only using each other and they were thinking of Shun (well, a faceless Shun since they couldn't remeber how he looked like) the entire time?! Both ended up with the person they didn't want to be with. The story forced them to be together. He knows that's what WE want for them but it's not what the characters wanted. For them It's not a happy ending. The story also talks a lot about the fear of being left alone in the world, with everyone you love dying around you. It's the kind of fear we all share I believe. And speaking of that how about Saki's strength to endure all the loses and still going. It's what makes her such a great and unique character. In her own way she is one of the strongest female characters I've ever seen. And what about what the show says about sexuality? Basically that we are all bi-sexuals by design and if we would have grown in a world where it's "okay" to have sex with whoever we want that's what we would have done. Unlike in our society in which we only grow up to think it's okay for only men and women to be with each other and same-sex relashionships are wrong. So yeah, there's just a lot you didn't even touch on. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
King Kuma
Posts: 6 |
|
|||||||
|
Great show, and an interesting podcast discussion about it. I watched it during college and I really, really enjoyed the style and aesthetic most of all. It's just an extremely well executed anime on pretty much every level. Hopefully it doesn't get lost to time.
I have a question, and I don't mean to come across as a jerk, but why do Zac and Jacob feel the need to use Japanese words like "sakuga" and "iyashii" in conversation? I've noticed it on a few podcasts now, and it just kind of seems cringey and exclusionary to people who don't know the Japanese. Especially with sakuga, when you could just as easily say "drawing". Just curious if there was some extra meaning that you guys feel is conveyed by throwing around vocab words, or if it just subconsciously comes out. I'm probably just oversensitive to it, though. It's kind of my pet peeve when anime fans use Japanese words when there is an easy English translation (seiyuu being another that springs to mind). Thanks for the show. These series discussions are always great, and definitely my favorites, even though I'm sure they are a lot of extra work. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Valhern
 Posts: 916 |
|
|||||||
I don't know why Iyashii (Greedy, avaricious), but sakuga clearly has not the same meaning as "drawing". Sakuga is just animation, for Japanese people, even in the industry, everything animated can be called sakuga, even if is not done by Japanese. However, for outsiders, we use the term sakuga for particular cuts of animation that outsand in comparison to others, be either special effects, detailed character animation, very well modeled CGI, and so on. You can just call it good animation, but perhaps the term sakuga is becoming more and more appropiated by westerners (like people saying "oi look at them sakugas in that ep") for its specific use. You don't use it on western animation (not because this could be inferior) nor on any piece of animation, only the ones you consider particularly important (though I must make clear again that's not the original meaning). You can navigate a little in sakuga booru to find some. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
King Kuma
Posts: 6 |
|
|||||||
So "great animation/cut of animation/animated scene/draftsmanship/series of drawings" wouldn't convey the intended meaning in an English conversation? Do you understand what I mean when I say it seems sort of exclusionary? I know what the words mean, so it doesn't really affect me, I was just curious why the words were being used. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Valhern
Posts: 916 |
|
|||||||
No, like I said, good animation is esentially the same thing, although we should also point out that there have been a handful of articles on animation work and staff here in ANN and thus regular audience might be familiar with the term, and I don't think it's particularly exclusionary, when you are talking about anime I would expect for these term to be brought up. Plus, it's the internet, you can look it up. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
|
|||||||
Yeah, I think this was really just a make-it-or-break-it factor for me that others might shrug off in the process of finding interesting factors elsewhere. I just wasn't genuinely interested in any other part of the show. The mutant rat war plot fell flat for me, the dystopia itself felt kind of...laughably inefficient and nonthreatening? It just felt like a generic sci-fi context in which these characters were intended to form relationships and come into their own truths. Turns out that wasn't the case. Oh well.
Well, I guess that's one perfectly valid way of looking at it. However, I wouldn't exactly say that's what I signed on for.
I found myself asking precisely the same question at the place where you're at. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the rest of the show more than I did! (Seriously though, the mole-rats...)
Thanks for the insight! I get the feeling there was some indication of this as subtext in the anime, but that sounds like a much more effective method of communicating this message about the characters. Also gotta say I agree with your evaluation of Saki as a terrific lead. She's well-rounded, both pragmatic and stubbornly human, throughout the entire series and I gotta give the writer(s?) props for at least sticking to their guns with her characterization. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
|
|||||||
I agree totally. For me, this is one of the few works of fiction/art where I could really say that my life is better for me having experienced it, and that's because it really made me think differently. Pretty much every time I think about it I'm taken on a different, wild train of thought to somewhere new, and there's no sign yet that I'll run out of thoughts in response to this any time soon. For one thing: I recently read a good deal of the book On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, which was the novel author Yuusuke Kishi's inspiration for the FTNW novels. When Kishi read this, he had the idea for From the New World, and spent the next 30 years perfecting the idea. You can totally see that this story is something that had decades of thought behind it. On Aggression deals with explaining a lot of animal social behavior in addition to aggression, like what interpersonal bonds are and how they evolved. The stuff that was the main inspiration was the idea that since humans are physically weak, they did not evolve strong barriers to intraspecies aggression like other animals such as wolves did, because before the invention of weapons, the fights humans would get into with each other would usually not result in death. So our aggression has become maladaptive now that we fight with missiles and guns rather than fists. And telekenetic power ups the ante even more. Turning the powerless humans into the rats has a kind of twisted brilliance to it. There's the obvious motivation of allowing the humans to freely kill them without remorse since their ideas of empathy and morality rely heavily on the distinction between self and other, even more so than ours do. But also, based on stuff from Lorenz's book, turning them into beasts would also have the effect of lessening the chances of conflict between the two (!). According to Lorenz, aggression between different species is much less common than between the same species, because the same species competes over the same resources and the aggression evolved to ensure even distribution over the available environment. So by changing the powerless people into rats, you're subconsciously making the humans not see them as a threat, and also making it so that in reality there is less competition because the groups no longer occupy the same ecological niche. And in the show it's pretty clear that most of the humans don't see the rats as competition at all. In addition to being eusocial mammals, naked mole rats have some other ideal traits that would make them the ideal candidates for what to use if you want to make animal-people. They're extremely long-lived for animals of their size, with lifespans up to 30 years. They're completely immune to cancers and chronic pain, and they can survive in low oxygen, high carbon dioxide environments. In reality, there is talk of using naked mole rat based gene therapy for cancer prevention and life extension in humans. Maybe our future really is to end up as the rats (he he he  ).
As for more on the romance stuff, it's a shame Saki and Shun weren't able to develop and manifest their relationship, since I think their personalities and preferences looked like the best match. That's really not to say that Saki wasn't also in love with Maria at the time and didn't fall in love with Satoru later, or that Shun wasn't in love with Satoru (to me it was pretty clear that Shun broke off his relationship with Satoru because he knew he was becoming a Karmic Demon and wanted to push Satoru away for his own safety and lessen the pain of his loss). Sure the time they had sex in the igloo they were thinking of Shun, but also they were releasing the stress of losing two more of their closest people (Maria and Mamoru), as well as solidifying their own bond since they now know they are the last two from group 1 left in the village for varyous reasons. People are complicated and a lot of things they do have multiple motivations simultaneously. Like I said on the podcast, the whole Satoru-Saki thing stems from this emotional connection that they share from both liking Shun. But they both like him for different reasons and those different reasons are compatible with each other too and that makes its own kind of love. One of Saki's best strengths is the ability to continue on with her life despite her grief, to keep going in the face of losing almost everyone she loves and make the best of it anyway. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
|
|||||||
|
I've often wondered whose hand it was that Saki is holding at the end of Wareta Ringo, the first ED. Satoru's probably I suppose, but its owner is never revealed.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
kpk
Posts: 484 |
|
|||||||
Satoru. And as for Saki's feelings. They make it clear in the book, she was never in love with Maria. Saki even says once "The only person I want to end up with is Shun". She also called him the person she loved more than anyone else in the world including herself. So yeah... However the book also make it clear Shun did had feelings for Satoru even if they weren't as strong as his feelings for Saki. Oh and about Shun becoming a Goma demon, if you want to get even more depressed... In the book Saki realized that it was actually her fault. When she did the ceremony on him to restore his PK power she did it while he was awake (Satoru and the others later on got their powers back when they were in a state of sleep). By being awake, all of Shun's "gates" in his head were wide open which made his PK slip outside even more. So add that to his state of mind and how he felt about what they found and walla... He became a Goma demon. By the way, is From The New World the only anime show to not have an OP? I wish more anime shows were like that. I feel it makes it more cinematic. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Valhern
Posts: 916 |
|
|||||||
|
Seems like there are a few bits we miss not mentioned in the anime, I always wanted to read the novel (it is just a novel, not a light novel, right?) but never knew if there is even fantranslation of it, I know it's not been license.
Saki's and Satoru's relationship would have been more interesting knowing their real intentions out loud, although maybe the director preferred implying it to the watcher's imagination. Also, I don't know if she outright loved Maria as in she wants to live her life with her, but they definetely did have a special bond. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
killjoy_the
 Posts: 2468 |
|
|||||||
|
The novel has been fully fantranslated like last week. I haven't read it yet to know how well it reads, though.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Valhern
Posts: 916 |
|
|||||||
Ooh, that's good to know, I hope I can get around to read some of it someday, if it's not licensed in my country which is kinda not happening, nope. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group