Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! Identity Theft
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eyeresist
 Posts: 995 Location: a 320x240 resolution igloo (Sydney) |
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Following the link to the Mad Bull 34 manga (not OVA), I was surprised to see the illustration looked quite a lot like, erm, Tom of Finland (NSFW, folks).
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pachy_boy
Posts: 1341 |
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How about Heroman? That show gave a very positive and fairly accurate portrayal of Americans, and I noticed the animators keeping in mind to mix occasional African-Americans among the extras |
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GATSU
Posts: 15572 |
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Actually, I brought it up @ a Geneon panel once, and they said Kohta was allegedly pissed that they used his costume designs.
Even the floating corridor and broken mirror?  BTW, at least two critics don't think it's coincidence.
As for Mad Bull, I thought it's supposed to be a parody of our cop movies. |
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Orange Hollow
 Posts: 68 Location: Krasnoyarsk, Russia |
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Yeah, and for the same reason, Durarara!! has a fairly inaccurate portrayal of Russians )) I mean, African-Russians almost do not exist. And the language, that they spoke occasionally, was anything but Russian (i'm a native speaker, couldn't understand it without subtitles ><). But any foreign language isn't a strong point of Japanese, anyway ) |
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vashfanatic
 Posts: 3495 Location: Back stateside |
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...whiiiiiich was lampshaded, and part of the joke. Re: similarities between shows, I honestly have not seen Kimba the White Lion to make any comparisons, though the fact that it has humans in it already means Lion King wasn't a direct copy. If Disney would just admit, "Yeah we took inspiration from it" this whole debate would never have happened. Nadia and Atlantis? The only way you can argue that they are remotely similar is if you've only looked at the covers of one or both of them and saw a few character design similarities. Setting aside the fact that the hero/heroine pair of Nadia are children and those in Atlantis are adults, the princess in Atlantis lives in Atlantis, she isn't spoiler[an amnesiac working in a circus in Paris]. There are no spoiler[aliens] in Atlantis, Atlantis was spoiler[destroyed] in Nadia, etc., etc. They have more or less nothing in common, save that "there is a submarine, Atlantis plays a part, the hero has glasses, and the heroine has dark skin." Van Helsing and Hellsing? No. Just, no. Apples and oranges. As for Paprika/Inception, most of the comparisons I've heard there have been positive, as in, "Inception reminds me of Paprika, and that is awesome!" And I... am trying to keep my expectations down on Inception, so let's not talk about it any more...  ;
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Myaow
 Posts: 1068 |
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UGH. I wish that the "Atlantis = Nadia" brouhaha would just go away and never come back. I could kind of get into it a couple years ago, back before I'd ever seen "Nadia", but once I actually watched the show, the arguments started looking like complete nonsense.
You could make a pretty good list of visual motifs and worldbuilding concepts they have in common, but the actual plots and characters are sooooo different, I don't see why this is even an issue. Having guys with glasses, mysterious ruins, THE OCEAN, blue crystals =/= the same story. |
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TatsuGero23
 Posts: 1277 Location: Sniper Island, USA (It's in your heart!) |
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Is it weird that I understood the Flake of the Week? I think he's looking for Ronin Warriors. While there are more then 3 people and they aren't robots, it seem like the natural progression of logic jumps you'd have with the series if you only remember bits and pieces of it like the transformation sequences. But I don't know. Maybe he's thinking Bayblade or Gear Fighter Denda (whatever that show is called) or something like that.
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DRWii
 Posts: 642 |
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Yeah, most of those "Hollywood steals ideas from anime" examples are bogus. The one that really kills me is "Van Helsing/Hellsing." Sure, the movie was made after "Hellsing," but it's based on a character who was created back in the late 19th century, about 76 years before the creator of "Hellsing" was even BORN.*facepalms*
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 390 Location: Florida |
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Speaking as an avowed Angel Cop enthusiast, it's always been my take that the stupendously nationalistic / anti-American / anti-Semitic content of the script were less to do with Ichiro Itano and more to do with his longtime collaborator Shou Aikawa, whose works often tend to include something completely crazy on that level. He's pretty much been given a retroactive pass for this stuff due to having worked on this relatively little-known series called *ahem* Fullmetal Alchemist, but I firmly believe Ichiro Itano's interests lie primarily in motorcycles, jet planes, guns, missile swarms, and bloodshed. This was still not enough to make me watch through all of Blassreiter...yet.
It's interesting that Gunsmith Cats is generally praised while Mad Bull is near-universally panned, since the reason cited was the level of visual accuracy in depicting Chicago even though the characters and events were positively outlandish. Yet the same is true for Mad Bull with regards to its visual depiction of New York City. The fascinating thing about the works of Kazuo Koike is that the artists he collaborates with all have a knack for putting in heavy-duty research from a visual standpoint. Mad Bull looks like 1980s New York, Offered's depiction of the inside hallways of MIT is 100% spot-on, and the worlds of Lone Wolf and Cub/Samurai Executioner/Path of the Assassin look exactly like how you'd expect feudal Japan to. It's the events that unfold which shatter the illusion. The real streets of NYC are not routinely terrorized by Chinese tanks, Count Dracula, wheelchair-bound cyborg Latino drug dealers, or the Predator (thus forcing the NYPD to fight back using the power loader from Aliens). You can't buy canned coffee from a vending machine, and they certainly can't double as grenades no matter what elderly diabetics do to them. And it's not that Gunsmith Cats isn't just about as insane on the plot and violence/dismemberment metrics. After all, you're not a true Kenichi Sonoda villain unless you lose a limb and then replace it with a firearm. Yet somehow, my love for Gunsmith Cats and Kenichi Sonoda in general has greatly diminished over the years, as the release of the Omnibus editions managed to switch on a light bulb in my head. Suddenly, it became more apparent that while Kenichi Sonoda digs cars, guns, and robots...what he's MAINLY into is naked underage girls.  Hmm, maybe THAT'S why Gunsmith Cats gets all the kudos despite being very similar to Mad Bull 34...
It's pretty awesome, actually. Tell me, what's it like providing no argument to the contrary besides "no it isn't"? Because as Michael Palin so famously said, that isn't an argument. It's just contradiction. Listen: both are targeted to the same seinen demographic. Both draw their primary influences from American action movies and television shows of the 1970s and 1980s. Both are quite high up there on on the violence and sexuality scale. Both feature very detailed depictions of locations and firearms while simultaneously being incredibly unrealistic. If you've only ever seen the respective anime titles for each, then I can see how you may be skeptical of the comparison, but this is not an arbitrary flight of fancy on my part. Last edited by Anime World Order on Fri Jul 09, 2010 1:30 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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rabrek
 Posts: 188 |
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The thing is, anime fans see similarities between anime and Hollywood projects because we watch anime. Anime informs our frame of reference when evaluating other stories and characters. If I had a dollar for every Stephenie Meyer worshiper who drips contempt for some vampire project that's "ripping off Twilight", I'd have ample funding to dispatch roving interventionists to force them to read earlier vamp works, right back to Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872). As I see it, the difficulty is that genre fans often forget the library of ideas that artists draw from with greater or lesser skill to create something "new". Fortunately, we have TVTropes to educate us until someone steps up with financing for a broad range of roving interventionists.
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2093 |
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It's not a phenomenon unique to anime fandom, that's for sure. If I had a dollar for every Star Wars or Harry Potter fan who think their beloved series is completely original........
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Rakkan
Posts: 16 |
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marie-antoinette
 Posts: 4136 Location: Ottawa, Canada |
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I've never seen Kimba so I can't comment too much about similarities (other than knowing that kimba/simba is a word for lion in one of the African languages and thus there is a good, albeit unoriginal, reason for that one being the same). But I've always wondered one thing: do people claiming that Lion King ripped White Lion off taking into account the fact that the Lion King is a re-telling of Hamlet? It seems to me that after getting the main plot from that source, there wouldn't be much room for anything else.
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spankminister
Posts: 15 |
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The king's brother killing the king, and the prince in exile coming back to reclaim the throne is a far more general story structure than just Hamlet. Also, Simba does not spend the majority of the Lion King pondering the nature of death, and trying to decide on whether or not he should assassinate Scar, so I'm not sure one can really say it's a "re-telling of Hamlet." Simba's mother doesn't marry Scar or anything, and there's no real Ophelia or Polonius analogues either.
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RestLessone
 Posts: 1426 Location: New York |
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As much as I love The Lion King, it's hard to deny the similarities. It's not necessarily the stuff taken from Hamlet, but the plot points unique to the film and the art. For example, Simba and Kimba both end up eating insects instead of meat. I guess this site would explain it most: http://www.kimbawlion.com/rant2.htm (I'd ignore most of the writing and just look at the images, though. I'm tired of the ongoing debate myself. I rather just accept both are good, even if The Lion King did borrow elements. Also note that some of the examples are pretty far-fetched; I've seen poses like the one on the manga cover a hundred times.) Then there is the production shot from an edition of a DVD, showing that Simba was originally going to be white. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earlypresentationreelwhitelionking.jpg Also, like spankminister said, it's definitely not like a lion version of Hamlet. More like a very broad adaptation with lions. |
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