Forum - View topicGankutsuou vs. Speed Grapher.
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18274 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Echo_City, the more I read your comments, the more I'm starting to wonder if you aren't actually trolling here just to get a rise out of people. You don't like Gankutsuou? Fine, I can accept that. I thought it was a great series, one which showed The Count's systematic execution of his revenge plot with style and without totally distancing him from the human elements of the story, but I know not everyone always sees things the way I do.
To claim that Speed Grapher is a superior story of the same type, though? I'll admit that you are far more eloquent than most in arguing your case here, but I have seen both series, reviewed both, and will never be convinced of your position. What you see as a story which makes statements, acts with carefully crafted purposes, and cleaves close to the original material I call a hack job. I have tried to delineate my arguments above about why I believe that to be the case, and you seem clearly unwilling to accept them, so I will not press them further. I have better things to do with my time than argue endlessly about why a mediocre series is mediocre. I also think you're stretching to draw the "Count of Monte Cristo" comparison here for SG's story. I'll grant you that there is a superficial resemblance, but that's it. Even though Suitengu's scheme does have similarities to Edmond Dante's revenge scheme, and even though it does ultimately play a key role in the story, it is not the story. The series is trying very hard to be about a disillusioned man (Saiga) who has lost hope in what he sees as an ugly world until he encounters the one pure thing that seems worth fighting for (Kagura). Suitengu's scheme, which isn't even apparent until near the end of the series, is not a "reverse perspective" ploy; it is simply a sidelight used as an excuse to explain his iffy motives. I do not see in the latter any deeper messages about society than the blunt one the whole series forces down the viewer's throat - i.e. mankind has become irredemably corrupt and is just wallowing in its perversions - and trying to assign the series deeper insight is like trying to find an image in the clouds: it certainly isn't designed to have it, and any resemblance it does have to anything else is only by happenstance. And for another argument that I'm sure you won't accept: when I watched both series, the thought "this is quality stuff" popped into my head repeatedly while watching Gankutsuou but the only time that happened in SG was when Kagura was signing "Amazing Grace." Where does that quality I was perceiving come from? All of the elements of the production coming together just right to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Gankutsuou does that. SG, most emphatically, does not. |
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Nagisa
Moderator
 Posts: 6128 Location: Atlanta-ish, Jawjuh |
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Because the artwork in Gankutsuou wasn't bad, it was stylistically different. It didn't take "getting used to" because it was bad and the viewer was forced to overlook that, it was simply outside of the norm. It's like comparing styles of painting, really. If you look at a lot of baroque and mannerist and rococo style paintings, and then suddenly jump to one of Picasso's cubist works, it's going to take a bit of adjustment to the drastic change in style. But that's not because the cubist piece is bad, it simply stands apart stylistically from the other pieces. Whether that cubist piece is to your liking or not is entirely a matter of opinion, but its technical merits are still perfectly sound. Gankutsuou, compared to anime with more conventional artwork, is much the same way. Really, the only complaint I could levy against Gankutsuou's artwork would be that the CGI pieces (the ships in flight, the pseudo-mecha knight armor, etc.) clashed a bit with the two-dimensional work. However, the show's heavy use of textures in place of flat color still managed to make it clash much less than just about any other anime with 3D CGI elements that I've seen short of Last Exile. As for the actual animation, it's been a couple years since I last saw Gankutsuou, but I don't really recall anything standing out as particularly bad about it. It was decently above-average work for a late-night television anime. Not quite to level of, say, Stand Alone Complex, but well above many of its contemporaries. Nothing was particularly stiff or off-model (which tend to be huge problems for television anime), and while I wouldn't call it stellar, it was certainly very good for its format. |
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Echo_City
Posts: 1236 |
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Key, I'm not trolling. I'm not advocating Speed Grapher to get my kicks from inciting people. It seems as though some of your remarks are made as though you have already judged me to be a forum troll though. Not the reputation I wanted to get just a few days into being a member, I must say. As you hold a higher position here, I have some trepidation about being so judged by you.
It is possible that I have subconsciously made Speed Grapher more than it was. If I have, then there is no way for me to determine that short of getting an assessment from someone else on my views, right? You contend that I have done this. It is highly possible as I am a huge fan of the book The Count of Monte Cristo, and so Gankutsuou was a massive let-down for me. I couldn't forgive it. Then I saw Speed Grapher, and saw the similarities between the Count and Suitengu and latched onto them. Did my disappointment with Gankutsuou allow me to see Speed Grapher through rose-colored glasses? Even if it did, it explains my motivations for posting here. I saw a disparity between 2 things I saw as similar, a similarity you have noted. A similarity that I had never seen addressed or even considered. So I asked why. I feel as though I should mention that I do not hold Speed Grapher as the greatest show in the pantheon of anime. Not by far. I give it a B, personally. ANN did as well. Speaking of which, I would also like to submit that I was not attacking the ANN reviews or the reviewer for Speed Grapher. Indeed, I brought this specifically brought this assertion to ANN as ANN's review for Speed Grapher was the only place I've encountered someone contemplate the show objectively.
Allow me to pose a final idea then--if the story had been obviously focused on Suitengu, would the similarity between Speed Grapher and The Count of Monte Cristo have been more than merely superficial? It does seem as though Suitengu was working on his revenge goal the whole time, they show him setting up for it. There seemed enough arguable setup and foreshadowing that the revenge plot at the end was more than a deus ex machina employed by Gonzo when they realized that episode 22 was at hand and they had a ton of loose ends to clean up, and figured they could score some extra depth. Gankutsuou was made by Gonzo the year before they wrote Speed Grapher, so it isn't impossible that they decided to borrow elements from that show, is it?
Nagisa, clearly you have some artistic knowledge, perhaps it is but a modicum in the grand scale of things, but compared to mine it appears gargantuan in scope. To the average viewer, I submit that it would be gargantuan in scope. Additionally, art that is different from the norm is often perceived as "bad" by some of the average viewers. Some people hate the One Piece art style, others couldn't deal with the art in The SoulTaker. These people would consider the art of those shows to be "bad". Those who liked the art would consider it to be "good". Judgment of art is always subjective. That is the idea I operated under, and put quotes around my usage of the word "bad" in this context to show this. However, you are asserting that there is a way to establish whether or not an artwork is good or bad in a way that is completely objective, a way which is unaffected by the viewer's opinion of the art. Apparently you can perform this ranking as you are armed with superior art knowledge and can state officially whether or not art is truly good or bad. Neither I nor the average viewer have knowledge to argue against this objectively-based ranking. I find this mildly vexing as now my position has been compromised by you based on art. I have spent the entire time here trying to remove art from the equation because I knew coming in that any comparison would be immediately hung up on art. Now I can not easily do that as you have levied your power as an art pedant against me, and as I have already said that I do not have such art pedantry, me now trying to remove art from the equation would be seen as a novice trying to disregard the knowledge of an expert for his own sleazy gain. Thus sinking my metaphorical battleship. In short, you pulled the rug out from under me by bringing in heavy artillery that I admitted I had no counter to.  
Thankfully, this need not go any further as I have found an answer to the impetus for starting this thread. A common ground has been reached, and without arguing in a field truly deprived of opinion, unless one accepts nothing short proselytizing everyone, nothing more can be done. Thanks for the input. (Also, I'll continue to rank art only as it appeals to me. Personally romantic works appeal to me, for although realism provides a more realistic style, the aesthetic I find most pleasing, it embodies a concept of man minimizing what he is, acquiescing to the notion that he is fated to toil under adversity forever. Romanticism employs a more lofty ideal of man transcending adversity.  )
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naninanino
 Posts: 680 |
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So I take that you are one of those people who can't understand what adaptions are. The truth however is, that most people couldn't care less in how faithful it is to the original novel. They are not watching Gankutsuou to relive The Count of Monte Cristo. They are simply watching it because it's a critically acclaimed anime drama show. It might matter to you, but it's just a trivial thing to many. |
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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You're not really hearing me at all here. I said that I don't have any problem with their super powers themselves. I don't mind that this lady has super hard skin or the guy turns into a spider just as I don't mind that Greed has the power to turn into anything.
Yeah, Yeah it can. You don't need to go to such ridiculous extremes to demonstrate the depravity and selfishness of humanity and it fact, when you try and portray in the absurd, over the top manner of Speed Grapher, all you do is trivialize it by turning it into this over the top caricature of evil. That's where the show failed.
The internet still exists in the real world even if it is, itself virtual and the fetishes you run across are real fetishes that real people have. Hence, the stuff I mentioned is 'real world' stuff as opposed to the stuff from the fictional world of the story in question. Honestly, this was pretty clear just from my initial comment but hey, thanks for instead being obnoxious about it. |
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SgtMustang
Posts: 158 |
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I think I got half way through speed grapher before giving up on it.
It seemed like it was written by a group of highschool boys trying to be XTREME and shocking. Never saw the other series, but might check it out now that you've brought it to my attention. |
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bahamut623
 Posts: 1463 |
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No, no, no, no, no, no. No. Do NOT forget Speed Grapher is anime. When you're watching an episode of Speed Grapher, for those 25 minutes what you're seeing is 100% hand drawn animation. That is no superficial part of the experience of watching Speed Grapher. It's an integral part of how the story is told. You say you couldn't justify putting animation on the same level as story, but animation IS story. Otherwise why watch anime at all, or any visual medium for that matter. If there was no dialogue, you can still tell a complete, satisfying story through animation alone. Think of animators as actors. Any movie or play could live or die by the quality of the acting. No matter how good the story, bad acting could diminish the quality of the work considerably. In the case of Speed Grapher, where (superpowers aside) they're presenting a real world setting, inhabited by human characters with human proportions, the movement of those characters damn well better be convincingly human. It doesn't have to be completely fluid (that kinda thing has more to do with frame count), but in the number of frames they do use, they should manage some sort of convincing movement. For emotion to be convincingly portrayed, that has to be done through body language and facial expressions, which is done through? Animation. In an action/adventure series like Speed Grapher you want the fight scenes to be dynamic and exhilarating. This is done through? Animation. So no, judging a series based on animation quality is definitely not petty. This rant wasn't really about Speed Grapher, but more about your dismissal of the importance of animation to the overall product, which to me is just horrendously, horrendously wrong when talking about anime or any kind of animation. As for the show itself, I liked it quite a bit, but mostly I just remember it as a monster-of-the-week with adult themes. Not bad by any means, but nowhere near as memorable as Gankutsuou. And if your problem with Gankutsuou was that it wasn't close enough to the book...I think spaceships in the first episode should have been a big red flag. An adaptation doesn't have to be 100% faithful to be good. |
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Echo_City
Posts: 1236 |
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Obviously, as "adaptation" implies that it will never be 100% faithful to the original version.
That's fallacious. Animation is not story in anime any more than the font, print size, or paper quality are story in books. Was the animation in a movie like "Up" the story? You're saying it is. Animation is not story just as writing is not plot. With such a perspective, you seem to be an animation connoisseur & arguing out of passion for animation. I guess my attempts to prevent this from happening were for naught. Brutal.
No, it was most definitely about Speed Grapher. Others before me had made a huge deal about the art, and it was my belief that many of these people were getting hung up on the art alone, so I sought to bring the show to a field where it could be evaluated on free of prejudice for its art. A Sisyphean task, and irony abounds that my bringing up the subject of art first has led to many doing the same thing here. Additionally, I'd hesitate to call it a "rant".
I said I accept animation & art as valid criterion for evaluating, "judging" if you will, a show. To make art & animation the prime criterion, with weight ample enough to kill a show based on its merit alone, that is where I find fault. For example, I do not like the art in Fairy Tail at all. However, I did not just look at the art and decide not to watch the show based upon the art alone. That would be petty. To go back to book analogies, that would be akin to judging a book by its cover. Oh, and prior to the emergence of any more assiduous arguments against a point I set out to not argue--the irony is killing me--I'd like to point out that my original point has been met and to the most basic level, accepted. In other words, the argument is as done as it's going to get. |
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braves
 Posts: 2309 Location: Puerto Rico (but living in Texas) |
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Have you ever watched the first episode of Texhnolyze, where there's about 5 lines of dialogue and the rest is handled merely by the storyboarding and the animation? How can you equate that to a font? Or the scene where in Tokyo Godfathers (animated by Shinji Otsuka) where Hana is berating Gin in the hospital hallway? That scene wouldn't have had an ounce of its impact had it been animated as poorly as any given scene in Speed Grapher. You can play that with no volume at all and it can still get the emotion of that scene across. Or maybe somebody could have given the Speed Grapher team the task of redoing Akira or any of Miyazaki's movies to show that poorly animated scenes can still be effective that way. Princess Mononoke, now with scenes that convey no character subtlety or no range of believable emotion at all! I wonder how much effect Ghibli's movies would have if they didn't have people like Makiko Futaki working on them (somebody whom Miyazaki calls a "valuable asset" to his films... much like the font size of this post, right?)
In my opinion. (Though, the live-action acting=animation isn't a direct one-to-one equivalent. But it makes a lot more sense than specific fonts or paper quality for a book. ) Last edited by braves on Wed Apr 06, 2011 8:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Nagisa
Moderator
Posts: 6128 Location: Atlanta-ish, Jawjuh |
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If bahamut623 was too extreme in saying animation alone was equivalent to story (which is a debatable point and I for one don't think he was), then here you're going to the opposite and equally fallacious extreme of dismissing animation as having any role in the story entirely. The medium chosen to tell a story is incredibly important to the quality of that story, as the competence of the artist ("artist" here used to refer to any producer of a story, including writers and filmmakers) has a very significant impact on the clarity & enjoyability of a story, as well as its ability to convey its themes and engage the audience. Whether it be an author's prose, a film or television director's ability to establish a shot, an actor's ability to convincingly portray a character, an animator's ability to do both, a painter or sequential artist's ability to draw, ink, and/or paint, or a musician's proficiency with their instrument, the skill the artist wields in their chosen craft is vitally important in telling a story or indeed producing effective art of any sort. Despite the brilliant script and direction, The Godfather would not have been as good a film as it was without masterful actors to play the roles. The story would not have been as effective because lower quality acting would have detracted from the ability to enjoy it. Who would have been as inspired by the story of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as they are now if the books were riddled with sentence fragments, spelling errors, and a complete failure to grasp punctuation? And to bring this all back to anime, artwork and animation that proves poor enough can and does detract from the ability to enjoy the story being told, while artwork and animation that stands above and beyond the norm can greatly enhance a story. Just look at the first season of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, with its distractingly bad moments of off-model artwork and stiff animation, versus the ten-minute short Comedy, which is so fluid and vivid and stylish that its story is perfectly understood despite a bare minimum of dialogue restricted solely to vague narration. Animation in itself usually doesn't tell a story all on its own, nor is it entirely superfluous. It is, however, a core staple of storytelling using animation as a medium that works in conjunction with great direction, great voice acting, great editing, and great scriptwriting to make a piece work. And when it's lacking, it can easily cripple a project and its effectiveness at storytelling. To say animation is important is not shallow, and it's not "judging a book by its cover." It's assessing the quality of a story told via the animation medium, in the same way that assessing the literacy of an author or the skill of an actor is not a shallow thing to do.
No, it was not about Speed Grapher explicitly. Just because other posters made it a point to reference the art and animation quality of Speed Grapher does not mean that bahamut623 was doing the same. He was arguing against the dismissal of a story's chosen medium as an integral part of the experience of the story, regardless of title. That much was clear, at least from my point of view. |
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RoverTX
 Posts: 424 |
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Wait...... I always thought Speed Grapher took ques from Oedipus Rex.... not from the Count of Monte Cristo.
The whole ending with Saiga(Oedipus) blind in the middle of an Urban desert a few years after the end of the story, seemingly as punishment for his unwitting perversion, and his basically adopted daughter Kagura(Antigone) coming to his aid in the desert. Seems to be ripped out directly from Oedipus to me.... |
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