Gormongous
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Everything posted by Gormongous
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I thought of the "maybe you've always dreamed of her" bit as interesting in that way, but also because it reveals how little we actually know about Don's inner life, despite him being the nominal protagonist of the show. We're given glimpses of his dreams and fantasies, which we assume are meaningful, but we don't really have any idea what Don is doing, because he's still a deeply dishonest person to himself, to others, and to the audience. Maybe he was always dreaming of Rachel and we're only shown it now because it fits into a narrative about Don that he wants to believe. I don't know.
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Auteur anime directors- an overdone list
Gormongous replied to matthew's topic in Movies & Television
It's late and I should go to bed, but I'll try to clarify briefly. I think that Mizushima is one of the few directors willing to embrace moé fully in his anime as a means for accomplishing a holistic goal, usually a disruptive pattern of aesthetics or characterization. He uses the Rei-style moé of the main female character in Another to cause the audience to leap to conclusions about her, heightening the hypothetical horror of the turn in the last act. He uses the K-On!-style moé of the main characters in Girls und Panzer to highlight the harshness and mechanization of tank combat, as well as to emphasize the cooperation and camaraderie between members of a tank crew and between tanks in a platoon. He uses the somewhat generic moé of the five main characters in Shirobako as a grounding point for the audience while they take in the world of professional animation (and probably other things, but I haven't had as much time to process Shirobako as I'd like). There are some exceptions to this pattern (and thanks for catching Kujibiki Unbalance on that count, because it has some oddly interesting touches but is overall a weird mess without even good art to save it) but I think that most of his works have a similar "feel" that's distinct among anime of the same subgenre. Granted, it appears that I was wrong to call him a staff director at PA Works, because he's worked just as much with JC Staff, Production IG, and Hal Film Maker. Maybe I don't really have a bead on his career, but I feel like his niche of "somewhat subversive moé with strong ensemble casts" is noteworthy and it's something that I've picked up in the past. The deciding element would probably be whether he seeks out these projects or they come to him, but even then... Ugh, sometimes I resent the language barrier a great deal, because the only translated interviews with him are about xxxHOLiC and Blood-C, both of which are from before I think his interesting and more coherent output began. -
Thanks! I don't mean to sound like I'm begging anything off, because I'm really committed to this. The few people I know to whom I've told our podcast plans have congratulated me, because I always have a lot to say about the medium but not much of an audience. Speaking of, I edited the liveblog for the first episode of The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan that I posted here, adding pictures and a bit more sensical commentary, for my blog. I like it a lot, and it'll probably get double the usual hits just because I bothered to capture my own screenshots.
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Auteur anime directors- an overdone list
Gormongous replied to matthew's topic in Movies & Television
Kamiyama has a very strong voice as a writer for all his series, but he's only really just competent as a director. That's the faintest praise ever and I hate myself for typing it. Also, as far as standout staff directors, I think Mizushima Tsutomu at PA Works is the closest we get. He's directed a wide variety of work, from Joshiraku to Another to Girls und Panzer to Shirobako, but they all have similar approaches to the use of moé as a unifying aesthetic, to characterization especially of women, and to pacing. I see it myself, but I'm not really prepared to argue it as an auteur phenomenon here. -
Auteur anime directors- an overdone list
Gormongous replied to matthew's topic in Movies & Television
Eh, it's different reasons for different shows. With Nadia, he was given to believe it would be a single cour, after which he would be allowed to pursue his own projects, but then it was popular enough that the studio asked GAINAX for another half-cour of episodes, to which GAINAX agreed without Anno's consent or even knowledge, I think. He had to throw most of his original design document outside the window and pad out of his series to accommodate this turn of events, which appears to have been the perfect hell for him and caused his mental breakdown, during the recovery of which he got the idea for Evangelion. Of course, some of the other reasons were the same. Anno hated how some fans saw Nadia as the perfect fuckdoll and a lot of that hate is poured into the characters of Rei and Asuka in Evangelion. He hasn't hated all of his works. By all accounts, he was enjoying Kare Kano until the manga's author kicked him off of it for not taking her characters as seriously as she'd have liked, and he's still very proud of his Cutie Honey live-action movie. EDIT: Okay, reading up, it sounds like I have some of the details wrong about Nadia. GAINAX seems to have committed itself to an over-ambitious pitch by Hiroaki Inoue from the start and expected Anno, their third choice for director after Inoue and Sadamoto, to pull it off anyway. He didn't, instead feeling trapped and stifled by it, and GAINAX ended up losing a ton of money, which they tried to make up by making a video game using the rights that Anno was also pressured to direct. This is why I'm reading The Notenki Memoirs, I guess! -
Thank you for your succession of excellent posts, Codicier. Right now I feel wholly unequal to the task of hosting a podcast, even in part, because you've said everything that I wanted to say, only in a much more literate way. I agree that moé is most often overused because it is a easy signifier for creators, marketers, and fans that an anime is of a certain type, which makes its misuse a self-legitimizing path to success. I can't really go into much more depth than that, because barring a few terrible shows that I've sat through because I'm stubborn (two seasons of Chuu2Koi being the main offenders) I haven't really seen much out-and-out abuse of moé as a stylistic choice. Almost always in the shows I like, it's either being used intentionally to enforce a specific kind of audience reaction through a generic and non-threatening character or to promote high-level masking, like Codicier says. I also think that there is increasing pressure, thanks to the CG animation boom in anime, to augment the amount of detail and motion in anime without allocating the time and money to do it, so the designers and animators cut corners by adopting a rigid preset style, among which moé is by far the most codified. Again, laziness, but that's not at the doorstep of moé itself.
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Auteur anime directors- an overdone list
Gormongous replied to matthew's topic in Movies & Television
I mean, Nadia was his thing too, but he wasn't in charge of a lot of the planning there and came to hate it in the end, so I'm trying not to put it at the fore. -
Auteur anime directors- an overdone list
Gormongous replied to matthew's topic in Movies & Television
As the resident Anno fan, I'm going to say that Gunbuster (enormously popular and influential "hard sci-fi" take on giant robots... with notorious fanservice), Neon Genesis Evangelion plus the sequel movies (duh), Kare Kano (adaptation of a shoujo manga that's unorthodox to the point of experimental, using a lot of Evangelion's techniques), and the Rebuild of Evangelion tetrology (which is unfinished and uneven, but still notable for the growth and revision of Anno's work) constitutes a sufficiently broad and deep career, even without invoking stuff like Nadia that he didn't love himself. I also wish I could bring up Yamamoto Yutaka, the KyoAni director who was fired after four episodes of his debut anime Lucky Star for being too much of his own person, as the exception proving the rule with staff directors, but he hasn't really done anything worthy of note since founding his own company. -
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
Gormongous replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
Fair enough! -
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
Gormongous replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
Unless you're a woman or a person of color. Or certain kinds of poor. -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
That is, almost word for word, Isao Takahata's reasoning for the rise of limited animation in Japan. It's moderately accepted, but that still puts you in good company. Also, "Mouth Flaps" is hardly glamorous, but is the best anime pun I've heard so far, so it gets my vote. I agree that spotlighting Japanese manga and games is probably beyond the purview of our hypothetical podcast, but I am vociferously in favor of allowing discussion of them in the "free talk" segment. If someone's reading a great series that's somehow relevant to anime as a medium, that's only going to elevate the conversation as a whole, at least if they're knowledgeable or opinionated about it. Maybe that's my academic background talking, which always tends towards the interdisciplinary, but I don't want to have (say) Tegan on the show to talk with everyone about Ouran and feel like she can't bring up (what is no doubt an awesome) manga she's reading when we say what we've been enjoying lately. -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
Until we know the relative size and availability of our pool, I'd much rather just let people talk about manga as well as anime on this podcast. They use most of the same language and cover most of the same subjects, so it'd probably be as noticeable (and objectionable) as the Thumbs talking about board games on a video game podcast, which is to say not at all. I can do next weekend, if my microphone arrives in time (bless Amazon's heart, it didn't ship before the weekend even though I ordered it Thursday afternoon). I can still do next weekend, even if my microphone doesn't arrive, but you'll all have to deal with my low-grade webcam mic in that case. Should we set up a Doodle or something to nail down a time to record Episode 00? -
I don't disagree with you. Her depiction is definitely hyperreal in a way that's easy to find distasteful. I'm honestly not interested in defending her, because I don't think I care as much as you. Hopefully you can gather your thoughts and post more later!
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Liveblog of the first episode of The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan! Okay, that probably wasn't worth the effort. This was resoundingly a low-end C for me, probably a 73 if I had to put a grade on it. The show, not my post.
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My friend, who's involved with animation and film, is actually exactly like her, so what bothered me about her (albeit to a much lesser degree) was not her cringing silence, but that she found a voice in the company after the most superficial encouragement from one of the main characters. That's not really how it works.
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I did like the moments, especially as the show ended, where we got to see the more female-dominated side of production, especially tweening and coloring. I'd liked to have seen more, but it's definitely not as glamorous even as being a production manager, so we don't have an abstractly aspirational girl to serve as a window into there.
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All I can figure are two things: first, that it's a moé director at a moé studio and that's just the house style that's familiar; and second, a lot of this anime's subject is harder than most, so the "conventional" designs of the five girls, each with their experience in different parts of the industry, offer several entry and attachment points for viewers who wouldn't otherwise consider themselves interested in a high-realism anime about... well, anything. That's not an excuse for the stylistic clash, but it's certainly a decision I understand making.
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
I agree. Anyone else interested in being one of the regulars? Just based on volume of posts about anime, N1njaSquirrel and Twig are good choices, but I can get on with just about anyone (and I like all y'all too, else I wouldn't be part of this forum), so we don't have to be picky. Eh, if you or anyone else is unsure, my feeling is that you all should still voice your willingness here. The idea is to get the ball rolling with a core group first, which will help you decide if you want to contribute once it's all in motion. -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
You guys can't all be Nick Breckon! -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
I mean, I'd like to create a podcast where that sort of appearance works with the format. The last two anime podcasts I tried to pick up both had this really awful structure of i) literally going through ANN's news digest and stating their feelings on each item, and then ii) "re-examining" a popular anime from a few years back by watching a couple episodes and agreeing that it doesn't "hold up" without much further discussion. Anything but that for us, seriously. No lie, I've never seen any of the Dragonball shows or movies, but one of my favorite things to do is to ask people who're really into it to explain the plot to me without skipping over anything. We'll get Zeus or somebody on and you guys can walk me through it. -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
Awesome, all will be welcome! How's your Rodkin and/or your Breckon? I'll consider it. Seriously though, if all you watch is sports anime, then of course that'll be what you talk about every week (or month or whatever). And that's cool, too. Way too much of the anime community online (including us here, at times) is devoted to sniffing out "the good show," as if there aren't multiple awesome offerings even during dry seasons. Having someone stump for something evergreen like sports anime would be great. -
I've made a thread where we can discuss planning and execution of our as-of-yet untitled anime podcast. I've also used my monthly anime budget to buy a C01U Pro, like Rodi suggested, because it had incredible review for its price, but don't take that as a demand that we do a podcast immediately. Sooner or later, I'll be recording voice stuff for one reason or another, and the sale was today, so...
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I mean, I'm not going to tell a woman how to live in a sexist society, but if she said something awful about herself or about another woman, I'm going to say that that's fucked up, as succintly as possible, because I don't want my silence to be validation for her beliefs. I almost always leave it there, unless she and I are close, like Bjorn said.
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Your paterfamilias is very disappointed in you all. Pull yourselves together.
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I was actually speaking non-hypothetically about my own teenage years in this specific instance, but yes, I agree.