anime

[Gormongous]

You keep bringing up Zetsubou so I guess I have to add it to my watch list. ):

 

It is easily my favorite comedy anime. Since there are no licensed versions of it (and probably never will be), I bought all fourteen volumes of the manga that have been translated (there probably never will be any more) to show my support.

[Twig]

Well I'll get around to it after I finish... everything else on my list. Or sooner. Who knows. FAVORITE huh.

 

Also I forgot about Kaiba on the Yuasa front. To be honest, though I'm not down on it, it's not a favorite of mine. However, it probably deviates the most from the typical anime style than anything else I've seen by him (barring partnerships ala the aforementioned Adventure Time episode).

[syntheticgerbil]

Oh yeah, Masaaki Yuasa also animated this part in Samurai Champloo:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xyow1_champloo-ep9-masaaki-yuasa-sakuga_video games

 

He also directed a short for the Slimes from Dragon Quest which require subs, please contact me if you know Japanese and you want to do it!

 

Since Twig stole my Yuasa love (although you forgot KickHeart, Catsoup, and I'd recommend his Genius Party short), I'd recommend trying out Koji Morimoto works too, who is somewhat of Yuasa's mentor. He was the animation director on Mind Game, while Yuasa served as animation director before that on his short Noiseman Sound Insect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOlYfHdpwU

 

Morimoto has a lot of great music video directorial credits, but they are often very abstract (especially as of late) or just series of cool looking scenes, so they won't hit a story itch. He also was series director the the strange short reality show spoof thingy Eternal Family. His short Beyond on the Animatrix and the concert scenes in Macross Plus are probably his most well known outside of Japan.

 

Pretty much everything else Koji Morimoto has directed is on some kind of anthology set like Memories, Robot Carnival, Neo Tokyo, Short Peace, Digital Juice, and Genius Party Beyond, which are all must see if you want to see the heights of what some of these Japanese animators are capable of.

[Blambo]

Thanks for the cartoons guys.

[Tanukitsune]

"The Daily Lives of High School Boys" is kinda getting on my nerves, do they spend the whole series trying to get a girlfriend? 

[Gormongous]

"The Daily Lives of High School Boys" is kinda getting on my nerves, do they spend the whole series trying to get a girlfriend? 

 

Nope. Not even a full episode, I think? There are very few fixtures in terms of plot.

[Tanukitsune]

You're probably right, the episode started with the group discussing how to "get chicks" and the next skit was them trying to get a date at the beach, having these so close together rubbed me the wrong way. 

[Cyborg771]

High School Boys is more or less a sketch comedy show. Honestly I don't remember many segments about them trying to get girls but it's been a while.

Also, while we're recommending stylistically unique anime. FLCL! How the hell has nobody here said FLCL??? It's absolutely amazing and only 6 episodes long.

Tatami Galaxy is great and so is Monogatari but I don't know if I'd recommend the latter to somebody not as familiar with the medium. It takes some patience to see why their use of sexual imagery is more than just fanservice.

[Gormongous]

Tatami Galaxy is great and so is Monogatari but I don't know if I'd recommend the latter to somebody not as familiar with the medium. It takes some patience to see why their use of sexual imagery is more than just fanservice.

 

Shaft is generally known for this practice. I didn't mean my personal enthusiasm for their work to be a general endorsement for all types of viewers.

 

Anyway, stylish and smart anime that doesn't trade too much in tropes (for better or for worse)... Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gankutsuou, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Mushishi (do you ever get tired of recommending it, Twig?), Ghost in the Shell movies and series, Miyazaki movies, Hosoda movies, Shinkai movies... Hey, does Moribito hold up under scrutiny? I remember Balsa being a strong female character (in the near-vanished unironic sense of the term), but the show as a whole kinda washed over me when I watched it several years ago, so I'm not sure if I should be recommending it as anything special. Same goes for Eden of the East, too.

[syntheticgerbil]

THIS ISNT CARTTOONS THIS IS AMINE

I glazed over this but I've always hated calling it "anime." All it means is just cartoons from Japan, which seems a bit odd to make a distinction of. If anything the word represents a gross time where you have to label an import from Japan as "anime" so that you know it will have nudity and violence and you should rent this VHS now. And I guess all characters will have the same faces but with different hair. I suppose, if that is indeed a drawing point. It's just a term that either means lesser or more than just simply animation, depending on who you talk to. I'll take that over "Japanimation" though.

 

Also I hate saying "manga" as well. It's a god damn comic! It's comics! What if I started saying "bandes dessinees" when I started talking about French comics? It would be absurd.

[Blambo]

Whoa I used to call French comics bandes dessinées at my high school snob club. Well we called all comics that because we thought "comics" was too infantilizing and categorizing of a deep, rich art form, which in retrospect is dumb to the core.

But we didn't make the distinction between anime and cartoons. That's insane person talk.

[Cyborg771]

There's a stylistic difference (and I'm not just talking about aesthetics, though that's part of it) between anime and most western animated series though. I love both but they exhibit different priorities. French comics are pretty similar to other western comics so a distinction isn't really necessary, but British Comedy is a distinct genre as is French Film.

[syntheticgerbil]

But that's exactly what I'm saying, by giving animation from Japan only an all encompassing word, you are insinuating that all animation in the country is pretty homogenous while there are things that are brilliant and stand alone in their stylistic influences and really should just be called nothing more than animation. Plus it complicates things when you have many French animators being influenced by the more anarchic animators in Japan while many of those same creators were greatly influenced by European produced animation and comics in the 60s and 70s.

 

The manga distinction makes even less sense to me since early Tezuka style are clearly using Disney comics as a reference for silhoutte and layout. Plus Katsuhiro Otomo's comic output greatly takes after Moebius in both style, staging, and layout and then that led a great influence on other Japanese artists looking for more tech and realism in their work for a couple of decades after that. To me, these distinctions between countries blur very quickly when you start getting down to it. I don't see the point of making a distinction of what country it originated from as an introduction to a creative work if the work speaks for itself, but more of a secondary description.

 

I suppose it's useful if you want to make the distinction between something like Family Guy and Dragon Ball or Garfield and Love Hina, but why would you need to?

[Ozzie]

Also: Yuasa's Space Dandy episode:

 

 

YEP!

 

I knew it! While I watched the episode I kept thinking to myself "Huh, this kinda reminds me of Mind Games". I rather loathe Mind Games though, despite it having some good scenes. I didn't find it even pleasurable on a purely aesthetic level, I thought it looked ugly most of the time. Tatami Galaxy, on the other hand, is a favorite of mine.

[Cyborg771]

You can find works in any genre or medium that blur the lines, it doesn't devalue those categories. There's a culturally accepted platonic ideal of what anime is and it's somewhere in the area of your Dragon Balls and Love Hinas. (Loves Hina?) Considering we're discussing this in a forum topic all about Anime I don't know how you deny the usefulness, or at least common understanding, of the distinction. There's a flavour to Japanese produced works and having vocabulary to define them is only a good thing.

[Cyborg771]

That isn't to say all Japanese animation is instantly anime, nor does a work NEED to be produced in Japan to qualify. Generally speaking though that's what defines the medium.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hey I didn't start the thread, people only sometimes talk about cartoons I like in here. "Genre and medium" are not equal to country. In Japan they animate just like the rest of the world and they use whatever genre as any film, book, or TV series may. Not sure how saying "anime" instead of "animation" or "cartoons" adds any value whatsoever. Comes off pretty western centric to me considering in Japan they don't have a catch all phrase for any kind of animation or comics other than their own, why must it be applied opposite?

 

I'm not sure where you are coming from that there's Japan and there's everything else. I brought up how French animation and comics tend to also be very different from North American productions and are a great industry in that country as well but you said it's all the same, yet Japan is somehow distinct. But you didn't really address how all three animation industries we are speaking about have influenced a great amount of artists from one country to another, they are obviously not exceptions, but instead the rule. In fact as we get more global in our entertainment with the internet, the general sensibilities within each country tend to become more independent on choice of influence.

 

Pretty much every country has a sensibility when it comes to media if the industry is big enough there, but we don't have a special catch all term for say German films or French comics. I was joking about "bande dessinee" because that's what the French call all comics.

 

But your second post pretty much qualifies how pointless and confusing it is to make a distinction, because it's all going to be so subjective. If anything, I think anime tends to have negative connotations to people who might not be interested in animation from Japan just going by the homogenous stuff constantly produced over there. I tend to see a variety of original works that cover many genres with ground breaking art styles that many people can enjoy who may not know of and see animation as more than a Pixar film with a chase scene, a tear jerking scene, and is ultimately about finding yourself. I could say that's all the Calarts incestual style, but that's doing a disservice to a lot of the amazing student films I see from Calarts. The homogenous stuff in any country lumps itself together without any help from a label.

[Twig]

wakfu is a french anime. avatar is an american anime

 

(ps this argument is one of the oldest and dumbest anime arguments i hope you all feel really bad about yourselves)

[Gormongous]

I think you're focusing too much on the art and production rather than the culture and industry, syn. Sure, anime is just Japanese animation, but it's been produced, disseminated, and consumed in ways that are sharply different from Western models. Even though it's mostly a relic of mid-century Eurocentric media culture, the term still has utility in those respects. I mean, like people say, we don't have special terms for them, but British TV and French film are both seen to be distinct subsets of their mediums despite individual works often having a lot in common with those of other cultures. If you go within genres, you find stuff like this all the time. What are gialli besides horror/slasher movies made in Italy, with a few stylistic similarities shared between them? But there's an intensive history specific to the giallo that makes that term appropriate.

[Cyborg771]

the word anime is just a loan word of course. In Japan it refers to all animation, but they do (as far as I know) consider western animation to be a different category.

[syntheticgerbil]

Twig, don't get mad, you brought this up in the first place.

 

I think you're focusing too much on the art and production rather than the culture and industry, syn. Sure, anime is just Japanese animation, but it's been produced, disseminated, and consumed in ways that are sharply different from Western models. Even though it's mostly a relic of mid-century Eurocentric media culture, the term still has utility in those respects. I mean, like people say, we don't have special terms for them, but British TV and French film are both seen to be distinct subsets of their mediums despite individual works often having a lot in common with those of other cultures. If you go within genres, you find stuff like this all the time. What are gialli besides horror/slasher movies made in Italy, with a few stylistic similarities shared between them? But there's an intensive history specific to the giallo that makes that term appropriate.

 

That's for a specific type of Italian film, it's not a catch all term for movies from Italy. Shows produced in the UK are produced, disseminated, and consumed in ways that are sharply different than American television. All of your comparisons could fit any country that we don't have a catch all term for. Japan does not do it back, they call all animation anime, so what we have done is make an American term to separate industries based on country. It's less insulting than "Japananimation" from the 80s and 90s, but still obnoxious.

 

It's much more accurate to see in terms of country when there's one industry set in a region that perpetuates the particular idiosyncrasies through the nearby schools, producers, company methods, and dominant directors. Then after that it's easier to go by company house style and animation method and then director. It used to be easier in the United States in a particular region during the golden age since you had Fleischer studios, Disney studios, and Warner Bros. all producing shorts created from very different ideas of styles and animation method.

 

Considering Japan right now has the biggest animation industry of any country in terms of content produced and not money, seems rather silly to create a catch all term that lumps some sort of specific style, one of which no one can actually agree on.

 

I guess I see amazing amounts of variety while you guys don't, I'd prefer to drop these Americentric terms though.

[Gormongous]

That's for a specific type of Italian film, it's not a catch all term for movies from Italy. Shows produced in the UK are produced, disseminated, and consumed in ways that are sharply different than American television. All of your comparisons could fit any country that we don't have a catch all term for. Japan does not do it back, they call all animation anime, so what we have done is make an American term to separate industries based on country. It's less insulting than "Japananimation" from the 80s and 90s, but still obnoxious.

I guess I failed to run my comparison all the way through, in terms of the giallo. They're just Italian horror/slasher movies, often with very little in common with each other, so why do we have a different term to distinguish them from French or American horror? Well, because a term existed at a time when they were very different from what the rest of the filmmaking world was producing, so it got borrowed and kept. Same with J-dramas and K-dramas.

Likewise, "anime" as a term is a historical accident, but it's clearly somewhat useful, because there are substantial differences between the cultures surrounding Japanese animation and Western animation. At the outset, I'm interested in almost all Japanese animation but very little Western animation. Having a term that reflects such differences is useful, even if admittedly obnoxious. Admit it, if there were a native-derived term to differentiate British television from American television, it would see almost ubiquitous use. I don't see the difference here.

[Pepyri]

So, is anyone else keeping up with Fate/Stay Night(Edit: The Ufotable version)? It's off to a fantastic start, and so far has been appropriately dark and interesting. And the budget is completely out of control- short of the Eva Rebuilds or Makoto Shinkai's works(both of which shouldn't count considering they're movies, whereas this is a 26-episode series), I'm not sure I've actually seen anything higher.

 

It's also nice for me to jump back into this world, if only because one of my most significant game ideas is based on their world, and I ended up really falling in love with the game idea at least as it stands in my head. An FFT/DotA/Neptune's Pride combination of sorts, in this world.

[Twig]

Twig, don't get mad, you brought this up in the first place.

...with my intentionally misspelled "CARTTOONS" and "AMINE"? You're right, I am the harbinger of doom.

 

I'm not mad, just bored. Heard it before, will hear it again.

[syntheticgerbil]

I don't know Twig, I just figured you misspelled when using all caps! You're already hammering away with that shift key held.

I guess I failed to run my comparison all the way through, in terms of the giallo. They're just Italian horror/slasher movies, often with very little in common with each other, so why do we have a different term to distinguish them from French or American horror? Well, because a term existed at a time when they were very different from what the rest of the filmmaking world was producing, so it got borrowed and kept. Same with J-dramas and K-dramas.

I don't really agree with the J and K in front of things either like K or J pop. Even JRPG has a twinge of condescension to me. Oh well.