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“Who knew the ramen guy had so much backstory?” In my years of reading anime reviews, I have seen many writers try and define what makes a ‘good character’, usually citing a certain element of characterization that they find most important in doing so. Leaving Continue with Interesting Characters: Deep, Developed, and Chemical A lot of anime fans probably don’t grasp this, but they really don’t ‘hear’ Japanese. I was watching subbed anime for a good while before I started to realize that what I had been hearing was actually a voice in my head reading off the dialog. It takes having read a significant amount of subtitles to stop doing this. Yesterday, Ghostlightning did a post about how it’s possible for him to like a show that he did not enjoy, and to conversely enjoy a show that he did not like. I at first decried this as impossible for myself – after all, I’m known for not putting up with things I don’t enjoy – my enjoyment seems to be intrinsically tied to what I do or don’t like. However, I mulled around with the thought and realized that, holy shit, ‘like’ and ‘enjoy’ are two totally different things, and then I finally cracked open on something I’ve been fighting for a while. I’ve always hated the way that people often declare ‘their favorites’ as separate from what they consider ‘the best’ anime. And now I’ve stumbled on the real meaning of those dual-lists – it’s a difference between what you ‘like’ and what you ‘enjoy.’ One of the things that anime is surprisingly not very good at is creating a fully-realized fictional ‘world.’ When you open up a fantasy book (and fantasy is of course the best genre for fictional worlds) you are often confronted with a ‘world map’ right off the bat. You will be given details about all sorts of countries and locations and customs, etc., to bring this world to life as you read. The reason that this doesn’t really happen in anime is for the same reason it does happen a whole lot in JRPGs – time. I’ve been playing/listening to a lot of Touhou-related stuff in the past few days, and I began to think about why it was that I never feel compelled to post about anything from this franchise, which is without a doubt one of my favorites. What makes Touhou so fun is, of course, only a little bit to do with the canonical games, and more to do with the endless whirlpool of series fanon. Looking through Touhou-related goods, you could find something to say ‘woah, that’s badass!’ about just about every minute of every day, but if I love to post about things I find awesome so much, then what’s with the lack of Touhou posts? And then I realized that it is simply because I have nothing to add to them. Stereotypes are hard. On the one hand, I want to say I don’t mind stereotypes, because they are often funny, and a lot of the time they are funny because they are mostly true. However, there are a lot of stereotypes that are so blatantly wrong that it’s kind of hard to keep laughing – especially when they happen to be about you. So I somehow found myself on Drastic My Anime Blog today and spotted this post that I missed before that talks about a pair of music videos by self-taught animator Kousuke Sugimoto, one of which you’ll see above. It’s a truly cool video, and it’s style reminded me of a certain Australian artist/animator that I know of named Paul Robertson. Here’s a sample of Paul’s work. |
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