Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Anime Gets Sloppy
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uguu
Posts: 220 |
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That's basically what I was saying when I was criticizing Theron Martin's reviews, and you said I was just refusing to accept that he has a different opinion: 
And you've also called people out on simply being 'wrong' in the past (like when someone said old Disney films look 'dated') |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Why is it weird that fewer people than you thought are animation fans? The animation process is tricky, complicated, tedious, and often classed as behind-the-scenes wizardry that most audiences don't want or need to know about. It is no different than film-goers knowing little if anything about a live-action movie is made; they appreciate great cinematography without knowing anything of how that effect was achieved or what sort of effort would have gone into to making it.
You can't honestly tell me that Gundoh Musashi's infamous animation is not of poor quality, or that PMMM's trippy Witch sequences aren't breathtaking in their design.
Wrong. Given your quotes and choice of words this is obviously aimed at me and you're wrong wrong wrong. I already stated that I liked Windy Tales' style, and there is no way that it could ever be called "neat". The Tatami Galaxy has quite stylised characters that look weird but at the same time are really interesting. I also liked Wandering Son's propensity to dispense with backgrounds and have very softly-drawn characters. Bunny Drop also has a flat watercolour look that many strongly dislike (including Theron and Carl) but that I love. I already stated to uguu that while I do want consistency, I also love seeing different styles and methods. I just want the differences to be from show to show instead of episode to episode (unless it is a comedy show purposefully doing that like FLCL).
Most fans love to talk about the visuals and animation - just look at what happened with Flowers of Evil, or Seitokai Yakuindomo* - but they just aren't experts at it. Ask a thousand fans what an inbetween frame is and many would have no clue at all. Anime may indeed draw those who like visuals, perhaps even lots of them. But remember, anime is a medium, attracting many people from different ages and backgrounds, so as a percentage of the overall population there is even more people who don't . |
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uguu
Posts: 220 |
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So style shifts only work if it's a comedy? I dunno how that works. You can use the emotional reaction created from art shifts to create laughter, but not any other emotion? I think that's a close-minded way of viewing things. FLCL isn't even as purely "comedic" as people say. I rewatched episode 1 recently and the melancholic teenage angst scenes actually outweighed the comedy. There was drama and seriousness in FLCL, along with understated slice-of-life scenes with hazily-drawn backgrounds. And it's not like the aforementioned SOL scenes were never drawn 'weirdly' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3v2Z7nlk7s
There's absolutely no way the people who don't care about visuals outweigh those who do. The artwork is one of the things that instantly reels people in. As for the main audience that watches anime in Japan, children? Kids are very visually-driven.
"Animation fan" doesn't mean necessarily knowing the technical aspects. Just CARING ABOUT ANIMATION AS A MEDIUM. When you say "I take it you don't watch much old anime" to make your point about scripts being the most important part, you do come across as the anime fan equivalent of a film viewer who doesn't care about cinematography. Because there's loads of old anime that looks fantastic. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4604 |
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To be fair, there are many people (myself included) who fully appreciate what's going on in your second example, but feel that this one is in fact an example of garbage, at least in the finished form presented there. (Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so either.  ) There comes a point where one needs to be able to call a spade a spade, and recognize that sometimes, something really is just QUALITY.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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"I don't like Jackson Pollock and these other people don't so this is a bad example of something that objectively sucks" Great argument. Really sound logic. |
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Fencedude5609
 Posts: 5088 |
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My thought on this is that while I very rarely have stopped watching a show because I thought the animation wasn't very good, I have frequently stopped watching a show because the story or characters were terrible and/or pissed me off.
Similarly, I'm not going to watch a show just because its amazingly animated, if I hate the story. This is a difference in priorities. Animation matters, but so does story, and so does characters. The amount of weight each aspect is given will vary from person to person. Also FYI picking out tween frames from well or even just averagely animated sequences and calling them "QUALITY" is really obnoxious. The stuff you should be looking at are things like the Samumenco screens Mike posted, or stuff from Wake Up, Girls. Scenes that aren't animated AND look terrible. |
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JulieYBM
Posts: 209 |
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A big part of the problem is that people have been conditioned to think 'loose' or 'off-model' is bad. It's not. The character model is a tool, the intentions of the staff for each specific cut is what is important. Kameda's work here is especially strong. He does a better job of telling a story then the actual dialogue of the film does. An actor or use of music in film will often tell you more about the character and story then dialogue will. Great animators like Kameda do just that with their own slice of the artistic spectrum.
Those three seconds is the only cut in the entire episode that looks that way. It's a part of a six and a half minute segment drawn entirely by Yamashita Shingo using flash (he even did the in-between animation for a total of 5,500 or so drawings, more the most TV episodes use across an entire twenty minutes). Yamashita animated his segment in two or three different styles. Think about the combination of the animation, dialogue, and performance. "My pain is greater than yours!" Pain is expressing disgust with Naruto's reaction because he believes Naruto is being naïve for attacking him in rage.
It was. Series Director Akane Kazuki spoke about the episode here. |
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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But I rarely see people ever talk specifically about the visual aspects of the animation. I almost never see comments like, for a made-up example: "The box slides at the camera, and you can see the amount of mass in it by the way the character pushing it moves their legs. Their whole body gives effort and it makes you able to feel the effort they are exerting. When the box gets really close I think the shot composition of it taking up a full half of the screen with another box in the distance between the character's legs is really cool." You don't really need to know about the production methods to be able to talk about things that way (though it definitely does give a heightened appreciation)
Sure. I agree that Gundoh Musashi looks bad and the witch sequences look great, but I don't always agree with everyone on those points, and even when I do, I don't just stop and say "this looks good" or "this looks bad." That's not interesting. What's interesting is talking about the material, and why and how it makes the impressions it does on you, rather than just saying that you liked it or didn't..
No, it wasn't aimed at you and I didn't intend to give that impression. |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4604 |
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...except that wasn't my argument at all. You were the one who forwarded the analogy of those particular styles of art, which I honestly agree with to some extent: certainly the works of Masaki Yuasa are far more akin to impressionistic paintings in terms of animation style than, say, Kyoto Animation's offerings. But I think if you run that analogy to the extreme case, such as with the Pollock example, that's where you run into problems. There comes a point where your "experimental" animation style becomes so janky and distorted that it becomes nothing short of a distraction to the overall intent, and indeed can become indistinguishable from the work of some low-budget hack studio. (I think the neck-twisting Sasuke scene posted earlier is a great example of this: even in motion, my visceral reaction to it was, "Man that's just not right.") Context is also a big part of it, which is why I don't think FLCL holds up as a counter-example: from the very beginning, that show was intended to be Gainax going crazy with a 26-episode budget crammed into a short OVA, and the off-the-wall variations in style are very much part of that. Counter that with a long-running shounen like Naruto, or even a fairly-consistent shorter series like Gurren-Lagann, that suddenly exhibits some wildly-divergent techniques in a single episode or two over its run, and the effect can be extremely jarring, even negatively so. I guess my bottom line here is that a big part of the appeal (or lack thereof) of more stylistic animation comes from when it's being used, and that there are times when the result is just...bad. After all, I don't think any studio out there would want their work to be equated with the lovely Gundoh Musashi, even if there was decent money and talent behind it. (As far as the Pollock thing goes, my understanding is that most of his acclaim in the art world comes from the process he employed while looking at art, instead of what the finished product looked like necessarily. For me personally, that might make him worth studying as a performance artist, but I don't feel like his finished works have much inherent value in and of themselves: the reason that so many people joke "a monkey with a paintbrush could make this" is that, in a certain sense, it's absolutely correct. I'll leave things at that though, because it'd be waaaaaaay off-topic for what's going on here.) |
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kevinx59
 Posts: 959 Location: In sunny California |
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Great article. I find these type of images amusing, regardless of whether they are intentional or not. I still can't figure out if the faces in Higurashi are supposed to look the way they do. Also reminds me of episode 9 of Vividred Operation with images like these:
http://puu.sh/2enCK http://puu.sh/2en8c http://puu.sh/2enzS Himawari looks pretty bad. I don't usually notice mistakes in anime the first time I watch them, but for some reason I noticed them all in this episode. I sure hope this isn't intentional, and that Aniplex fixed them on their home video release. |
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Roukanken
 Posts: 19 |
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Thanks for the link, mate. This is awesome. |
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jcaliff
 Posts: 156 Location: Houston |
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Legend of the Galactic Heroes had a ton of off-model issues in the first two seasons, which is why they did a crap-ton of cleanup and reanimation for the DVD releases. It's nice to have more consistent animation, though I'm not as much a fan of the later animation faces - too strong chins on a lot of characters. You could tell they were operating under a really tight budget on the original, but it does give the animation a certain character. Also, unlike a lot of newer shows where the cleanup between broadcast and DVD is a matter of months, the time between original first season release and DVD release was over a decade I believe. Having watched the originals over and over, there's little bit of a feeling of wrongness when I see the new animation.
Here's a derpy Yang cel from an early season. 
http://www.jcaliff.net/cels/logh/yng10cel.jpg |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Yeah, I'd prefer to just take the original animation, crappy art and all. That way, a proper HD transfer could be made instead of that upscale.
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Running Wild
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Anime sucks, just read manga instead, art is usually less crappy.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Why, thank you for that absolutely life-changing piece of advice. Because of your superb insight I have seen the light, and I now realise that I've wasted the past nine years of my life being a fan of a crappy medium. I will now meditate under a waterfall deep in the mountains and reflect further on how anime sucks and is no good for anything. |
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