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The Mike Toole Show - Anime Gets Sloppy

Damn yeah, so many great animated moments in FMA in there.
Those Bradley fights sampled in those sakuga collections for example were incredible and some great Milos scenes in there too.

Cool info on Birdy, loved that show.

uguu wrote:

I just looked through episode 21 and I have no idea what you're talking about. are you upset that Mugen has more facial definition here or what

It's not that he has more detail...it's that the shot you posted looks nothing like Mugen. He's horrifically off-model there, and if I remember correctly Jin was even more so in that episode. You can't convince me for a moment that this was a stylistic choice, especially since it's in the second half of a two-parter; why in the world would any episodic series decide to get experimental halfway through something like that, when they could choose any other episode to do so? And again, this is coupled with the fact that the episode's animation looks extremely low-budget when compared to almost every other fight scene in the entire series. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and not in the "we meant to do this" way that Gurren-Lagann's infamous episode 4 did.

Some people still don't get that Japanese animation is actually very similar to jazz or very Technical Progressive Metal with lots of tempo changes and time signatures. American animation is more like a pop song with a time signature of 4/4.

The great thing about anime is that you can have a cut animated by Toshiyuki Inoue in a very realistic way and the next one is done by Imaishi using Kanada's Style. Kyoani in another hand is a Studio were is very hard to tell animators apart because the animation in their shows is very consistent.

I've been kind of on the fence about the Anohana movie ever since I heard it was the series, but from Menma's perspective; not only did that feel extremely lazy, but Menma herself was one of my least favourite aspects of the series and I always felt it would have been just that much better if she herself existed only as a memory. Same series, just no actual appearance of her. This makes it sound like something a bit more interesting, although 60% seems like quite a lot of "story digest" for a movie that will mostly be seen by people who saw the series.

I was expecting to see the Max and Milia knife fight from Macross in that link, dtm!

"Let me put it this way. Let's say you were three hundred pages into reading a novel. And then for no in-story reason the font suddenly changes to MS Mincho and the text size doubles and the kerning gets dicked around with, and the changes only last one chapter before switching back to what they were. Would you not find that irritating as hell? I know I would."

That example is deliberately irritating. There is poetry that messes around with formatting in interesting ways, and it's cool because it's part of the medium.
In any case, the analogue would be the style of prose, not the font size. The prose is what makes a book interesting.

The thing that kind of surprises me is how so few anime fans are really animation fans. I see so many people only really thinking about animation in terms of some kind of 'objective quality' (and arriving at irritating-as-hell descriptors such as "QUALITY"), on a sliding scale from good to bad, where they really only seem to like things that look 'neat' and 'consistent', rather than really giving the visual art much thought.

For one brief, shining moment, Mint, Rouge, Lemonade, Aqua, and Mint

I'm only responding to this because I think the way this analogy is bad points to the core of the issue here.

The analogy is bad because in a book, things like the font and text size are aspects of the substrate of the material: they have nothing to do with the content. In anime, the way the animation looks is part of the content.

This matters because a substrate related thing changing around would be distracting, while a content related thing changing around is... just the content changing around.

The thing that kind of surprises me is how so few anime fans are really animation fans. I see so many people only really thinking about animation in terms of some kind of 'objective quality' (and arriving at irritating-as-hell descriptors such as "QUALITY"), on a sliding scale from good to bad, where they really only seem to like things that look 'neat' and 'consistent', rather than really giving the visual art much thought. I don't think a lot of fans have a good visual vocabulary, and don't really like to think much about the visuals, which is weird to me because I'd think that a medium that is visual art would draw people that like to think about visuals in a serious way.