| Key wrote: | | First, to Jose Cruz: Serial posting is generally not tolerated. Please combine responses to multiple posts into one post in the future. |
I plan to do that.
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| Jose Cruz wrote: | | Roger Ebert had decent taste among American film critics, being able to walk through his prejudices a little bit more than other critics and recognize artistic talent in a work of non-western popular culture. Though, overall, he was not a specialist in animation and I wouldn't actually give much weight to his opinion on any anime film. |
Then I assume that you don't care about his glowing evaluation of Royal Space Force or his extremely high opinion of Grave of the Fireflies, then? |
No I do not. I cared about it a couple of years back when I used Ebert's reviews to watch movies. However, from the perspective of someone who now has some experience with animation (having watched 400 anime titles plus a couple hundred western animated films), his reviews of anime films are completely useless.
| Quote: | | Roger Ebert may not have been a dedicated connoisseur of anime, but he did know animation and he understood anime well enough to recognize its premier efforts. |
I disagree. He didn't understand that Ghost in the Shell was a masterpiece when he first watched it and he didn't watch a substantial amount of it as well. True he recognized a couple of titles as important but fact is that he wasn't a specialist in the area. And to know a little about anime is something I though was absolutely essential to any film critic although none actually have watched more than 100 hours of anime (which is so little considering the enormous size of the medium), now, to review anime, well then experience with the medium is obviously required as it is obvious that to review a Hollywood movie experience watching Hollywood movies is required. This is valid for any area and any field: to write about biology well, it's better you know biology. While anime is a sub-field of cinema, it's different from the rest of film in that it uses the visual language developed by manga and that it has it's own history, aesthetic values and sub-cultural background. Therefore, knowledge of anime is required to review anime. Roger Ebert watched Citizen Kane over 50 times, that's over 100 hours and probably more hours than he had watched of anime in his life. Hence, he understood Citizen Kane well, he was obviously fit to write a review of it. While when he reviewed anime he always reviewed it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about the field as if beginning to have it's first contacts with it. He considered Grave of the Fireflies the best animated movie he ever watched but well, it's perhaps one of the most accessible anime films to western audiences as it doesn't contain almost any elements of the visual language of manga and the degree of distortion of character designs is pretty low and it's themes are universal and conventional (war). Now send Utena for him to watch and he probably wouldn't understand 1% of it.
| Quote: | | And I think you give American animation too little credit. There is nothing "second rate" about many of its "kiddie movies." |
Well, they show contempt for their audience. Are lacking in seriousness, violence and complexity of character development. As well as the art style is very cartoonish and lacking in detail. They are simplistic in art, direction and writing. This applies to adult TV series as well (South Park and Family Guy are not exactly artistic achievements). Archer might be an exception in some regards, featuring a more complex writing, character designs and art style. But still, even a shoujo series like Sakura Cardcaptor is more sophisticated than any US animation ever made. So it's very easy to pick an anime series that operates on a higher level of sophistication than any US animation. Also US animation is very small as well in terms of raw number of hours produced. Overall, I find American animation to be very limited in general though it is improving over the past couple of decades. The lack of development of American animation is a quite sad thing (any anime fan would love to have also huge volume of American produced adult animation as well).
Brazilian animation is also extremely limited as are Brazilian graphic novels, I hope in the future our artists will improve in this area as well. I am not saying this as someone who has a prejudice against US animation but as someone who has been systematically disappointed by it. I would like to see serious animated films and series made in the US in many genres but that's just not going to happen.
| lapoune wrote: |
| Jose Cruz wrote: | |
I don't recall him citing any North American animator though. |
I recall him saying a couple times that he deeply admired Frederic Back, a french-canadian animator. I think he also said he wanted to do the kind of shorts\passion projects that Back did now that he is retired from feature film.
I recommend everyone really interested in animation to watch this (well, even if you're not): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvYh8ar3tc
His other shorts are also very good, though some might be linked to our culture a bit too deeply to be easily understood. |
He did not cite Back out of the blue on the books Starting Point and Turning Point though, while he cited Norstein several times. He wrote a review of The Man Who Planted Trees there, it's a great animated art film. As I said, western animation is restricted in many ways but they have produced many great short films (which are usually not commercial so they don't need to care about the general public's perception of animation). Though I am not the world's biggest fan of short films because they lack the required time to have character development, deal with complex themes and have sophisticated world building. But I concede that in terms of short films western animation is well endowed.
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