×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Forum - View topic
Hey, Answerman! Identity Theft


Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6  Next

Note: this is the discussion thread for this article

Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Talkback
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
eyeresist



Joined: 02 Apr 2007
Posts: 995
Location: a 320x240 resolution igloo (Sydney)
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:27 am Reply with quote
Following the link to the Mad Bull 34 manga (not OVA), I was surprised to see the illustration looked quite a lot like, erm, Tom of Finland (NSFW, folks).
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime
pachy_boy



Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 1323
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:58 am Reply with quote
Quote:
Remember when I asked you about how this country and its people are portrayed in anime? Well, I've got a question for you. Which anime portrayed this country positively?


How about Heroman? That show gave a very positive and fairly accurate portrayal of Americans, and I noticed the animators keeping in mind to mix occasional African-Americans among the extras
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
GATSU



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 15279
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 6:14 am Reply with quote
Quote:
Aside from the name, there's... I mean come on, now!


Actually, I brought it up @ a Geneon panel once, and they said Kohta was allegedly pissed that they used his costume designs.

Quote:
Whatever similarities exist between the two films, which none of us really even know for sure if they exist or not aside from just reading the plot synopsis because Inception has only been screened for a handful of critics and NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD HAS SEEN IT YET, is purely coincidental.


Even the floating corridor and broken mirror? Rolling Eyes BTW, at least two critics don't think it's coincidence.

As for Mad Bull, I thought it's supposed to be a parody of our cop movies.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message AIM Address
Orange Hollow



Joined: 02 Jun 2010
Posts: 66
Location: Krasnoyarsk, Russia
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 6:46 am Reply with quote
pachy_boy wrote:

How about Heroman? That show gave a very positive and fairly accurate portrayal of Americans, and I noticed the animators keeping in mind to mix occasional African-Americans among the extras


Yeah, and for the same reason, Durarara!! has a fairly inaccurate portrayal of Russians )) I mean, African-Russians almost do not exist. And the language, that they spoke occasionally, was anything but Russian (i'm a native speaker, couldn't understand it without subtitles ><). But any foreign language isn't a strong point of Japanese, anyway )
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime
vashfanatic



Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 3489
Location: Back stateside
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:15 am Reply with quote
Orange Hollow wrote:
Yeah, and for the same reason, Durarara!! has a fairly inaccurate portrayal of Russians )) I mean, African-Russians almost do not exist.

...whiiiiiich was lampshaded, and part of the joke.

Re: similarities between shows, I honestly have not seen Kimba the White Lion to make any comparisons, though the fact that it has humans in it already means Lion King wasn't a direct copy. If Disney would just admit, "Yeah we took inspiration from it" this whole debate would never have happened.

Nadia and Atlantis? The only way you can argue that they are remotely similar is if you've only looked at the covers of one or both of them and saw a few character design similarities. Setting aside the fact that the hero/heroine pair of Nadia are children and those in Atlantis are adults, the princess in Atlantis lives in Atlantis, she isn't spoiler[an amnesiac working in a circus in Paris]. There are no spoiler[aliens] in Atlantis, Atlantis was spoiler[destroyed] in Nadia, etc., etc. They have more or less nothing in common, save that "there is a submarine, Atlantis plays a part, the hero has glasses, and the heroine has dark skin."

Van Helsing and Hellsing? No. Just, no. Apples and oranges.

As for Paprika/Inception, most of the comparisons I've heard there have been positive, as in, "Inception reminds me of Paprika, and that is awesome!" And I... am trying to keep my expectations down on Inception, so let's not talk about it any more... Anime hyper;
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime My Manga
Myaow



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 1068
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:20 am Reply with quote
UGH. I wish that the "Atlantis = Nadia" brouhaha would just go away and never come back. I could kind of get into it a couple years ago, back before I'd ever seen "Nadia", but once I actually watched the show, the arguments started looking like complete nonsense.

You could make a pretty good list of visual motifs and worldbuilding concepts they have in common, but the actual plots and characters are sooooo different, I don't see why this is even an issue.

Having guys with glasses, mysterious ruins, THE OCEAN, blue crystals =/= the same story.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
TatsuGero23



Joined: 18 Nov 2008
Posts: 1277
Location: Sniper Island, USA (It's in your heart!)
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 8:48 am Reply with quote
Is it weird that I understood the Flake of the Week? I think he's looking for Ronin Warriors. While there are more then 3 people and they aren't robots, it seem like the natural progression of logic jumps you'd have with the series if you only remember bits and pieces of it like the transformation sequences. But I don't know. Maybe he's thinking Bayblade or Gear Fighter Denda (whatever that show is called) or something like that.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
DRWii



Joined: 16 May 2007
Posts: 636
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 9:30 am Reply with quote
Yeah, most of those "Hollywood steals ideas from anime" examples are bogus. The one that really kills me is "Van Helsing/Hellsing." Sure, the movie was made after "Hellsing," but it's based on a character who was created back in the late 19th century, about 76 years before the creator of "Hellsing" was even BORN.*facepalms*
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime My Manga
Anime World Order



Joined: 05 May 2006
Posts: 389
Location: Florida
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 9:57 am Reply with quote
Speaking as an avowed Angel Cop enthusiast, it's always been my take that the stupendously nationalistic / anti-American / anti-Semitic content of the script were less to do with Ichiro Itano and more to do with his longtime collaborator Shou Aikawa, whose works often tend to include something completely crazy on that level. He's pretty much been given a retroactive pass for this stuff due to having worked on this relatively little-known series called *ahem* Fullmetal Alchemist, but I firmly believe Ichiro Itano's interests lie primarily in motorcycles, jet planes, guns, missile swarms, and bloodshed. This was still not enough to make me watch through all of Blassreiter...yet.

It's interesting that Gunsmith Cats is generally praised while Mad Bull is near-universally panned, since the reason cited was the level of visual accuracy in depicting Chicago even though the characters and events were positively outlandish. Yet the same is true for Mad Bull with regards to its visual depiction of New York City. The fascinating thing about the works of Kazuo Koike is that the artists he collaborates with all have a knack for putting in heavy-duty research from a visual standpoint. Mad Bull looks like 1980s New York, Offered's depiction of the inside hallways of MIT is 100% spot-on, and the worlds of Lone Wolf and Cub/Samurai Executioner/Path of the Assassin look exactly like how you'd expect feudal Japan to. It's the events that unfold which shatter the illusion. The real streets of NYC are not routinely terrorized by Chinese tanks, Count Dracula, wheelchair-bound cyborg Latino drug dealers, or the Predator (thus forcing the NYPD to fight back using the power loader from Aliens). You can't buy canned coffee from a vending machine, and they certainly can't double as grenades no matter what elderly diabetics do to them.

And it's not that Gunsmith Cats isn't just about as insane on the plot and violence/dismemberment metrics. After all, you're not a true Kenichi Sonoda villain unless you lose a limb and then replace it with a firearm. Yet somehow, my love for Gunsmith Cats and Kenichi Sonoda in general has greatly diminished over the years, as the release of the Omnibus editions managed to switch on a light bulb in my head. Suddenly, it became more apparent that while Kenichi Sonoda digs cars, guns, and robots...what he's MAINLY into is naked underage girls. Sad Hmm, maybe THAT'S why Gunsmith Cats gets all the kudos despite being very similar to Mad Bull 34...

Rakkan wrote:
What's it like to be so much of a fan boy that you delude yourself into thinking Mad Bull and GSC are similar in any fashion beyond being gun heavy action series' set in America?


It's pretty awesome, actually. Tell me, what's it like providing no argument to the contrary besides "no it isn't"? Because as Michael Palin so famously said, that isn't an argument. It's just contradiction.

Listen: both are targeted to the same seinen demographic. Both draw their primary influences from American action movies and television shows of the 1970s and 1980s. Both are quite high up there on on the violence and sexuality scale. Both feature very detailed depictions of locations and firearms while simultaneously being incredibly unrealistic. If you've only ever seen the respective anime titles for each, then I can see how you may be skeptical of the comparison, but this is not an arbitrary flight of fancy on my part.


Last edited by Anime World Order on Fri Jul 09, 2010 1:30 pm; edited 1 time in total
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website My Anime My Manga
rabrek



Joined: 06 Apr 2009
Posts: 188
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 10:23 am Reply with quote
The thing is, anime fans see similarities between anime and Hollywood projects because we watch anime. Anime informs our frame of reference when evaluating other stories and characters. If I had a dollar for every Stephenie Meyer worshiper who drips contempt for some vampire project that's "ripping off Twilight", I'd have ample funding to dispatch roving interventionists to force them to read earlier vamp works, right back to Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872). As I see it, the difficulty is that genre fans often forget the library of ideas that artists draw from with greater or lesser skill to create something "new". Fortunately, we have TVTropes to educate us until someone steps up with financing for a broad range of roving interventionists.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
doctordoom85



Joined: 12 Jun 2008
Posts: 2091
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 11:07 am Reply with quote
It's not a phenomenon unique to anime fandom, that's for sure. If I had a dollar for every Star Wars or Harry Potter fan who think their beloved series is completely original........
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Rakkan



Joined: 28 Dec 2009
Posts: 16
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 11:39 am Reply with quote
Anime World Order wrote:
Suddenly, it became more apparent that while Kenichi Sonoda digs cars, guns, and robots...what he's MAINLY into is naked underage girls. Sad Hmm, maybe THAT'S why Gunsmith Cats gets all the kudos despite being very similar to Mad Bull 34...
What's it like to be so much of a fan boy that you delude yourself into thinking Mad Bull and GSC are similar in any fashion beyond being gun heavy action series' set in America?
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
marie-antoinette



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 4136
Location: Ottawa, Canada
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:24 pm Reply with quote
I've never seen Kimba so I can't comment too much about similarities (other than knowing that kimba/simba is a word for lion in one of the African languages and thus there is a good, albeit unoriginal, reason for that one being the same). But I've always wondered one thing: do people claiming that Lion King ripped White Lion off taking into account the fact that the Lion King is a re-telling of Hamlet? It seems to me that after getting the main plot from that source, there wouldn't be much room for anything else.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime My Manga
spankminister



Joined: 09 Jul 2010
Posts: 15
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:46 pm Reply with quote
The king's brother killing the king, and the prince in exile coming back to reclaim the throne is a far more general story structure than just Hamlet. Also, Simba does not spend the majority of the Lion King pondering the nature of death, and trying to decide on whether or not he should assassinate Scar, so I'm not sure one can really say it's a "re-telling of Hamlet." Simba's mother doesn't marry Scar or anything, and there's no real Ophelia or Polonius analogues either.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
RestLessone



Joined: 02 Aug 2009
Posts: 1426
Location: New York
PostPosted: Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:50 pm Reply with quote
marie-antoinette wrote:
I've never seen Kimba so I can't comment too much about similarities (other than knowing that kimba/simba is a word for lion in one of the African languages and thus there is a good, albeit unoriginal, reason for that one being the same). But I've always wondered one thing: do people claiming that Lion King ripped White Lion off taking into account the fact that the Lion King is a re-telling of Hamlet? It seems to me that after getting the main plot from that source, there wouldn't be much room for anything else.

As much as I love The Lion King, it's hard to deny the similarities. It's not necessarily the stuff taken from Hamlet, but the plot points unique to the film and the art. For example, Simba and Kimba both end up eating insects instead of meat. I guess this site would explain it most:
http://www.kimbawlion.com/rant2.htm
(I'd ignore most of the writing and just look at the images, though. I'm tired of the ongoing debate myself. I rather just accept both are good, even if The Lion King did borrow elements. Also note that some of the examples are pretty far-fetched; I've seen poses like the one on the manga cover a hundred times.)
Then there is the production shot from an edition of a DVD, showing that Simba was originally going to be white.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earlypresentationreelwhitelionking.jpg

Also, like spankminister said, it's definitely not like a lion version of Hamlet. More like a very broad adaptation with lions.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic    Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Talkback All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Goto page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6  Next
Page 1 of 6

 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group