Forum - View topicShelf Life - The Polar Express
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Erin,
What did you think of Adam Warren's Dirty Pair series? Guess you could call it manga, since it was based on the original series. I loved the artwork and characterizations. Never really liked what they did to Kei and Yuri in Dirty Pair Flash. Always thought of Dirty Pair Flash as a victim of the Scrappy Doo effect. Though now I guess you would call it moeification. Make them younger, cuter, and dumber. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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Depends who you ask, I guess. I marvel at BluRays of analog films, something which few modern anime make me do, even worse if they use CGI but don't "sakuga" the hell out of it. Those analog anime have the ability to look even better in the future, again with the 4k thing going around; digital anime are stuck at their under-1080p resolutions. If you're talking dated as far as character designing, that's another matter. But the anime of today will go there someday as well; look at your early 2000s shows and tell me those look fine now as well. |
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RoverTX
 Posts: 424 |
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P&S's grotesque moments gave me flash backs to Courge The Cowardly dog, and how everything in that show was drawn. It was kind of strange watching a show where the main characters where clearly drawn in Dexter/Power Puff style, but where the action a lot of the time would devolve into a more primitive style like Courge or even Ed Edd and Eddy.
The South Park homage at the beach was also jarring, almost as jarring as all the South Park references in FLCL. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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Hence the original Pair living in a bright and clean city bustling with people and the Flash Pair living in a filthy slum where it always seems to be night.
Warren's Pair series often has the problem of surrounding Kei and Yuri with ideas more interesting than they are. The artificially-created human with automatically switched emotional/intellectual modes and the evolving computer network that tried to kill humanity until it grew so smart it no longer wanted to are great concepts but they play bit parts to mere action-comedy (albeit well-executed action comedy).
And less sexually threatening. Original Kei and Yuri were interested in attractive men in a breezy, fun-loving way but Flash Kei is asexual and Flash Yuri seems to seek out men only to try to marry into money. |
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sharpied
Posts: 17 |
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I feel the opposite about anime from the 1990s and earlier - I find them superior to what's being released now. While it's true that the older anime aren't as bright and sparkly as most current CG productions, I think it took a higher degree of artistic talent to create the CG-like effects that cel productions employed.
I have a bunch of cels from the 1990s and I absolutely adore them. Even with certain studios using inferior quality ink, the colors are still vivid, 15-20 years after their creation. Colored pictures feel more "alive" to me than the largely black and white sketches from current CG productions. Art is subjective, and I can understand your feeling regarding 1980s character design versus 1990s character design. I feel the same way regarding artwork from the first two seasons of Sailor Moon. It's awful. But then I look at some of the work that Ikuko Ito and Miho Shimogasa created during the S - Stars seasons, and I love it. |
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KoujiTamino
 Posts: 163 Location: Tacoma, WA, USA |
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I always found "Classic" Kei and Yuri to be dull as rocks, unfortunately. No matter how many times I try and get into Dirty Pair, I always lose interest. It took me forever to get through the TV series, despite the quality of the stories themselves. I just couldn't get behind the leads.
Flash, on the other hand, caught me right from the get-go. I loved the chemistry between that version of Kei and Yuri and I enjoyed watching them grow as a team. |
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eyeresist
 Posts: 995 Location: a 320x240 resolution igloo (Sydney) |
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Haven't seen the shows, but find myself strongly disagreeing with Erin this week!
The comments about Dirty Pair Flash seem to indicate a grudge of some sort. I mean, saying that "It's painted on cels, which looks insanely dated in this day and age" makes no sense when original DP is even older, and obviously was done on cels too. More character development and arc plot sounds like a plus to me as well. That's the kind of stuff I watch anime for, after all.
Yeah, I don't know if it was deliberate, or if ink quality was suddenly really degraded in Japan during the 1990s. I noticed that Karin, produced in 2005, deliberately adopted the same colouring as (presumably) a retro gesture. As for Panty & Stocking, that "flat-flat-flat" style and reliance on gross-out humour are two reasons I avoid US animation, so I think I'll give this a miss. I refuse to believe that Penguin is a jerk 
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4074 |
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It's possible unrelated by I noticed the same thing in the Tenchi Muyo OVA footage reused for the third OVA, which was washed out when compared to the remastered DVD image from several years earlier. I don't know if it was intentional or if it was the film stock itself. Any animation fan should know that color intensity is the first thing to go on film stock {baring scratches, tears and whatnot}. Restoring the luster is pretty much essential.
I know this is insulting but I can't tell if it's intentional. I've recently restarted a rewatch of Blue Seed and I'm loving the cel animated monsters, as well as the Omakes epecially the one covering the limitations of cel animation. The CGI opening is dated but that's the way of it; However I would never call cel animation itself dated as there's too many shows I like because of it. Thanks to overly slick computer animation, viewers have gotten lazy and probably greedy. People took the time to draw it and every time a cut occurs in Bue Seed {a surprising amount for a TV show at that} just means more and more drawings done and cels painted. I guess cel animation is like black and white movies {And no, I'm not going to bring up black and white cel animation}, it just bothers some people. Rather than dated, I like to think of cel animation as classic. Even if it's just part of the times, it is truer animation more than computer animation. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4365 Location: New York |
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I'll second homage, since it's their attempt at doing a take on it, as opposed to picking the style apart. They parody specific things, but the style is a homage vs parody. Also note, Panty and Stocking has quite possibly the best Transformers parody ever. |
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Kimiko_0
 Posts: 1796 Location: Leiden, NL, EU |
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Thanks for the warning. I don't like American-style cartoons much at all, so I'll avoid P&S too.
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Shippoyasha
Posts: 459 |
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Dirty Pair Flash is a classic in my eyes. The comedy sensuality is just perfectly 90's and I really wish the show was a proper 26 episode series so the plot and characterizations can grow.
It has story/backstory flaws I agree, but it seems to be a typical downfall of stories confined to OVAs. Predictably, Dirty Pair original had the luxury of being a proper 25 minute show with 20+ episodes. So Dirty Pair Flash has several handicaps already. Personally, I rather liked the angular styles of 90's anime and Kei in Flash seemed to take her tomboy persona to new heights. Overall, I have very fond memories of the show. I do agree it has flaws though, but mostly because it was such a short series. And yeah, it's kind of strange that 90's nostalgia is a thing now. Replete with dull, painted on cel coloring and all. |
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The Human Spider
Posts: 334 |
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I thought P&S was one of the more entertaining recent shows I've seen--I really wish I tried to watch it earlier(I first avoided it because of all the hype around it.) I didn't find it all that gross, except for the nose-picking episode which really bothered me though I can't specifically say why. Although I don't like it at all, I think SUPER MILK-CHAN is a very under-rated show because it seems to anticipate the direction Adult Swim would go with their original shows.
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crosswithyou
 Posts: 2892 Location: California |
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Glad to see another positive review for Shirokuma Cafe! It's definitely one of the series I look most forward to every week.
Saw this on a friend's Twitter that made me laugh hard: 
LlamaD! XDDDD The guy is Ono Daisuke (aka OnoD), the voice of Llama. His facial expressions are special. 
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notazaku
 Posts: 135 |
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Flash was my first experience with Dirty Pair so I’ll always be more fond of it than any other entry in the franchise. And after revisiting the series with this new release I found it’s still my favorite Dirty Pair series overall. The only difference, if I’m remembering correctly, is that Kei used to be my favorite character but now I prefer Yuri. Poor Kei, her character designs are so dated between her 80’s hairdo in the original and her big spikey hair in the 90’s. Yuri tends to fare better regardless of whether it’s the original or Flash. Anyway I’m glad I’m able to own all the Dirty Pair anime now as I did enjoy the original series/ovas/movie quite a bit too, just not as much as Flash.
On a side note, I was amused by the similarities between the climax of episode 16 of Flash and the climax of the movie Iron Man. If you’ve seen both it kind of jumps right out at you with just how similar they are considering both involve spoiler[overloading a reactor below to blow up the roof of the building where the villain is standing]. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence. Doesn’t help that the title of episode 16 is the “Grey Avenger”. Could it be a reference to the comics? I’m not familiar enough with the comics to know how similar they are with the movie. Anyway it’s just something that amuses me. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8459 Location: Penguinopolis |
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I have a feeling Polar Bear Cafe would be a very difficult show to dub in English, with all of Polar Bear's Japanese word puns. Imagine how much more cringe-inducing the attempts at replacing them with English word puns would be.
Plus, knowing how dub studios treat comedies these days, they'd probably make it a gag dub and replace the humor with jokes about abortion and rape. Great show, though. |
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