Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! [2009-10-30]
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4474 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I'm surprised no one's mentioned the most inconsistently-drawn series in recent memory, Minami-ke Okaeri, where it's very apparent that Studio Asread splits up each episode with their A-team giving us lavishly illustrated scenes with all sorts of detail including intricate hair highlights almost on par with the quality of the original Studio Doumu Minami-ke series before the midpoint commercial break, and their B-team giving us hastily-drawn crap like this
after the midpoint commercial break. |
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reanimator
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How do you know it's expensive or not? Is it in a commentary? Do you have proof? |
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pparker
 Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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Some of the perceived drop in quality is due to style changes. The commentary on FLCL mentioned how individual styles get "normalized" to promote consistency. That practice alone wouldn't be perfect, so as directors and key animators change, some differences will leak through.
FLCL's creators decided not to normalize the styles, so the drastic, wacky changes are intentional. When the characters are all sitting around the porch and the designs go completely off and strange, they had planned to normalize the style, then liked it so much they didn't touch it. And it worked, adding to the creativity factor. The only time I got upset over animation quality was with Gurren Lagann, episode 4. It's famous for having caused a long-time GAINAX board member to resign after insulting the fans who complained about a drastic drop in quality. Turns out the animator just had a different style, and GAINAX decided to treat it the same as in FLCL. But wrong show, wrong context for an experiment like that. It just didn't fit and caused an uproar. In that case, I really did decide that if it didn't get "fixed" within a couple of episodes, I would drop the show. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4622 |
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The series' staff has stated as much elsewhere, but it's also riffed on within the show itself. After the second scene in episode six ends, Naota's father goes into a rant about how they weren't supposed to use "manga style" again, because the original scene in the first episode was so difficult to animate and wore the animation staff out...but then he also worries about people accusing them of "being lazy." It's a rather amusing bit of fourth-wall breaking.  When you think of them being "easier," I think you're thinking about the "motion comics" like those that SyFy aired over the past few weeks, which were mostly camera pans across still images. FLCL's effect was something completely different: the panels were all individually animated from scratch themselves, with all sorts of crazy movements and effects going on.
I'm honestly a bit surprised to see so many people mostly dismissing the importance of animation quality within a series. From where I'm sitting, animation is primarily a visual medium, and the fluidity and style of a show's raw animation can comprise a big portion of my enjoyment of it. (This is probably the primary reason why I prefer my anime dubbed; I want to be able to view the artwork and animation unfettered by text overlays, whether they be DVD-yellow or fancy fansub outlined beige.) A scene with particularly fantastic animation makes me sit up and take notice like almost nothing else. For instance, I'm watching the current SyFy rebroadcast of Macross Plus, and I'd forgotten how jaw-droppingly gorgeous Itano's work during some of the aerial combat scenes is; in the same way, his work on the fighter scene in Cowboy Bebop: The Movie leaves me speechless every time. Likewise, Eureka seveN had a few episodes where BONES had to skimp on the budget, but they made up for it with some ridiculously good animation in a few key episodes at the midpoint and near the end. By the same token, a particularly bad episode art- or animation-wise sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I still feel that Evangelion deserves every bit of ridicule it gets from a cost-cutting standpoint; those "ran-out-of-ink" scenes of 45-second still images and glorified storyboards are just laughable. Likewise, some of the ridiculously off-model episodes of Bleach after the Soul Society arc concluded have been almost painful; I remember one or two that might as well have been motion comics. From what I've seen, Naruto falls victim to the same thing, and even my beloved One Piece has its off moments (though its animation gets progressively better as a whole as the series progresses). Granted, I don't think I'd ever flat-out drop a series just because of poor animation quality, but it definitely lowers my overall opinion of it: I watch anime to entertain my eyeballs, not wince at artist flubs. (I do give passes to older material, particularly TV series, since they obviously operated with a world's worth of difference budget-wise. It's rather fascinating to see how series like Astro-Boy or Gigantor were able to utilize shortcuts, though there are certain points where they really devolve into slide-shows.) I'm glad to see the Lupin love in the column, too. I'm a big fan of the second TV series, and I absolutely love the dub that Tony Oliver and company turned out for it. It really is a damn shame that only half of it ever made its way over here, though I do understand that it was probably a money-losing venture from the get-go. As soon as the news about Geneon's general shutdown broke, I scrambled to collect all of the single DVD volumes that were released, and I'm still working my way through the episodes that [as] never aired. Great stuff. |
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ayashe
 Posts: 122 |
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Well, it's just my opinion as a yaoi fan and mecha and moe hater (more mecha), but I think they and their fans are a lot more screwed up.
 I'm just kidding for any extreme fans of those. I've always wondered about yaoi and yuri in Japan, but more about how the seiyuu view it.
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Avarice_WP
 Posts: 44 Location: Northrend |
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Actually if the sun were to explode right now, since light is the fastest measurable substance in the universe that we know of, we would not know there was a problem until about 8 minutes later. Then of course, we would be instantly vaporized as the (what i'm assuming is a) supernova obliterates every planet in the solar system.
Actually, the sun will likely destroy the Earth in about 1 billion years when it expands near or beyond the orbit of the Earth as it changes into a Red Giant Star. The atmosphere of the Earth will be blasted off from the intense heat resulting from the proximity of the planet to the star. The Earth will be uninhabitable, and quite resemble Mercury. Eventually the star will expand to or beyond the Earth's current orbit, vaporizing the entire planet. Some theories suggest that as the Sun loses mass during it's expansion, the gravitational hold on the Earth will weaken and the plante's orbit around the Sun will expand. Even if this happens and the Earth is not engulfed inside the star, the planet will be well out of the habitable zone. Don't worry about 2012, worry about 1,000,000,000 AD. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Wrong. Well, not completely, but Sol will not enter its red giant stage until almost the end of its life. You are right in that Earth will become uninhabitable in just one billion years, but because of Sol's increasing luminosity, not because it will swallow the Earth. If you are going to go professor on us, at least be right.
As Top Gun has already mentioned, the staff have said how difficult it was. And after the second sequence the show really did break the fourth wall; it's all true. I can see why you would think that the Manga-sequences must have been cheap and easy to do. To my eyes it doesn't look like anything that could be considered any different than what other Anime use. But, I am not an expert of animation techniques ( know practically nothing in fact), so I have to go on what the show and its staff tells me. |
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Ralifar
 Posts: 205 Location: League City, TX |
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Seems like some of you are focusing a little too hard on the end of the our sun. Maybe by then they'll have developed a similar system to what was used in Infinite Ryvius.
I remember watching Hakkenden: Legend of the Dog Warriors. The first half of the series was animated fairly decently. Then on the 7th or 8th episode they changed out the entire animation team to drunk, retarded, preschoolers. I honestly couldn't tell what was going on on the screen half the time. It was that bad. I cringe just to think about it. |
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vashfanatic
 Posts: 3492 Location: Back stateside |
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ow. Ow. OW. Okay, somebody only knows Newtonian physics... Okay, let's forget about explosions versus red giants versus whatever. Even if the sun just magically disappeared, we would not go flying off into space immediately. "Gravity" is not a tether tying us to the sun that would snap, flinging us off into oblivion the moment the sun went bye-bye. It's a distortion in space-time, and it would take the full 8 minutes for the distortion to disappear, at which point we would begin moving in a more-or-less straight line. I'll let someone else do the math to see if we'd be "flattened" by the "launch," but I strongly doubt it. Ditto on someone imagining the earth would freeze in only eight minutes. We'd freeze, but it would take somewhat longer than that due to 1) latent heat in the atmosphere and 2) the earth's own geothermal energy. Now, if the sun actually exploded at high enough velocities, we'd know in less than 8 minute because it would be moving towards us. But otherwise, it wouldn't happen any faster. |
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Avarice_WP
Posts: 44 Location: Northrend |
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Expansion/Luminosity- yes I think your right. It was late and I didn't bother to fact check; good call.
Besides the post was just intended to mess with the Answerman some. |
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Myaow
 Posts: 1068 |
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I've never seen anyone knock on Kubo's manga artwork before, not even in 4chan. In fact, I remember seeing more 4channers lamenting that the perceived-mediocre plot and characters don't match up to the awesome art! Remember, Kubo doesn't work on the Bleach anime, which is the version that gets all the heat for being so fugly and awkward-looking. He only draws the manga. |
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vashfanatic
Posts: 3492 Location: Back stateside |
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Like most manga writers, his early stuff is not reflective of his best quality. Compare character designs now with those at the start of Bleach, and you can see huge leaps in improvement. Just based on the first few volumes, you could bash Kubo Tite easily. If animehermit has only read these, they might have thought the "quality" meme was about the manga art, when in fact it refers to the cheap animation in the TV series. But so it goes on a series where you have to continuously pump out one episode a week for years on end. Why should anyone be surprised that there are hiccups in series like Bleach or Naruto? |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4478 |
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They were probably thinking that they had to do as they were told. Geneon USA caught some bad decisions not only from the original license holders but from their Japanese parent company, which is probably a large part of why they collapsed. I'm sure that they would have done sets if they could have but the TV series showed up here when jumping straight to sets just wasn't done, no matter how long the show is. If it weren't for the sickly state of DVD sales here and Funimation's efforts we would still be seeing the traditional releases. |
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The Unknown 24
Posts: 112 |
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A lot of Lupin III fans did not like the way the 2nd tv series release was handled. Especially with the high prices at that time. almost $30.00(between 25 to 30 depending on what store you went too) for only about 5 to 6 episodes on one dvd. The 2nd series is 155 episodes in all. That's a lot of dvd's to buy and really expensive at 25 and up for 1 dvd.
Now days a box set is cheap. The only way to see Lupin III series 1 with subs, 2 (complete), and 3 with subs is to buy the HK dvd boxsets(or find fansubs on the net). Even though a lot of people disapprove of both methods. If Funimation(or any other company) don't decide to pick the show up(or finish series 2) for region 1 dvd release. I've seen all 3 series on HK dvd and the subs were really decent. I've only bought HK sets when region 1 sets are not available and/or I know never will be available(or if available not completed). And this is only on certain shows. 
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pparker
Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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IIRC, Geneon didn't "collapse" in the U.S. They were profitable when they closed their doors. The relatively new management or parent company decided they were not generating enough profit and closed the U.S. operation. Apparently, the amount of effort to them just wasn't worth it, or maybe they already saw numbers indicating that the market was rapidly declining. If so, they decided that rather than spend the money to figure out the new market and re-work the business model, as Funi has done, they would just get out. Probably the right decision business-wise, but I sure would have liked to have all those incomplete franchises finished. As of now, I consider that Funi has abandoned all the Geneon franchises they eventually got and won't finish them. |
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