Forum - View topic

Hey, Answerman! [2010-01-08]

This can easily be witnessed by the internet exclusive release of Haruhi season 2, where crafty marketers decided to switch solely to the realistic realm of their base for initial release.

Also the greatest thing that can happen in 2010? The UK stops messing with its anime fans and giving them their streaming anime like we get in the US. Just make a deal with CR and Funi already. I feel for you my otaku brothers and sisters.

malik_chan wrote:

In reply to the first one. I don't think Utena should be on that list, mainly because it isn't notorious as Bebop.

Excuse me?
As far as shojo goes, Utena is pretty huge. When I asked for another title I should get for my daughter who like Sailor Moon (11 yrs old at the time), the anime shop owner suggested Utena. You might want to check out the title if you've never seen it. The whole egg cracking thing gets annoying, but it has a point, probably more of one than Bebop which is largely a space opera. (not begrudging them. I love Star Wars & Bebop was one of my first box sets. I have the cool hinged lid box)

"Lupin III vs. Detective Conan is a story about vengeance, loss, and regret. Lupin III, a shambling wreck of a man, wracked by guilt over leaving his wife after her third miscarriage, goes to Detective Conan to solve the murder of Jigen, who was brutally killed by his gay former lover. Conan, frustrated by his inability to grow up and mature and lead a normal life with lasting relationships, is contemplating suicide. Joined together by their sadness and longing, Lupin and Conan discover that the true mystery that needed to be solved was inside each of them. And at the end they fight a T-Rex."

Grossest food? Frankly i can't stand rice balls. Unless dipped in gallons of teriyaki sauce they are tasteless giant round things that I can't bring my self to finish.

How some people mistake the series for being nothing more than a nude, gory, slugfest, must've been looking for a hentai title...

Well, in my neck of the woods, I didn't even know of Utena for several years, but I sure heard of Trigun. I don't know if my friends just never mentioned it or what, but I know a few of them didn't have Utena in their collections, we never watched it in our high school anime club either. But all my friends knew about Trigun and Bebop, and I kinda link them because they both in space and both westerns, in a way. I never saw Bebop as a space opera either.

Perhaps this lack of familiarity with the source language indeed facilitates part of a viewer's appreciation. To wit, being impervious to the lack of verisimilitude of the vocal aspect of a performance would not be to the detriment of a veiwer's entertainment, suggesting that this could well be a quaint case in which liking something would be restricted, not aided, by knowing more about it.

umm... Funi and all the others use dual-layer DVDs for the thin packs, or any dvd with > 5 eps. And the single volumes of yore (and Media Blasters of today) used single layer DVDs, unless there were lots of extras. So the bitrate itself is about the same between 7 eps on a dual layer and 4 eps on a single layer.

Grossest food? Frankly i can't stand rice balls. Unless dipped in gallons of teriyaki sauce they are tasteless giant round things that I can't bring my self to finish.

configspace wrote:

umm... Funi and all the others use dual-layer DVDs for the thin packs, or any dvd with > 5 eps. And the single volumes of yore (and Media Blasters of today) used single layer DVDs, unless there were lots of extras. So the bitrate itself is about the same between 7 eps on a dual layer and 4 eps on a single layer.

Yeah, Funi's 7-ep DVDs are dual layer, but still look really bad. And just how "today" are we talking with Media Blasters? The newest title of theirs I have is Genshiken (from 2004, admittedly), and DVD 1 (five eps incl. Kujiun OVA) is 7.58G. Which ones of theirs did you find to be single layer?

Watson.

eyevocal wrote:

configspace wrote: umm... Funi and all the others use dual-layer DVDs for the thin packs, or any dvd with > 5 eps. And the single volumes of yore (and Media Blasters of today) used single layer DVDs, unless there were lots of extras. So the bitrate itself is about the same between 7 eps on a dual layer and 4 eps on a single layer. Yeah, Funi's 7-ep DVDs are dual layer, but still look really bad. And just how "today" are we talking with Media Blasters? The newest title of theirs I have is Genshiken (from 2004, admittedly), and DVD 1 (five eps incl. Kujiun OVA) is 7.58G. Which ones of theirs did you find to be single layer? Watson.

That's because it's 5 eps + OVA (like i said, unless there are extras). The size of 4 eps should fit on a single layer. I'll have to check again, but I think my Phoenix vol 3 @ 4 eps dvd from is single layer. Most other singles I've seen at 4 eps/dvd without extras (aside from textless op/ed) are also single layer. Other new MB single releases would include Ikkitousen 2, Blade of the Immortal, upcoming Queen's Blade. But they too switch to dual layer DVDs for their thinpacks and I see no problems in video quality.

Anyways the point is that you can't simply blame all video quality issues on bitrate/cramming since they don't all clearly suffer from problems i.e. good video vs bad video at about the same bitrate from different releases.

Ew!!!

To reiterate: EWWWWWWW!!!!!

But seriously though. Do I really get to have the "IS THIS ARTS??!?" debate about freakin' guro?

...guess so. Anyway, uh. Here's the thing; I believe, and call me a free-spirited hippie freak if you want... that there is art in all things. Writing and drawing are, by their very notion, creative endeavors. I've seen "Salo" and "In the Realm of the Senses" and "Irreversible," and those films are completely repelling and disturbing to me, but there's an art and discipline to their construction that I admire. Even though they make me want to vomit. I love the Berserk manga, and some of the two-page spreads of nothing but demon carnage and gristle are downright disturbingly beautiful, in their own unsettling way. I think Elfen Lied is a horrid and dull mess, but I could tell that it was at least attempting to get the audience to care about the story beyond being luridly entertained by the viscera and effluvia.

But, each of those examples above were trying to do something more than just show gross carnage for it's own sake. Even if I didn't agree or enjoy what it was saying, I could recognize small pieces of humanity there beyond all the gross ickyness. Guro isn't concerned with that. It is, quite literally, like pornography. It is giving exactly what it's depraved audience wants, without any subtext or emotion. Which, I mean, that's fine, cool, whatever; you guys can enjoy your sick stuff and get off all you want, I honestly don't care. I'm not some judgmental prick who thinks you're going to read guro manga and immediately start traveling the country on serial murdering rampage; you get your rocks off however you want, man.

But it isn't art. To me, anyway. Art needs to make a statement. And not a hollow one; too many people like to think that making a self-reflexive statement counts as an artistic statement; e.g., "oh, movies like 'Saw' and 'Hostel' are making a point about the acceptance of stylized violence in society!" Well, no, that's bullcrap. That's not making a statement, that's just... telling you what it was already doing. Art can't and doesn't make a statement about itself. That's like describing the taste of salt as "salty." By that same logic, though, I could easily see how people can see art within guro. I'm sure there's some amazingly talented artists out there in Japan right now, with draftsmanship skills that would make me weep with envy, who are studiously drawing the hell out of some underage moe girl getting chopped up by an axe.

Sorry for the rant there, but that's what you get I guess when you bring the word "art" into the mix. Guro isn't art, because it doesn't aspire to be. It is what it is; gross stuff for people with gross tastes.

Being my first time to post, i don't know how to put your quotes in the boxes...but seriously? You think Elfen Lied and Berserk are guro? If you're just going for series that are violent and have sex, you forgot Gantz, by the way. And MPD Psycho. And...well, you get the picture. It makes me wonder-you do know what guro is, right? You looked it up before you compared Berserk and Elfen Lied to tentacles and H. R. Geiger. Guro (by two definitions) is a genre that in actuality implies "malformed, unnatural or horrific." Well known guro mangaka include (and i'm pulling this from wikipedia) Suehiro Maruo, Shintaro Kago, Jun Hayami, Toshio Maeda, Henmaru Machino, Horihone Saizō, and Waita Uziga. Oddly enough, none of them have to do with Elfen Lied. Or Berserk. Berserk was done by Kentaro Miura. Elfen Lied was done by Lynne Okamoto. Neither of these people are guro mangaka. Neither of these series is guro. They're really well done series that happen to have a lot of gore and nudity.

It does, however say, that "this movement is often used incorrectly by western audiences to mean "gore"—depictions of horror, blood, and guts." Is that the definition you were using? I'll grant you that all of those series have horror, blood and guts-but that doesn't make them disgusting series. I like all three of those series; i also like Toradora, Azumanga Daioh, and Haruhi Suzumiya. The fact that i like the former series (Gantz, Elfen Lied, Berserk) does not mean that i have gross tastes.

If we take Guro to mean what you think it means, wouldn't that mean that people who like films such as Kill Bill (blood and sex), Dawn of the Dead (blood and sex), and From Dusk till Dawn (blood-and scantily clad women) also disgusting? It doesn't irritate me so much that you didn't even bother to wiki what guro is before lumping Berserk and Elfen Lied into it; but you are supposed to be the answerman. I really just wish you would've looked it up first.

And by the way, just because you don't like it doesn't make it not art. I don't like Dadaism, and don't think that "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp is art-but we still learn about it in art history, because obviously, someone did. I'm not saying that people are suddenly going to consider guro art-i'm just saying that each person has their own tastes.

...almost all of us have been forced to the realm of piracy...