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ANNCast - Diabolical Ruh-minations

RE: The future of feature anime and Justin's comment that "people are still going to the movies in Japan":

This comment really stuck with me, because it seems to buck a bigger trend that I thought was having a strong impact on the entertainment industry: I thought that with the expansion of HDTV, BD, home theater 3D and like technologies the cinema industry was slowly but surely going the way of commercial radio? Is Japan somehow in exception to the trend? Is anime the exception? Or am I taking too strong a connotation away from a one positive comment?

Daryl Surat had a problem with Millennium Actress, and I hated Tokyo Godfathers, and was half-and-half with Paranoia Agent, so you're not entirely alone.

Ostensibly it's done by BONES, but the listing of studios under in-between animation reveals a lot of big names:

I'm not sure if Justin read my words wrong, but I got the impression he's trying to tell me studios still create their own works under their own funding. I've a tremendously difficult time believing this when so much contradicts this, especially news regarding artist salaries.

While I do understand production committees (anime funding group) exist, it has been my understanding these are formed long before a single line of art is even drawn, thus removing studios from recouping royalties of their own works. I say this only because the salary situation doesn't seem to have improved, so it's a good assumption studios are indeed hired, not IP owners (which would allow them to share royalties).

In fact, most news of salaries seems to carry this type of message. No offense to Justin at all, but my take on this is that studios don't have enough revenue lying around to properly pay the artists what they deserve.

If the anime industry thinks it has it bad now, just wait until China enters the picture more than it already has.

...but Susan Napier doesn't know the first thing about Evangelion.

have you *read* what she's said about it? Her "When the Machine Stops" article was one of the worst things I've ever seen...not to mention she devoted *literally one sentence* to End of Evangelion to dismiss it as "just revenge on fans"

She ended up concluding that the series had a pro-existentialist message....that "the message is that Shinji can dream up any reality he wants".........when that was really the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the show was about.

you at least respect the professor for their experience and seniority and just try to find middle ground where it exists because to a great degree they DO know what they're talking about...but this is the arts, so they may have become a bit too self-indulgent along the way.

On those points, I really agreed with what she had to say. As for the other, well, Evangelion is an existentialist work, but that's a BIIIIIG broad category so she still may have had it wrong. It's pomo existentialism, which kind of considers itself "higher" than humanistic branches of existentialism because it believes that reality sucks harder. I dunno, it's complicated. It's hardly as sophisticated as its few believers think considering it revolves around a singular contradiction: "There are no absolutes." (Except this absolute statement!)