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The Best Anime of 2016

To put it another way, it's like the difference between drawing a realistic human vs. a cartoon human: while both have their merits, the former is by far the more challenging to properly render, particularly in complex compositions and perspectives, simply because it's not as flexible to interpretation --- you can't fudge the look and feel and still look "right".

Not just that, but I find more realistic animation to be that much more immersive, since the look and feel comes across as more organic in the interaction between the characters and the setting, and makes me better invested in the believability of the world that's being portrayed. When a high-production moment appears in modern shows, I oftentimes feel taken out of the moment, because the ungrounded style (with sometimes jerky, unnatural human movement) seems to be in stark contrast with the physics of the world, and I'm made that much more aware that I'm watching an animated sequence.

Starbuckets wrote:

meiam wrote: snip Please, please read this.

How does that change anything? Do you believe that this post says "yuri on ice animation would have been better if they had hired less animator" cause that's literally not what its says. The only things it says is that it's possible to get good animation with few animator, but that doesn't means the opposite is necessarily true, i.e. having many animator does not guarantee poor results. If anything the problem might just be that the studio are trying to work with many animator using management technique that work well for project using few animator, but as the post itself mentioned the anime is transforming into a model where more and more animator are dealing with smaller project. The industry is probably simply not used to this new model and has to update it's method.

Another possibility is to use more time, by simply starting production earlier to avoid getting rushed. You know what that require? Money. The studio will need to keep paying it's employee without any direct revenue, meaning it'll need a good reserve of cash on hand. So here again, more money = better results.

So this is also your "personal experience". You don't actually have any data.

I studied psychology and in general I like to help people. I suck at sports so I emphasize intellectual pursuits instead. And it's not YoI fans that are unaware, it's most people in general. According to my courses, being able to identify and separate one's biases from a critical evaluation is a more advanced mental skill.

I don't see how you can dismiss KyoAni as unimpressive for modeling stuff you can see in real life and then turn around and say this, that more realistic animation is the more technically impressive. This is one of the biggest reasons I thought Euphonium was the best this year and one of the best last year (I declined to rank them then so I'm not sure how I would rank them now).

Bait shows do have a tendency to do better than non-baity shows. That is an actual trend.

I don't get where your argument is going with this

This isn't your social psychology course where people's behaviors become trends, these is individual people you are talking to who come with a variety of opinions.

Ok. BL/GL is a niche product so that makes sense. That doesn't change much.
The division between "baity" and "non-baity" shows is really dumb.

Like I said, I was answering VoidWitch's questions about my personal biases and stuff. I didn't claim this made me better or anything, I was just providing the information requested.

Individual people who all live in a society that is likely influencing them in ways they don't even realise. If you don't want to think about such things, okay, just ignore my posts and move on.

I guess just to personally close up some final responses on animation, since these were posted right after my last message:

I think what's impressive about the older works is that the animators had to have an innate understanding of the physical laws of the world, and how they would apply to characters and objects under unrealistic circumstances. Slice of life shows have the benefit of animators being able to more easily observe normal, real-world motion and portray that in normal real-world circumstances --- it's easier to find or even reproduce reference material for capturing those sorts of sequences. To me, it's the ability to give realness to unreal situations that I find impressive about the older works, since they have to try and make uncommon sequences feel real.

all the while the "point" (I'm assuming) of your argument was to gather why people liked Yuuri!!! on Ice.

You...do know how animators are paid, yes? They don't have a monthly wage (hint: the only studio that does it is Kyoto Animation because their pool of animators is restricted and small), they are strictly paid by key frame drawn.

What the Sakugablog post says is that there are barely enough animators to produce the shows each season, and a lot of times it won't suffice for all shows (see how a lot of anime had to skip an episode or two in this season). And yes, there has been a flux of animators to smaller productions (like Planetarian or short format anime), it's not a wrong idea to get that, but the point is that the format of TV anime is being handled wrong by most of the industry, not that the format is dead per se.

Not quite. My question was what factors other than the quality influenced its popularity. Very few people actually addressed that question, and the only real answer I got was as to why something like YoI is regarded differently from dedicated BL titles.

Instead I got people wildly misinterpreting my question as something malicious, apparently reading it as me claiming that people could only like it because of some sort of "conspiracy" or something. It sounded like they were completely denying that outside influences can affect opinions and that it's only popular because of the show's own merits.

So what I'm getting at here is how much is Yuri's #1 rank due to the actual quality of the show, and how much is it due to the mind set of "A mainstream gay couple! I must support it so I can have more like it!" or more unfortunately, "A gay show? I must say I like it or I'll be accused of being anti-gay!"

Could Yuri on Ice be ranked #1 solely because it's a great show? Sure, but that's boring. It's much more fun to look at its success from different angles and see what else there is to see.

Blanchimont wrote:

This is reeally getting out there from the original topic...

Yeah I do kind of agree, my apologies for derailing the topic a bit to quantify my thoughts on animation production. Maybe I should consider opening a thread in a different forum to discuss it in more detail, though if anyone wants to send me any further examples of impressive modern animation, I'm interested to take a look.

Valhern wrote:

You...do know how animators are paid, yes? They don't have a monthly wage (hint: the only studio that does it is Kyoto Animation because their pool of animators is restricted and small), they are strictly paid by key frame drawn. What the Sakugablog post says is that there are barely enough animators to produce the shows each season, and a lot of times it won't suffice for all shows (see how a lot of anime had to skip an episode or two in this season). And yes, there has been a flux of animators to smaller productions (like Planetarian or short format anime), it's not a wrong idea to get that, but the point is that the format of TV anime is being handled wrong by most of the industry, not that the format is dead per se.

And do you realize that studio aren't made up of just animator? They have, you know, employee that require regular pay (I will admit I don't know if it's weekly, bi monthly or monthly pay)...

Animator are a pretty flexible resource, you can grab more by simply paying them more (i.e. poaching them from other studios) or you can hire oversea. The larger studio could easily form there own in house if the need become dire enough. So once again, more money = better results.

You are also the one that directed it down the path of only being a response on it being "a gay show".

I could probably find more but each time you are attacking that it's a good show which is going to make people defensive about it being a good show.