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REVIEW: Seis Manos


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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
Posts: 4352
Location: New York
PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2019 8:16 am Reply with quote
Cardcaptor Takato wrote:
I have no interest in this show but why are some anime fans reacting so much more negatively to this than they did Cannon Busters and Castlevania?


Cannon Busters was a million times worse and there are many shady things like the Kickstarter backers never receiving their rewards. But it had a Japanese studio so it’s still anime even if it was a terrible example of the medium and hopefully doesn’t see a second season. Castlevania, for any questions one could have about the anime label, was based on a Japanese video game and these characters and settings were created by a Japanese guy, even if the head writer admitted his main source of inspiration were the old European Hammer Horror films.

Here it’s a show, and while the advertising is...suspect (Alvaro Rodriguez, flat out said at NYCC he had heard the complaints about the anime label and didn’t pay them any mind) but the show itself is just being asked to stand on its own two feet. The biggest argument for the show is the cast and the action, rather than the hilariously tone deaf preview High Guardian Spice had.
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Sam Murai



Joined: 01 Dec 2006
Posts: 1051
PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2019 2:24 pm Reply with quote
Zac wrote:
We go case-by-case on these sorts of things; Netflix is actively attempting to redefine what "anime" refers to (we have an in-depth article about this in the works) but I am fundamentally not discriminatory and don't really care that much about what people online say should belong in specific categories.

The trick is to relax and not be too uptight or obsessive over labels - the idea that we're being corrupted somehow because one article covers a show that's billed as "anime" but not actually made by Japanese people is just antithetical to my entire ethos. The times are changing - the point is to adapt.


While I, personally, don't have a problem with anime-related or -inspired work being covered—particularly in this case, with VIZ Media's direct involvement making it notable—and even with the history/intention of the Japanese use of "anime", I think it is disingenuous to call something an "anime" when nothing of it was crafted by Japanese people, of which the term has a longer and greater meaning towards. Perhaps it would be better (and more accurate) to take a page from the manga industry and list such works as "original English-language anime", or "OEA", instead.
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Cardcaptor Takato



Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4784
PostPosted: Thu Oct 10, 2019 3:05 pm Reply with quote
Sam Murai wrote:
Perhaps it would be better (and more accurate) to take a page from the manga industry and list such works as "original English-language anime", or "OEA", instead.
In France they came up with their own word and called it "Franime."
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave



Joined: 14 Jan 2019
Posts: 479
Location: Poland
PostPosted: Fri Oct 11, 2019 2:59 am Reply with quote
Sam Murai wrote:
Zac wrote:
We go case-by-case on these sorts of things; Netflix is actively attempting to redefine what "anime" refers to (we have an in-depth article about this in the works) but I am fundamentally not discriminatory and don't really care that much about what people online say should belong in specific categories.

The trick is to relax and not be too uptight or obsessive over labels - the idea that we're being corrupted somehow because one article covers a show that's billed as "anime" but not actually made by Japanese people is just antithetical to my entire ethos. The times are changing - the point is to adapt.


While I, personally, don't have a problem with anime-related or -inspired work being covered—particularly in this case, with VIZ Media's direct involvement making it notable—and even with the history/intention of the Japanese use of "anime", I think it is disingenuous to call something an "anime" when nothing of it was crafted by Japanese people, of which the term has a longer and greater meaning towards. Perhaps it would be better (and more accurate) to take a page from the manga industry and list such works as "original English-language anime", or "OEA", instead.


Denoting origin country is notae bad practice, but with growing amount of chinese anime, south korean anime and so on it's weird to claim they're something different, when there's increasing amount of chinese works on anime sites. Also in many cases of japanese anime much of the actual work is done in subcontractor companies from different countries, like S. Korea. When it comes to manga, people talk about manhwa, manhua etc., but it is usually more as information about country of origin, not meant as a different genre. You can see people ask "What romance manga/manhua/manhwa do you recommend" for example, but it's clearly meant as the same category in that question. I get the effort to retain the cultural meaning, but with the growing worldwide popularity of manga/anime the meaning of the term must grow too. After all, there is so many countries you can list to be precise: "On this website we talk about anime, franime, uknime, gernime, amenime, rusnime and manga, manhua, manhwa, franga,..." At some point you will need to have one encompassing term and it will be the original one.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2267
PostPosted: Fri Oct 11, 2019 7:00 am Reply with quote
I usually don't chime in on the "Is it anime?" debates, as they strike me as weirdly driven by ethnicity & also not generally as very important (e.g., I think the rage in past debates about whether RWBY or A:TLA are "anime" is completely irrelevant, and largely mindless). I'll break mildly with that in this one example, though; I definitely don't think of Seis Manos as "anime" -- not because it wasn't produced by Japanese artists, but because stylistically (both artistically & narratively) it feels to me as if it inherits a lot more from Western cartoons and comics than from most anime. I might be hard-pressed to make that creative-heritage argument precise if pushed on it, though.

That said, I thought it was a pretty decent show and I think it's cool that ANN is covering/talking about it; personally, I do in fact have a kind of generalized interest in "animation targeted at adults", and I don't have any particular need for it to originate from or emulate the stylistic traditions of Japanse anime. Some more detailed thoughts on the show, with a few spoilers (particularly at the end):

spoiler[Some of the dialogue in Seis Manos was clumsy, artificial, and felt sort of like a 40 y/o hanging out at a high school and trying their best to be cool, but it was a lot less bad than most animated shows that Netflix is involved in funding/producing. Some of the dialogue was even legitimately clever & funny, particularly in the show's final arc; hopefully that's a sign of more selective taste to come in how Netflix chooses to throw its weight around behind creators.

The plot was unfortunately kind of convoluted and the connections between its components didn't always feel very natural. In particular it seemed like they got a little overexcited about wanting to stuff both a Mexican gangster war and some kind of Eastern mysticism sub-plot into their very limited 8-episode window simultaneously, and as a result didn't really do either of them or the tie-ins between them justice (though I'm glad they at least made a cursory effort to hint that they're related in the post-credits scene of the final episode).

I also thought they tried to incorporate more characters than they seemed ready to properly invest in, and as a result a lot of its key characters ended up unfortunately underdeveloped. In particular, I thought we really could have done with better exploration of the primary Mexican jefe's backstory; his unscrupulous behavior was pretty uniquely interesting & downright chilling, but he was never fleshed-out enough for me to understand or care why he was what he was. By the show's end he was just sort of a hollow bad guy propped up for the good guys to eventually knock down. Ditto (and worse, really) for his family, of course; ultimately, it felt largely empty, anticlimactic, and confusing for his mom (who we know very little about) to be the one who (mostly) kicked his butt, and it was a very strange choice to suddenly have that same underdeveloped mom character's love for her son re-ignited. Particularly when the primary story point for both characters has been 'son locks mom in magic box and strips off her skin to devour it for power'. I mean -- transcendent love between mother and child is a nice enough theme, if rather trite, but her suddenly remembering just how much she loves him feels a wee bit forced when the primary plot mechanic driving the show is the son slowly magic-torturing the mom in the worst imaginable way, y'know?

I would be remiss if I didn't end by praising the best part of the entire show: I would totally 100% watch a spin-off about Garcia and her upcoming utopian remake of Lord of the Flies. Little Mexican girl and her rebellion were easily my favorite little turns in the story; her and the rest of the kids loss of their parents was, uh, underexplored to say the least, but the kids' town takeover with the death of apparently the only competent mobster was downright hilarious. A+ would watch a feature length movie about them doing that.]
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