I’ve posted a new poll, so please come and vote? I’m curious to see if you think the quality of anime has improved over the past decade, both in terms of graphics and storyline.
You can also read my new take on it Sometimes We Take Things For Granted for my take on the issue.
Thank you!
I’ve been re-watching some awesome older shows lately. I’ve been showing them to my girlfriend, and we sat down together and watched them on my big TV. Now, for a point of refrence, the two shows I’m going to focus on are Cowboy Bebop and Love Hina, but this is true of pretty much any show of these eras, I believe.
I think we take current anime too much from granted. There, I said it. We all act like it’s not a big deal, like we hate the character designs, or the graphics are too bland, or whatever. However, I don’t think many of us ever sit down an realize how far things have come.
When you watch most older shows, they’re trite, ugly, disproportioned (in a bad way), and have more plot holes than swiss cheese. The plots tend to suck, and the characters are less interesting than cold pizza. Seriously, I think the reason we don’t remember more of this is because we block these shows from our minds. I’ve watched shows like Rayearth, Fushingii Yugi and a few others on VHS, and I cried. They were painfully awful, in every way. The visuals were lame, bland, and dark (in terms of atmosphere and style, not a lack of brightness or a bad copy.) The plot was flat like cardboard, and made it seem like there was one plot they recycled for each episode.
Now, I don’t think many of you saw anime back when it was like this. Those VHS tapes cost a fortune, and had to be imported from special retailers, because no one in America even knew what anime was back then. (We’re talking early 90’s here, for the record) And these shows sucked.
Fast forward to the late 90’s. Just before 2000, anime was just starting to become popular. I knew a few other people that had heard of it, and despite abysmal download speeds (back when 3 kpbs was a good speed, and it took all night to download an episode, which was only 75-100 mb), we were getting some fansubs through Napster, Usenet and other protocols I never even saw. I just knew some people were pulling more of this stuff out of the clouds for me. I cannot recall any of these shows except Cowboy Bebop, which was (and still is) a masterpiec, one of the best shows ever produced.
Bebop was stunning, with hand-drawn visuals and background, painstakingly coaxed from a blank page, and set to animate. Tens of thousands of frames went into those episodes, and they look stunning.
Looking ahead a few more years, and computers were taking over some of the duties of animators, but not quite yet. Love Hina was still drawn mostly by hand, and it shows. If you look closely, and know what to look for, you can see all the little shortcuts animators took to simplify the task of animating a show. Characters talking with their backs to the camera, zooming in on a face, talking over a still camera, all of these tricks were used to re-use frames, and save animation time.
Today, computers can do much of this slave work. Hell, some studios even use 3d animation programs to design characters, skinning them by hand, but letting a computer take care of some of their movements (or I think they do, I’ve seen a few shows that I swear give the characters skeletons.) Wacom and photoshop take much of the waste out of animation, and let animators re-use backgrounds, panoramas and even characters with ease.
Comparing the range of motion, the quality of the animation, the liveliness of the characters, and the use of “tricks” to ease the animator’s workload from the anime of yesterday to today brings us to one conclusion: the quality (at least graphically) of anime has increased drastically in the past 10 years.
Of course, what really matters to us and fans is not the fact that it’s easier than ever to create these shows, which partially explains the explosion of new shows, but that since it’s easier (and cheaper) to animate them, two wonderful things happen.
#1: New shows can be tried out at a much lower cost. Today, studios and networks are more likely than ever to greenlight an experimental new show (think Haruhi.) If it doesn’t take as much manpower or money to make the show, why not give it a shot and see how it does? This quirky idea may become the next big thing.
#2: More money (and attention) can be devoted to other aspects of the show. The producers can afford to spend more time writing the show, improving it’s quality. They can afford better voice actors, giving the show more life. And, they can afford to take it a little easier, since the animation doesn’t take as much work, so everyone is a little more relaxed.
So, I think we’re all taking this marvelous transformation for granted. Shows today are better than ever (at least, some of them are), and are easier than ever to produce. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back and re-watch some of the atrocities from my anime past, and I think many of you would agree with me on that.
So, have you been taking the increasing quality of anime for granted, or have you, like me, come to appreciate this fact?
Over at That’s Not Kanon, he’’s put down his thoughts on the whole Blu-Ray/ HD DVD pissing match. I also want to put my thoughts out there on the whole debacle, considering that I have (or will have, depending on how you define it) something of a vested interest in this, both as a consumer and as a economist.
While we all know this is fascinating to watch play out, as each week there’s some minor triumph for either side. HD DVD gets paramount, Blu-ray has more trojan horse PS3 players, etc. The real news is this, and we have numbers now: After a small Christmas sales surge, sales of these discs have dropped to less than 60K units a week, worldwide, each. I think you’ll find that pretty much any bestselling DVD sells more than that a week. In fact, most DVDs probably sell more than that a week. It’s really not hard at all to sell 60,000 units in a week. (I know I read this first on Gizmodo, but I’ll be damned if I can find the source.)
So, its pretty clear that no one’s buying the discs anymore. Sales have been steadily declining for Blu-ray, while sales for HD DVD have been mostly steady, declining at a slower pace.
The story in players is a little different however, as HD DVD standalone players are outselling Blu-ray players 2:1 in the US and nearly 3:1 in Europe. I’m not too sure about Asia’s exact numbers, but I know HD DVD sells the most there as well. However, if you include the trojab horse PS3, Blu-ray has a much larger install base, but I’m not so sure how much that matters. I had a DVD player built into my original XBOX, but that doesn’t mean I bought more DVDs because it could play them.
Now, a lot of people claim that High-def video format adoption will increase when consumers have more HD televisions. I guess that when you buy an LCD or plasma TV, the next thing you “have to have” is a high-def movie player. I now own an HD LCD tv, and I have no desire for anything more than the quality of DVD.
For those not in the know, DVDs are normally encoded in 480p, which is awesome resolution. It’s crisp, clean, and has tons and tons of detail. HD DVD and Blu-ray are in 1080P, which is a much higher resolution. However, a majority of televisions sold do not support 1080p, topping out at 1080i, which (to me at least) is nearly indistinguishable from 720p,a step down. In fact, you won’t even notice a difference between 1080p and 1080i unless your television is larger than 42″. (which is fucking huge, have you seen those behemoths in Best Buy? They weigh a ton, and costs thousands of dollars.)
The point of all these numbers is that if you don’t have a tv with at least 1080p, and thus over 42″, you will notice little to no difference going from a standard DVD to Blu-ray. Your television simply does not have the resolution to take advantage of the higher -quality source.
I’ve seen the same movie in three forms now. I have Serenity (which is awesome, go buy it now!) as a ripped, compressed Avi file, on DVD, and on HD-DVD, all on the same TV. The Avi and the DVD were played from my laptop, and the HD DVD was played off my friend’s Xbox360 HD Drive. Now, I won’t go so far as to say that the HD DVD one wasn’t better at all, but honestly, the difference was negligible. There was a big difference between the DVD and the Avi though, which brings me to my next point.
Over at That’s Not Kanon, he makes the point that he can’t see online media as the next big thing. This is what I don’t agree with from his article. He thinks that an online copy simply can’t equal the quality of a DVD. However, that’s all just a matter of compression. If you want the full DVD quality, you can download a 4.3 GB DVD file. If you don’t mind a little loss, get an Avi, or an MKV, which should sit around a gig or so.
The reason online media isn’t as good as DVD is mostly because of two reasons: that the studio’s don’t want it to be, and here in the US, we don’t have the bandwidth yet to offer true HD downloads.
The problem is simply this: entrenched companies are too concerned about their bottom dollar to make needed improvements for the future of everyone. In the case of people offering the internet, they could put in residential fiber optics, which offer bandwidth from 15 to 100 mbps, allowing people to download movies in a few hours (in higher def, no less), but it’s very expensive to do so, and they’re putting it off until they HAVE to. (Probably in 2-3 years, we’ll see a nationwide rollout of fiber-optic home lines.) In the case of the media companies, they’re afraid because digital distribution means they’ll have to drop prices, and will receive far less profits as what people are willing to pay drops off.
Of course, neither company’s stalling will make the current high-def formats a success. They’re both miserable failaures. I for one will not buy either format unless ALL movies are on it, my Xbox 360 (or Wii, if I don’t get an xbox ever) plays it (so I don’t have to buy a standalone player), and the price of the discs is the same or less then current dvd’s. So, pretty much, I’m not buying in. There’s just too many reasons not to.
So, what do you think, are these formats doomed? Is this pissing match even relevant? Are we empowering them just by talking about them? And what do we have to do to hurry up proper digital distribution?
Yes, that’s right. I haven’t made a single major edit to my site in over a year, and now, I’ve finally done all the things I wanted to do with it!So come on in, check it out, and let me know about the bugs!
I made the post area a lot wider, so I can cram more text in (it always felt too narrow to me, I can’t explain why, it just did) As a result, pictures look about a hundred times better, as they can be much bigger. I’m not sure I want to go back in the archives and fix all the old ones, which are formatted to look best in the old layout.
Oh, and of course, new banner! Yay! This one is a picture of Nemu from Da Capo, which the majority of you told me to use in my poll. I’ve also changed the icon I use for my site in a could of different, off-site places, so you might see that popping up.
Of course, as with any time I dive into the code of my site, there’s going to be problems. As of right now, I need to figure out how to give my posts a little left padding, scoot the sidebar over again, and fix the placement of my sitemeter counter, as it’s not behaving at all. If anyone knows what the commands in CSS are to fix those, I’d love to know, as I can’t quite seem to find them. (I’m busy, and don’t have enough to to get through my stylesheet code line by line.)
Thanks, enjoy, and let me know if anything’s messed up besides those issues!
This here is a little tribute to a genre of anime we just don’t get to see enough of anymore: Cyberpunk. Sure, there’s Ghost in the Shell, but in the past few years, there’s been precious little of the awesome that is cyberpunk. This is a wake up call to everyone as to why we need more of it, and why we’re not likely to get it.
Cyberpunk is primarily concerned with the future, and the invasive modification and problems we are likely to encounter during it. It is nearly always dystopian (the opposite utopian), which is awesome. Simply put, there is just not enough dystopian work out there anymore. It seems like all the good shitty futures are taken.
Keep in mind, dystopian is not apocolyptic. The world has not ended yet, but it’s getting there in a dystopia. Dystopias share a few common features. There is always some major world crisis, be it alien attack, overpopulation, or governmental breakdown. There tends to be large cities, often filthy, overcrowded and broken down. However, even with all this bad stuff, there if often a thin veneer of civilization over all the grime and muck.
This is why dsytopias succeed. While painting a picture of a world in crisis, they can maintain a part of it as normal as possible, and draw amazing comparisons between this society and our own. By showing where we could be in a few years, dystopias are capable of showing what’s going wrong today to get us there.
As such, a good dystopia is critical for a cyberpunk anime.
Secondly, cyberpunk must contain a high degree of technology. This technology can take many forms, but often, cybernetics and human enhancement play this part. They don’t need wrist computers, but giant robots, or synthetic body parts can serve this well.
Many cyberpunk animes deal with “the ghost in the machine”, the notion that machines are capable of artificial intelligence/ life. While this is a very popular theme, it is not the only good one. Other anime deal with finding humanity within your own twisted form, or overcoming alien technologies far more advanced than your own. Still others focus upon finding humanity in a person or place that seems totally devoid of it.
Again, we do not have enough cyberpunk anime today. Where else can you explore complex issues of what makes us human, a question that burns ever brighter today than before? How else can you afford complex commentary on the future direction of us as a people?
Now, for those who are thinking that this sounds just like sci-fi, why can’t we do this in a happier, science fiction setting, I say this: we cannot explore our future unless we are realistic about it. Key to a cyberpunk anime is the realism, the fact that all of this is possible. There can be no magic, there is not insane technological progress. Even the fact that aliens land and attack is isn’t that much a stretch of the imagination (well, maybe it is, which is why this convention tends to be much more rare).
I love ghost in the shell because it does such a good job of examining these complex issues, like what it means to be human, while providing a fascinating look at a possible future. Sure, some Gundam shows are close, and Macross is halfway here, but cyberpunk isn’t about war, it’s about people, first and foremost.
Cyberpunk has the unique ability to spend more time on the people than anything else. While many anime focus on feelings, and relationships, cyberpunk can focus on a much deeper conflict, that of humanity. In most shows, this would be a ridiculous question to ask. Am I human because I like this girl?Is my giant robot human because it moved? Is humanity discovered through war? These may be valid questions, but none of them get at what makes us human, none of them are answerable.
Despite all this, with the ability to look at these deep issues, why do we see so few anime like this? The sole recent good example I can think of is Ghost in the Shell. I think it’s because of the world we live in. Most cyberpunk anime was produced in the 90’s, a period when japan was in the middle of a prolonged recession. The mood was grim, which means that the animation at the time reflected this. New technology was scaring many people, who had never seen things move so quickly, and cybernetics seemed only a few years away.
Looking at Japan today, it is a much happier place. Commerce has picked up, and people are employed and happy again. Thus, many people are interested in anime with lighter themes. Thus, we see fewer shows which are serious in tone. Also, technology has come more under control. The pace of progress has slowed, and advances occur at a more manageable pace. We no longer feel technology will master us.
Thus, cyberpunk died down. However, do not fret, o lover of more serious fare. All things move in cycles, and I am certain that this is a trend we will see resurrected in the coming years.
So, what are your favorite cyberpunk/ dystopian shows? I’m open to suggestions, and I love discovering shows new to me. So leave a comment, and let me know what you think.
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