Zipang is pricey anime, I’ll grant, but obviously anime nonetheless. A character is talking, his mouth is moving and absolutely nothing else in the scene is. I watched a few seconds of the first Bruce Timm Justice League cartoon for contrast, and while there are indeed stretches of mouth-only movement, there is the occasional head-turn and shrug and actual, y’know, body language, from the speaker and the people around him or her. Its utter absence in Zipang is obvious and offputting. It’s like Japanese animators don’t know how to handle speech and movement at the same time, even in what I assume is a high-end production like Zipang.
Even the Simpsons blink once in a while. Yeesh.
Hey, Japanimators… camera movement is no substitute for character movement.
Right. It’s 26 episodes, i.e., about 11 hours of animation. The realism that you want is going to cost a lot more than they spent on the series. What they did take a lot of trouble over is details of warships, uniforms, etc. However, if you want life-like, then watch live action TV series. Zipang could have been made as a live action series, but then money would have been spent on sets and models rather than on drawings. What is most important to me is the story line, then comes the style of drawing. Realism in mouth movements is not so important – to me, at least.
Since I’m getting confused about what people are saying, can I ask a few establishing questions?
Is “anime” the correct term for all Japanese animation? Because if we’re all using different terms, that doesn’t help.
A few people have linked to things showing the vast differences in anime “styles.” But what I find offputting I am seeing in all of those “styles.” The eye thing, the mouth thing. Are people not considering the character design a “style”? I guess it’s more clearly just labeled “character design.”
This. All Japanese animation looks terminally cheesy to me. I grew up on Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Crusader Rabbit and Rocky & Bullwinkle. You know, the good stuff. Japanese animation will always be Astro-boy to me. Not worth my time.
In fairness, even Cowboy Bebop has some of the anime stylistic elements Loach speaks of (Edward, and to a lesser extent, Faye), but I think it’s not as prevalent, and the style/subject matter of Bebop itself lets me easily overlook it.
Did the makers of Zipang have a smaller animation budget than Bruce Timm had for a typical season of any of his animated shows? Seriously, I don’t know, but the number of hours of animation is comparable.
Heck, Batman Beyond looks to me like some Americans watched a bunch of Japanimation and said “Y’know, we could really improve on this…”
Re: the gasping — I do enjoy anime, but after going on a harem comedy binge on Netflix I did start thinking it was getting ridiculous the way the characters gasp, “Oh!” every single time their cell phones ring, as if receiving a phone call is a complete and utter surprise.
I stated up front that I am not the world’s biggest fan of animation. I avoid a lot of it because it is grotesque (as in the distorted definition) or just ugly.
I think it’s kind of funny that you link to Snow White and don’t show Snow White herself.
Character design that’s all eyes doesn’t really bother me when it’s not supposed to be a person. Dunno why. Probably because that’s what I’m used to.
Over the top reaction shots from an unrealistic cartoon character does not bother me. Its a cartoon. But in an otherwise realistically draw human character it is off-putting. Especially the way I have usually seen it. With a jump cut and annoying noises (gasps grunts).
The objections to anime that a lot of posters are listing seem very superficial to me. There is a lot of very creative storytelling to be enjoyed. There’s a lot of wit and humor. There’s inventiveness and imagination on display unlike any other form of entertainment. There’s a lot of heart and pathos behind those over sized eyes you folks can’t seem to get past. I know I sound like someone telling a gay person who has never been with a member of the opposite sex, “You don’t know what you’re missing.” But you don’t.
You can tell me I don’t know what I’m missing when it comes to gay sex. I don’t. And I’m really not interested. But you would be right, I haven’t tried it. Sorry your analogy breaks down right there. When it comes to anime I do know what I’m missing. I have tried it. I don’t like it. Since it is a large genre I’m sure there are individual items that would annoy me less than others. The entire Cowboy Bebop movie was linked here. I looked at it. Looked at it when it was on Adult Swim. Don’t like it. I know what I’m missing. I’m missing a genre that annoys me.
You’re asking the wrong ruggedly handsome Irishman
Seriously I don’t really know much about anime but have really enjoyed much of what I have watched, I’m a science-fiction fan so thats mostly what caught my eye.
Watched and enjoyed, Ghost in the Shell (TV series and movies), Akira, Appleseed, Macross Plus, Yukikaze. Outside of that I haven’t really seen a huge amount.
That’s why I put the (?) after the word genre because it didn’t sound right but I wasn’t sure what the correct word was.
I hear it, although I wonder to what extent that’s present in the original Japanese version. Japanese doesn’t translate into English very smoothly at all, and it wouldn’t surprise me if additional gasps and grunts were added in dubs to account for a character’s mouth moving when (in the English translation) she or he has already finished talking.
I just popped in my DVD of the movie, and compared the Japanese track for that scene to the English track. The English dub adds a huge amount of gasping and heavy breathing to the scene, and not just to pad out the dialogue. The entire sequence where the hacker guy and the bounty hunter are running up the escalator, there’s almost no sound from either character. The bit where the giant pink puffball bounces over the bounty hunter’s head, instead of a series of random squeaks and grunts, she has an actual line of dialogue, and when she loses the guy, she sighs in frustration, but other than that, nothing. All the heavy breathing appears to have been invented by the translators.
Well, somebody else seems upset in 3 words out of my 339 word post, so I suppose I could revisit the issue. If somebody said they don’t like Shakespeare because of all the weird vocabulary or they don’t like opera because of the screechy voices do you think they are being reasonable?
As I tried to convey earlier, I actually do think that’s a reasonable position. And it doesn’t especially bother me if someone I’ve never met doesn’t want to go see Shakespeare, Mikazawa, Mondrian, Tezuka, Watanabe, Kurosawa or whomever. No problem. Really. It’s unfortunate if we know each other and can’t do one outing or another, but hardly tragic. That said, all those artists have strengths that are being given short shrift, but hey, that’s ok too.
I have found a shortage of examples among some of anime’s critics. And I sense some ignorance among those who attack anime but use examples wholly from 1980s mecha stuff. Hint: they were imported into the US and shown on Saturday mornings: doncha think maybe there is a little selection bias going on?
Anyway you can click the Haibane Renmei link if you want to see whether the character designs still turn you off. Or not. I don’t find the eyes to be too big, but I can’t say I really glom on to the problem here. Haibane Renmei - Wikipedia
Freedom!
…and yet I’m called a freak for leaning towards a subtitled version. For me trying to decode the cultural stuff is part of the fun.
Totally legit. For me though Hollywood-style forced happy endings irk me so much that I find an absence of resolution to be refreshing, though I acknowledge it as a definite artistic flaw.
You see it a lot when a manga gets transformed into an anime when they are only partway through the whole story. Full Metal Alchemist (1st series), Claymore, and Corpse Princess had this problem.
I don’t share this taste, but yeah I can see it being a real problem.
gaffa: As a rule anime movies unsurprisingly have higher quality animation than anime TV shows. Same in the US. The other constraint they have in Japan is that typically it’s expected that the anime style will be a variant of that presented in the manga, which is usually a black and white format. The characters are expected to be stylized from the get-go.
A lot of this involves picking your poison. Sure, Cinderella has some fantastic sequences, but you have to be able to tolerate Disnification, overblown sentimentality and easy moralizing. Personally I put a stronger weight on theme, credibility of character and have an aversion to black and white thinking: it seems to me that everyone’s a hero in their own minds, even bad guys. Especially bad guys. But this I hasten to add is a minority opinion.
It occurs to me that it’s not so much that anime characters tend to have bigger eyes than western ones…it’s that they have bigger irises and pupils to match. Most western ones just have big ol’ black dots.
The little differences seem to be the big sticking points on this subject—or, maybe, just easy points to dig one’s heels into when feeling defensive. Over one’s own old artistic favorites, or just in the face of over-fervent anime fans.
