Anime I am preparing to start watchingFollow

Well, many anime series actually have a plot, and character development.

Not all do, like "slice of life" and many comedy series, which would be more like cartoons airing here.

Also, I have added Strike Witches to my list due to the other thread.

Other than cute, how is it as a serie?

Sometimes I forget how little people understand about anime, not to be rude to you. Jophiel, for instance, is someone who I'd consider an intelligent person who isn't one to make grand assumptions, but even he thought that anime is mostly fantasy or scifi. I think it's important to understand that most everything you know about anime is probably based on the bottom of the barrel materiel. The cheapest alcohols are also the ones most wildly sampled. If I used Coors as a representive of beer, Sora/HAllertau would gut me where I stand.

Anime isn't a genre, but a medium. It covers a lot of materiel, good and bad. And while there are many characteristics that tend to appear often, it isn't defined by any one of these.

There are several common features where anime differes from western television that I tend to like and believe are good qualities.

1. Continuity. Even the best of western televisions tend to have very weak continuity, and even the worst Japanese animations tend to have a fair amount of it. Most western shows tend to have an "episode of the day" plot with some minor overall story in the background. More recently western television has been getting better at this, but now they tend to divide a show into "a plots" and "b plots" with half the show being episodic and the other half being continuous, but the two totally unrelated. For example House will usually have two plots going on in any given episode, there is the story revolving around the specific case and then there is the overarching story about the characters, but the two rarely touch. In many animes, the main story is completely continuous. A 26 episode series is like a 13 hour movie broken down into watchable chunks. It's not always a good movie granted. I think continuity improves the quality of many of the shows.

2. Screening. Many western shows are usually written specifically for TV. Anime on the other hand, tends to be adaptations from comics, light novels, or books. Ultimately what ends up becoming an anime is something that is viewed as profitable and not necessarily good, but the two often share some overlap. This extra filter helps screen out the truly terrible ideas that otherwise would have been made into western shows. It also gives access to a large number of very well written stories.

3. The Japanese have different sensibilities. I don't care whether overall one might consider them better or worse, but they are different which interests me. If you see a paedophile character in western television, then the vast majority of the time he/she is there for shock value and audience exploitation. In a japanese anime there are severals reasons he/she could be there, it could be for pure audience exploitation, it could be as a low brow comedic character, or this individual could even be a real character with depth. The point is that the Japanese are willing to explore possibilities western television is not. You get to see ideas that western television just wouldn't show.



To be terse, I watch anime because it offers me something better than western television. There are tons of shiz anime out there, but pretty much all of western television is shiz, and the best anime has to other trumps the best western television has to offer.

You missed the point. Strike Witches was made for fan service, everything else was created to facilitate that. It accomplished it's goal well, something something uncensored episode seven.

And for the love of god, WHY NO PANTS?!

Strike Witches was ok. I don't generally care about fan service, but the plot, while nothing special, didn't disappoint me.

The Escaflowne movie was not what I expected. I didn't really care for it, possibly because I did not realize it was not a continuation of the series but an alternate telling.

Depends on what you seek in television, I guess. Thanks for the quick summary, though.

I have never read anime, but I have watched some, with varying degrees of success. I enjoyed Avatar, but the comedy sort of ruined the story for me. Which is the first on my list of reasons why I believe I don't get anime.

1. Humor. Mainly because Asian countries seem to run with a completely different sense of humor than at least me. They seem to fancy the 'fall on your ***' sense of humor and I haven't been into that since around fifth grade. Either a character says or does something, usually to a pretty girl, which backfires onto him in some way, and his utter lack of being able to make up snazzy comebacks on the go makes him grin madly while blushing and sweating. Charming, but not very funny.

2. Facial expressions. I mentioned it briefly in the previous point, but anime drawers seem to want to exaggerate everything about a character's facial expression. If they blush, they don't just turn pink, they turn tomato red, sometimes even blue/black(?) and start to sweat heavily, all while trying to deflect the shame with a facial expression that somewhat resembles xD, but with teeth visible. As well-drawn as animes can get, it seems like facial expressions were last on the budget list, or maybe not. I don't know, I just know it looks silly.

3. Avantgarde or crazy? A lot of animes feature some sequences wherein the viewer is bombarded with audio-visual stimuli through crazy electronic sounds accompanied by a character yelling and/or flashy colors. Lots of flashy colors. Sometimes enough flashy colors to make me think that either the drawers were using illicit substances during the coloring process, or that Asian people are mildly colorblind in general. On the more detailed animes, these crazy scenes are often replaced by a very hallucinogenic dream scene where crazy stuff happens.

4. Voice-overs. Most of the animes I've enjoyed have been dubbed ones. There's something about the Japanese language that just seems... angry. Constantly. Either they're yelling at each other like they're severely pissed off, or they're just yelling like they're deaf. Seriously, the dB in some scenes makes an F-16 firing up sound meek. If you've ever heard an F-16 firing up its engine, you'd know how serious I am about it. It seems like when they're surprised, they draw out their vowels for too long. Gasping, panting and moaning sounds like they're reaching sexual climax every single time. It was hot at first, but not so much now.

There are animes I've enjoyed, like Avatar and Paprika, but it definitely hasn't been the epiphany that others seem to have received. Maybe it's because I'm from that last generation that avoided the whole Pokémon era. Maybe it's just because my sense of humor is different (I know it is, it ties into my nationality). I consider anime to be cartoons and that's why I was so curious to see people talk about it as if it was finer art.

Maybe anime is good simply because it's anime? It's cult?

Hopefully I didn't come off as demeaning or condescending. I'm more curious than anything, really.

Edited, Apr 20th 2010 7:44pm by Mazra

Definitely need someone else to truly comment on your post, but here are mine (and they are just comments, no flaming intended):

Avatar is, I believe, a western attempt at anime. I've never seen it, so I can't be sure. I do hear it's good, but I'm not sure I would call it truly anime.

I'm curious to know what other anime you have actually seen, because from my experiences your points (1) and (3) do not really apply to the majority of anime out there.

As for the voice-overs, I guess that's just a matter of opinion. I find english voice-overs to 95% of the time be absolute crap. They overdo inflections and emotion in their voice much more than the Japanese voice actors, at least from my experience. Maybe my inexperience with the Japanese language as a whole is a large factor there, I'm not sure. Or maybe I've just gotten used to it? It's interesting to see the thoughts of someone who is not very familiar with anime, as it brings a very different perspective.

As for the volume comment... turn the volume down? I've never experienced this problem. When they seem to be yelling is only when they are actually yelling, at least to me... and even then the actual volume is not in any way distressing to me. Maybe I just don't watch things at the volume you do?

That was so not a double! I saw your first post after I posted mine, and your second one came 10 minutes later! =P

Pretty sure that falls under the "flashy and overly colorful" category.

I was editing the first post, but since when you edit you can't see other people's posts, I copied what I had written before, then went to reply again so I could see the four points listed. Then the instant I hit 'post message' I realized that's not what I was originally aiming to do.

Most of this comes back to bad anime. Pick a western sitcom at random; what is the likelihood it will have quality humor? There are a lot of comedic animes out there that just aren't funny, just like western television.

Some of it has to do with cultural references that don't make sense to foreign audiences.

Some of it has to do with different visual cues used in teh cultures. Bleeding from the mouth is often used in western television (and somewhat in anime) to indicate severe injury, even if such a wound wouldn't normally cause bleeding from the mouth. A bloody nose is used to indicate arousal in many anime, and jokes that play off this point require an understanding of this superstition/belief.

When overdone, usually evident of--again--bad anime.

However, you should know that a lot of anime has influences from early western animations. Those Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Roadrunner cartoons where characters expression and behaviors are hugely exaggerated.

There is nothing that can be said to defend this. The Japanese are fudging crazy. The Gainax staff probably woke up one day in a hotel room to find 3 empty bags of coke, 2 dead hookers, and 1 script for Evangelion.

I've never noticed anything like that. Japanese is another language though, so it is going to sound different.

Those people definitely exist, and I loathe them greatly. Those are Otaku.


I think it has largely to do with two factors.

1. You're probably seeing lots of garbage. I know this is the kind of excuse that can be easily overused to defend anything, but most of the anime that gets exported is the anime that sells well to one of two demographics. Either it's targeted to kids (the obvious pokemon, digimon, etc.) or it's targeted to Otaku who will buy anything with the word Japanese on it. This is because most western adults hold the view that comics and cartoons are for kids; so the result is that more mature series are not often exported.

2. Some of it is acquired taste. I don't want to sound overly fancy, but the most accurate phrase I can think of is that "you need to develop your palate." Your first time trying anything, even if it's the best that category has to offer, probably isn't going to allow you to appreciate or even like it. This Streetfighter video may look somewhat impressive knowing nothing about SF, but it becomes even more impressive when you understand the mechanics of the game.