Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

The story thus far:

• Cheap anime can be impressive
• The cheapness of the SHAFT aesthetic

Alright guys, there’s a thing on ANN where established internet personality Erin Finnegan writes about Japanese animation. These writings are usually followed by a bunch of forum responses, and those are usually complaints about whatever she said. This time the forumites complained so loud that she wrote a supplementary post explaining herself, but here’s the short version: Erin reviewed the first part of Casshern Sins, a dreary little number from back in 2008, and amongst her flurry of criticism towards the show, she called the animation “cheap.” People allegedly exploded on the forums over this (I can only guess from her reports; you don’t expect me to read the ANN forums, do you?) and as a response she left a few tweets, as well as that post I linked above. The post outlines some basics about animation that you should know if you have eyeballs, but for people who don’t notice things, it’s something of an eye-opener from an insider who knows what she’s talking about.

However, I take issue with her perspective towards this whole thing. That being, she constantly compares the standards of Japanese TV animation to American TV animation. You see this a lot with animation professionals in the States, and quite honestly I feel it’s a little wrong-headed. Japanese animation came out of the dirty, muddy hole that was Japanese society in the post-war era. From day one, all they wanted were manga-like pictures on the screen, and they wanted them on the cheap. Everyone was in the shit, so entertainment had to be pumped out by the truckload on shoe-string budgets to entertain bored people who had no money. So naturally anime developed its own cheap visual shorthand due to low budgets, and those same production styles persist to this day.

What I’m trying to drive home with this oft-repeated history lesson is that the approach to making anime is fundamentally different than the approach to making American cartoons. This can be said for both Western and Eastern approaches to artwork in general, but I’ll save that for another time.

This isn’t to say that anime hasn’t moved beyond being cheap entertainment. Erin highlighted Steamboy in her post, which was a ridiculously expensive movie to make. Similarly, production houses like Kyoto Animation have shown just how many key frames one can pack into a 24 minute TV episode. However, that is not the norm. In lieu of drawing lots of pictures to define clean, fluid motion, anime tends to fall back on more detailed and expressive designs to stimulate our senses. Furthermore, the skillful arrangement of well designed still shots, the tasteful use of negative space, and the overall frugal approach to anime production is one of the medium’s defining traits. It’s a fundamental part of it. Sure, at times cheap anime can just look bad, but when done well, very beautiful things can blossom.

So, is Casshern Sins cheaply animated? Yes, but what Japanese cartoon isn’t? Cheap doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Less is often times more, and I feel more people need to get that into their heads. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a thrifty, stripped down production. And I personally don’t mind Erin finding fault with the other aspects of Casshern Sins. Honestly, I found the show to be a bit of a chore myself. But citing cheap animation as a negative seems like a lost cause, since all Japanese animation is cheap, and has been that way since the very beginning.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

I am under the impression that most professionals who work in American production houses are so locked into the rules they’ve learned, that they are unable to fathom that our buddies in Japan may have just written a completely different rule book. It’s been entertaining the masses in Japan for the past 60 years, so they have to be doing something right.

Click for bigger.

Not sure how I feel about this :S

Comiket 78 was a few weeks ago, and sadly I was unable to attend like I did last year. As per usual, a number of trailers for upcoming anime were screened across monitors in every corner of the event’s industry hall, and as per usual some industrious individual taped them all. Luckily, the trailers I’m looking at have all since been uploaded to their respective official sites, as well as posted on youtube, so there’s no cam rips here! There aren’t many trailers that I feel are worth really saying too much about anyway, so this won’t be long.

Ore no Imouto wa Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai

I honestly don’t think she’s that cute, to be quite honest. The raven haired goth loli seems far more inspiring. Anyway, it’s not surprising that this show is being handled with a pretty safe and traditional visual aesthetic, as the production team is undoubtedly shooting for wide appeal. The designs are solid and well animated, and the colors and shades are executed well. But like I said, it’s all very safe, and not that interesting beyond the fact that it’s just solidly put together. This isn’t a bad thing, but I’d probably have less contempt for this if I cared more about the source material, which just seems to be pedestrian at best.  Regardless, I’ll give it an episode or so at the very least.

It’ll probably be very popular.

Koe de Oshigoto

I’ve fallen behind on the original Koe de Oshigoto manga due to thoroughly unreadable fan translations, but if this trailer is any indication, its anime adaptation will capture the spirit of the original perfectly. Actually, I’m pretty sure that it’ll be able to top its source material by virtue of being an animated and voiced anime as opposed to a manga.

Studio Gokumi (GONZO refuges behind masterpieces such as Strike Witches and Saki) have opted to give the show a simplistic, flat, and illustrative look. Characters and objects are given noticeably thicker outlines around them, while lines inside of them are thinner. Not dissimilar to Clerks: The Cartoon, but a little more subdued. The backgrounds take on the same sort of simplistic style–they’re not as minimalist and clean as Bakemonogatari’s backgrounds, but not as detailed as typical anime backgrounds. This really controlled and simplistic visual style complements Konno-sensei’s artwork well, given it’s also rather simplistic. Furthermore, his amateurish-but-charming designs have been given professional polish, and look great. It’s kind of like when Madhouse adapts Fukumoto’s designs.

But what sells this trailer 200% is how well they nail Kanna’s embarrassment. All of her awkward fidgeting, blushing, and hilariously uneasy delivery of her lines are rendered with lots of care. The erotic scenes seem to be animated well, too, which is another thing you simply have to get right when doing a Koe de Oshigoto anime. The absolute best part of the trailer is Kanna delivering some erotic lines to the backdrop of fireworks. Thank god this is an OVA, huh!?

This anime’s gonna be pretty good.

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru

I know nothing about the original manga on which this show is based upon, but I have on good word from a man who will remain namless that the original is quite entertaining. This is also an adaptation by SHAFT and Shinbo, so naturally I have some invested in interest in it. However, after the fairly uneven Arakawa Under The Bridge, and the could-stand-to-be-better Dance in the Vampire Bund, I was losing some faith in SHAFT, after them putting on good show since 2004.

But this show’s trailer inspires some degree of hope. Of course, while I would like SHAFT to tackle slightly more serious subject matter to stretch their artistic muscles in a new direction, the Sore Machi trailer seems like a return to the classic Shinbo-isms I like. While slightly subdued, there are some pretty interesting angles and shots. They even have the camera-inside-the-floor-looking-under-the-character’s-feet shot from Shinbo’s episode of Yu Yu Hakusho! The backgrounds seems to be pretty orthodox, but they make use of ornate patterns here and there, which seems to be something of a SHAFT trademark these days. The color and lighting scheme are easy on the eyes, and have a degree of warmth and realism about them. There’s a ton of animation in the trailer, which is unusual for a SHAFT show, and leads me to believe that all of the clips are from the first episode. But who knows, maybe they somehow got a lot of people on board for this? I somehow doubt it, but a man can dream.

While not the SHAFTY-est looking SHAFT show, this trailer almost makes me think that Sore Machi will be something of a return to Shinbo’s more classic style. I’m still more excited about Kizumonogatari, though.

Kon Satoshi is dead. No one will see him ever again. He will never make another movie. Ever.

I think what’s hitting most of us the hardest about this whole deal is how shocking it is. No one was expecting that there would be a day in 2010 where Kon would die. This is to say, his death was untimely. He was only 46–younger than my parents!

Putting aside the obvious personal loss to his family and friends, for people like me who only know him as a director, the weirdest thing (second to him dying so early on) is that he will never make another movie ever again. With only four films under his belt, one TV series, and a new film in production, his career was cut way too short. Certainly he’s had his fingers in a variety of other sinister soups, doing animation work and script work on a number of projects; but the stuff that was actually 100% him was short in number, and will never be seen again. That really sucks.

Truth be told, I’m not able to call myself a devoted Kon fan, but I have enjoyed all of his output that I’ve seen, which is basically everything that has his name beside the word “director,” except for Perfect Blue. Like most other people, I also feel that his death is gigantic blow to the anime industry. Kon undoubtedly had his own unique vision when it came to movie making, one marked  by characters rendered in a semi-realistic style, along with a pension to bend that established reality into whatever his imagination could conjure up.

Is anime dead? No. I mean, I still have all my fun otaku-centric stuff coming at me at full speed. But anime is no longer on the map, and while Hosoda is making great movies, I’m not sure how many people are going out to see ‘em! Kon’s movies were things you could show to any seasoned movie goer, and they’d probably enjoy it. I can sit down with my parents and watch one of his movies with no reservations. Anime is shoulder deep in the shit right now, and the industry needed a man like Kon to make movies that would help bring the industry back above water and thrive.

Whether you loved his work, hated his work, or were just indifferent to it; it is a fact that his death is a severe blow to the industry. It is also a fact that Kon’s storyboards–which he’d keep working on for a year and change per movie–are amazing.

It took me a while, but I finally got around to watching that BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER anime. Since it’s now a month or so after this thing was first released to the masses on a free insert DVD in Hobby Japan, complete with seven (!) subtitle tracks; this shit has been pirated to death, and I bet everyone has said what they’ve had to say, and I bet it was all very similar. But I haven’t read that stuff at all, so prepare yourself for something you’ve probably heard before!

After being overrun with fanart of the titular BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER and her presumed nemesis, the Dead Master, I was somewhat hyped up for the Miku-music-video-turned-full-length-anime project backed by visionary douchebag Yamamoto Yutaka. Amongst the flood of fanart, as well as official artwork, visages of girls who were neither B★RS or Dead Master passed before my eyes every now and again. Who were these girls, and how did they work their way into what seems to be a work concerned with a Gothic-styled world with a serious checkerboard fetish (SUP SHINBO) in which really pale girls fight against each other? Well, we have a handy-dandy English website that explains that all to us. With the amount of words devoted to the touching story of two girls in middle school versus the amount of words about girls with flaming blue eyes, I should have known that this OVA would focus more on the goings on of that last screencap as opposed to the top three.

If you haven’t figured it out yet–and you have, because you’ve seen this damn thing already–BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER isn’t really about BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER. But that’s not a bad thing.

You don’t need a story summary, right? I just linked to one written in charming Engrish right up there! So let’s get down to the dirty stuff. BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER mainly focuses on the relationship between Mato and Yomi. Both of them are forged from established molds, but rather than come off as used and abused tropes, their portrayals are subtle and thoughtful, with their interactions subdued and realistic. Come the girls’ second year of junior high, they’re put into different classes, which creates a degree of distance between them. The way this is handled is also realistic. Things don’t really devolve into a whole pile of drama, but rather into more realistic puddle of drama.

This stuff is great. I like it a lot. The scenes of Mato and Yomi slowly getting to know each other on their way to school, doing homework together, and doing other girlfriendy-things is plain fun to watch. Similarly, watching them come to terms with their feelings about being separated from each other is engaging and touching. But between these scenes–in fact, almost every other scene–we get thrown into the aforementioned world of broken down Gothic (I’m assuming Gothic, someone can correct me on this) castles and checkerboard patterns in which two girls fight for no apparent reason.

I know why they cut this stuff in so early and consistently–they don’t want you to forget that this is in fact a BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER anime between Mato and Yomi’s cute girltalk/drama–but it almost seems intrusive when a lot of the scenes don’t amount to much more than three seconds of B★RS walking silently while the camera is cocked at a dutch angle. After a while we get some fights, but the wispy and loose animation style, which works wonders in rendering the daily lives of our cute middle school protagonists, doesn’t really work when rendering fights. The few bits of action in the OVA are pretty loose, with lots of them being shot from far away. This wispy and loose animation style makes the fights seem somewhat insignificant. There’s no force behind the violence, and the danger doesn’t feel immediate or important. This may well be the feeling they were shooting for. In fact, I’m willing to bet that it was. But when I look for action, I like something more brutal and visceral, so this doesn’t really scratch my itch.

To their credit though, the scenes that do feature B★RS have some really wonderful backgrounds. The look and style of the world, which is realized extremely well by the background artwork, really captures the style of the intial BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER illustrations. They even put a little filter on top the animation to recreate the same sort of texture huke adorns his pictures with, and the use of color and shading is spot on.

Cute GAARUZU RAIFU scenes, as well as dark fight scenes, are both accompanied by a soundtrack composed by some fuckin’ guy called ryo. Once again, GAARUZU RAIFU comes back up on top in the music department, especially when things get dramatic. Scenes of clear pain in the characters’ tormented preteen hearts are backed by wonderful strings and piano pieces, whereas the fight scenes between B★RS and Dead Master get the generic rock treatment, which doesn’t inspire me in the least.

Near the end, the drama between Mato and Yomi is tied to the conflict between B★RS and Dead Master in the world of checkerboards. Things come together nicely, even if you saw it coming from a mile a way. But when all is said and done, I can’t help but wonder why this is a BLACK★ROCK SHOOTER anime. The short bits that actually have anything to do with the hurricane of fanart out there probably barely amount to 15 minutes (if that) of the OVA’s total run time, and the story could have worked just as well without cutaways to B★RS walking around quietly and looking unhappy. It seems as if they couldn’t think of anything to write around the established imagery, so instead copped out and wrote a youth drama. A damn fine youth drama, but with extraneous bits of pale girls looking at each other angrily. To be fair, the final frame of the OVA leaves things wide open for a sequel, where things may in fact be expanded upon.

But this is all we’ve got for now!

About a year ago, back when I was Living The Dream in Japan, a man who will remain nameless extolled the virtues of the Mitsudomoe comic to me. Considering that the comic ran in a shounen publication, it would have furigana, so my rudimentary gaijin mind would be able to comprehend it. Intrigued, I perused Japan’s numerous used bookstores, and to my surprise was unable to find copies of it. About a year later, its anime adaptation–which is a lot easier to get a hold of–is currently being transmitted across Japanese airwaves, and I don’t think I’d be able to go back to the comic, quite honestly.

This is not the to discount the comic, mind you. This nameless man who recommended it to me is not a man of poor taste (in fact, one could say he’s a man of exquisite taste) but there is something to the Mitsudomoe anime’s presentation that warrants mentioning, and that’s simply in how over-the-top it can be. Stripped down to its bones, Mitsudomoe’s pretty simple. The humor is primarily centered around misunderstandings, toilet humor, sexual humor, and the personality quirks of the various students. It’s simple, straightforward, and free of pretension; inspiring anything between a giggle and a wholehearted guffaw out of this anime blogger. What tends to push it up to 110% is a special brand of care that goes into making everything as ridiculous as possible.

To see this, one has to look no further than the characters. Mitsuba’s sadistic tendencies always come complete with a perfectly rendered sneering expression, sometimes highlighted with a touch of drool, and a seductive and bratty show put on by seiyuu Takagi Ayahi. Futaba’s unreal strength is portrayed as unrelentingly destructive. Rather than being cartoonish, her destruction of desks, walls, and public property is always portrayed as realistic and brutal, underscored by painful sound effects. Furthermore, her enthusiasm for breasts is driven home wonderfully by an energetic performance by Akesama Satomi that pulls no punches. Hitoha’s evil eyes are rendered with the utmost amount of detail every time, complete with dark shadows and at times a gloomy aura that radiates off her every pore. And like the rest of her sisters, Tomatsu Haruka’s performance is sharp, cold, and deadpan, but considerate when need be. I don’t doubt that some of these elements are present in the original, but the anime’s attention to detail when portraying these kind of character quirks (not just amongst the main girls, but everyone) along with the voice acting (which is of course not present in the original) is what gives Mitsudomoe its charm.

Aside from the characters, there is a general push to take everything up to 11. You know, sometimes really stupid stuff will be rendered in overly-dramatic slow motion, or certain scenes will be backed with spectacular orchestral music. And often times, there will be one scene in an episode (I can’t be sure if it’s every episode) where some kind of action is just given top-class treatment. One scene in particular I’m thinking of is when the sisters’ father cleans up for parent’s day, and ends up looking like a yakuza thug. The girls were tasked with writing an essay about their parents to read aloud to the class, but Futaba and Mitsuba get their essays mixed up, so Mitsuba–who is usually cold to her father–reads a very embarrassing and gushing essay about her dad, while Futaba (half-awake)–who is typically all over her father–reads Mitstuba’s insulting tirade aloud, and promptly falls back asleep. Shocked by Futaba’s words, their father runs out of the classroom crying. This scene of him running is magical, complete with fully rendered 3D backgrounds–so the “camera” can move around freely–and inspired and fluid running animation lavished upon the girls’ father, who also often drawn in a sketchy, dirty style. It’s moments like these that make the Mitsudomoe anime what it is.

The crack team behind this madness aren’t newbies to anime sitcoms. Both the director Ohta Masahiko and series composer (that’s what you call someone on series composition, right?) Aoshima Takashi, as well as bunch of others all have previous experience with the first season of Minami-ke (you know, the really good one) so the style and quality of the humor is not unexpected. It seems these guys have carved out a niche for themselves doing things like this, so my only hope is that a potential second of Mitsudomoe isn’t passed on to another studio, like the ill-fated Minami-ke. Well, season 3 was alright I suppose.

Otakon’s been over for how many weeks? Two? Three? Four? Five? SIX?! I dunno, I haven’t been keeping count, nor do I have any concept of time. But what I do know is that this con has been over for a while, and a bunch of other cool cats already have their reports up. You should know how things run over here at Mistakes of Youth by now, so this punctuality shouldn’t be surprising.

I missed Otakon in 2009 due to being in another country while it was going on, and upon hearing reports of how fun that one was, I was actually pretty excited to get back to Otakon this year. And it wasn’t bad! Really chilled out. There were a few panels I wanted to go to–mostly run by friends and acquaintances–and between them was plenty of time to peruse the dealers’ rooms and socialize. Autograph lines were no problem, and I got to see a cool movie!

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Here are some photos I probably shouldn’t upload to the Flickr.

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Alright you guys, since they’ve let the cat out of the bag in Japan, I can tell you guys about it here: Mistakes of Youth is returning to Comiket. Well, I won’t be there personally, but my insane writings will be! And in Japanese! Yes, Mistakes of Youth is breaking into the world of hardcore anime criticism doujinshi in Animerca volume 2!

“But, volume 2!?”, you say in shock, “What about volume 1?!”

Well, I wasn’t in volume 1, but some of my associates were. What happened was, since I was once a member of the prestigious MIT Anime Club (I am no longer geographically capable of being a member, sadly.) I was part of their mailing list. So one day the editor of Animerca, Episode Zero-san, emails us asking if anyone from the club wants to write something. This hit at a somewhat busy time in my life, so I passed. But when he emailed the club again asking for submissions for volume 2, I decided to give it a shot.

So just what in the hell am I writing about? Big surprise here: Shinbo Akiyuki. What was originally meant to be a short 1500 word piece turned into a 3500 word epic, covering a lot of the material my Otakon panel covered in far more meticulous detail. There is a section at the end that covers the general reception to his works in the west, which is what that spot of research was for a while back. Now you know!

Aside from my little novella, there’s other stuff you should look out for from The Land Of The Free in this book. Internet superstar and anime convention panelman extraordinaire Alex Leavitt has a piece in the book about Toonami. There’s also a round table between Mr. Episode Zero, the aforementioned Mr. Leavitt, the mysterious kransom, Dave “Subatomic” Cabrera, and little ol’ me. We talk about anime’s reception in the states over the past 10 years, covering topics such as the reception of moe (guess how that one turns out), how anime found its way over here, and what Americans want out of anime.

The book’s being sold at Comiket 78 (that’s in like, a week) on day 3. Their booth is in the east hall at table N-04a. If you’re around, pick it up. It’s like 10 bucks.

In the great tradition of blogging about anime-related dreams, I would like to share one of mine with you. Don’t worry, it isn’t sexual.

It was like some kind of anime game show thing, apparently thrown together by this guy. It was like a board game, except instead of moving pieces around, you moved from place to place yourself. In order to move from one place to another, you had to answer bits of anime trivia correctly. In some cases when you answered questions correctly, you were presented with a prize.  However, if you answered incorrectly, you’d be thrown down another path. It wasn’t made quite clear why this happened, since logic doesn’t really work in dreams, but I’m going to assume this other path was a longer-way to the finishing point.

The locales for each of the questions was weird. They changed between old houses I used to live in, school settings, and opulent Arabian palaces.  But in each case the questions were written down on some ghetto sheet of paper that was laminated and stuck to a wall.

It was really quite fun, but thinking about it doesn’t really make sense in real life.