アニ・ノート

I think I completely burned myself out trying to follow the Autumn season. So if anyone is interested what’s on in the Winter, read Hashi-hime (the thin slicing at DbD is delayed again this season).

Seen at DbD:

I’m looking for superior animation. I’m looking for things like “How well do they make use of HDTV?”, “How many frames are animated?”, “Does the background move?”, “When a character speaks, do they redraw the whole character or just the face/mouth?”, etc. Some studios are really good at hiding their animation shortcuts, but I’m also not too bad at picking them out (after seeing thousands of frames of these, of course). There’s also bad drawing (like quality cabbage), bad animation (like the character-like statues in Kimikiss), and an unholy combination of the two (Gun Musashi, Neuro, Xenoglossia). There’s also good drawing (Black Lagoon), good animation (Minami-ke), and an unholy combination of the two (Haruhi Suzumiya, Gigantic Formula, Escaflowne).

This is very curious for me because I made a call for Kimikiss over Clannad. Another common complaint is the lack of blinking. I’m certainly going to have a harder look at the animation of motion.

On the second thought, I liked the art of Xenoglossia. You just look at that eye, it’s the best anime has to offer across the board. Perhaps my taste is just different from Jason’s.

After seeing Brett Farve play over the last decade, he had a great early career (along with a Super Bowl win), but then he started getting old and just started chucking the ball without care. More than one person thought he was washed up. Then 2007 came along, and it was like we got back age 28 Brett Farve instead of age 38. Gainax busted out of the gates with the landmark Evangelion, which influence still pervades anime today, followed it up with the fantastic Kare Kano, FLCL, Ebichu, and Mahoromatic, and then proceeded to mail in series like He Is My Master and Konomini. It’s scary the parallels between the two, especially with the “Who the fuck do you think we are?” power play of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in 2007 for Gainax. The Absolutely Farvian tier is very dangerous just because they can submit a pantheon performance even better than The Pantheon tier, but they can also toss game-ending interceptions in the red zone. Still, I absolutely would not bet against this tier.

Jason probably thinks that he made himself a name with references to sports, although it’s equally possible that AoMM/DbD succeeded despite them. Oddly enough, I know how to spell Favre’s name, because he appeared in a guest strip of online comic PvP. In it, Jase yells at TV, “Favre, what are you doing?!”, and in the next frame Favre sits with them on the couch and says, “Sorry guys, my finger slipped [from the Xbox controller]”. The analogy above was good, however, because it still works even if you don’t know Favre.

Jason omitted UFOtable, which is too bad. I think it would probably climb up the ranks quite nicely on the strength of Shinobu’s body. Also, they invented the gradient hair in Manabi.

If anyone wondered why I never have any content at the blog anymore, it’s because I’m grinding on the Hourglass of Summer like a Chinese goldminer in WoW. My word, that thing is long.

Currently I’m playing it straight with the unshakable love of Kaho, but I think I might switch to Tomo for the next pass, unless the game disappoints me severily enough to drop it. This will give me an idea how branchy the plot is.

Ani-nouto was down every morning in recent weeks, so Maestro, the owner of Animeblogger, moved me to a different server and also tweaked various caching thingies. Look, I’m only a kernel monkey, I don’t know a thing about webservers. But everything seems to work peachy now.

In addition, we’ll experiment with ad placement in the nearest future. This is a little worrysome, because there is virtually no feedback when ads get too obnoxious: the leakage of frustrated readers is too slow to notice in the server stats. But it’s either that, or no blog at all, so brace yourselves.

Kanon (2006)–Anime Review:

[] I don’t think I’ve ever changed changed my mind as often as I did while watching this one. // Partly it’s a matter of expectations. The early episodes look like a light-hearted comedy. Indeed, the distributor is explicitly marketing it as a comedy. But it is not really a comedy at all, and parts of it are emotionally wrenching to watch. Nor is it a realistic drama. I prefer to think of it as a modern fairy tale; a story whose characters wander down strange paths and end up trapped in an abyss of dispair, but are ultimately saved by the purity of their hearts and a bit of supernatural assistance.

I’m still not watching it, and not just because I was poisoned by Toei. These girls are still too defective for me. But I can give a justice to a balanced, even positive review.

UPDATE: He also has spoiler notes to match.

In the yesterdays’s debate I tried to make a point that Omo never mentioned any kind of “open-source anime”, and that it’s nothing but a distraction which Avatar trotted out. Making copyright laws in the U.S. sane is essential for the proprietary media industry’s well-being, because it is eaten from the inside by its own incumbents. One sign of it is how widespread violations are. If you aren’t convinced by NHK (Dennou Coil) stealing from Geneon (Haibane Renmei), please have a look at this:

In the advertisement for RACS, a character is holding P-chan. I have to wonder if Robert had paid ViZ for the righs to use the likeness.

Saw Moero Amazon posting that Azumanga is in reruns at AT-X, which seems like a more successful blueprint for the ailing Anime Channel:

AT-Xで再放送が始まったので視聴。何回観ても楽しいなぁ。

Indeed, it never gets old. I even toyed quickly with an idea of checking out if the idiot box shows anything interesting these days, but immediately became apathetic again. Not even the power of Azumanga is sufficient to compel me to watch broadcast TV again. Besides, I have the ADV orivinal release with VSM.

BTW, the moonspeak is still too tough. From the same place:

今じゃ金朋地獄なのになぁ。。。（笑）

The double-moon thingie is not even in a dictionary. Hell, indeed!

UPDATE: Lupus explained that “金朋” refers to Tomoko Kaneda, the seyuu for Chiyo-chan: “kane”+”tomo”.

Here’s a little piece of NYAF which I missed:

[Bandai’s President Ken] Iyhadomi further sparked my fiery, as well as that of other bloggers, later in the day at Bandai’s official industry panel. This was a panel that many more people actually attended. They made announcements on other titles, and restated the little information they gave about Lucky Star earlier that day. But during the Q&A, one innocent question was asked about plans to go to new high-definition DVD formats. To paraphrase Mr. Iyadomi:

“We are not really that enthusiastic about the new DVD formats. They are not region coded, so we foresee problems with releasing titles in both Japan and America. An anime DVD releases in Japan for $50. A year later, that same DVD releases in America for only $25. The Japanese fan will clearly wait a year to import the American DVD at a much cheaper price.”

You just can’t make up shit like that.

First up is Minami-ke:

<Extrange> wtf?
<Extrange> You don’t know Touma?
<Extrange> Heretic
<zaitcev> Is she their mother?
<Extrange> Clue: same anime, not the same family
<TheBigN> zaitcev
<TheBigN> that’s why you should watch the anime. :P
<Extrange> there is another Minami family
<TheBigN> Tomo and Miu annoy me to hell, but somehow, Kana doesn’t. :3
<zaitcev> Yes, but… the traps? I am afraid of traps.
<Extrange> lol
<Extrange> Touma is a reverse trap
<zaitcev> Oh, well, I suppose that helps a little.
— mellow_bunny is now known as Mako-cakes
<Extrange> well, Chiaki has a “selective” vision
<Extrange> so she adopted Touma as her “brother”
<Extrange> oh and Touma has 3 brothers, which are as crazy as Chiaki’s family….
<Extrange> want more info, Zait?

No, I don’t think I want any more information. My decision to drop it was
correct.

Next, Darker than Black:

<theholyduck> i remember sukoshi talking about her experiences in her anime club
<theholyduck> and some bleach watchers
<theholyduck> oh man.. that as hillarioous
<theholyduck> and they couldnt sit through the first 5 mins
<theholyduck> cause it had a guy breaking his own fingers
<theholyduck> with acompanied crunchy sound effects
<theholyduck> and screems of pain
<theholyduck> she asks them what kind of gore and action they watch

Not watching that either.

The weak comparisons with Haibane Renmei, which Owen and I have made, evoked my worst fear in animeblogging:

Intellectual bankrupcy.

Haibane Renmei is one of the three to five greatest series of them all, or perhaps even the greatest one period. So it’s only natural that five years down the road it continues to guide the story-telling anime, just as Azumanga does to the slice-of-life anime. But would not it be good to find a language for dealing with any new series on its own terms?

Hmm. I suppose the color key is sort of similar…