Film and Animation

This past weekend, I started an Uncle Walt-a-thon. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be watching every major animated Walt Disney film. First up was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Overall, it was quite good, primarily as an animation showpiece. The background art was done with a soft colour palette, similar to water colours, which gives it a childlike, storybook feel. It reminds me somewhat of last year’s Wandering Son. There’s also a nice variety in the settings; the evil queen’s castle, the dark part of the forest, the dwarves’ cottage, and the mine all have their own colour schemes and very different atmospheres. The character animation was very fluid - this show has almost constant movement, which modern animation often lacks (granted, this applies mostly to TV shows).

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - Endless Delinquency and Despair

In 2010, my university career ended with a whimper, and I entered the “real world.” Actually, I just continued at the job I already had and spent most of the next year or so wondering what to do for a career. It was a somewhat depressing time, in a way, but hey - I still had my Japanese cartoons.

Now, at this point I’d seen enough that fewer and fewer shows offered really new experiences for me. Most of the shows I saw in 2010-11 stood out because they excelled at something that I’d already seen elsewhere. I also find it difficult to say much about some of these shows because they’re so recent that I can’t quite contextualise them yet. After reflecting on how to go about sharing my experience from these years, it occurred to me that the most significant event is probably a shift in how I watched anime. So here we go - how I watch anime in a modern fashion.

Code Geass took me a while to get through, partly because Crunchyroll has the first season but not the second, but I finished it. This turned out to be one of those shows that I should’ve watched sooner, because, despite a few problems, it had a lot of things I enjoy - a grand scale, a battle of wits, moral ambiguity, a mix of angst and humour, pizza, and a little sister character, among other things. To start, I liked the character designs, which were done by CLAMP. Every character felt unique, and the main characters developed believably over the course of the series. Some of the side characters were one-dimensional, but nonetheless they did have a part to play so they didn’t feel tacked on. The art used a vibrant colour palette, perhaps too much so for some of the darker moments, and the animation was fluid throughout. The OP and ED themes consistently disappointed me, though the animation and artwork used during those segments partly made up for that. The soundtrack itself supported the show well, and I wouldn’t mind owning it on CD.

As one of the brave ones willing to shell out $370 for shiny discs, yesterday I finished rewatching Fate/Zero on glorious blu-ray. Since it’s a limited edition I don’t know how much longer it’ll be available, or if it is even now. For those curious, though, I figured I’d share my thoughts on how it turned out. I won’t say much about the content of the show, except, “Go watch it.” It’s an excellent series, and I’m looking forward to the second season, which starts in a couple weeks.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - Into the Bowels of College

Sometimes, one discovers the right show at the right time. In high school, I found Azumanga Daioh, early at university I found Genshiken, and early in 2009, the second half of my junior year, I found Welcome to the NHK!, about a seemingly hopeless shut-in who dropped out of college. Having already noticed a pattern in the shows I watched, I thought, “Is this what I have to look forward to?”

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - Anime Clubbin’

Going into 2007 and ‘08, the combination of university, work, and commuting between them destroyed the vast amounts of free time I’d enjoyed in high school, though having my own car and a decent income for a college student did take some of the sting off that. My hobby of collecting hobbies, though, had to go. I dropped the time-consuming video games, especially the RPG’s I liked, as well as my attempt at learning to play guitar. Literature remained, and though I did as much leisure reading as I could manage, as a literature major I got most of my fill of that in class. Most of my leisure reading, in fact, consisted of graphic novels.

Recently, my sister and I were talking about our favourite anime, and she said that she finds it difficult to separate her top three, Madoka Magica, Gurren Lagann, and Mushi-Shi. Now, ‘favourite’ is a subjective term, so there’s no need to try to be scientific about it, but this did get me thinking about how one would objectively judge between works that, though in the same medium, are so different from each other. Obviously, art will never be mathematically precise, but it is possible to make some judgements of quality. So, as a little exercise, I thought I’d consider these three.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography: A Rental Hobby

I began university in Fall 2006, and lived on-campus the first semester. Very quickly, I joined two clubs - the Newman Club, where I’d spend most of my time, and of course the anime club. At the time, I don’t think I realised just how little anime I had actually seen, and though one of my roommates was also a fan, he was just a casual fan like me. So, now able to watch several different shows a week, my experience with anime would expand rapidly.

A recent conflux of posts on blogs I follow has me thinking about the place and perception of animation in the United States. On Friday, Yumeka over at Mainichi Anime Yume wrote about introverted and extroverted fans. An excerpt:

At first glance, it seems like anime should be a hobby one indulges in in an introverted way. After all, in our society it’s not typically considered “normal” for adults to be really into foreign animated shows. […] Like other so-called “nerdy” hobbies, in both Japan and elsewhere, anime tends to be associated with anti-social geeks/otaku who have few real-life relationships and stay at home all day on the computer – a prime example of introversion.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - serial experiments lain

Moving into 2005, though lain had inspired me to seek out more anime, I faced a couple roadblocks that prevented me from fully immersing myself right away. First, I lacked time. Though I had loads of free time in high school, I’ve long had a hobby of collecting hobbies, so anime had to compete with comics, video games, literature, guitar, film, and whatever else grabbed my interest.