OTGBionicArm wrote:
I'm starting to think that's why I just can't get into anime. It has no real feeling for me. I feel like every single one tries to hard to get me to feel what the characters are feeling (The aforementioned unnecessary angst) but there's no effort put into the production of the animation that a full scale live action show would have.
I have no reference point to understand or feel anything for these characters because nothing feels real and everything feels forced.
I respect all of you for liking anime, but this really isn't turning out to be my cup of tea. ><
And I respect your thoughts on the problems of the medium.
The medium has a lot of strengths too though, but people value things differently.
Comedy doesn't necessarily suffer as much from the problems you've pointed out, so if you feel like giving comedic anime a shot; Nichijou should hopefully bring tears of laughter to your eyes.
Have you given manga a try? Or are you just not the reading kind of person?
I'm personally big into manga and I could give you a few recommendations if you're interested (do describe your likes of genre and such).
Joxuu wrote:
Baka and Cuddowls, the anime gurus
No, just Lifebaka.
MrCuddowls wrote:
You aren't watching a gateway anime like you should.
You should be watching either Death Note or FMA: Brotherhood
You can also try out Samurai Champloo or Cowboy Bebop for less plot and more badass action and characters.
Oh my god...
Please stop being Cuddles.
After he explicitly wrote about his dislikes in the medium you go ahead and suggest 4 more series that most definitely suffer from the problems he wrote down.
"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated." - Mike Rogers, U.S. Representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district, 2013
I.e: Mike Rogers doesn't think it's rape unless the victim knows (s)he has been raped. Sounds legit.
I.e: Mike Rogers doesn't think it's rape unless the victim knows (s)he has been raped. Sounds legit.
xIchi wrote:
Maybe you should not watch animes that try to convey their characters feeling as hard as some do. And you just watch some for the awesome story (Death Note, Monster, Darker Than Black, Requiem for a Phantom). All the oldschool classics with (jaw dropping) storylines?
Stories often hinge on the feelings of the characters, so I doubt any of those will resonate with him.
"I love the dirty bomb tag because i get either
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
honestly if you can't get over the medium and impossibility of the reality that most anime generate it probably isn't for you. i have tried to get multiple people into anime that said the same thing regarding the medium and the fantasy style of most anime and said they couldn't get into it. shame though cause i have yet to find any non-anime movies/series with the depth of character and emotion that have been portrayed in anime. seriously i have watched princess mononoke and spirited away like 10 times each lol (yeah i know they are not as mature but doesn't mean they aren't great). such great story telling.
i feel like manga is different from anime but i don't think it is so dramatically different that you will enjoy it enough more to really put time into it.
at least you gave it a shot :)
i feel like manga is different from anime but i don't think it is so dramatically different that you will enjoy it enough more to really put time into it.
at least you gave it a shot :)
I actually liked FMA: brotherhood. That MIGHT have had something to do with my girlfriend at the time, but I remember at least liking the characters and none of them really annoyed me. Was in English dub, btw.
Idk maybe it would be different now, as I had a very good reason to watch it then, heh.
And @Searz, I'm not much of a reader, honestly when it comes to entertainment. Reading is my preferred method of learning, but not entertainment. Writing is my main method of expressing my imagination though. Perhaps writing my own stories would be more fun than reading them from a manga. :p
Idk maybe it would be different now, as I had a very good reason to watch it then, heh.
And @Searz, I'm not much of a reader, honestly when it comes to entertainment. Reading is my preferred method of learning, but not entertainment. Writing is my main method of expressing my imagination though. Perhaps writing my own stories would be more fun than reading them from a manga. :p
^ hard not to like FMA: brotherhood imo. the english dub isn't as good but that doesn't kill it.
haha well having a significant other helps you to watch all sorts of things you may not have before and enjoy them when you wouldn't have before. sometimes you end up not really watching it though ;)
haha well having a significant other helps you to watch all sorts of things you may not have before and enjoy them when you wouldn't have before. sometimes you end up not really watching it though ;)
OTGBionicArm wrote:
I actually liked FMA: brotherhood. That MIGHT have had something to do with my girlfriend at the time, but I remember at least liking the characters and none of them really annoyed me. Was in English dub, btw.
Idk maybe it would be different now, as I had a very good reason to watch it then, heh.
Hmm, we might be onto something here. YOU'RE RACIS... nah jk, but maybe you have an easier time with English?
"I walked up to her big butt and asked her *** butt what." - Lil Wayne, lyrical genius
"I can't decide where I stand on abortion, on one hand it is killing children, on the other it gives women a choice." - ???
"I can't decide where I stand on abortion, on one hand it is killing children, on the other it gives women a choice." - ???
Warning: Long post incoming.
Monogatari gets 3d so right though, don't you agree baka?
Not really. If you can tell they're using 3D, they're not doing it right. Period. I'm also not watching the current -monogatari series, because I simply can't be arsed to sit through that much pointless banter right now.
Comedy doesn't necessarily suffer as much from the problems you've pointed out, so if you feel like giving comedic anime a shot; Nichijou should hopefully bring tears of laughter to your eyes.
Nichijou is excellent, but Japanese humor in general doesn't translate well to a western audience. Certain tropes that Nichijou uses might not make as much sense to people who aren't as versed in anime (such as the art-style-related visual jokes). It's worth giving it a shot, if you're up for trying something different, OTG, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Anyway, I'm not actually going to keep giving suggestions unless OTG actually asks for some, and I suggest everyone else do the same. Although there are anime out there that he'd probably enjoy, I don't know if it's worth his time wading through the much larger number that he isn't likely to. There're plenty of other things out there to watch.
I feel like every single one tries to hard to get me to feel what the characters are feeling (The aforementioned unnecessary angst) but there's no effort put into the production of the animation that a full scale live action show would have.
I have no reference point to understand or feel anything for these characters because nothing feels real and everything feels forced.
Certain things are much easier to do with a live show than with an animated one, so I'm not sure that the amount of effort put into production is really all that easy to judge. Many of the techniques anime artists use to reduce their workload aren't all that noticeable to the average viewer. Although the still frames in Shingeki no Kyojin, for example, are very blatant, in many other anime they're more obfuscated, and I've seen several very interesting techniques used to trick the audience into thinking more things are moving on screen at once than actually are. (As an example: There's a particular shot in Tamako Market's first episode, where they're carrying the bird inside, that seems to have a lot of moving parts. Only a couple are moving at any given time, but it still appears to be an extremely active shot.) I could think of more examples, but I'm not sure if anyone is actually interested in discussing animation shortcuts in anime in this thread.
I can understand not having a point of reference for what in anime is supposed to be impactful, though. Anime uses a lot of tropes to get its various meanings across, and it's hard to be familiar with those tropes unless you've watched a lot of anime already. I think that most people who get into anime do so off of some of the more popular shonen series, like Bleach or Naruto for more recent anime watchers, because in those at least the fight scenes are pretty easy to understand without any prior understanding of the genre. From there you can start to learn some of the cues and tropes necessary to understanding other anime.
It's worth noting that neither animation shortcuts or tropes are indictments of anime as a genre. Animation shortcuts are 100% necessary for making anime profitable for the people making it, and when done properly they aren't even noticeable. Trope-y-ness is just the nature of all cultural media, so the only thing different about anime is that we aren't Japanese.
i have yet to find any non-anime movies/series with the depth of character and emotion that have been portrayed in anime
In terms of non-anime stuff I'm watching right now, House of Cards has basically every anime I've ever watched beat in terms of character depth. Most characters in anime tend to be fairly simple, especially as a whole lot of them fit very neatly into only a dozen or so tropes. I don't really hold this against anime, though, because it's extremely difficult to make a character deep, believable, sympathetic, and likable all at the same time. Most media chooses to drop character depth in order to keep the other three, as losing any of them is generally worse than having not-so-deep characters. But I think that to have a good discussion of anime character depth we'd need to talk about specific characters. Which anime are you thinking of as having good character depth?
As for emotion... It depends on what emotions we're talking about. Few anime I've seen are good at portraying love, for example. Attraction, sure, but not love. There's a lot of anime that are pretty good at portraying struggle, as that's what a lot of shonen boil down to. And a lot of shojou, for that matter. But, again, I'm not sure that anime, as a whole, has really done a very good job of portraying complex or varied emotion. Not because it can't, but more because it just hasn't yet.
MrCuddowls wrote:
Monogatari gets 3d so right though, don't you agree baka?
Not really. If you can tell they're using 3D, they're not doing it right. Period. I'm also not watching the current -monogatari series, because I simply can't be arsed to sit through that much pointless banter right now.
Searz wrote:
Comedy doesn't necessarily suffer as much from the problems you've pointed out, so if you feel like giving comedic anime a shot; Nichijou should hopefully bring tears of laughter to your eyes.
Nichijou is excellent, but Japanese humor in general doesn't translate well to a western audience. Certain tropes that Nichijou uses might not make as much sense to people who aren't as versed in anime (such as the art-style-related visual jokes). It's worth giving it a shot, if you're up for trying something different, OTG, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Anyway, I'm not actually going to keep giving suggestions unless OTG actually asks for some, and I suggest everyone else do the same. Although there are anime out there that he'd probably enjoy, I don't know if it's worth his time wading through the much larger number that he isn't likely to. There're plenty of other things out there to watch.
OTGBionicArm wrote:
I feel like every single one tries to hard to get me to feel what the characters are feeling (The aforementioned unnecessary angst) but there's no effort put into the production of the animation that a full scale live action show would have.
I have no reference point to understand or feel anything for these characters because nothing feels real and everything feels forced.
Certain things are much easier to do with a live show than with an animated one, so I'm not sure that the amount of effort put into production is really all that easy to judge. Many of the techniques anime artists use to reduce their workload aren't all that noticeable to the average viewer. Although the still frames in Shingeki no Kyojin, for example, are very blatant, in many other anime they're more obfuscated, and I've seen several very interesting techniques used to trick the audience into thinking more things are moving on screen at once than actually are. (As an example: There's a particular shot in Tamako Market's first episode, where they're carrying the bird inside, that seems to have a lot of moving parts. Only a couple are moving at any given time, but it still appears to be an extremely active shot.) I could think of more examples, but I'm not sure if anyone is actually interested in discussing animation shortcuts in anime in this thread.
I can understand not having a point of reference for what in anime is supposed to be impactful, though. Anime uses a lot of tropes to get its various meanings across, and it's hard to be familiar with those tropes unless you've watched a lot of anime already. I think that most people who get into anime do so off of some of the more popular shonen series, like Bleach or Naruto for more recent anime watchers, because in those at least the fight scenes are pretty easy to understand without any prior understanding of the genre. From there you can start to learn some of the cues and tropes necessary to understanding other anime.
It's worth noting that neither animation shortcuts or tropes are indictments of anime as a genre. Animation shortcuts are 100% necessary for making anime profitable for the people making it, and when done properly they aren't even noticeable. Trope-y-ness is just the nature of all cultural media, so the only thing different about anime is that we aren't Japanese.
Bioalchemist wrote:
i have yet to find any non-anime movies/series with the depth of character and emotion that have been portrayed in anime
In terms of non-anime stuff I'm watching right now, House of Cards has basically every anime I've ever watched beat in terms of character depth. Most characters in anime tend to be fairly simple, especially as a whole lot of them fit very neatly into only a dozen or so tropes. I don't really hold this against anime, though, because it's extremely difficult to make a character deep, believable, sympathetic, and likable all at the same time. Most media chooses to drop character depth in order to keep the other three, as losing any of them is generally worse than having not-so-deep characters. But I think that to have a good discussion of anime character depth we'd need to talk about specific characters. Which anime are you thinking of as having good character depth?
As for emotion... It depends on what emotions we're talking about. Few anime I've seen are good at portraying love, for example. Attraction, sure, but not love. There's a lot of anime that are pretty good at portraying struggle, as that's what a lot of shonen boil down to. And a lot of shojou, for that matter. But, again, I'm not sure that anime, as a whole, has really done a very good job of portraying complex or varied emotion. Not because it can't, but more because it just hasn't yet.
OTGBionicArm wrote: Armored wimminz = badass.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
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