K – Return of Old Footage #10 — The Episode Where Nothing Happens

December 4th, 2015

 

Part a billion.

Non-Impressions:

GoHands has obviously given up and so have I. Another episode entirely of people standing around talking about how the random sparkly thing and how important it all is, which is why they're all sitting around and waiting for the magical sparklies to spur them into 'action.' I clearly made the wrong choice between this and the awful Garo 2. Unless I didn't. I fear learning the answer. The obligatory half-baked fight of the week was even recycled footage from the first episode, so it didn't even (not) animate as many talking heads as usual. I guess they hadn't gotten all the mileage that they wanted out of it. Those torpedo tits continue to make me wince as well. Good thing they remembered what was most important and made sure to get that all up ins this business.

Mostly, I spent the thing wondering what Japan's obsession with Dutch angles is. Not that this episode was particularly abusive of them, it was just a thought in my head. One of the really neat things about animation in general is that you can easily do a lot more with camera angles, colors, shadows, etc than you can in more traditional filming, and even in many cases with CGI. Japan has taken its abuse of tilted frames to a level that goes beyond sense though. It's like when a graphic designer discovers a neat new plugin and then for a month, everything they do has beveled drop shadows. I'd guess that it probably stems from the manga tradition that most artists and animators come up through, while the west has a much much more extensive film tradition to fall back on while the Jack Kirbys and Stan Lees are politely told to keep their hands out of things and maybe they can be a cameo for the rest of their lives. It feels like Japan's gotten a lot more obnoxiously prevalent recently, but I base that on little more but half-remembered impressions from old Lupin. I get the feeling that it's just the same thing as flashbacks and childhood friends, except for images. Someone thinks "This lacks oomph," and the most half-assed way to turn a shot from dull to slightly uncomfortable is to turn the frame off-kilter. Japanese media is an expert at taking simple good ideas, and turning them into horrible ones through wanton abuse, after all.

Next Episode:

So, uh… anything going to happen?

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