天下制覇

Random yuletide rantings to confound and confuse.

Oh, Canada.

The second season of the absolutely spectacular Spectacular Spiderman series was finally announced recently for a broadcast. Canada will be picking it up with a few episodes airing starting on January 11th, though if Wikipedia is to be believed, it won’t start regularly broadcasting the full season until March. If you haven’t already watched the first season, you really should. It’s everything a Spiderman cartoon ought to be.

There have been quite a few other new western superhero lately too, but I’ve been pretty disappointed in pretty much all of them. Unlike Spidey, Wolverine and the X-Men is pretty much a core rewrite of essentially everything about the characters. Wolverine gets transformed from an out of control berserker to a reluctant leader that everybody looks up to, Cyclops becomes an angsted up version of Wolverine, and Professor X’s disembodied floating head is giving them all orders from the future. None of that makes me happy in the slightest.

In stark contrast is Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which packages up and sells pure cheese. The first episode has Batman breathing in space, wielding a light saber, and cracking wise as tiny alien goothings muck all over their evil oppressor. If you’re down with the 1960s Batman, complete with Bat Shark Repellant and other especially bizarre gadgets, and want to see an endless line of DC’s B-list superheroes, you’ll probably enjoy it, but the tone and presentation is definitely comic and really nothing like the last 15 some odd years of animated Batman that I’ve grown to love.

Art, Animation, and The Distance Between

There seems to be a lot of confusion, especially when I talk about certain shows (Birdy and ZKC spring to mind) about art and animation. These are two very distinct things, and while it’d be great if every show did both excellently all the time, anything from stylistic choices to budget constraints will get in the way of that. Art is simple. It is just how good each individual frame looks. Animation is the fluidity and amount of motion. Something can be very well drawn while being extremely poorly animated, and something can be very poorly drawn while being excellently animated. There’s no ‘right’ way to do this, or even a proper balance that anybody should strive for.

The two things I personally often take issue with in relation to art and animation, are consistency and direction. It can be a consistent stylistic choice to draw or animation something poorly, and as long as it’s done consistently, there’s really no problem. It seemlessly fits into the presentation of the show (usually… lest we forget Minami-ke’s blackfaced people). It’s a conscious stylistic choice, and while you may agree or disagree as to whether it was a good one, it’s unarguably part of the style. When the bad art or bad animation randomly creeps in an then disappears, then there are problems.

Of course, direction is about as importance as both art and animation, but that’s a rant for an entirely different day.

Totali Irregularly Eats Cats

Is it just me or are there almost no new worthwhile games being advertised for this upcoming Comiket? A quick browse from a couple days ago through the normal big hitters shows Dispositif releasing a comic, Tasofro and French Bread sitting on their thumbs, Zun napping, and lots and lots of OST releases from just about everybody else. Thumbing through the Comiket catalogue showed me mostly a barren wasteland. There are a couple things that could be interesting for about 15 minutes, and a few expansion packs, but this looks like a really sparse Comiket for games.

Hopefully I’m dead wrong, but I’m not going to cross my fingers.

And no, I don’t care a single bit about the Touhou anime. The one at the last Comiket was horrible, and they didn’t even get as solid a VA cast list as Gleam of Force. That’s right, a silly boxing SD fighter had a better set of VAs than this. Hiring VAs for doujin stuff is not unique or special. In fact, I’m sure the VAs love the work. A bunch of programmers and artists with little idea how to direct or critique them paying for an afternoon of work. What part of that shouldn’t they like?

The Coming Digital Distribution Non-Revolution

It amuses me to see people pointing at the growing number of anime companies using digital distribution and screaming that they were right and fansubs have driven the industry to this. The big names in this whole business are… Gonzo and Naruto. If you can already see the problem here, then feel free to skip to the next mini-rant. Gonzo’s bought into the whole "appease the west and money will flow" mindset for years and look where they are now. They’re all but out of business while anime DVD sales have reached record levels. Now that’s a successful business model that all other animation studios should try to emulate.

Naruto and the other mainstream shows sure to follow are a more interesting case study, for a certain definition of interesting. Basically, what it boils down to is that the show is not what Naruto is selling. While shows like Sekirei or Nodame (to pull two random things off the top of my head) rely almost entirely on their DVD sales to make a profit, shows like Naruto are promoting a franchise and selling the comics, games, and toys to their young audience. The DVD sales for shows like Naruto and Bleach are horrendous, mainly because 10-16 year olds would rather buy games, action figures, or other things of interest. They have very little to lose by letting their shows get put up for free and in return, get a wealth of free promotion and advertising for the litany of related products that they can and will be making bank off of. There’s even an argument to be made that it will help them since they’ll be indirect control of how information about their show is presented and disseminated.

You’re not going to see too many, if any, companies jump on the simultaneous digital distribution train for anything but franchise shows until anime DVD sales stop skyrocketting, and even then, I’m confident that it’ll take them a couple years to make sure that they don’t follow Gonzo down the path to doom.Once the DVD sales trickle down to nearly zero, sure, you’ll see stuff pop up for free online for the western promoters to get their crack at marketting shows that most of their audience watched years ago. Simultaneous digital distribution may be the way of the future, but for the vast majority of shows, it’s sure as hell not a valid part of the anime merchandising business model right now.

Localization Companies Are Dying And It’s Your Fault

One of the biggest perpetuating misunderstanding about the western anime market continually is its own importance. Japan has a huge degree of control over how licensed anime is priced and advertised. That means that everything is going to be priced and delivered competitively to the Japanese paradigm where it’s still very much a collector’s market. Things like digital distribution, cheaper anime, simultaneous broadcast, etc are not actual options, no matter how much people may yell about localization companies forsaking these logical business decisions that worked for some other television show. Japan’s anime market, on the other hand, is booming under the same conditions, so telling them that things should change is futile at best.

Unfortunately, it’s a terrible situation for the localization companies to be in because there’s clearly a market for the stuff, but the Japanese companies hold all the cards. There’s no easy answer and not a whole ton that anybody can actually do, so it’ll be pretty much business as usual; blaming fansubbers and telling people to stop pirating shows. I do expect some changes as companies continue to slowly fold, but I wouldn’t count on the localization woes to be solved within the next five years, no matter how simple anybody thinks their solution might be.

And by Irregularly, I Mean That He Soaks Them In Pancake Batter First

Speaking of doujin games, the Battle Moon Wars translation is all but finished aside from the dictionary and epilogue (ye lords, the epilogue), but with the plethora (plethora!) of outstanding bug issues, I’m not going to really care too much about a ‘final’ release until Werk finishes the expansion material that they’re currently working on. The story stuff should be done by January 1st, at which point those of you who have been holding back can delve into the world of massive bug problems in the New Game+.

Badass Raw Watchers

I really don’t like commenting on what else is happening in the blog-o-sphere since it gives the more irritating people yet more fuel, but every now and then it gets a bit tiresome. There aren’t many of us willing to watch shows raw and at least Omni and Totali are total creampuffs who are about as threatening as a sack of kittens. I, however, am an ornery bastard. The easy thing about picking on episodic bloggers is that they tend to not fight back because they’re… episodic bloggers, and that’s what they enjoy doing. More power to them, raw or otherwise.

So here’s my collective rebuttal to everybody who has ever written about how this mythical creation known as ‘the community’ is being hurt by people just talking about episodes of anime: 
"Piss off, ya hosers."

It Stinks!

JP recently wrote a nice little commentary on criticism which I mostly agree wholeheartedly. The hallmark of a good critique is one part eloquence, one part communication, and one part actual critical thinking. There’s no such thing as a wrong or a bad opinion. However, there are such things as totally unsubstantiated opinions that are poorly expressed. When reading a critique, you should be able to tell what the reviewer thought was important and why that did or did not appeal to them. There is no such thing as a perfect show. Contrapositively, there is no such thing as a completely valueless show. There is always something good and something bad to say about everything. Communicating both the good and the bad and then expressing one’s own opinion on the overall efficacy is the final goal of a truly objective review. The reader should be able to read the review and garner enough information to say "those bad things don’t bother me," or "this is exactly the kind of show I wanted to watch, even if the reviewer did not."

Of course, true objectivity is a crock anyway. If you’re taking advice on shows from a scale, then… well… I highly doubt you’ve got the attention span to make it this far.

英語は難しいですね

More of an observation than a rant, but what’s with this hatred of using translated names for shows that’s cropped up in the last year or so? If the title doesn’t translate particularly well to English, or is based around a proper name, fine. However, it does significantly change the presentation at the same time. God help us when Full Metal Alchemist’s second season starts… excuse me… I meant Hagane no Renkinjutsushi. It’s really just a stylistic thing, but the total irregularity between refusing to translate the titles of shows, but translating the exact same text within the show itself seems to be a relatively new and incomprehensible development to me.

Pancake Batter With Grits

Seriously. He’s like some kind of freaky ancient Mexican half-snake half-goat demi-god who eats cats. You heard it here first.

Happy Holidays

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.