Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
People calling shows like Avatar "anime"
I'm not really obsessed with terminology, but what bugs me about this is, aside from the visual style, most anime and anime-inspired Western cartoons have very little in common. They each have, among other things, different storytelling methods, different broad themes, and especially different styles of humor, all of which are distinctly American or Japanese. Any real congruence between the two sensibilities is usually a savvy homage. So it's kind of dumb to equate one with the other just based on how they look.
Comments
Eh, to be perfectly honest, they are the same thing. Cultural differences don't make anime not cartoons or vice-versa, but I see what you're saying.
It's a question of medium, I think. Anime are cartoons by technical medium, but there's an argument for considering anime separate (in the same way one might consider geographically separate forms of cinema different).
I think one of the big deals with anime when compared to Western series is their tendency to be short. Seasons are twelve or thirteen episodes, and most only run for one or two seasons. That means everything has to be contained, so an anime that takes full advantage of this will get to the point and keep the plot paced according to the restrictions of the genre. Typically, for me, watching an anime is a fairly contained experience, and that's why I like it.
Obviously, plenty of anime fail at this pretty badly, and some of the biggest names run for stupidly huge episode counts. Then again, I don't watch those shows because they run from "not appealing to me" to "not appealing to me and objectively flawed on a level that makes watching them tedious". I notice, for instance, that even the re-edit of Dragonball Z can't save that show from its own mess, and I have a difficult time appreciating its nostalgia value because of how awful the show's pacing is. The early seasons of Pokemon get a pass, but that show is more than a little draggy. Sailor Moon is pretty amusing, and surprisingly badass, but still suffers from the pacing of "long anime".
In fact, I think Bleach did the best with it right up until the end of the Soul Society arc. To be fair, this is exactly where the manga gets shitty, too. A shame, given that Bleach was founded on some great ideas and had the capacity to examine concepts concerning death and the afterlife.
Another great thing about the short, contained format of most anime is that mediocre shows that appeal to your particular tastes are still worth the time it takes to watch them. Claymore is basically a 5/10 anime (fantastic beginning, but the whole thing unravels as it goes on), but, hell, 20ish episodes? I'll put up with that if it means watching attractive women swing swords around really really quickly.
>Scott Pilgrim in a used book store
>Manga Section
>"ERMAHGERD WERTDEFURK URS WONG WIRF YER?!"
^^ Really, it's just a cultural difference in how Japan and the Anglosphere approach television as a whole, just like how America and the UK's respective television traditions make them different (if more pronounced).
^ That's... "smart."
I dunno. I think anime and your average western animated series are pretty different, but if you asked me to name specific reasons why, I probably couldn't.
Something about cultural sensibilities, I suppose?
Exactly what I was getting at. I think I failed at the description, but yeah.
What makes anime special among other Japanese TV shows is that it's not one of these three things:
These three kinds of TV shows absolutely dominate Japanese TV, whereas in the West, we have prime time live-action shows for adults that thrive on action, drama, intrigue and all that good stuff. Something like 24 can dominate viewership during its finale, while such a show just wouldn't make it in Japan. 'Cause TV there is for women and children.
Lemme qualify that.
Japan still operates on more traditional gender relationships than the West, so usually it's the man of the house (or just men in general) working the long hours and bringing home the paycheck. Given that this is Japanese worker culture, you can imagine how time-consuming and intensive this can be. Men generally don't have the free time for TV, and even when they do, little inclination to watch it because of how precious their free hours are. Women, in comparison, have plenty of time to kick back. Apparently, their kick-back time just happens to be during TV prime time.
So it appears that a huge chunk of Japanese TV is actually based on appealing to women of all ages, but especially housewives. Pretty traditional ones at that, from our perspective. Ergo, lots of soap operas and variety shows -- they just turn a good profit.
And this is why anime is a reasonably important cultural outlet, too. Cartoons are an import into Japanese culture, and while plenty of anime is only released locally, a fair amount is also intended for an international audience (given that the anime fanbase in, say, the USA is probably bigger than the actual Japanese anime fanbase). It lacks technical, thematic and demographic restrictions compared to a lot of other Japanese TV.
... I guess all that could be considered further differences between Western and Japanese cartoons? I guess the short version is that, despite the fact that anime isn't exactly hugely popular in its home country, sometimes there's still something that comes along and blows the public away. You know, like our Game of Thrones. That's the kind of story that needs to use anime as its outlet in Japan, because regular TV just wouldn't have it.
For the most bizarre first-world country out there, Japan sure can be mundane and boring, too.
Ah, soap operas, they can be intriguing too, but I don't think japanese soap operas have guns ablazing like some of the latinamerican ones.
what soap operas are you even watching
also
Of these, only the first one is a valid argument for the separation of the two. Thematical differences is something that happens between each work, even if a lot of them address similar topics (And even then, Avatar is pretty much about spiritual and skill improvement and the value of friendship, which is pretty much a thematical similarity across most shonen) and the different styles of humor part is not just cultural as it's a difference that comes from genres, authors and works as well. Sure there's not much overlap between them and the Western kind but it's an irrelevant difference.
On the other hand, the fact is that Japan's visual mediums have grown up on relative isolation from the world's other arts so they have indeed developed their own language with different cues and symbols which is why anime's often discussed separately and why I agree with this notion, but the cultural differences are relatively non-important for the same reason why you can't separate European and American art: Because that part refers to the content and not the presentation. And the content of all works, while different, does operate on the same level, which is the conjunction of a group of narrative elements centered all around a theme. And even if that theme is how the French behave or what do the Japanese do during rain, the fact is that the barebones procedure is the same.
The differences come in the shape of the "language" that European, American and Japanese (Which are the big three producers of visual mediums) uses in order to communicate their content. As Europe and American art "met" each other during the 50s and 60s, they grew together and manage to sort of create a conglomerate language of its own. Japan's art and media did not start opening up to the rest of the world's influence until the eighties (With rare exceptions such as a certain Akira Kurosawa who you might or might not have heard of) as such its visual language still conserves a degree of uniqueness which is also maintained due to heavy demand.
The big budget ones which are filmed in colombia but interestingly enough happen in far away from the capital lands, unspecifiedly so we don't even know which country they are supposed to happen in. And happen in an unspecified sort of mismash of countryside at start of the 20th century with some technology from the late 20th/early 21st century.
Oh. Yeah those. Heh, I don't call those soap operas because they are sold as "TV Shows" and such. (They totally are soap operas, mind you, but I don't normally think of them as such if that makes sense)
Pasión de Gavilanes wasn't sold as a soap opera in colombia? Who tried to lie to colombians?
Oh, I thought you were talking about stuff like "Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso" and "El Cartel de los Sapos"
Sin Tetas no Hay Paraiso y el Cartel de los sapos no suceden en un tiempo indeterminado en el area rural de un país sin mencionar.
Fair enough.
Come to think of it, does Pasion de Gavilanes even have shootous? I know there were cowboys but they seemed to be more of the Brokeback Mountain type (minus the gay sex)
Towards the end of it, it had shootouts, but I was actually thinking more like La Tormenta where shootouts were far more common.
(Yeah, it was a bit of a stealth joke.)
But things like Paranoia Agent and the stuff Harahuki Murakami writes tend to be a pretty big hit don't they? Then again, I guess it might be difference between outsiders criticizing them and self criticism.
That and cartoons mostly fill a niche there outside of children.
I think the biggest exception to the "anime is unpopular in Japan" thing is obviously Gundam. Apparently, Gundam to them is like Star Wars to us. Which I can totally see, because both have laser swords and that seems to be a pretty solid choice on a narrative level.
but
what about the giant robots
surely it's the giant robots
Yeah, Gundam's the obvious exception. I just wish it had remained that popular here.
Giant robots are like the Japanese version of space ships, or something.
And space ships are also the Japanese version of space ships.