Anime is something of a lazy medium

Schitzo

Don't get me wrong, it's one of my favorite forms of entertainment ever. But I can't help but sense that it's suspiciously cost effective.

Stuff like Kawajiri films, Haruhi and Akira are exempt from this argument (though even they have their moments), and obvious targets like Sailor Moon (or any show with stock footage) will be overlooked.

Lots of animes I've seen tend to use one of more of the following:

*characters talking off screen or behind something so that their mouths don't need to be animated.
**And for that matter, extremely complicated or unnecessary (though stylish, I'll give it that) angles of scenery during exposition.
* Characters are frozen in place as they talk. on the next sentence, they'll probably move an inch or two, maybe make one gesture. then become frozen in place again as they talk.
*Walking cycles, talking cycles, and sometimes, even attack cycles. Canned animations that can go on and on if you let them.
*panning still frames when there should be a shitload of action.

And well, other stuff. And well, this really doesn't make Anime any less of a good medium. I quite like what they do to compensate for the low budgetness (such as all the cinematic angles and shit.)

And yes, I know that Western Animation has it's fair share of laziness as well, but its more prevalent in anime, from i've seen.

Vorpy

And then there is  8^V to 8^| mouth movement, where the mouth just flaps open and closed regardless of how loud the speech is or what is being said.

CommandoDude

SILENCE HERETIC!

YOU DARE BLASPHEME ON MY INTERNETS?

BURN THE WITCH!

MoeDantes

I gotta admit, I actually admire some of the techniques (especially the panning on a scene where nothing is happening). The fact is, something is moving therefore your eyes are still glued to the picture.

I just love how the Japanese have a way of making cheap stuff look like it had a high budget, and unless you're really really sharp (or you're a member of a crazy vampire clan) you'll never see through the trick.

Schitzo

That was precisely my point, Dantes. Good jaerb.

Nyktos

Anime budgets are, for the most part, insanely low.

DYRE

POMF =3

Will you be my little sister Vorpy?

Vorpy

Which most anime fans who want to become animators don't seem to understand. Making a high-end graphic driven masterpiece with intense action and flowing hair and tons of effects will probably not be possible with most budgets, and you will HAVE to resort to still shots and simple gimmicky stock footage, cycles or snapshot pans in order to make enough episodes to continue garnering reception and ratings (which decides your budget ultimately, companies don't hand out money to things they know will never sell or won't be finished).

TheConductor

And remembering that animation in the East was never really a thing until, like the 60s with AstroBoy. Where as in the West we've had a good 130 years of practice ahead of them.

Schitzo

What did you say, DYRE? I wanna see

DYRE

^^ Actually, Japan has had animation since at least 1917.  Though, yeah, it wasn't nearly as big a thing as it was in, say America, until around the 60s.

^ Nothing interesting.

Vorpy

DYRE

That is totally, definitely, in all ways exactly what I said, without any editing having been done at all.  In fact, might as well just edit it back into my post, so as to accurately represent what I definitely actually said for real and not falsely.

There.  Edited it in so everyone can see what it would have looked like had I kept my post exactly as it totally, obviously was, when I originally posted it and any implication that I might have said anything else is clearly totally false.

MoeDantes

I honestly don't buy these "theories of evolution" re: America is better because they got started first. It's not like the skills and knowledge of previous animators pass on to the next generation automatically.

And even if they did... well, I once saw a guy who had been playing Street Fighter II for years and was even on tournament circuits get his butt handed to him by a guy who had only discovered it last Christmas and put himself through hardcore training. My point is, years is just a number.

Vorpy

It's called Fan Myopia. They will actively ignore what good animation America made because they like Anime better.

DYRE

But anyway, Dantes is kinda right about this.  The anime industry has had more than enough time to develop.  It's not a matter of them being behind Western animators or anything.  It's just that they have different production methods for various reasons including their extremely low budgets that they have to work with.

MoeDantes

*narrows his eyes at Vorpy*

I'm not dismissing America's accomplishment. I'm just saying that "they're better cuz they started first" is faulty reasoning.

Schitzo

@ DYRE: YESH! YESH!!

TheConductor

I never once said that. I said WESTERN (not American) animators will have had more practice. 

DYRE

That does not change Dantes' argument in any way.  Just mentally replace "America" with "Western countries".

Malkavian

(or you're a member of a crazy vampire clan)

...your passive aggressive is showing, dude. Don't get all huffy just because I had the good sense to use my freebie points to max out auspex.

In any case, I don't really remember complaining about anime's animation. I mean, I've probably done it at some point because there's a good deal of it that has some pretty god-awful animation, but it's hardly a sticking point or anything like JRPGs or J.J. Abrams.

In any case, the tricks very rarely bother me unless they're gratuitous. It's unreasonable to expect these Japanese animators, given only beans to eat and cardboard to draw on, to create Disney-level animation. I mean, after all, a couple seconds of Haruhi mouth-flapping isn't going to be all the much more engaging than a shot of Haruhi's ass. The frozen characters thing is something that happens, but I can tend to forgive it. The recycling of fight animations is something that really annoys me, though, as it's very uncreative, obvious, and lazy. It also seems to ascribe to the idea that with fight scenes "longer=better" which is a thought cancer killing the action genre. That's hardly unique to anime though, and thankfully five-episode fights seem to be dying out in anime. (or I've just gotten better at avoiding them)

One thing that does annoy me is the presence of sudden art shifts that kill the mood. Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood was particularly bad about this. That's more an example of poor direction than lazy animation.

Nyktos

I'd say in Brotherhood's case it's mostly an example of how things don't always translate well from one medium to another.

Scrye2

Too be honest, the poor animation techniques are almost a majority of the reasons I'm not a fan of the medium. The two frame crying or talking cycles pisses me off in particular. Another peeve is the flapping mouths, not only because its a cheap, two-three frame cycle where only the mouth changes and nothing else, but because it has two forms: open and closed. They don't animate it to show the different positions the mouth forms when pronouncing different sounds. I don't care how cost effective it is. Even South Park and the Simpsons avoided that shit from day one.

Ponicalica

South Park and the Simpsons also avoided remotely detailed character designs.

The_Edge

They are also the most well known for their negativity continuities.

MillerCross

South Park and the Simpsons also avoided remotely detailed character designs.

I see it in SP, I don't see it in the Simpsons.

Malkavian

^Simpson's character designs are distinct, but they aren't very complex.

^^That really doesn't have anything to do with animation quality though.

AHR

I think it's because there is way more animé than cartoons, so they're naturally going to be on varying ends of the money scale. 

Scrye2

The Simpsons and South Park are also on the lowest end of the quality-of-animation scale. The fact that even the cheaply made western animations still do actual voice synching techniques tells me something about anime.

snowbull

But characters/backgrounds/pretty much everything in the simpsons are a lot less detailed than say, Evangelion (a show in which seeing the backs of peoples heads when they talked was terminal), so they can afford to be a lot more dynamic, which includes greater lip synching.

Scrye2

Dude, at least they had backgrounds to begin with. How many times has some anime shown just a flashy gradient or cycle of moving lines behind a keyframe of a character as he shouts his attack name?