Anime. What's your opinion on it?

[Shiny212]

Newer anime has followed a trend of looking a bit more same-y due to the way the industry operates. I will happily grant you that.

However, to just pull a few pictures from my files: http://imgur.com/a/uDjo2. I cannot see how it is possible to claim a lack of artistic diversity with a straight face.

Artistic diversity is an ambiguous term. I think it's better to say stylistic similarity or lack of stylistic diversity. There's certainly diversity within anime, as in the completely unrealistic doll-face with massive eyes, no nose etc v the more face with a nose, smaller eyes, wrinkles etc. But if you have any interest in drawing and the concepts of shapes, line-drawing and silhouettes the similarities are considerable, and contribute to what the layman would say are indefinable qualities that instantly tell the viewer "this looks like anime".

It's not so much meant to disparage anime, just recognizing that if you showed any of those images to a layman, he or she will easily identify them all as the same art-style, with the same name, coming from the same place, and having serious difficulty determining time period, since it's changed very little.

[minteK917]

In Japan anime is pretty much hollywood, aka its the visual medium that ends up in theater the most. Just like hollywood a large portion of it is crap. Then you also get unique and interesting stuff in between that shit. I used to be an Anti anime guy in early high school, then people introduced me to the proper stuff, now i watch a bad anime same i would watch a bad movie or western tv series. Good ones are again just the same, can be highly addictive and gets you thinking about how it ends and how the story will unfold. A good example is Attack on Titan, i was and still am much into its weird mystery of a world, i dont watch or read any material about it, simply to not be spoiled.

[Demontjuh]

This makes me sad, or rather the fact that you love SAO but not DBS Where is the Laurcus we know and love, we miss him in the DBZ thread

SAO was a decent watch, the only thing that bothered me was that only the first 2-3 eps and the last 2-3 where about what i expected the story the be about, the inbetween was just slice and i didn't really care for it, nevertheless it was good quality, im not joining the hate bandwagon just because i was disappointed with half the content.

[Deleted]

I would appreciate if you people stopped calling anime a "medium" comparable to film and literature, it's insulting to those.

And we would appreciate if you just could shut your Mouth... you clearly have no idea how much of Anime/Manga is in "todays" Movies

Let me Help you with a few Examples

Edge of Tomorrow
Inception
Matrix
Lion King
Black Swan
Looper
Pacific Rim
Man of Steel

fucking ignorant people

[Shiny212]

And we would appreciate if you just could shut your Mouth... you clearly have no idea how much of Anime/Manga is in "todays" Movies

Let me Help you with a few Examples

Edge of Tomorrow
Inception
Matrix
Lion King
Black Swan
Looper
Pacific Rim
Man of Steel

fucking ignorant people

Mhm, what deplorable hole on the internet "taught" you these factoids? Complete falsehoods. Especially hilarious that you'd claim an american comic-book hero, THE american comic-book hero is derived from anime. And please, join conspiracy.net before starting up another asinine debate about The Lion King's would be anime origins. It's all been debunked if you'd bother looking.

I'm not going to bother with the rest, prove your nonsense claims or be exposed as a liar.

[Kudos]

I like some Anime. I've enjoyed Cowboy Beebop, Future Diary, Psycho Pass and Stein's Gate.

I avoid the ones that have 'cutesy' sidekicks. I find that too annoying.

[Escariot]

its degenerate

[Nerph-]

Tried watching a few different ones, didn't like it at all, definitely not my cup of tea.

I mean Death Note is supposed to be brilliant but I just get annoyed at the style and therefore don't enjoy it one bit.

[minteK917]

I'm not going to bother with the rest, prove your nonsense claims or be exposed as a liar.

Not sure about that list. Pacific Rim is kind of obvious lol. Matrix as well, infact both creator specifically said alot of their design ideas is straight out of the 1995 ghost in the shell movie. Which is easy to tell, down to the green text and plugging stuff behind your neck. To be honest about this whole topic, the older i get the more i dont really give a shit what people think of mediums lol. Just like western cartoon, i prefer to just watch something like Avatar last air bender with my kids over 90% of the marvel movie. Same goes for good animes. Just like video games, just like everything. When something is good to me, its good.

Same way i used to be hater of entire genre of music, getting older made me realize i was just a young idiot. All genre of music have good in them, just had to find it.

[Deleted]

All anime is good because everyone's favourite anime is shit, which means that everyone has shit taste.

But okay for real most of it is trash but I happen to like trash like that.

[Deleted]

I personally enjoy it generally because you can do stuff in a cartoon that you can't do in live action without having a massive budget. As in, magical powers, excessive amounts of blood and weird shit happening works better animated (imo).

Although only yesterday I was talking to my friend how every time I try to find a new anime to watch, it ends up being hugely about sex. I don't mind it when it's a genuine plot device later in the show, but I really don't enjoy the whole hentai scene. I prefer semi-serious shows/movies when it comes to anime, although I have watched some good comedies.

One of my all time favourite anime was/is Wolf's Rain, the art style, the plot was interesting, violent but not overly so, emotional (first anime I cried at but I'm super sensitive at time) and overall just felt apart from the usual stuff I've seen. I would suggest it, just depends what you like in an anime as with any show or movie :P

[Independent voter]

One thing to keep in mind is that there's like 20-40 anime series a season now and there are four anime seasons, fall, winter, spring and summer so that's like 100-200 anime a year and 90% of it is not very good. So how do you find good shows each season without have to sift through all the trash?

Go to https://myanimelist.net/anime/season and click on the season you want. You'll get a list of all the anime for that season and a user review ranking. I usually watch stuff > 8.0 unless I hear good things about it.

[Deleted]

You are better off chosing anime based on the summary-description alone. Pick shows based on ratings and you'll end up with best girl trash and miss the actually good ones. Pretty much applies to everything - games, movies, anime, food... dislike something ? Obvously it's a 1/10 show! like something? Obviously it's a masterpiece 10/10!

Mhm, what deplorable hole on the internet "taught" you these factoids? Complete falsehoods. Especially hilarious that you'd claim an american comic-book hero, THE american comic-book hero is derived from anime. And please, join conspiracy.net before starting up another asinine debate about The Lion King's would be anime origins. It's all been debunked if you'd bother looking.

I'm not going to bother with the rest, prove your nonsense claims or be exposed as a liar.

Please.... the directors of Matrix themselves said that they took several ideas out of Ghost in the Shell. They weren't exactly hiding it in interviews.
And Edge of Tomorrow is actually the english version of All you Need is Kill.

So.. I don't know about all of them but it's nothing to worry about, it's only natural that people would look at works in the same genre and take ideas from them. It's not complete bullshit though.

[Asetotti]

Mhm, what deplorable hole on the internet "taught" you these factoids? Complete falsehoods. Especially hilarious that you'd claim an american comic-book hero, THE american comic-book hero is derived from anime. And please, join conspiracy.net before starting up another asinine debate about The Lion King's would be anime origins. It's all been debunked if you'd bother looking.

I'm not going to bother with the rest, prove your nonsense claims or be exposed as a liar.

Most of his list probably bullshit but for example Edge of Tomorrow is based on a Light novel called All you need is kill.
Matrix is said to take inspiration from Japanese animation and Pacific Rim obviously has taken some inspiration from them too.

[minteK917]

You are better off chosing anime based on the summary-description alone. Pick shows based on ratings and you'll end up with best girl trash and miss the actually good ones. Pretty much applies to everything - games, movies, anime, food... dislike something ? Obvously it's a 1/10 show, like something? Obviously it's a masterpiece 10/10.

Agreed. Its almost as if that was the point of a summary! Plus what is good is highly subjective, so just like anything in life. Scores is not enough to make something entertaining to you. And sometime youll like something someone else think sucks. Just like i can eat sushi all day and my best friend throws up just talking about sea food.

[Deleted]

I choose what anime I watch by .gifs and .webms I see online or by word of mouth from friends.

[Rucati]

I like most anime because of the way the stories are told. A lot of western shows are pretty much episodic, you can watch episode 1 then skip a couple watch episode 5 pick back up in season 2, like it doesn't matter. There might be a little character development, but for the most part the episodes are independent of each other. Like for example NCIS, the show is fine, but if you miss a few episodes it doesn't matter, the overarching story is slow and uninteresting. Whereas in anime every episode is important (aside from some comedy shows) because the overall story is more constructed. Whether that's because it's all planned out before it's created, or because most of the shows are adapted from other material, or whatever other reason I'm not sure. But I can get a lot more invested in a show and the characters if every episode continues to develop them and progress the story in a meaningful way.

[Deleted]

Also Kaiji most underrated anime. Check it out if you want to watch a guy play a single game of pachinko for 7 episodes.

[OrcsRLame]

This makes me sad, or rather the fact that you love SAO but not DBS Where is the Laurcus we know and love, we miss him in the DBZ thread

The Laurcus you knew and loved is exactly the same as ever except more grouchy. For the record, I haven't completely given up on DBS. I'm gonna wait until the English dub is a lot further along, then I'll binge watch it. The English dub is how I experienced DBZ as a kid, and if anything can save Super for me it's that. That being said, I had some harsh criticisms of Super that I felt were perfectly legitimate. Vegeta's character growth was walked back pretty hard from the end of the Buu saga, and I felt like Goku had been flanderized to care more about his training than the Goku of the past. Gone was the Goku that had sex with Chi-Chi the night before the Cell Games because he knew he was going to die. Gone was the Goku that experienced righteous indignation at the deaths of the innocents in the Frieza saga. From my point of view, he was more like the Goku of Dragon Ball, just in the body of an adult, a mirror opposite to GT where he was an adult in the body of a child. I blame a lot of this on DBS's format, because even with Toriyama being involved it's not the same as if he had to make the story himself panel by panel. That's extremely hands off compared to how DBZ was made.

Now, what I like about SAO, is a lot of the things that made me always go back to DBZ in the first place. I've been a fan of SAO for so long now, that on Reddit I have probably written more about SAO than I ever did about DBZ. I guess in that regard I really haven't changed much. I always feel the need to tell other people that they're retarded when they've completely jumped the shark on something, and I end up rebutting stupid criticism of SAO quite frequently. Btw, if you aren't connected to the major anime communities of the internet, bashing SAO has been the hip thing to do for a few years now.

To be crystal clear, I don't like SAO ironically. This is a series that I truly love. DBZ will always have a special place in my heart, but in some ways I care about SAO more than I ever did about DBZ, which speaks to how good I think SAO is. I actually went to meet the author of SAO in person; great guy btw. Engaging in a bit of self-analysis; to me Kirito is the hero that I always wanted Gohan to be, but Gohan never quite measured up post Cell Games. It's hard to place, but he has something in common with the Goku of old that all the main characters of all the DBZ clones out there just don't have.

I miss you guys too though. I tend not to go on mmo-champ so often these days for a variety of reasons. The first is I don't like the format of the site compared to Reddit. It's annoying to follow a discussion on this site. The second is that coming to mmo-champ I always see the political threads, which never fail to frustrate me for various reasons. In short, (I don't want to make this post about politics) I think politics are worth talking about, because I see several kinds of cancer growing within society, and I want to do my part to ensure that future generations can still do things like watch DBZ and SAO and argue about which one is shit. And I see no easy way to deal with these various cancers because of what I see as a loss of group sanity and a failure to agree on a set of moral principles that supersede ideological beliefs. The most cynical part of me thinks that this may be our Great Filter within the paradigm of the Fermi Paradox. In other words, we're going to destroy ourselves because we're too stupid to stand together on the things that actually matter, and we have no effective way of ripping up elements of society that would ruin those things that actually matter without also ruining those things in the process. So when I see people fishing for gotcha moments in political threads while trying to pass themselves off as honest and rational actors it makes me want to reach through the screen and shake a bitch, which long term makes just not want to come back to the site at all.

[Neichus]

It's not so much meant to disparage anime, just recognizing that if you showed any of those images to a layman, he or she will easily identify them all as the same art-style, with the same name, coming from the same place, and having serious difficulty determining time period, since it's changed very little.

I'm going to concentrate on this part, because I unabashedly admit to little knowledge in drawing technique.

This brings us to a question then: what do you consider a reasonable rate of change for an art style? The majority of the series I linked in my pictures were produced post-2000. The only two that predate that are the second picture of the girl (1985) and the yellow-haired man (1990s). Number five also stood out, a result of it being a purposeful homage to Astroboy (1960s). Incidentally, these were the ones people have picked out and commented on, even while still identifying them as anime.

If we want to go further backward, anime technically starts in 1917, but the 1950s is probably a better decade to start with. Hakujaden and Ribon no Kishi are examples from this era, and I would argue don't bear a great deal of similarity to current anime; the former draws more on traditional Eastern styles and the latter would be easily confused for Disney (which is not a coincidence).

So would it be fair to say that, at least in this 70 year time frame, the art style has evolved to some degree?