The Anime Thread: Finding Good Anime

[Medic_wheat]

It's nice to see a hugely profitable studio deciding to take some time off instead of just making...you know, Cars 2 or whatever.

But there is no way this is the final Ghibi movie, as cool as that would be.

Deep down I hope this is just a momentary hiatus and they will come back strong in 2-3 years.


For them to move away from feature films is like Disney saying "you know what people really want today?"

ALIENS. I mean Commercials.

[DragonmasterDan]

For them to move away from feature films is like Disney saying "you know what people really want today?"

Disney has answered that with "Live action remake's of our traditional hand drawn classics and CG movies where celebrity voice actors have punchy dialogue" and has basically ended their tradition of doing traditional 2D animated films.

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, I don't know WTF is up with Disney. Such disposable crass garbage. They really need to stop designing movies around Metacritic sores. Even stuff like Treasure Planet and Atlantis, themselves hugely dirivitive and kneecapped by cliche and audience pandering, seem impossibly innovative and original compared to a live action Cinderella reboot with %99 CG backgrounds.

There is a rumor, possibly true, I don't know, that Bandai has a 100 year business plan for Gundam. This probably won't be needed! But hey, it's already 35 and bigger than ever before so...maybe. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Disney doesn't have such a plan, or if they do it's terrible. They probably realize by now that subsequent generations find Disney's best work (Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, etc) unappealing if not completely terrifying. The "new classics", Mermaid, Beast, Lion King, despite being 1/4 as old are four times as played out since the animation is cheap, the plots largely interchangeable, and the songs...well, you can only hear that shit so many times. So obviously they need to make new high quality work, but their creativity destroying power structure makes that unlikely. I think they might actually be screwed.

[DragonmasterDan]

They probably realize by now that subsequent generations find Disney's best work (Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, etc) unappealing if not completely terrifying. The "new classics", Mermaid, Beast, Lion King, despite being 1/4 as old are four times as played out since the animation is cheap, the plots largely interchangeable, and the songs...well, you can only hear that shit so many times. So obviously they need to make new high quality work, but their creativity destroying power structure makes that unlikely. I think they might actually be screwed.

I call it "The Aladdin effect".

After Aladdin, Disney and many other animation studios found the "Let's make an animated movie with celebrity voices and pop culture references" formula to be the perfect template for making animated features. None of them did this as well as Aladdin did, and very soon this became the templated design for  almost every entry in the new to the mid 90s genre of completely computer generated animated films, and as they continued to be successful, they found no reason to change this approach. Here we are twenty years later, quality Western 2D animation is dead and all that's left is a constant stream of Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and other garbage studio crap following the same template set but not matched by Aladdin more than 20 years ago.

[turboswimbz]

They probably realize by now that subsequent generations find Disney's best work (Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, etc) unappealing if not completely terrifying. The "new classics", Mermaid, Beast, Lion King, despite being 1/4 as old are four times as played out since the animation is cheap, the plots largely interchangeable, and the songs...well, you can only hear that shit so many times. So obviously they need to make new high quality work, but their creativity destroying power structure makes that unlikely. I think they might actually be screwed.

I call it "The Aladdin effect".

After Aladdin, Disney and many other animation studios found the "Let's make an animated movie with celebrity voices and pop culture references" formula to be the perfect template for making animated features. None of them did this as well as Aladdin did, and very soon this became the templated design for  almost every entry in the new to the mid 90s genre of completely computer generated animated films, and as they continued to be successful, they found no reason to change this approach. Here we are twenty years later, quality Western 2D animation is dead and all that's left is a constant stream of Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and other garbage studio crap following the same template set but not matched by Aladdin more than 20 years ago.

  This is a really intresting look at this.   I must say people have gotten quite upset that I hate frozen.  And it's mostly for these reasons, IMO it doesn't stand up to those older classics.   Although growing up with some of the new classics, I must say I really like Lion king and some of the older pixar stuff, but this might have a lot to do with growing up with it in the first place.

[SignOfZeta]

I saw Frozen. It was slightly above average. I don't hate it or anything, but I do have trouble understanding its popularity. I bet the boys in Disney's top secret audience pacification institute have some good data on this, but they probably didn't expect this level of popularity either.

[wilykat]

How are LDs "a bother"? You plug it in, you turn it on, you put the movie in. Are you so physically weak that a DVD can be lifted but you need special equipment to lift an LD? I ask because I generally consider them far more convenient than other formats. They don't break or need rewinding like VHS. They don't have stupid menues and unskipable copyright warnings like DVDs. Anything related to random access, freeze frame, or slow motion is still vasty better on LD than any other format. They are also devoid of region locking or copyright protection.

replacement DVD player: about $5 from Goodwill
replacement BD player: about $50 from Walmart
replacement working LD player: an arm and a leg just to ship it.

Since LD is heavier, the spindle has to handle the weight and I've had a few go bad (sounds like banshee) and these day, replacement spindle can cost almost as much as an used working LD player.

So unless there's new LD players or reasonable priced replacement parts, LD would be rather low on my list.

[SignOfZeta]

The comment was aimed at someone who, probably 10-15 years ago, had a working player in the house already. Nobody is arguing that obsolete technology is a pain in the ass. It usually is, but in this case it wasn't obsolete or a pain, it was just owned by a hoarder idiot who didn't appreciate what he had.

Regarding spindles and the banshee sound: most of the time, if it's really loud and happens during high torque events (i.e.: start, stop, side change) this isn't the spindle, it's just the little rubber sticker that mates with the disc. You can usually get away with just cleaning it, but the sticker is still available from Pioneer for a lot less than a spindle.

Btw: this out of time criticism of LD, that it isn't impossibly cheap like everything else nowadays, amuses me. I have LD box sets that probably cost more than what these punks have spend on home theater in their entire lives. A Bluray player for less than the price of a fancy Bluray disc is a great thing, I have many Blurays, it's completely unfair to someone use that reality against a technology from the 1970s.

[DragonmasterDan]

I recently obtained a Hulu plus subscription and with what free time I've had lately to watch TV I've been watching the TV series of Space Adventure Cobra. It's fantastic, I love the art style, Yuji Ohno's jazzy tunes and the overall pace and flow the the show.

[roflmao]

Not long ago I dug out one of my VHS players and unpacked a box of my old VHS tapes that have been in storage for a long time:


(Click for larger view.)

[ClodBuster]

Pretty nice.
From this point of view, Bubblegum Crash's box design looks like My Little Pony softporn.

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, Animeigo had a real weird idea of what graphic design was back then.

[DragonmasterDan]

Yeah, Animeigo had a real weird idea of what graphic design was back then.

I have one of the older bubblegum crisis DVD sets and it's an eyesore sticking out as being bright pink on my shelf. From a distance one might assume it's Barbie or Rainbow Bright.

[SignOfZeta]

The original VHS was actually extremely good. The LDs aren't perfect, but still OK.

I guess...it was the 90s. US companies had some budget to deal with and instead of behaving like Criterion or whatever they all wanted to put their own mark on things. Dubs are a huge part of this, naming compilations that didn't exist in Japan with "funny" parodies of western things was another. Marketing BGC to fans of Barbie...was another, I guess.

All this is mostly over and the guys who are left over are back to doing what they should have been doing all along; taking something previously only available untranslated in the Japanese market and selling it to Americans in a way that it can be appreciated; that is, with subtitles and a much lower price, but otherwise changed as little as possible from the original.

[DragonmasterDan]

This arrived today.