Some fannish nitpicking...
Apr. 26th, 2005 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
senoritafishI love all kinds of animation, and I obviously love anime, or I wouldn't be wasting so much of my time on it. I do have some little annoyances with it though. Please note that I am in no way trained in doing any kind of animation, aside from a flipbook or two I doodled in school notebooks when the lectures were boring. My art experience is limited to a handful of drawing classes in high school and junior college, eons ago.
One of the reasons I like Cowboy Bebop and others like it so much is the animation is fairly sophisticated and realistic-looking. There is very little use of what I'll call "shorthand" - the stylized sweat-dropping, veins-popping, chibi-appearing, fangs-growing, kitty-faces, expression of emotion. We get what the characters are feeling without being beat over the head with it. I think Faye gets googly-eyes for exactly one frame, when she surprises (or rather, is surprised by) Gren in the shower. I really didn't care for Tenchi in Tokyo (Shin Tenchi, I think?) just because that kind of shorthand seemed really over used. It was annoying. For some reason, this doesn't bother me so much in Fullmetal Alchemist - maybe because without it, it would be hard to tell what Al was feeling at all, since he spends most of his appearance in the show as a big metal suit of armor. So I can put up with a little "shorthand," as long as it fits the context, and isn't overdone.
What does bug me, even in a fairly high quality shows like CB or Trigun is this. Note the following graphic, which someone sent me in an email.
This looks like it was originally a piece of film footage before being converted into animation-by-punctuation. See how, with each stride, the leg swings forward ahead of the body? Granted, this is a person who is walking fairly quickly, so it may be exaggerated. In many anime I've seen, however, unless a character is running, the leg swings forward only to the vertical, in line with the body, and rarely ahead of it. It makes for very awkward-looking movement in an otherwise beautiful piece of artwork. I have not noticed this in other forms of animation (although they do have other flaws), so I'm wondering if this is some kind of cultural thing or just a short cut to save drawing a few extra frames?
Examples would be:
1) Cowboy Bebop: Ballad of Fallen Angels, when Spike is entering the church to confront Vicious.
2) Trigun: Good-Bye for Now, when Leena is walking across the porch before cutting Vash's hair.
Have you tried actually walking this way? It's possible, but you don't make a lot of forward progress per step.
The other thing that bothers me is noses. I don't mind so much that sometimes they are nearly nonexistent, or merely a line. However, sometimes a character who actually has a nose is shown face-on with this this weird triangle drawn at the side of where their nose should be. Is it supposed to be a shadow? The side of the nose? If it's a shadow, why isn't it shaded in like the rest of the face? Occasionally it is (and if it is, shouldn't the line be removed?), but sometimes it's just a triangle, colored no differently from the rest of the face. I am obviously uninformed about the niceties of animation drawing, but hell, I find it distracting. I can usually ignore it, but in the case of Hige in Wolf's Rain, I began actively hating it, it was so bothersome. I wanted to look at his pretty eyes, and that damn line beside his nose just drew my gaze, like a big mole. *Sigh* I don't know; maybe it's just like one of those old woman/young woman sorts of drawings, and people are seeing something different than I am.
All ranting aside, I really have very little to complain about. For the most part, in the face of so much network programming in the form of "reality" shows, I'm grateful for a form of entertainment that's given me so many hours of pleasure, and that it's become so much more available, even in the few years I've been watching it.
An aside - Google oddities: I was trying to google some screenshots of Hige to illustrate my point. I was unable to find any, but I was reminded that Hige must mean "whiskers," because not only did I get him, but also tons of photos and cartoons of men (and a few women :D ) with various facial hairs, some fairly outrageous, snoozing cats with close ups of their noses, plus cats with "mustaches" (black spots under their noses, as well as whiskers), chinstrap penguins (must be their common name in Japanese, hmm?), and oddly, various pictures of jeans. I could not figure this last out, until I finally noticed something common on all of them; a few close-ups provided a clue. They were focusing on the faded creases in the lap and around the zipper, that you get when you sit down. Whiskers? Hmm...some sort of fetish thing?
Oh and also...a photo of Charlie Chaplin's mustache, of course.
(crossposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
anime and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
otaku_over_30)
One of the reasons I like Cowboy Bebop and others like it so much is the animation is fairly sophisticated and realistic-looking. There is very little use of what I'll call "shorthand" - the stylized sweat-dropping, veins-popping, chibi-appearing, fangs-growing, kitty-faces, expression of emotion. We get what the characters are feeling without being beat over the head with it. I think Faye gets googly-eyes for exactly one frame, when she surprises (or rather, is surprised by) Gren in the shower. I really didn't care for Tenchi in Tokyo (Shin Tenchi, I think?) just because that kind of shorthand seemed really over used. It was annoying. For some reason, this doesn't bother me so much in Fullmetal Alchemist - maybe because without it, it would be hard to tell what Al was feeling at all, since he spends most of his appearance in the show as a big metal suit of armor. So I can put up with a little "shorthand," as long as it fits the context, and isn't overdone.
What does bug me, even in a fairly high quality shows like CB or Trigun is this. Note the following graphic, which someone sent me in an email.
This looks like it was originally a piece of film footage before being converted into animation-by-punctuation. See how, with each stride, the leg swings forward ahead of the body? Granted, this is a person who is walking fairly quickly, so it may be exaggerated. In many anime I've seen, however, unless a character is running, the leg swings forward only to the vertical, in line with the body, and rarely ahead of it. It makes for very awkward-looking movement in an otherwise beautiful piece of artwork. I have not noticed this in other forms of animation (although they do have other flaws), so I'm wondering if this is some kind of cultural thing or just a short cut to save drawing a few extra frames?
Examples would be:
1) Cowboy Bebop: Ballad of Fallen Angels, when Spike is entering the church to confront Vicious.
2) Trigun: Good-Bye for Now, when Leena is walking across the porch before cutting Vash's hair.
Have you tried actually walking this way? It's possible, but you don't make a lot of forward progress per step.
The other thing that bothers me is noses. I don't mind so much that sometimes they are nearly nonexistent, or merely a line. However, sometimes a character who actually has a nose is shown face-on with this this weird triangle drawn at the side of where their nose should be. Is it supposed to be a shadow? The side of the nose? If it's a shadow, why isn't it shaded in like the rest of the face? Occasionally it is (and if it is, shouldn't the line be removed?), but sometimes it's just a triangle, colored no differently from the rest of the face. I am obviously uninformed about the niceties of animation drawing, but hell, I find it distracting. I can usually ignore it, but in the case of Hige in Wolf's Rain, I began actively hating it, it was so bothersome. I wanted to look at his pretty eyes, and that damn line beside his nose just drew my gaze, like a big mole. *Sigh* I don't know; maybe it's just like one of those old woman/young woman sorts of drawings, and people are seeing something different than I am.
All ranting aside, I really have very little to complain about. For the most part, in the face of so much network programming in the form of "reality" shows, I'm grateful for a form of entertainment that's given me so many hours of pleasure, and that it's become so much more available, even in the few years I've been watching it.
An aside - Google oddities: I was trying to google some screenshots of Hige to illustrate my point. I was unable to find any, but I was reminded that Hige must mean "whiskers," because not only did I get him, but also tons of photos and cartoons of men (and a few women :D ) with various facial hairs, some fairly outrageous, snoozing cats with close ups of their noses, plus cats with "mustaches" (black spots under their noses, as well as whiskers), chinstrap penguins (must be their common name in Japanese, hmm?), and oddly, various pictures of jeans. I could not figure this last out, until I finally noticed something common on all of them; a few close-ups provided a clue. They were focusing on the faded creases in the lap and around the zipper, that you get when you sit down. Whiskers? Hmm...some sort of fetish thing?
Oh and also...a photo of Charlie Chaplin's mustache, of course.
(crossposted to
anime and otaku_over_30)
