*Rides into Spam Zone on an Ursa*

Actually, the term "Anime" in japan refers to anything animated. It dosnt fall upon japanese animation exclusively.

there are anime websites that include american anime style features as well.

As a matter of fact, Big O, the anime, was made by Cartoon Network. It dosnt haveto come from japan to be anime, but can be considered anime all the same.

 

Have you seen my favorite anime, Lizzie McGuire?

 

Spoiler

 

Oh man, some british guy with a speech impediment referred to it as an anime.

I guess my post that used rational thought and applied general logic has been trumped by a mildly popular video on the internet.

 

So I was wrong it actually ISN'T anime, as you said. I probably heard wrong and he said "It wouldn't be anime STYLE without an anime opening." (I know for a FACT Monty said something like that) I'll have to rewatch the RWBY panel from RTX to make sure.

 

K, let me throw another one at you for the hell of it.

Spoiler

 

to be honest...... who cares if its anime or not, its AWESOME! :3 just finished ep 8

 

Be right back, I'm gonna go ahead and watch my favorite anime Ben 10. Oh that reminds me, hey have you seen the anime Dora The Explorer?

 

I watched for about 2 minutes before I stopped listening to the guy blow hot air out his ass. Aside from trying to rationalize the idea of taking a guy wearing a fake military uniform seriously, he's got some pretty eloquent ideas and he speaks well. It's just that the use of a strawman argument to define a "problem" with one definition, and then using that hypothetical grey area in the definition to justify making the whole damn definition a grey area is pretty dumb.

But, I'm assuming his argument eventually just ends with "if it's done in an anime style, and the creator intended it to be an anime, it's an anime".

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch my new favorite anime Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls. Which is an anime, by definition, apparently.

 

Play nice. I don't want mega reports and staff getting all infractiony up in spam again.

 

It's actually pretty terrible. If it didn't have Monty Oum's name associated with its inception or Rooster Teeth involved in its distribution it'd probably be a total laughingstock. Now, I know people who have never heard of Dead Fantasy who took a look at this and said, "This is ****," from the trailers. I actually didn't want to level with them, at first, because the trailers are Monty Oum doing his thing, choreographing fun little fight scenes. I thought they were okay, animation values were weak, but it's basically machinima so how could I blame it? Then it dawns on me when the first episode hits. He's in charge of most everything. A choreographer is the head creative mind on a project and has clear and documented influence on the rest of the staff. Problem. So what though? He could still do well, right? Yes. But he didn't. The animation looks cheap and awful, simple as that. It's basically little MMD models showing their lack of expressive capacity and range of motion. It works with RvB more or less because its machinima and that means it's supposed to look that way. This is an anime knock off and is clearly not supposed to look like this. All of the actions are pale imitations of the actions they are attempting so ham handedly to portray. So there's that fact. If he wanted to do an anime inspired show, he should have either made it in an animation style that didn't make it look like garbage or he should have ditched the theatrical visual tropes that just don't fit and stuck to the story and dialogue tropes that he can pull off.

Alright, so visuals are definitely in a strange kind of uncanny valley equivalent of animation. He still might tell an interesting story with good characters, right? Well, that does remain to be scene but the whole thing is hopelessly generic and dime a dozen right now. It actually would run better as the plot of shovelware JRPG now that I think of it, it gives you a reason to be around a lot of people who can fight and it gives you a reason to fight monsters and finally a big villainous organization. So the plot's got some filling out to do and I'll give it that chance, it's what I owe any series. So the characters. Well, they're not completely distasteful. For the most part. So far. You see how I need to add a lot of qualifiers because this series really hasn't set any of its characters to an extent where you can say whether they're good or bad? They all feel like they have their starting gimmick or stereotype and are going to grow from there or not grow from there. It's really a tossup if they do or not. So far we've seen the standard development where the team fights together but them forgets that entire experience five minutes later and decides to start at square one again the next time they meet. This doesn't exactly bode well. Also, Monty Oum didn't need his own character to voice. It seems a little egotistical.

So here's what really bothers me more than the style or the plot or the characters. It's the amount of effort that was put in here. This clearly was poorly planned. If you don't see it, that's on you. But when I see the blacked out background characters or the horrifically incongruous (and, might I add, badly drawn) 2D inserts at random times and the backgrounds with jagged pixelated edges and cookies disappearing into thin air and blocky capes going through shoulders I think, "Wow, you actually went ahead with that." It's lazy. When you are working in a limited medium, do you really want to tell your audience, "Hey, look at all these flaws we chose to let you see because we couldn't be arsed to find a decent workaround."? So this tells me something; they probably went for a fast production cycle on a low budget. When you want something good you need to put a lot of time or a lot of money into it. Unfortunately, it's just how it works, but they clearly did neither because all of the flaws and continuity errors and just plain weird looking things are basically pushed into the foreground. And that's what really gets me. They are expecting their audience to put up with this crap and like it in spite of themselves. Well, I don't.

So here's the one thing I will commend Rooster Oum for doing: hiring unknowns as voice actors. They're actually not bad either. They are at least average for modern voice actors (an incredibly low bar, I know) despite this being the first job for several of them. So here's why I like this. The anime dubbing industry is horrible. They hire the same people for everything because they're too poor to afford taking a chance on someone who might not show up for recording or might not bring that minimum sales. It's hard for people, even talented people, to get into an industry so steeped in reputation so it was completely refreshing and nice to see some midgrade voice actors get work doing something that will help boost their notoriety on some level. So nice job on that.

Now, I'm sure many people will disagree with a lot of what I've said here. That's because most of my complaints really do come down to personal tastes. I prefer something that is polished, precise, tight and above all well planned. This show is rough, somewhat slow to start, inconsistent in quality and above all trying too hard to be animu without actually being animu. That said, I do enjoy it and I do think that every episode has been building on the last and certain things (like the dialogue) have been consistently getting a little better each time. I'll probably never call this good at the rate it's going but it's interesting and I want to see it through. So that's my opinion. Take it, leave it, dispute it, hate it. Do whatever, I'm giving this to all of you because I trust that you'll get some use out of it. Have fun.

 

Ok it's really late right now and I'm very tired, thus my effort threshold is painfully low

but can I just say

I love you for so many things you just said

What it means in Japan doesn't always correlate to what it means in America

The reason it means anything animated in Japan is because in Japan it's not a friggin' loan word

Doesn't make it proper

No, the SECOND SEASON of Big O was FINANCED by Toonami

A much better argument would be IGPX, which is perhaps the closest thing to an east-west fusion there is

Y'know, I'm arguing for consistency of definition, that's why I'm a stickler for it

I really can't understand, however, why people feel the need to defend the 'anime' status of certain shows

Does it add some immeasurable amount of street cred or what

 

I'm surprised nobody on the other side of the argument brought up shows like Jem, which was animated in Japan (by Toei) for Hasbro.

Oh, wait, I forgot that the median age for this site is like 14.

 

Except I took it as a compliment and we're okay