8 votes

Why over sixty years of animation history still remains obscure

1 comment

  1. Whom
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    Wow, this is the best thing I've ever seen in this group! Thanks so much for posting it...excellent find, if a little unfairly dismissive of certain kinds of criticism :P I'd like to hear if, from...

    Wow, this is the best thing I've ever seen in this group! Thanks so much for posting it...excellent find, if a little unfairly dismissive of certain kinds of criticism :P

    I'd like to hear if, from the side of viewers uninvolved in animation ourselves, do the generalizations about the craft of anime translate to our own experiences? I can't say my impressions of anime as a whole align with this bit:

    Most of the time the ‘roles’ in anime are little more than stock archetypes or emblems of a particular social class, give or take a few distinguishing quirks. Even in serious productions like Miyazaki’s the animation rarely has specificity of character – any given Miyazaki heroine is interchangeable with any other. And when we’re able to be emotionally affected by what happens to a character or empathize with their situation, the acting is almost never the reason why. This is probably why anime characters are appealing to fanartists and fanfictionists; they’re nearly blank slates.

    I think of the great personalities of anime, characters like Haruko from FLCL, and there's absolutely a great "specificity of character" that is uniquely their own, it's just expressed differently. The author themselves makes the rest of that argument for me, and they could easily say what I just did and have it fit right in, so I'm a bit lost with that one. I wonder if this is me being defensive toward a valid point or if this is just a concession to the audience the author is speaking to.

    3 votes