Geek Confessional Thread 2024

[Autumnal]

I have two now-older anime series I recommend to people who don’t like a bunch of common anime motifs.

Planetes is a hard sf series. The opening shows a horrendous orbital disaster wiping out everyone on board an orbital shuttle. The nations of earth establish an international project to clean up all the junk. Time passes. The project slips into the background. It’s as important as ever, but it’s no longer prestigious. It becomes one more important job left to drifters and losers. And these are the people the show is about. Over the course of the show, some of them get their shot, others don’t, and complications abound. These days I compare it to the Murderbot series of humanity and warmth.

Serial Experiments Lain lives in the hinterlands where near-future extrapolation (IPv7 is important), thrillers, and Philip Dick-style reality shifts hang out for a snack. It starts with a high school girl committing suicide, and the sending e-mail to her friend Lain a few days later. Weirdness accumulates: strangers follow Lain, messages from other unusual sources come in, Lain herself has bouts of very different temperament, her parents are keeping some secrets from her.

A friend of mine once wonderfully described a classic anime fail mode: you get 12 episodes of tightly plotted locked-room murder mystery, and then in the finale, the detective reveals that the ineffable unity of things is responsible for the death, and everyone is fine with that. Serial Experiments Lain isn’t one of those. It actually does account for all its mysteries. And Lain’s final scene with her father is the kind of heartbreaking combination of revelation and response that I still aspire to write some day.

Lots of both are available on YouTube so you can check them out, and both will reward if you like the kind of mature drama they are.

 

[MNblockhead]

...and then again after the 5th and then 7th?

Yep, it keeps getting better!

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I'd second both those recommendations. Planetes is very solid hard scifi with strong characterization behind the science. It avoids anime tropes so hard that it wouldn't even be thought of as anime if it wasn't made in Japan. Serial Experiments Lain is a good head trip with a pretty satisfying conclusion, and mostly avoids anime tropes beyond the schoolgirl protag and a little bit of OTT emoting - which was pretty justified considering the situation.

If you want something with more action, the 18 years old Black Lagoon series is worth a watch. Pretty much a serialized action movie about a group of rather seedy mercenaries set in Southeast Asia. Their shenanigans are violent, frenetic and usually very, very illegal but their opponents (and often employers) are even worse, so they wind up feeling like antiheroes. Stunning action scenes even by 2024 standards.

More recently, 2019's Vinland Saga is a good (albeit grim) historical piece that's surprisingly good at criticizing the pointlessness of revenge and warfare even while it puts both in the spotlight. I found the protag's character arc pretty satisfying, although it takes a bit to get there.

 

[MNblockhead]

I swear, I'm not trying to knock anyone by harping on this, but Netflix's Castlevania is not an anime in any sense. It was written by Warren Ellis, directed by Sam Deats (and a few other people, none of whom are Japanese), and animated by South Korean studios Mua Film and Tiger Animation. It's no more "anime" than The Simpsons is.

Fair enough. I'm not invested enough in the genre to get the terms right. Besides I have had many discussions with my son about this. There is nothing more a teenage anime fan, who also studies Japanese language, loves more than to have his 50+ year-old father dispense such wisdom at the dinner table as, "so it's just Japanese animation? Oh, in the style of Japanese animation? So you are you saying that the Japanese only have one distinct style of animation?"

 

[MNblockhead]

Unfortunately yeah folks just stopped calling all animation cartoons.

I feel like the battle was lost long ago. "Graphic novels" really never caught on outside of fandoms. Calling "In Hell" a "comic" has always felt off. I think as animated shows targeted at adults have gone mainstream, the industry and fans have co-opted the word anime because it is less awkward than saying "animated shows" and the word "cartoon" has too much cultural baggage in English-speaking countries. Despite Japanese anime fans feelings about it, I expect "anime" will eventually just become adopted into the English language as the word for animated shows and movies.

 

[payn]

I feel like the battle was lost long ago. "Graphic novels" really never caught on outside of fandoms. Calling "In Hell" a "comic" has always felt off. I think as animated shows targeted at adults have gone mainstream, the industry and fans have co-opted the word anime because it is less awkward than saying "animated shows" and the word "cartoon" has too much cultural baggage in English-speaking countries. Despite Japanese anime fans feelings about it, I expect "anime" will eventually just become adopted into the English language as the word for animated shows and movies.

Probably, but im not sure things like Simpsons, Family Guy, Bojack Horsemen would ever be called anime.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I feel like the battle was lost long ago. "Graphic novels" really never caught on outside of fandoms.

I don't think that's true. You see book reviewers -- not just comic sites -- calling stuff like Maus "graphic novels" all the time, especially for the YA and indie stuff that places like the New Yorker would review, rather than something featuring Blue Beetle.

 

[Deset Gled]

There's been a huge amount of linguistic drift around that word over the centuries. ...

I feel like the advent of using computers for everything (and I do mean everything) is pushing us towards an era where terms like "cartoon", "comic", "anime", "graphic novels", and even "live action" are a description of visual style and/or aesthetic rather than the technique used to make them.

People colloquially call the 2019 version of the Lion King live action, but it's 100% animated. The "live action" Beauty and the Beast remake is blatantly more CGI than live action. Meanwhile, we call movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Phantom Tollbooth animated, even though they probably have more live action film in them than the Star Wars prequels, which were basically just actors against a green screen with everything non-human added later. Can you really give a technical reason why The Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks would be considered live action while Space Jam: A New Legacy is considered animated? I can't.

So, yeah, I'm okay with calling Avatar: The Last Airbender or Castlevania anime. It's the style. It fits. I've been arguing about whether something is technically anime since The Last Unicorn, and the world just keeps getting more gray.

"Animated cartoons" weren't a thing until 1911 (when Windsor McKay's static cartoons were first animated), and it took decades before the "animated" preface faded away in common usage. There were also competing terms like cel animation, although they were too technical to win the popularity cotest that evolving language generally is.

I absolutely love me some Windsor McKay. But I was under the impression that silhouette animation predated his hand drawn stuff. Do you happen to know what things like The Adventures of Prince Achmed were called at the time of original release?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

So, yeah, I'm okay with calling Avatar: The Last Airbender or Castlevania anime. It's the style. It fits. I've been arguing about whether something is technically anime since The Last Unicorn, and the world just keeps getting more gray.

If nothing else, "anime" is slowly becoming uncoupled from the former criteria of "most be made in/by a Japanese business" and "Western anime" is starting to gain ground in the English-speaking fan base. OTOH, there's also been a rise in recognition of aeni (South Korean animation in teh same broad sense that anime is Japanese animation) as its own distinct thing, so nationalist definitions certainly aren't going away anytime soon.

I feel like the advent of using computers for everything (and I do mean everything) is pushing us towards an era where terms like "cartoon", "comic", "anime", "graphic novels", and even "live action" are a description of visual style and/or aesthetic rather than the technique used to make them.

Possibly, although "graphic novel" is more a format than a style or technique, and likely to remain distinct from "comic book" or the more recent "floppy" despite generally being essentially compilations of them. Graphic novels started off as their own thing - essentially long comic books or (as the name suggests) novella-length fiction illustrated with a comic book style - but these days it's far more common for their content to be published as floppies first and then re-sold as a compiled reprint volume. Somewhat weirdly, we don't see them called "trade paperbacks" (which was sometimes used for graphic novels by the trad book retailers) much anymore despite the persistence of the term "writing for the trade" - ie, writing story arcs that conclude in about six floppy issues so they can be easily turned into a coherent graphic novel.

I absolutely love me some Windsor McKay. But I was under the impression that silhouette animation predated his hand drawn stuff. Do you happen to know what things like The Adventures of Prince Achmed were called at the time of original release?

I don't know of anything called a "cartoon" that predated his earliest, partly-lost stuff in 1911, and Gertie (1914) might be more properly the first to use many features expected in an animated cartoon, but I may have missed something in the 4+ decades since my college days. There's a few much early examples of animation (eg Blackton's Enchanted Drawing in ~1900) but they used stop-action techniques (and later stop-motion) rather than cartooning as such. Certainly animated, but not an animated cartoon if that makes sense. Same goes for silhouette animation and variants on it like shadow puppetry, which were also very early - Cristiani's lost works predating even Reininger in that category. They're definitely animation techniques, but last I really looked into it "cartoon animation" called for animating sketch art. Admittedly, I'm not sure the line's as sharp as some people say - especially with some stop-motion work that sure looks like modifying "sketches" in sand to me - but it gives the real experts something to debate about.

In terms of what very early animated films were called for publicity purposes, I think it was just that - animated films or features, at least in English. Not positive though, and definitely not sure when it comes to other languages. I've never dug into (say) European or South American animation history the way a serious researcher would.

 

[trappedslider]

And once we stop arguing about the usage we will be one step closer to world peace