Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Because it only took Viking-Sensei three years (and the approaching end of Errant Story) to come up with a better name for "General Discussions"
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Sareth
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Post by Sareth »

Pointless Digression Response

This would probably merit it's own topic, but I am hot, tired, and lazy.

ANYWAY...

During my final class for my bachelors, every student was expected to do some sort of significant communications based study, write a scholarly paper with their results, then do a presentation. One of the projects conducted was a study on how Disney cartoons communicated American Values. A brief side discussion on the subject discussed the very flagrantly racist propoganda cartoons made by Disney during WWII. (You can find a surprising number of them on Youtube.)

One of the members of the class, an older student like myself, was Japanese American. His father had actually been interned at one of the camps in California, in fact. So afterward, because he and I got along so well I felt there would be no issues of disrespect or misunderstandings regarding what I was asking and why, I asked him "So, Jim, I'm curious about your thoughts on those propaganda films."

He laughed, smiled, and looked at me, then replied. "Honestly? My first reaction was to run to a mirror and check to see if I had buck teeth. I've got the glasses and the eyes..."

Interestingly enough, his response to those films is that "they were a product of their time, and understandable within that context." He's not offended by them at all, but instead simply finds them another aspect of the era, no more or less acceptable than any other part of WWII, and as important for study as "Rosie the Riveter." Interesting, no?

On Topic

I haven't watched the English dub of Black Lagoon, I'm afraid. Although I have watched "the Fucking Short Version" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SUvD5fhQ68) and it cracks me up every time. But yes, Revy's "English" in the Tokyo scenes is atrocious. Which actually has it's own absolutely bizarre appeal.

Given that all the members of the Black Lagoon Trading Company are American with the exception of the English-fluent Rock, it would make sense that they use English. The Manga makes it VERY clear that Hotel Moscow uses Russian internally, and I actually got the impression that Rock speaks that as well, and was actually translating Russian to Japanese in Tokyo, not English to Japanese. As for the language of Roanapor... yeah, it probably is a multi-lingaul society that interchanges English, Thai, and Malay, much in the same way that Manila interchanges English, Spanish, and Tagalog, or Singapor intermixes English, Malay, Tamil, and Chinese.
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Boss Out of Town
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Sareth wrote:
During my final class for my bachelors, every student was expected to do some sort of significant communications based study, write a scholarly paper with their results, then do a presentation. One of the projects conducted was a study on how Disney cartoons communicated American Values. A brief side discussion on the subject discussed the very flagrantly racist propoganda cartoons made by Disney during WWII. (You can find a surprising number of them on Youtube.)

One of the members of the class, an older student like myself, was Japanese American. His father had actually been interned at one of the camps in California, in fact. So afterward, because he and I got along so well I felt there would be no issues of disrespect or misunderstandings regarding what I was asking and why, I asked him "So, Jim, I'm curious about your thoughts on those propaganda films."

He laughed, smiled, and looked at me, then replied. "Honestly? My first reaction was to run to a mirror and check to see if I had buck teeth. I've got the glasses and the eyes..."

Interestingly enough, his response to those films is that "they were a product of their time, and understandable within that context." He's not offended by them at all, but instead simply finds them another aspect of the era, no more or less acceptable than any other part of WWII, and as important for study as "Rosie the Riveter." Interesting, no?.
It no doubt helps that, since World War II, racism directed towards the Japanese and Japanese Americans has never been as blatantly dangerous as racism towards Blacks, Hispanics, or Amerindians. I expect that, in the mostly White suburbs where I've lived, an Asian-American could walk about freely and meet no more flagrant racism than the occasional curious stare. A Black, on the other hand, would have to worry constantly about being harassed by local cops, being shunned or stared at by shop-keepers, or, in some neighborhoods, being threatened or attacked by White toughs.

The economic success of the Asian-American communities has also made conditions easier for them in this country. They were smaller in numbers than Blacks or Hispanics during the primary decades of immigration and were able to form full economic hierarchies within those communities: rich, middle-class, and poor. From this base of "Chinatowns" and "Little Tokyos," especially with the increasing prestige of native Japanese and Korean industry over the last forty years, they have a solid base for economic opportunity and, just as important, solid, simple counter-memes to traditional racial stereotypes.

Of course, reservation-bound Amerindians lacked that kind of concentrated economic power until the advent of Indian gaming. Since the Mexican War and the Civil War, Blacks and Hispanics were able to form solid middle-class communities in some parts of the country, but not in others. Particularly in the American south, there were large stretches of territory where virtually the entire Black population lived in abject poverty, enforced by legal and extra-legal means. Middle-class Black communities started up in the south in the generations immediately after the Civil War, but a series of bloody White "riots" at the height of Jim Crow (1890 to 1920) destroyed most of them. The Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s finally got a solid Black middle and upper class settled into northern cities, but it wasn't until after the Civil Rights revolution that a majority of African-Americans broke into the middle class, leaving behind millions of poorer Blacks trapped in decaying inner cities, still providing fuel for White racist memes.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Boss Out of Town wrote:Having had a chance to watch more of Black Lagoon, right into the second season, and it is one of the series where I consider the English script to be noticably better than the Japanese script. While I am not fond of the "stream-of-expletives" dialog style, it works perfectly here. The entire artistic premise of the series is juvenile psuedo-macho self-indulgence, and the language fits right in. If you lived in a world in which being a stone-cold sociopath or a giggling psychotic made you a more deadly fighter or assassin and being subject to outbursts of uncontrollable rage made you harder to shoot, this is how people would talk!

That said, the series has some good writing mixed in with the cartoonish violence, with lots of serious comments about the brutalizing effects of human evil. The despairing end scene, with its slow, tragic music, ending with Revi ready to use the shotgun on whoever is intruding on her pain, sums up the series nicely.
Finished up the last episodes of the second season of Black Lagoon, and the quality is holding up nicely. The Japanese voice actress got Revi's English dialogue a-little-better-by-apparently-reading-it-phonetically-from-a-translation. The fight scenes continue to be utterly ridiculous, but the characterizations and dialog still do a beautiful job of selling the drama. Revi's posture during her final duel with the swordsman is telling. Her exchanges with Balalaika and Etta subtly point out her impossible position. She likes Rock and his "normalcy" and hates them at the same time. Rock and Revi have some sort of chemistry, but really no more in common than a shark and a porpoise. Like the rest of the damned of Roanapour, they cling to whatever relationships they can stitch together.

The true secret behind Balalaika's bitterness: that guy lied to her when he told her she might be an Olympic gymnast. By the time she was growing up, the Eastern Block countries were already recruiting pixies at an early age. Balalaika looks to be about six feet tall and maybe 150 lbs. Assuming she isn't cursed by a pituitary problem and vaguely resembles her parents, she wouldn't have gotten through the screening in grade school. So she joined the military and became a psychotic mob boss instead.

One of the cooler things about Etta: she's in on the joke. Every character is so over the top in Roanapour, distorted, evolved into showboating and posturing, but Etta is a created personality, not an evolved one. She's Valerie Plame playing the spy role before she decided to become a NOC, marry a diplomat, and have babies. Yeah, one of Plame's buddies training at Langley said she was the best shot with an AK47 in her class. People do become spies because they like the game.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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zanntos
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Post by zanntos »

Yeah, second season had quiet a few crowning moments of awesome, and of course sneer power is at a maximum, Revy is obsessed with the guys ability to split a bullet with his swordand needing to fight against that. Also the Rock/Balalaika interaction in that arc is great, down to the "you pulled the trigger" comment.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Okay. BOoT's warned us about this show back in April, but I forgot about it. I just watched the first episode of Queens Blade online. Great Moogley Boogley! :shock: The review that he quoted barely does justice to how utterly f**ked up the show is. Of course what makes it worth watching is the utterly ludicrous job somebody did of subbing it. It was done in borderline AOL-speak. If you need to loose some sanity points, give it a go.

Here's the review BOoT's pasted in case you missed it.
Here's what happens in the first episode of Queen's Blade, which is apparently based on a roleplaying game in Japan:

A blonde chick is strolling along a medieval highway when she's intercepted by some sort of a cutsey demon girl wearing a ridiculous pink outfit whose hair turns into hands and the hands cover her giant breasts. They start fighting, since the blonde girl is apparently someone important; the breast-holding hair-hands squeeze said breasts, which shoot acid from her nipples as a primary means of attack. The blonde's clothes get dissolved (and then she's mostly naked for pretty much the rest of the episode), but she's saved in due time by another woman, a rogue “bandit” named Risty, (who also has huge breasts and a skimpy outfit) and then some angel-cherub girl shows up and briefly explains how this is all part of the Queen's Blade tournament, where 12 women fight it out to become the new Queen. Queen of what? Not sure. Don't care.

So the blonde, Leina, turns out to be the escaped sister of some cruel matriarch who, along with Leina's creepy twin sister, keeps her captive in a castle out in the middle of a lake. They apparently put a bounty on her head, hence why Risty was after her in the first place. They imprison Risty, who of course breaks out, steals some iconic armor from the castle's treasury, and gives it to Leina before that demon girl with the acid-shooting boobs shows up again and pretty much wrecks the place. Leina defeats her by mashing her own breasts into the demon girl's nipples mid-acid-squirt, which I guess isn't something the demon girl has great control over because it forces her to overflow, and she expands like a hot air balloon before exploding all over the place in a gooey, acidic mess.

Oh, and the main character, Leina, graphically pisses herself twice in just this one episode. That seemed worth mentioning.

This is an actual show that is airing on cable TV right now in Japan.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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davester65 wrote:Okay. BOoT's warned us about this show back in April, but I forgot about it. I just watched the first episode of Queens Blade online. Great Moogley Boogley! :shock: The review that he quoted barely does justice to how utterly f**ked up the show is. Of course what makes it worth watching is the utterly ludicrous job somebody did of subbing it. It was done in borderline AOL-speak. If you need to loose some sanity points, give it a go.

Here's the review BOoT's pasted in case you missed it.
Here's what happens in the first episode of Queen's Blade, which is apparently based on a roleplaying game in Japan:

A blonde chick is strolling along a medieval highway when she's intercepted by some sort of a cutsey demon girl wearing a ridiculous pink outfit whose hair turns into hands and the hands cover her giant breasts. They start fighting, since the blonde girl is apparently someone important; the breast-holding hair-hands squeeze said breasts, which shoot acid from her nipples as a primary means of attack. The blonde's clothes get dissolved (and then she's mostly naked for pretty much the rest of the episode), but she's saved in due time by another woman, a rogue “bandit” named Risty, (who also has huge breasts and a skimpy outfit) and then some angel-cherub girl shows up and briefly explains how this is all part of the Queen's Blade tournament, where 12 women fight it out to become the new Queen. Queen of what? Not sure. Don't care.

So the blonde, Leina, turns out to be the escaped sister of some cruel matriarch who, along with Leina's creepy twin sister, keeps her captive in a castle out in the middle of a lake. They apparently put a bounty on her head, hence why Risty was after her in the first place. They imprison Risty, who of course breaks out, steals some iconic armor from the castle's treasury, and gives it to Leina before that demon girl with the acid-shooting boobs shows up again and pretty much wrecks the place. Leina defeats her by mashing her own breasts into the demon girl's nipples mid-acid-squirt, which I guess isn't something the demon girl has great control over because it forces her to overflow, and she expands like a hot air balloon before exploding all over the place in a gooey, acidic mess.

Oh, and the main character, Leina, graphically pisses herself twice in just this one episode. That seemed worth mentioning.

This is an actual show that is airing on cable TV right now in Japan.
Oh...my...god...

I just tracked down and watched the first episode....

My brain has been damaged. I need to watch some Haruhi to repair it.

Avoid this show at all costs. It's even worse Than Garzey's Wing.
4uk4ata
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Post by 4uk4ata »

Good god, did Uwe Boll start producing anime after watching Ninja Resurrection as an inspiration? Just what kind of a brain must one have to think of something like that?
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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4uk4ata wrote:Good god, did Uwe Boll start producing anime after watching Ninja Resurrection as an inspiration? Just what kind of a brain must one have to think of something like that?
I find it amusing that the people who give out the "Razzies" -- Golden Raspberry Awards, for bad movies, performances, etc. -- gave Uwe Boll a special award last year for "Worst Career Achievement."
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Post by gertruda »

What kind of markers are good for drawing Anime? My son is very interested in animation and anime drawing. What kind of drawing markers are best. We are looking at Prismacolor brand, but they are really expensive. Any other suggestions? We oticed that a 24 piece set is about $50-$70. What is best for the money?

Edit: Spammer on a delay setting. Now banned.
Last edited by gertruda on October 1st, 2009, 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Not really the thread for this, but I'm going to treat it as a serious question instead of spam just in case. I would personally recommend Copic markers. I have a set that I love, and I prefer the colors and how they blend over Prismacolors. They're also refillable, and modular so that you can replace the nibs as needed, so I consider them a better value for the money. Generally, art markers tend to run EXPENSIVE no matter what brand you're buying. Don't bother with the cheap no brand sets from the craft store, they won't give clean color at all, they don't blend well, and the nibs degrade pretty much immediately and are not replaceable.

If you really want to encourage coloring without any recurring expenses, though, just buy him a good scanner, a Wacom tablet (or similar), and a copy of Photoshop instead. Digital color work is generally a more useful colorist skill these days.

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