本当に？
As we’ve turned our cranial cogs with T3h Dave, we keep coming to the topic of the sad state of affairs that Japanese animation seems to be in these days.
I remember when we were still roaming the halls of compulsory education; it was action, folding and developing plot lines, slice of life with depth of character, or light hearted escape. Now it’s mindless fights that have no plot to drive them, almost absolute predictability in story telling, characters that leave everything to be desired (and that are SO archetypal that you feel like they’ve bored you in the first 10 minutes), and crud so saccharin it seems catered as much to a cucumber as it does to you.
Even amidst all of this, I figure I want to pick up an art form I know has brought me some of the most unexpected changes in p.o.v. So I check out Random Curiosity‘s Spring, 2011 preview list.
I have to admit I’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that any prospects show up at all. It’s true there’s your monster battle carbon copies, über cute magical girly gobs, excessively hodge-podged fantasy, and your share of useless robots.
But a few stick out like a sore thumb of potential.
昭和物語（Showa Monogatari)
へようげもの（Hyouge Mono)
ユルアニ？（Yuruani?)
and
Appleseed XIII
I’ll let you check the bit on each of them on your own but…
This is my thing. I guess what I’m looking for is something I can relate to. I’m 23 years old, two years out of college and faced with a tonne of real life decisions to make, a life to build and trying to come to a conclusion of what the world “is” or “is like”. I don’t need poorly pieced together tales with gaudy animation, or school days episodics that don’t even resonate to my experience.
I want something with depth, with characters that aren’t predictable or perfect. I want something that makes me think cyberpunk isn’t dead, along with the creativity, grit and concern for the future that spawned it. I want something makes something more of MY everyday, work, home (and when I’m luck, class).
In other words, I guess I’m looking for something adult. It’s funny. I remember when the only anime you could get in town was at Suncoast Video and most of it was crap, not because there wasn’t anything out there, but because people bringing it stateside didn’t know better (or were expat trolls). One of our biggest sticks to fight of the mob of ”that’s just cartoon porn”, (or oddly opposite), “Aren’t cartoons just for kids?”, was our feelings that there was skillful story telling, and that there was something that everyone could take away if they picked up Ghost in the Shell (what is it that makes us human?), or Cowboy Beebop ( a new take on noir, and KNOWING a soundtrack can be everything.). Anime and Manga are for adults too.
The only things that seem to still remain of “adult” in much anime now is violence, sensuality and the like.
Where are we. . . ?
-Beat
