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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1577421" data-attributes="member: 6929">These are things endemic to anime and manga (which are tied very closely). They're not present in all anime, for which I count my lucky stars.- Visual shortcut lexicon: big sweatdrops, the 'wavy tearstream', mouths bigger than heads, blue wavy lines and all sorts of things that have meanings but are not immediately apparent and are blatantly unrealistic. I hate this stuff, even though I've learned to read it like the heiroglyphic system it really is. It breaks suspension of disbelief: you're supposed to be watching moving entities, not codified terms that might as well be printed a hundred to the page. (American animation is just as guilty of this. When was the last time you saw a Looney Toon's eyes pop out of his head? Or seen eyes perfectly white against utter darkness? These, however, are implemented more dimensionally, with motion, without abrupt transition. So I don't mind 'em quite as much. Grossout Nick cartoons and their ilk are, conversely, utterly abhorrent to me. I will never willingly watch Spongebob Squarepants.)- Drastic economy of motion. Animation is the presentation of sequentially altered images to create the illusion of motion. Anime will often not take advantage of this, simply because it costs more to draw multiple versions of the same thing - and the preponderance of manga-based stuff means there's an abundance of still images to redraw once, colour, and twitch a little on a bright blurry background. Of course, when they do deign to implement motion, it's often pretty fantastic, but it's all too rare in most fare.- Shouted attacks. We all know this one. Heck, the Japanese all know it too, and timestops during the shout are getting rarer. Good.- Different goals. This is a big advantage of anime - the willingness to think outside the box. Often, they don't. Huge chunks of anime are just 'if we all work together, we'll overcome our enemies!'. Sometimes, however, they'll try to evoke a different mood, show you something different. Consider Ghost In The Shell, which you'd think was a cyberpunk story - but according to the Japanese voice actors, it's a love story. Yeah, I think they're on something too, but I'm now willing to alter my mindset and see different things in there instead of 'cool, shooting stuff, yeah'. It doesn't have to be about entertainment so much as experience. Subtle, but some of the time they achieve what they're setting out to do.This also ties into the fact that anime really does have every genre under the sun somewhere under its umbrella. (Woo, mixed metaphors.) And then it gets funky and comes up with stuff you can't get anywhere else - for a novelty junkie like myself, that's great. For someone whose xenophobia instinct (a vital part of every living being - not an insult here) is stronger than mine, maybe it's not so great.- Different story paradigms. Western entertainment tends to go 'heroes suffer great trials and overcome them to win the day'. Anime can easily go 'heroes suffer great trials, one of 'em dies, the others win the day and he stays dead', or 'heroes wander the world, doing stuff in alignment with their philosophy, stuff happens, the end', or something else that isn't formulaic. I've caught flak in the past for suggesting that people are too conditioned to the Campbellian Journey of a very specific type, but that's just what I think may turn people off to a lot of anime. For example, I liked the Final Fantasy movie and the Matrix sequels, and they weren't typical 'good guys save the day and live happily ever after' fare.There's a blurry analysis of anime for you. Most of it is, indeed, crap. But some of it isn't. I've seen stuff so simple you could replicate it in five minutes with some cardboard, a ruler, and a knife (Pokemon, frex). I've seen stuff that puts any Western comic to shame (manga, mostly; there's one passing shot of aircraft undercarriage in Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams comic that is both in-style and so detailed it looks like a photo - it probably was, once, but it's there, it fits, and I've never seen anything so well-integrated in Western stuff).So, in the end, I hate stuff that's stupid and try to catch the good stuff. But then, I always do.</blockquote>

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