Anime and Manga - I respect the first human to have eaten a mushroom

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Wolf Children (2012). @Sarex, look away - I could not even finish it. It's so extreme that I couldn't even get out of the prologue. I am now going to go on a completely insane and unhinged rant about anime drama films and why they almost never seem to work for me. Please do not take it personally, or better yet, don't even read it in the first place.

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Honest question: is there some unwritten rule about modern anime dramas that they have to start out by making the absolute worst impression possible? My gosh, it's like the equivalent of a video game that punches you in the face with an hour of cutscenes before the game has even really begun. Please, just start the actual game right now and fill me in on the details that I need to know along the way through a combination of environmental and direct storytelling as is appropriate. In other words, do not give me the ten minute-long monologue & piano session where a character(s) drones on and on while acting pathetic before we actually start to get on the events of the film proper. I liked A Letter to Momo better because that part of the movie only lasted like a minute or two before the movie started - this one took twelve minutes of my life to tell me "my mom fell in love with a furry" (this is worse than it sounds, honestly - they somehow conspired to make the entire sequence feel final breaths of your life slow and pointless while also making them fall in love in what feels like two seconds based off of almost nothing, probably because the entire thing is such an obvious "we're at point A where they're not in love and we need to get to point B where they are in love while having literally absolutely nothing to fill in between those points because this is an utterly farcical and unnecessary prologue sequence in a bloated two hour movie"), and then another six for the monologuer that's been telling the story so far to get to "they had unprotected furry-human sex and then I happened".

This is where I've stopped - the protagonist was just born, she's still a baby, and it looks like this nonsense is going to continue on for a while. I'm already so irate with this movie, I don't see how I can possibly continue it and get anything out of it. It's like all of these drama anime directors forgot that you can tell a story without dumping every possible crumb of information onto the viewer right off the bat in the most clumsy fashion possible...you can leave the viewer to figure some things out on their own while throwing them some bones when it's relevant and convenient (and only if the information is actually necessary in the first place, which I quite frankly don't think any of this actually is, but I'll probably never figure out for sure because I can't watch this). GAH!

Anyways, pretty good movie, I fully recommend it to everyone here, .

 

You made me watch the first part of the movie again. Hmmm, fair enough it does start with cheap drama, but imo after the intro it gains more traction. Guess I don't mind those cheap tricks if they are not the whole movie, but I can see how it could spoil it for you.

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

You made me watch the first part of the movie again. Hmmm, fair enough it does start with cheap drama, but imo after the intro it gains more traction. Guess I don't mind those cheap tricks if they are not the whole movie, but I can see how it could spoil it for you.

It's perfectly fine to like this sort of thing, truly and honestly. I am by no means the ultimate arbitrator of what is and isn't O.K. to do in film, animated or otherwise. There's plenty of proof of that in this thread alone, where most everyone else here cannot even begin to understand what it is exactly that catches my eye and delights me in the various things that I've enjoyed that does absolutely nothing for the rest of you, while what individually appeals to and excites everyone else equally does nothing for me. It's pretty much exactly what I was talking about two pages ago when I said there is something inherently offensive to me in films like this and A Silent Voice. Their style and sensibilities in how they attempt to present characters, dialogue, and tone, how they try to convey ideas and plot is so quickly and so intensely wrong to me that I don't think we are reconcilable. It's setting something off in my brain that causes the same sort of extreme resentment for @majestic that makes it impossible for him to enjoy any aspect of nu-Star Trek, even the parts that are actually similar to the old Star Trek shows that he does enjoy...but the thing is, I also have a way lower tolerance for what I hate than majestic does, and so I can't keep watching something that violates my sense of how things should be done to its very core like he is able to. The most I can do is take a few minutes of it at a time if it's between other stuff that I do actually like. It seems like a very remote chance that if I were to watch another half hour that it's all going to start to click, or that I'm going to suddenly like the style and characters of the film when I so strongly did not for the first twenty minutes.

Edited June 19, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

45 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

The most I can do is take a few minutes of it at a time if it's between other stuff that I do actually like. It seems like a very remote chance that if I were to watch another half hour that it's all going to start to click, or that I'm going to suddenly like the style and characters of the film when I so strongly did not for the first twenty minutes.

Ah no, that wasn't my intention, I think it would be counter productive to force yourself to watch something that isn't working for you.

[majestic]

Lady Asuka 20: Everyone is unhappy and miserable. 

[InsaneCommander]

Samurai Champloo 6-8

The trio continues to travel. Food is difficult to get so they enter a food contest.

Spoiler

“How much food can a human being eat? Her stomach is connected to the void of the universe!”

They also resort to gambling and pawning Jin’s glasses, just to lose their money to pickpockets or charming women. Twice!

 

[majestic]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

Lady Asuka 20: Everyone is unhappy and miserable. 

Amazon Prime is doing me a favor and will make Lady Asuka disappear in three days. Not going to binge 20 episodes in that time.

Guess that means I'll get to listen to the original VA somewhat soonish, that might improve the show a bit - or make it much worse.

[Sarex]

RuriDragon continues to be cozy and sweet.

[LadyCrimson]

^  That eating contest episode of Champloo is so funny.... 

...I watched about 20 minutes of the first episode of Spriggan on Netflix and felt like I had no clue what was going on. But in that way where I'm not sure if it's simply my sluggish  brain and maybe if I can get past a hurdle I'll find it interesting. I like the style enough so I'll keep watching and will hopefully stop scratching my head.

[LadyCrimson]

2.5 episodes of Spriggan - ok, figured out that it seems kinda episodic (even tho there aren't many episodes). Tech that is too high-powered/dangerous for mere humanity at this time, and groups trying to grab it and/or protect it each episode (well, what I watched anyway). Got it. I started out liking the style because it reminded me a little more of "older" anime in some ways, but the writing, editing, and chrs. started to weigh it down. Probably won't finish it.

Also, the ...digital? cgi? ... animation didn't work for me here. Either because budget or style, dunno. Where despite all the image clarity, it looks too sterile and clean, both graphically and re: motion, if that makes any sense. I have issues with that fairly frequently re: modern animation more and more often. I find it distracting, like an animation version of uncanny valley.

[Bartimaeus]

36 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Also, the ...digital? cgi? ... animation didn't work for me here. Either because budget or style, dunno. Where despite all the image clarity, it looks too sterile and clean, both graphically and re: motion, if that makes any sense. I have issues with that fairly frequently re: modern animation more and more often. I find it distracting, like an animation version of uncanny valley.

If it's the actual 2D drawn stuff, it's most likely just the result of the entire process being digital. There are actually people (and sometimes studios*!) out there who try to take the wonderfully soft and noisy traditional animation of older movies and shows and blast it with various filters until it looks "digital". Generally, it's a matter of blurring everything, removing and evening out noise, and then super sharpening lines/edges, all to result in what I call a very plastic looking effect. It's hideous to me. Probably last month, I was doing a source comparison for 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, and for HD sources, there is effectively one scan used by the blurays (although that scan has been tinkered with a few times between the different bluray releases over the years) and also a very distinct scan that was instead used for a rare TV broadcast. The TV broadcast, bizarrely, pretty much blows the bluray scan out of the water in terms of clarity, level of detail, and film grain (and also has a larger matte** to boot)...but the person who made the recording lost the original file (with only some screenshots still remaining of it) while re-encoding it after having plasticized it through filters so that it looks atrocious. Just a terrible human being on the whole really, .

*Terminator 2, which isn't even animation, got destroyed in a recent 4K bluray release because of whatever studio was responsible for handling it deciding they didn't like noise and filtering it to high hell - the original 1080p bluray consequently looks more detailed and less gross.

**That is, more of the frame is visible and not cut-off arbitrarily like in the bluray release. See, for a very clear-cut example, Watership Down in its original bluray release vs. the recent Criterion "remaster". Screw you and whatever the original aspect ratio was (if that's even the case), give me the complete frame if they actually drew it and there aren't any obvious problems with it.

Edited June 21, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Amentep]

Didn't get a chance to watch Cobra this week but did start reading some of Berserk.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 minute ago, Amentep said:

Didn't get a chance to watch Cobra this week but did start reading some of Berserk.

GRIFFFFIIIIIITTTTTTTTHHHHHHHH!

[Sarex]

4 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Didn't get a chance to watch Cobra this week but did start reading some of Berserk.

Let us know when you get to the scene.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

8 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Let us know when you get to the scene.

Do you mean

Spoiler

The Eclipse?

because boy howdy, that is gonna be a big shock.

[Sarex]

There is only one scene that can be the scene and it's that one.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

What about

Spoiler

The rape horse?

 

[Sarex]

That's a scene in Berserk I would say.

Doesn't reach THE heights.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

You know what does reach that height though?

Spoiler

 

 

[majestic]

21 minutes ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

What about

  Reveal hidden contents

The rape horse?

 

Pegasus is in Berserk?

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

5 minutes ago, majestic said:

Pegasus is in Berserk?

Too old for Pedosus.

[uuuhhii]

really hope more people watched hanamonogatari

one of the best op even though sawashiro miyuki are not that good at singing

[Amentep]

On 6/21/2022 at 11:43 AM, Sarex said:

Let us know when you get to the scene.

Heheh, I apparently have much to look forward to (for good or ill)...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

6 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Heheh, I apparently have much to look forward to (for good or ill)...

Both good and ill.

I remembered Hellsing and want to rewatch the OVA now. 2nd best Nazi Cyborg in anime.

[Sarex]

4 hours ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

Both good and ill.

I remembered Hellsing and want to rewatch the OVA now. 2nd best Nazi Cyborg in anime.

Hellsing has one of the best finales in manga that I ever read, which is not saying much as endings are usually their achilles heel, but even saying that it's still great.

Never got in to his second manga Drifters. It has an interesting concept, but it never grabbed me. It is still going, so it must have a following.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

Hellsing has one of the best finales in manga that I ever read, which is not saying much as endings are usually their achilles heel, but even saying that it's still great.

Never got in to his second manga Drifters. It has an interesting concept, but it never grabbed me. It is still going, so it must have a following.

I went into the anime completely blind. Was not disappointed at all.

Alucard's full release was something else. Hordes of the people he devoured over the years killing the nazi vampires and catholic soldiers was unexpected.