Favorite Anime Genres
Sci-fi (including mecha)
Fantasy
Drama
Historical

Least Favorite "Genres"
Harem
Moe
Ecchi
Hentai

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When I'm rating or reviewing anime, I have very high standards. I believe that anime is not a genre, and should not just be compared to other animes. I like to compare them to the great classics of cinema, such as The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, 2001, The Good Bad and the Ugly, and Schindler's List.

I believe that if you confine anime to only a small niche audience, and judge it accordingly, it limits creativity and prevents a larger audience from enjoying it. This is why I think the anime industry is dying. They are too afraid to branch out and try new things. They like to conveniently stick to familiar cliches and conventions rather than experiment with new concepts of the animation medium. Whether the cause may be arrogance or ignorance, animes are starting to look far too similar, and the characters are becoming all too familiar from series to series. Should anime start trying new things? Yes, I think they should.

I also believe that too many animes rely too much on dialogue to tell their story. Actions contain greater truth and say far more than words or thoughts. Actions allow us to see what someone is really like. They allow us to see an unbiased view of a character, with no lies, no propaganda, just the truth. People can lie to others with their words, and they can lie to themselves with their thoughts. It's not what you say or what you think, it's what you do that defines you.

I believe that characters are far more important than the story. Story is rather overrated, in my opinion. Just go watch Once Upon A Time in the West. The story is rather mediocre, but it's got some of the greatest, most developed and memorable characters ever to appear in cinema.

Are character actions underrated? Yes, I believe so. Visual storytelling is not childish -- it is IMO the most profound form of storytelling and one of the most efficient forms of communication. It breaks all language barriers. I believe that animation is an artistic medium (not a genre) with strengths that greatly favor visual storytelling. There is nothing that can't be done or can't be imagined through animation. Anything is possible.

Leuconoe | 08-14-08, 2:17 PM Hmm. I suspect (though it's hard to say for sure) that the appeal to novelty remark is specifically aimed at what you said about traditional anime stylisation (big eyes &c). In a sense, I suppose you yourself accused animators of the opposite fallacy, an appeal to tradition: they're sticking to the traditional anime aesthetic for no better reason than the fact that it is a tradition. Partly this rides on whether or not there are inherent advantages to characters with big eyes, and I suspect there might be - maybe they does convey more emotion, and maybe we are hardwired to think big eyes are cute. Then again, the appeal to novelty is less fallacious when you're talking about something relatively inconsequential like the way that characters are animated. It's not as though we're discussing something as momentous as a new piece of legislation, or something. Generalisations are, to some extent, necessary if you want to say anything meaningful without tying yourself up in qualifications and extra grammatical clauses. I'm sure there are anime that buck the trends you describe (Kaiba, for example, is anything but traditional - I see it's on your Plan to Watch list.) Good job on the Nausicaä review, by the way. Personally, I thought the speed you spoke at - a bit faster than previously - was about right, and I agree with your verdict: it's not perfect, but it's probably obligatory watching and it's definitely good (I think it's also my favourite of the Miyazaki films I've seen). I thought the humour worked reasonably well, too, though obviously sense of humour can really vary from person to person. Oh yeah, apparently the Nausicaä manga is considerably more awesome. I should get round to trying it some time. Reply - Anime - Manga

	nerva | 08-13-08, 8:16 AM Sorry for the late reply, I was browsing. >.< Do you make AMVS? :o I'd like to check out your videos. :] Reply - Anime - Manga

	nerva | 08-13-08, 7:08 AM Hey there. :] You added me a while back, but we never got the chance to talk. How's life? Reply - Anime - Manga

Leuconoe | 08-13-08, 5:33 AM Interesting to hear you liked McKee. Someone recommended Story to me and I read it a few months back. I rather liked it because it was so practical, though I'm not sure I agree with McKee when he suggests that the fundamentals of good storytelling don't change over time. It's possible that I'm thinking of a slightly different question there, though: maybe there have been periods of history, and will be periods in the future, during which people didn't want good stories. Reply - Anime - Manga

YourMessageHere | 08-12-08, 10:38 AM Dodginess is in the eye of the beholder. "Dodgy" isn't an absolute, just as neither "good" nor "bad" is absolute when talking about an interpretive piece of media like a film. As I said (but now I reread, didn't make clear) I very much dislike Ninja Scroll artwork - it seems heavy and cumbersome, not unlike some western comic strips. The section of the Animatrix done by Ninja Scroll's director (I forget his name) was the same. It's well drawn; I'll not deny that, I just dislike that style and prefer more traditional anime art styles. Akira's peculiar facial depictions are less unpleasant for me, simply noticably peculiar. They jump out at me every time I see Akira. I don't really object to them, so in this case "dodgy" simply means peculiar rather than actually bad (does the word have that meaning in the US? I don't know). That tag is intended to be fairly flexible in meaning, which is why I used "dodgy" rather than "bad" or an analogue. The Akira colour palette, too, is unusual rather than bad. For a long time I thought a lot of the film, especially the characters, looked oddly washed out, but I got a book of Hiroshige ukiyo-e prints recently and it occurred to me that the colours Hiroshige used are remarkably similar to those used for Akira's characters. Perhaps Otomo is trying to subtly link the pale, softly shaded characters with past ideals of Japanese life, then superimposing them on a dark, vivid futuristic dystopian background - yet another contrast in a film full of them. I'm not dismissing Ninja Scroll's or Akira's artwork; while I hope nothing else like Ninja Scroll ever happens, in Akira's case I'd be interested to see other productions with very different types of story use the same art style, and I could probably get used to it reasonably easily if it were more frequently used. I agree it's good to experiment, and the way I see it, there's a lot of experiments going on in anime all the time; look at Kaiba or Chi's Sweet Home. The new Ghibli is said to resemble My Neighbours the Yamadas in style rather than any of Ghibli's more traditional work. Although a lot of series seem pretty interchangable, any two given things are unlikely to look exactly the same. Where is the art if everything is done the same? That seems a silly question to me. Where, given it is 'all done the same', is the art in live action? In shot design, art design and direction, lighting, costume, mise-en-scene, choreography, set design and architecture...and that's only the visual elements. A visual style is like picking the paint colours, it's up to the artist to actually use them to make a picture. Reply - Anime - Manga

YourMessageHere | 08-12-08, 5:25 AM Bearing in mind I saw it many years ago, I recall that everything had a thick black outline, which I found to be extremely ugly. Each to their own. Akira on the other hand is very good looking; however there is something about the art style, most notably the colour palette and the way that faces are drawn, that is very distinctive and pretty much unique. The faces in particular are a peculiar blend of realistic shape and traditional anime characterisation that seems to me like something of a failed experiment. That's not to say they're bad, in fact some are very expressive, it's just they look inescapably wrong to me. Make sense now? =) Reply - Anime - Manga

	Leuconoe | 08-12-08, 4:52 AM I'll be sure to watch and rate, though I generally have an aversion to commenting on YouTube. Reply - Anime - Manga

	Leuconoe | 08-10-08, 3:16 AM Yeah, no problem - if I post something somewhere relatively public, I'm happy for it to be quoted. Good work on the review of The Cat Returns, by the way - the image you used to demonstrate how the characters were drawn looking somehow a bit flat, contrasted against really good backgrounds was a particularly well-chosen picture. Reply - Anime - Manga

	SpiralKing | 08-09-08, 2:51 PM Ah, a friend request. I didn't even know what that (1) was. Unfortunately, I only friend people I know. I have to say, you have good taste in the animu as well. I can see we are about the only two people in this entire universe who realize how amazing Honneamise is. Reply - Anime - Manga

	name_one | 08-07-08, 2:42 PM Thanks for explaining the history of those anime for me. And thanks for changing the link in your blog, too. I'm reading the article right now and it's interesting. It's making a lot of sense. Reply - Anime - Manga

	dabazzinator | 08-06-08, 4:03 PM yeah we do have a lot of the same tastes in genres. good to meet ya and stay in touch. Reply - Anime - Manga

	Alberto | 08-06-08, 12:49 AM Great youtube reviews. Reply - Anime - Manga

animedreamer240 | 08-05-08, 9:07 AM Yeah, considering that Monster has 74 episodes, you're bound to bump into filler from time to time, and sometimes the story feels like it's dragging. I don't usually go for long series, but in the case of Monster and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, they needed time to build up the characters and plot. I have enjoyed every single minute of both. My anime life wouldn't have felt this great without discovering those two brilliant pieces of work, to be honest. Ahhh I think I get what you mean now! I was just thinking within the anime fanbase, but when you include non-anime fans into the picture, it's no wonder that so many of them are turned off by anime. The large number of overrated, cliched anime coming out won't help non-anime fans get into it. If only there was a lot more variety, anime would appeal to more and more people. If the anime industry won't produce some of that variety soon, it will continue to push the mainstream audience away. Thus, as the mainstream audience grows, the number of dedicated anime fans become a smaller island of people in comparison to the whole. And that indicates the dying of the anime industry....wait...NUUU!!!!!!!!!!! T_T I don't like to think this pessimistic. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts! >.<!! Anime shall never die in my heart. <3 My dad is interested in anime, actually. He is enjoying Monster right now, but he wouldn't watch it on his own; he just waits for me to pull up the next episode for us to watch. At least he asks to watch it. And I showed him the movie Tekkonkinkreet a few weeks ago, and he thought it was pretty deep and interesting. Other titles he was interested in were Samurai 7 and Le Chevalier D'eon. I appreciate a good critic when I see one. ^^ It kind of bothers me when I meet people who give a 10/10 for every anime they watched. It's as if they see no difference in quality or plot substance. And I like to hear a good reason why people give anime the scores that they give them. Definitely keep up your reviewing; I plan to check out your Angels Egg video after I finish it today. -sigh- I have always wanted to write anime reviews. I sure hope to get around to that soon. D= By the way, have you glimpsed at any anime produced by 4c Studio? I recommend Tekkonkinkreet and Mind Game. They're slow-paced films as well, but they're very surreal and deep. Reply - Anime - Manga

Leuconoe | 08-05-08, 5:54 AM What's up? Not much, really. The British summer is still refusing to be warm, I'm doing odd bits and pieces of volunteering aroud my hometown, and just watching anime or reading. One of the fun things about studying literature is that reading as a hobby suddenly has a purpose - does the same happen when you study film, in that relaxing and watching a film can also be useful for your study? Or do you find that being forced to study films very closely ruins your enjoyment? Reply - Anime - Manga

	name_one | 08-05-08, 1:05 AM But anime can't be dying; I only just found it :( You seem to know a lot about its history. I had no idea Nausicaa was an innovation. How so? Same with Astroboy (although I've never seen that one, only heard of it). Reply - Anime - Manga