I have joined the Anime Club. (waits for Elena to choke back vomit)
This indeed makes me far more of a geek, but really, all St. John's guys are geeks. The girls are fairly normal; just a bit more philisophically minded. But the guys....no hope for us. We have our frat boys, never fear, but our frat boys.....love Verdi and Mozart's....operas. Yeah. You can imagine.
We make jokes about non-Euclidean geometry, reference Plato's dialogues in obscure, humorous ways, and dress up as Moses sophmore year for an Ark Party at the top of Camino de Monte Sol. Are we geeks? I leave that up to you.
But to return to anime. Abby and Zach have already been infected - most notably with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Elena of course hates it :( but probably because she's never seen good anime. Probably Pokemon and DragonBall Z. Good anime "Takes you to a place where you are intellectually very uncomfortable and explores that issue", according to the head of the Anime Club (who oddly enough is my economics study group tutor)
I have been blessed that I have only seen good anime. Bredon is mostly to thank for that - a handful of Miyazaki movies, Lain, Akira, and most recently, Millennium Actress.
Part of why I like good anime is because of culture shock. The Japanese treatment of familiar Western themes of love, romance, honor, and virtue are handled is such a different way than I am normally accustomed to understanding them.
Another reason is perhaps a sense of nonresolution. Many anime movies end on the cinimatic equivilant of a C minor diminished seventh chord. (ask Dad to play that on the piano) Not every issue in human life fully resolves and anime reflects this.
Lastly, and most importantly for me, good anime is a beautiful art form. Everything ties itself together in a magnificent display of Japanese culture, history, and worldview.
Go ahead. Don't knock it till you've tried it. (this may or may not apply to Mom and Dad who probably do not care for Japanese animation)
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5 comments:
I think it is a form of art and is artistic in nature, but one that I personally don't particularly find very "artful." I don't really care for the exagerated features (hair/eyes). I haven't seen any movies, but from what I have seen in terms of artwork and video games, I find the men to be rather feminine looking, the women to have their anatomy exaggerated, and the costumes to be unneccessarily racey for the occassion. I think its distracting. I could go on but that would lead me onto the topic of culture which would lead to a discussion of school girls, tentacles, and hentai, all of which I really don't know much about but have problems with.
I guess I am with Becca on this one. With most art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?
I think Rebecca has seen mostly bad anime. Final Fantasy is not a particularly wonderful example.
Try Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.
I don't 'hate' anime. I've enjoyed a fair number of anime movies, but for the most part find them few and far between; Paprika, Princess Mononoke, Graveyard of the Fireflies, Spirited Away. Sure. I can enjoy that. Yet I also find the concept of dealing with very adult themes through animation strange.
I'm also repelled by the way the figure is rendered in anime; bodies, especially supposedly sexual ones, are rendered in a very childlike, pseudo innocent manner that just screams "paedophilia!" to me.
I agree with Elena. Not only do the characters often resemble children, but there are also several instances of females (and some males I guess but I have mostly seen females) with ears, tales, whiskers, and the like, which is a little strange I think. And I think "anime" as a term encompases more than just movies, its the entire artform, which is what I criticize.
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