Tag Archives: Art

Clannad – A Critical Overview on Character Development, Dramatic Structure, and Thematic Dissonance

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Question:

What’s your problem with Clannad? Have you no soul?!?

Bobduh:

Quite likely. However, my main problems are that up until halfway through Afterstory, it’s a combination of cliched, one-note characters, repetitive slapstick, and maudlin sub-Angel Beats melodrama. Then it gets very interesting and unique for about ten episodes, then it flips the audience off with an ending that invalidates all the good parts.

Question:

But isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man?

Bobduh:

Let’s take this one item at a time.

Cliched one-note characters and repetitive slapstick, I don’t think you can really defend against. It’s hard to dispute that for the greater part of the series, most of the characters are defined by one core attribute – Kyou is a tsundere, Kotomi is the Rei-clone, Nagisa is straight moe, etc. The “repetitive slapstick” is even less arguable, since that just is true – some people find this more funny than others, but the fact is this show repeats its jokes constantly, and most of them are of the broad physical comedy variety. Easy, broad humor is a problem common to a lot of anime, but that doesn’t make it less of an issue.

The problem with the drama is that the show doesn’t give you a reason to care about the characters before telling a sad story – it introduces them as their character type, and they remain that type, but sad things happen around them. Fuko is only ever “ditzy girl who likes starfish”, but we are expected to feel sorry for her because life is sad. That’s not really how characterization and empathy work in storytelling – this is clearly subjective (I mean, a lot of people think Angel Beats is good), but I can pretty confidently say this show hasn’t learned the give and take of characterization and drama that Disappearance of Haruhi or Toradora have a mastery of. A tragic backstory doesn’t create character depth unless you see that depth in the characters themselves, and the side-arc characters are pretty uniformly shallow.

Then there’s Afterstory. For the second half of this season, I was actually extremely impressed with the show. It went beyond the usual high school daily life experience, showing things like the pressure/pride of personal responsibility and the tiring but satisfying honor of a manual blue-collar job. What other anime covers this stuff? It was also handled with much more grace and subtlety than the prior arcs – it felt like the show had an entirely new, much more talented director. The death of Nagisa actually struck me, since the second half had been full of great character-building moments between her and Tomoya, and the episode where Tomoya doesn’t know what to do with the daughter he’s abandoned is in my mind one of the strongest episodes of any anime. Even the stuff with his father is deftly done.

When Ushio became sick, I figured the show was finally pulling its strands together – the themes of nostalgia, of embracing the past while accepting sadness and moving forward, and the recurring references to the hospital/hill that saved Nagisa were all going to come together, and Tomoya would just barely save Ushio by getting her to the hospital, the “place where dreams come true” – this would be Nagisa’s last gift to him. It would be bittersweet, since Nagisa would still be gone, but life is full of sadness, and you have to learn to cherish your past without being captured by it.

Instead, all of that raw character building and sharp reflection on the earlier themes of the show turns out to be a dream because magic, and everyone lives happily ever after. Not only is this literally deus ex machina (god just decides to save them because they’ve been good all year), which is never good storytelling, but it also undercuts the themes of the show. The entire strength of the last act had been built on mono no aware and the idea that unlike high school, life doesn’t have any easy answers… and then it concludes with an incredibly easy answer. Not cool.

I think there are many moments of this show that are well-directed, and I think when it’s working on the main Tomoya/Nagisa plot, it’s actually a pretty good and sometimes extremely good show, minus that ending. But I also think it’s a very flawed show, that it makes a lot of too-easy narrative and character choices, and that many parts of it simply don’t work storytelling-wise.

Question:

So basically you’re a heartless monster. But adapting Visual Novels is really tough, as you’ve discussed in the past. Are Clannad’s problems even solvable?

Bobduh:

The answer here is, “yes, but not easily.” Still, let’s see what we can do.

The main, huge problem is that by adopting all the paths of a Visual Novel, they destroyed the pacing of the storyline and added a huge amount of superfluous plot and very poor melodrama. From the first season, I would cut all episodes from the Fuko storyline up through the end of the Kotomi storyline. I would also cut those two characters entirely, since they’re the worst offenders on the “just exist to be moe” scale and add nothing to any other part of the series. I’d perform the same surgery on the second season, cutting out all the episodes from the second until when they finish the superfluous side arcs.

This would condense the series to roughly one 26 episode season, and do wonders for the pacing already. This would also indirectly help Nagisa’s character a great deal, as her character development would now be continuous, as opposed to randomly stopping for 10-12 episode stretches. Tomoya would also lose a lot of his generic VN protagonist Woman Fixer absurdity. There’s still work to be done, though.

Sunohara would have to be fixed. His character is two jokes repeated over and over (Sunohara likes girls LOL, Sunohara gets hit LOL), and his character development arc requires him to randomly become an asshole for several episodes and then be “fixed” by Tomoya. Cut his sister, give him one or two actually good traits, and set his motivation arc in place from the first couple episodes. The resolution of the baseball team storyline was actually one of the better moments of the early stuff, so focus on what made this strong – his temper, his convictions, his bond with Tomoya.

Nagisa also needs work – she eventually comes into her own as a character, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple more defining traits than “cute, helpless moeblob” for the first half of the series. No, liking the dango family is not a personality – but it might be the lead-in to one. Find something to make her stand out and have a better-defined character arc of her own – right now, character arcs happen around her, but her own agency is very minimal.

Tomoyo is fine. Kyou is a generic tsundere, but she also gets some of the most honest conversations with Tomoya, so she’s also probably fine. Ryou probably doesn’t need to exist… no, actually, it would probably be better if Ryou were Kyou’s male twin. This would kill any last vestiges of haremness, and delete the last unnecessary moeblob. I’d suggest something even more drastic, like give male Ryou a crush on Sunohara, but anime writers apparently can’t handle gay characters without making them into tasteless jokes, so I’ll just leave that alone.

Finally, we’d have to fix the ending. Adding a “magic fixes everything” ending cheapens the themes of honest work, perseverance, and helping to hold each other up that are present all throughout After Story. Bringing Nagisa back to life destroys the significance of Tomoya’s character growth in the last, best act of the show. Instead, have that scene where Tomoya questions if he should have met Nagisa at all simply inspire him to get back up. Tomoya runs to the hospital on the hill, cradling his (unconscious, but not dead) daughter as he reflects on his time with Nagisa and all the people he’s met in this city. He wants to hate this place, but he can’t; like Nagisa said, this is where they were born, and there’s too much of him, too much of Nagisa in this place. He reaches the hospital where Nagisa was saved and begs them to save Ushio; she just barely pulls through. Nagisa is still gone, but his memories of her helped him save the daughter they were meant to raise together, in the city he’s come to love.

This maintains the strength of the last act while actually tying together the earlier themes and foreshadowing. Plus, by cutting the magical glowing balls, Tomoya’s early helpfulness can be resolved by something that actually helps the story – have it be his way of attempting to be the opposite of his father. If Nagisa makes him realize this, it would even help her character, too.

There’s an incredible show hiding somewhere in Clannad, but the humor, pacing, and early melodrama make it very hard to find. I think as a one season show that abandoned directly adopting the VN and instead attempted to tell a single story well, it could be something truly great.

Quick Aside on Critical Media Appreciation

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Question:

I feel that my experiences talking with the anime community have forced me to acknowledge too many flaws in shows I used to enjoy, thus lessening my enjoyment of anime. Do you think this is a necessary consequence of engaging with the anime community?

Bobduh:

The process that you’re ascribing to the internet here is basically “forcing me to apply critical thinking to my media”. To me, this is the opposite of a bad thing; stress-testing my opinions on and off the internet has helped me become a more discerning and critically-minded human being. Moving from simply enjoying or not enjoying a show to appreciating the thousand pieces that make up its artistic DNA is like stepping out from black and white Kansas into technicolor Oz.

There are so many shows that really reward a deeper look, and you can still enjoy any show you connect to while also being aware it’s not a perfect work. In fact, sometimes I actually enjoy shows for their flaws – often what a director was trying to say is most apparent in the way their show fails or overreaches, and if I weren’t looking for things like this, I’d just think “bad” and miss the humanity of the show. For me, a critical eye for media only enhances my appreciation of anime.

On the other hand, I think the specific point that discussion on the internet has helped me realize is that enjoyment and aesthetic respect or appreciation are two very different things. I can enjoy mediocre shows because they appeal to me while acknowledging they’re mediocre; I can respect well-crafted shows that don’t appeal to me without feeling obligated to watch them. Being able to look at media critically shouldn’t stop you from liking what you like.

Thoughts on Formulaic Storytelling and Critiquing Entertainment

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Management: This discussion was prompted by the creator of this blog post reflecting on the role repetition plays in enabling climactic and satisfying reversals in storytelling, and how our repetition-bred expectations can lead to more resonant moments in media. It’s a great article and a fascinating subject, and I only begin to explore the artistic implications here.

Question:

Do you consider the formulaic structure so much anime adopts a problem for you?

Bobduh:

I really like the point your article raises, about formula-breaking moments containing that much more power and significance by virtue of how established those formulas were prior to that point. The problem as I see it is that those moments don’t actually validate all the formulaic stuff that came before – sure, they lend it added significance, but they don’t make it in and of itself worthwhile or artistically interesting. I don’t know if there are any easy answers here, either… hm… let me cover some other facets of this, and then I’ll try to loop back around to that.

Alright, first, I do think formula does in fact have a place in certain works. It’s generally not that compatible with tight storytelling/character-building/thematic explorations, but not all shows are about those things, or need to be – for example, I think Madhouse’s Hunter x Hunter reboot is just a very fun exploration of the shonen genre, and most of the arcs follow semi-typical shonen structures, but the show is meant pretty specifically just to entertain. Well-crafted popcorn can be its own reward, and I think formula can be used to great effect there.

But regarding shows that actually want to say something, or develop characters with emotional resonance? There, I think it’s much more difficult to argue for formula, but there are still examples that kind of ride the borderline. For example, I think Cowboy Bebop is a great show that articulates a classic but still solid theme about the difficulty of rising above your past self and redefining/rebuilding yourself, but I also think it uses formula to great effect – many of the episodes are just “bounty-of-the-week” adventures, but they work very well as independent storytelling vignettes, and they contribute both to the mood/world-building as well as the slow-building empathy the audience is meant to feel for the emotionally distant/reserved protagonists. And many great shows are built almost entirely of similar thematically related vignettes (Kino’s Journey), and many other shows use a series of utterly unconnected and similarly structured conflicts to slowly build a mood and set of characters for the underlying story (Hyouka). There are endless examples of degrees of this, and frankly, the fact that anime is an episodic medium means that for most shows, the mere necessity of an initial conflict, rising tension, and resolution each episode will result in a number of semi-similar structures. This is just how storytelling works in mediums like this.

But I think your point was treading on more difficult ground – if the formulaic structure is useful purely because it provides a structure that can create suspense and surprise if deviated from. Honestly, within a single work, I don’t think this leads to incredibly successful art – it might lead to great moments, but as I said at the beginning, the subversion doesn’t retroactively grant all the prior material meaning, character, and distinction if it didn’t have those things to start.

However, I do think the meta-narrative trick of subverting expectations with the entire scope of a work can be effective and lead to consistent artwork, as long as that work is internally consistent. This is where I think shows like Eva and Madoka fall – even if part of their power comes from changing what came before, all the parts of those shows are solid on their own merits, and in fact the first few episodes of each provide some of that original context (though obviously well-written and tonally/thematically consistent with the later parts) to provide a portion of that dramatic turn even for people not well-versed in the relevant genres. Most of what makes these shows good is not their deconstructive or genre-defying nature anyway – it’s the fact that they’re well-written and well-produced stories with a lot of good inherent ideas, regardless of their position within an artistic tradition.

Incidentally, I think another interesting example of a similar effect is Aku no Hana – I don’t think it would come off nearly as effectively if audiences were used to rotoscoping, and that the art style intentionally serves to unbalance viewer expectations. But again, I think that art choice also results in a mood that works in that show’s favor outside of medium-conditioned viewer expectations, which makes this another example of “it works partially because of this expectation-subverting trick, but it also just plain works.”

Question:

Management: I’m rewriting this question so my response makes any goddamn sense – it wasn’t even really a question initially, but the subject is so interesting that I kind of went off on it regardless.

I think there may be differences in our standards of evaluation. I look for anime to succeed first and foremost as entertainment – and that moment of unexpected subversion results in great entertainment for me, regardless of whether it succeeds as “high art.” Also, you’ve covered a variety of ways formula can affect anime, but isn’t the phenomenon I’m referring to with Mazinger a little different from the craft arguments you’ve put forth?

Bobduh:

I don’t really mean to deny or demean the role of entertainment in media, I just feel that even (in fact, sometimes especially) shows that exist primarily to entertain still work within structures that can be examined and discussed – they have “goals” just like any message-oriented art, those goals are just different. For example, I think Redline is a pretty perfect piece of entertainment and nothing more, but it’s far from a stupid work – it displays an incredibly high degree of craft through its mastery of propulsive storytelling structure and economy of characterization/dialogue. Its “goal” is to entertain, but it entertains by doing what it does very intelligently and well. I don’t think saying “this work is just meant to be entertaining and nothing more” means it’s not useful or interesting to critically examine that work – it might not have deep themes to discuss, but storytelling is an art form worthy of discussion even if you disregard “message” works. So when I talk about whether a work is “successful” or not (I also don’t really like the high art/low art divide, and don’t find it all that meaningful), I’m mainly talking about whether I think it did the best job it could to succeed in its own goals, be they tell a taut and entertaining story or illuminate the nature of the universe or whatever.

But your point about entertainment being a relative value is a sound one. As much as I believe there are definite ways mastery and execution of craft can be close to objectively measured, art’s effect on the viewer, and what specific elements that viewer responds to, will always be a subjective, personal thing. It’s always good to keep that in mind.

I also agree that the specific situation your article describes is different and distinctive from the ones I’ve been discussing. There’s something more fundamentally shocking there, something that really seems difficult to quantify according to classic storytelling models… if I understand the kind of series Mazinger is, it seems like it conditions you to love these characters in the context of one entire genre over years, and then flips the table on you. That’s not just deconstructing a preexisting genre – that’s changing the stakes of a world you’re already emotionally invested in. The only example of that kind of thing which immediately comes to mind for me is Clannad, which is basically one story and genre of anime for 35 episodes, then abruptly shifts to another story and genre of anime, while keeping the characters you’ve already associated with the first mode. The thing is, I don’t think Clannad actually works in the way I talk about things “working,” because, well, first the writing is just not very good, but more fundamentally because the kinds of repetition that characterize the early arcs are not the correct kind of repetition for the emotional turn it’s hoping to provoke – they reflect more on tangential side characters, and their emotional stakes are not tied tightly enough to the actual protagonists, at least not often enough.

But if a story did do that… if it used the kind of repetition I mentioned Bebop or Hyouka employing for many episodes, and then veered into a turn in the way Clannad or Mazinger does…

Yeah, I think there’s a whole goddamn lot of resonant storytelling potential there.

Damn, now I’m getting all kinds of crazy ideas…

Thoughts on Art Appreciation, Anime Culture, and the State of the Medium

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Question:

How do you think anime and manga have affected your view of Japan and its culture/people?

Bobduh:

It hasn’t really influenced my perspective on Japanese culture, because most anime don’t try to be realistic, the ones that do tend to paint Japan as a nation of people just like any other (with some cultural quirks, obviously), and anime is generally not created to cater to the sensibilities of the “average Japanese person,” if such a thing can described of any person of any nationality (it can’t).

What it has done is give me a pretty solidly negative impression of the relevant, anime-watching market. But again, that’s still not a monolithic group.

Question:

Can you you elaborate on your negative impression of the anime market? I’m curious because I always see you give pretty insightful analyses of anime in general.

Management: I promise, I would have rephrased this question to be more neutral if my own response didn’t actually address the choice of words – and I think the tone of my response is kind of critical to keeping these discussions civil, so I’m leaving it as it was originally written

Bobduh:

That’s a dangerous question, but you also flattered me, and that’s well established to be my only weakness.

Let me preface this by saying that these are all my opinions, and most of what I’m talking about are things that are frustrating for me specifically as a consumer of media who would like to see more media that appeals to my interests. They are not value judgments on anyone outside of myself, and obviously people like media for different reasons, and that’s totally fine. People find their bliss in all sorts of ways; that’s totally cool. And I’m being reductive here as well, and I admit that, and I understand people are complicated organisms. And in addition to that, I don’t personally live in Japan, so everything I’ll be talking about will be inference based on the media I’ve seen, the ways I’ve seen audiences interact with that media, and the news surrounding fandom that has reached my distant, obviously not-fully-informed ears. One more time: these are all just my opinions, based on what appeals and matters to me. Alrighty.

Well, first there are the issues that could be leveled at the general audience of virtually any medium: the audience places a heavy premium on works that don’t really challenge them, they highly value familiarity and specific, sometimes problematic, sometimes just storytelling-averse tropes, they judge shows based on a variety of surface details as opposed to their underlying quality and nature, they judge all shows within similar frameworks of their own media desires, and will condemn or simply not engage with shows that have goals and ideas outside of their specific avenues of appreciation…

But as I said, that’s pretty much every medium. Anime seems to combine this with a few distinct and in my opinion negative additions: a pervasive acceptance of and even desire for sexist works, a particularly virulent desire for catering to their specific media and cultural preferences (Sakurasou getting attacked for containing a Korean meal, of all things), a predilection for “untroubled worlds” that don’t reflect any aspect of real experience and are generally storytelling and meaning-averse, a strange conflation of their media preferences and actually real-world identity and opinions (which is fine in moderation, but that’s not what I’m referring to here – and when you combine this with that fetishizing of “untroubled worlds” that don’t reflect reality you get things like the Aya Hirano slut-shaming scandal or the general idea of “idol purity” as something to be valued), and a related near-idolizing of various elements of their media (Love Plus vacation experiences, etc). Basically it seems like a portion of the audience’s attitudes and the industry’s need to cater to those attitudes to survive creates some kind of media obsession feedback loop that strikes me as socially limiting and also predisposed to result in awkward, artistically uninteresting media (which brings us back around to this being a problem primarily because I’m mad not enough people like what I like to dictate the majority of what gets produced, not because people don’t have the right to be who they are and like what they like, which they obviously do).

Question: 

It seems like you’re implying that anime will only continue on a downward spiral due to continuous re-enforcement of what you view as negative tropes (although I say “what you view as,” I’m pretty sure 90% would also regard those same tropes as negative). Think there’s any realistic way the current models can change?

Bobduh:

I honestly don’t think the situation is quite as dire as my post possibly implies – in fact, although many shows do seem to reflect the things I bring up, I’d say we’re actually entering/living within a period of relative artistic vitality.

Many people complain of desiring a return to anime’s “good old days” of the late 90s/early 00’s – perhaps there is something to this, but I personally I think this is partly nostalgia infusing old shows with merit they didn’t actually possess, partly a compression of the greatest hits of a ten year period and disregarding of the actual “average show” of that period, and partly a fact that the mainstream entertainment back then just catered to a different audience – the action and adventure shows that came across as more popular then weren’t necessarily “better” than the current trends (less psychologically questionable might be a decent argument, though), they were just different trends that appealed to different people.

It seems to me that, although the anime-culture trends I’ve referred to aren’t really positive ones, there’s actually a greater variety of solid works coming out these days, and certain studios are taking creative risks, whether they end up being rewarded or not. And there’s a whole gallery of talented and creative writers and directors who are being given a great amount of artistic free reign in spite of any ostensible market trends. The market also seems to be growing – charts like this one seem to imply more people are buying anime in Japan in general, which can only be good for the diversity of productions. And though obviously some people could happily watch shows catering towards the market I was describing forever, I think the law of diminishing returns applies here, and most of the audience will move on towards the next big thing soon enough. Regardless, it seems like there’s still room for shows to make at least reasonable profits without bowing to any perceived fandom needs.

Most things in most mediums will not be that artistically profound or interesting, and I don’t think anime’s entering any kind of death spiral in that regard. I just think some mainstream views within anime culture/fandom are pretty problematic in a very specific way, and that appeals to those attitudes tend to be reflected in too many works.

On the Value of Visual Uniqueness

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Question:

Is it worth pursuing a unique visual style even if it adds nothing to the narrative, or does it simply amount to crying for more attention from “sophisticated” viewers?

Bobduh:

I think there are a couple different arguments that could be made here, and the topic is, as you admit, a broad and ambiguous one.

First, there’s the argument that many people have made here and that seems true to me – in a visual medium, there is no such thing as a visual style that exists outside of the narrative. It always affects the viewer’s experience, and thus the best visual style should be the one that best services the needs and goals of the show. If that is a style that will be labeled “pretentious” by some, so be it – it’s only actually pretentious if it really does somehow work counter to the show’s own goals, and thus is being misused and its effect misunderstood.

But I think you could also make the argument that most anime following such similar visual standards is basically a failing of creativity, and that the only reason these styles come across as so intentionally provocative is because there just aren’t enough shows that experiment and take risks with their visual storytelling. I can respect the need for works that try bold ideas and fail, because it is the shows like that which lay the groundwork for future successes incorporating those bold ideas. OP raised an interesting point about how the history of anime has guided visual and storytelling standards to the point of polish we’ve currently reached, and that makes some sense to me, but I feel there is ample room for other, wildly different visual styles and standards that also achieve those effects, or at least that the pursuit of alternatives is a valuable one. So even in shows that don’t necessarily use their unique visual style to greatest narrative/thematic effect, I can see something valuable, because I consider them trailblazers who are feeling out the future potential for narrative and thematic resonance that only these kinds of experiments can discover.

Not only that, but as IssacandAsimov noted in his discussion with BrickSalad, there is (though this isn’t necessarily true of anyone here specifically, I’m just speaking generally) definitely a tendency to ascribe some provocative intent to unusual visual styles, which I frankly feel is unfair to the shows that use them. Obviously these styles are often used to create some specific effect, but I feel the starting assumption within the audience that they are aspiring to be some different kind of art can damage their effectiveness – it’s like the audience has less trust in the show, and expects it to have to prove itself, because it has started with an art style outside of the norm.

On a related note, someone raised Aku no Hana as an example, and that brought an interesting thought to mind – the specific value novelty and unfamiliarity can bring to a show. Obviously Aku no Hana creates its mood through every element of its production, but I feel one distinctive component of that is the fact that its visual style is something people are not very used to – they are not familiar with seeing characters regularly portrayed in this way, and so they are immediately put at a comfort-level disadvantage. This effect would not exist if shows like this were more common, and Aku no Hana would be less effective as a mood piece for it.

I think the point I’m stabbing at here is more communicable through using comedy as an example. A necessary component of comedy is novelty – jokes that are familiar lose their power, and humor is very often derived from undercutting expectations, which is not a repeatable trick. Comedians constantly have to chart new “storytelling” terrain, because the demands of their art requires a constant influx of novelty. Obviously this is not necessarily the case within visual storytelling (Aku no Hana only works so well as an example because part of its goal is to remove the viewer from their comfort zone), but I think it’s an interesting result of the pursuit of new visual storytelling methods that’s worth being conscious of. As well as the opposite effect – that the standard methods of visual representation used by so many anime result in a constant feeling of “safety” or “familiarity” that complements or contrasts with everything else the show is trying to do. Many shows take advantage of this effect, or deliberately use it to thwart expectations, as people here have noted. Shows like Madoka or Evangelion take it the step further of presenting both that visual style and a familiar starting narrative framework, but I think that standard visual style by itself isn’t truly neutral, and can carry its own set of expectations.

Management: This was a discussion question raised on TrueAnime, and my response only really scratches the surface of the directions you could take this. BrickSalad and IssacandAsimov go incredibly deep on the topic of subjectivity in art evaluation, and their back and forth was both very illuminating and partially the reason I didn’t really touch the subject myself. I mean, you’ve all seen my style of critique – I clearly fall pretty far on the “art is not a wholly subjective experience, and in fact is most often a craft that can be judged just like any other – a show will sink or float based on its structural integrity just as easily as a boat will” end of the spectrum.

I think one of the main takeaways of my wandering points, which I should have made more explicit in my original response, is that the fact that non-standard art styles immediately connote specific intentions in the viewer’s mind makes the application of those art styles almost doomed to failure, because the average viewer will be spoiling the actual intent of that artistic choice by automatically assigning their preconception of what artistic choices like that say about what kind of story the work is to that piece of art. And it seems to me like the only solution here is to be utterly unbiased in your approach to any media object (hah), or for the medium to reach the point where unique art styles are so ubiquitous that they no longer carry the pretension baggage they currently do.

In response to the prompt “Why Do You Watch Anime?”

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A few reasons.

First, animation can do things virtually no other visual medium can. The diversity of possible topics, the creativity and depth in which they can be explored, the absolute freedom of any visual representation of any idea, no matter how outlandish or high-concept it might seem… that’s awesome. Many anime could not possibly be translated to any other medium and maintain what makes them great.

Second, anime tends to focus much more sharply on the interior lives of characters than many other media, and I really appreciate that. I enjoy a good plot as much as the next person, but my favorite anime are all about subtle character moments and explorations of what makes people tick.

Third, the best anime often offer combinations of strengths that surpass almost any other media – I’m thinking here of moments where a long-building plot, a strong visual aesthetic, a slowrolled character turn, and a fantastic musical accompaniment all come together to make something incredibly unified and powerful. Moments like (Eva spoilers) this or (FLCL spoilers) this are why anime strikes me so powerfully.

Fourth, I really like “broken” works – works that are flawed in some obvious ways, but also compelling or deeply personal in other ways. There are many anime that could never, ever attract a mainstream audience because of some glaring flaw in immediate storytelling, or a necessary suspension of disbelief, or some strange visual choice – but that clearly demonstrate the singular vision and mind of a quirky and dedicated creator. I prefer my art un-streamlined, and while I can get plenty of this in music and film, anime combines this with the ability to tell a story over a larger time frame and the strengths I’ve already mentioned.

Fifth (I know, sorry), I like the pacing of many anime more than Western media – I like how so many scenes are built out of peaceful establishing shots, how so much is left unsaid in slow conversations, how the environment can often become as much of a character as any single protagonist. The town of Mabase is an intractable part of a show like FLCL – the environment does most of the telling in 5 Centimeters Per Second. To me, this really cements these stories, and makes me feel more a part of the character’s lives than more direct action and telling ever could.

Finally, I just like it. At this point, I’m programmed that way – an adolescence of Toonami, a young adulthood dominated by the visions of Gainax, Watanabe, and Miyazaki, and all the other shows I’ve seen and manga I’ve read along the way have basically conditioned me to feel incredibly comfortable and almost safe watching any new show. There will be things I’ve seen before. There could very easily be a high school that is not all that it seems, containing a somewhat detached student, sighing as he looks out the window from his window seat second from the back. And that’s okay. That seat’s a pretty fun place to be.

TLDR: Because.

Brief Note on Critique and Areas of Love/Expertise

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Question:

As a new anime critic, how should I decide what I choose to critique?

Answer:

Honestly, I think it should depend on what shows you watch where something in them strikes you personally, and you feel compelled to elaborate on it. Personal insights on shows you have a passionate response to will always be far more interesting than general reactions to shows that don’t grab you as specifically, whether they’re current or not.

For example, you didn’t seem to care for OreGairu, but I actually found its dialogue and philosophy on high school incredibly insightful and true to a very specific teenage mindset that I personally remember all too well. So I’m going to probably be doing more consistent/thorough writeups for that one, because something in it strikes me as fundamentally true to my own life experiences, and so I’ll have something to reflect on and share my own specific perspective on each week.

Also, I try to let my personality and my own passions (character writing, storytelling craft) dictate what I cover and how I talk about it. So I’m much more likely to have a strong, distinct opinion on a character-based romance than an action-based visual spectacle, because that’s the kind of thing I’ve spent years both consuming and studying.

A Brief Dialogue on Clannad and the Reason Reddits Gotta Be

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Here’s a brief exchange that started on the topic of /r/anime’s heated feelings regarding Clannad, but quickly diverged into a musing on the motivations of forum posters in general. Since the time of this posting, I’ve had several stress-testing discussions on my psychological desires theory, and have adjusted/refined it in a number of ways – but I still believe there is a decent amount of insight into people versus their media here.

 

OP:

Why does it seems like there’s a rising hate for Clannad’s popularity on r/anime?, Ive even seen people say its almost a circlejerk…

If so then fuck that. Clannad is popular because it is unbelieveablly amazing, its why its so highly rated, recommended and genuinely loved. You can hate the mainstream stuff if you believe they are dragging out series to earn more money. But how low you must be to feel the need to hate a short finished anime that people treasure simply for that exact reason.

Bobduh:

Clannad is the most popular show on /r/anime. Here, Clannad is the mainstream.

OP:

I believe the term mainstream has far more meaning than just popular. As Wikipedia puts it, its a cultural construct. its a Factor that affects media throughout production and has several causes, such as profit, popularity and largely shared tastes.

Mainstream is the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct.

So no, I believe Clannad is popular here, its the most liked if the latest polls are still valid, but I still believe mainstream isnt a term you can use to describe a sole entity, but rather movement and actions of that entity. For example, Dragon Ball Z Was mainstream, its still super popular, all over the internet and even in /r/anime[1] (sure its not liked that much), I mean every DBZ movie post gets like 100+ upvotes on ave (one got 2000+), however mainstream is used to define how that anime came to be, how it consistently stayed popular and sold well, but thats all in the past, and it wouldnt be entirly accurate to say its mainstream anymore (the same way how saying Elvis’ music is mainstream now inst right). And I believe it’s the same case is with Clannad (even if Clannish was never mainstream to begin with), it ended, it wasnt that popular, but it was good enough to create a massive fanbase and be treasured in a highly valued status, that inst mainstream, not here or there.

Bobduh:

Interesting response, and this is an interesting subject. Let me think “out loud” for a moment here…

Mainstream is a cultural construct, but I don’t think it only has to apply to macro-cultures (I don’t think that’s a word, but you get what I mean) – I feel that once any community reaches a certain size it can be described as having its own “culture,” and I also feel /r/anime[1] is large enough that you can describe it as having “cultural trends.” I feel like the backlash you’re describing (people mocking the “DAE cry at Angel Beats/Clannad” posts, etc) is a predictable response to a large, definable subset of the community.

Hm… I automatically typed “subset” instead of “culture” there, and I think that actually points to an issue with my own first thought. In my opinion, /r/anime[2] doesn’t have one culture, it has at least three, and they’re each partly responsible for a very different piece of the puzzle – I think the largest populations of new post creators, upvoters, and commenters are three very different groups of people, and that those populations are partially reflective of whether they approach anime (and by proxy, both media and communities in general) for entertainment, enrichment, or emotional resonance.

Okay, I am getting way off topic here. I’d actually like to write a full larger post about this specific topic, but ironically I’m pretty sure if my thesis were correct, that larger post would be downvoted into oblivion. But I think the points I should be making here are that:

A. Backlash to something that is very popular and inspires rabid adoration (which, in the context of /r/anime[3] , is true of Clannad) is to be expected.

B. I personally don’t see an issue with using the word “mainstream” to describe a work or opinion’s position within a smaller culture, though as I’ve said the case is somewhat more complicated than that here.

C. While Clannad may be considered “unbelievably amazing” to one of the largest subsets of the /r/anime[4]community, that is not necessarily a reflection of its inarguable qualities, and more a reflection of how well it satisfies the needs/desires of that subset. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I feel like your original post was implying that people were hating something inarguably amazing just because other people loved it, which isn’t at all necessarily true.

Sorry this got so long; it’s just a reflection of how interesting I find these arguments.

OP:

Fantastic response. You do raise many valid and interesting points. I’ll admit that I may not be presenting mainstream entirely accurate, it does seem like it’s possible in smaller communities, but it’s much more vague. You describe the backlash perfectly, and my original point was that it seems to be growing. I’m not entirely sure why? Is it because people are sick of hearing about Clannad? Is it simple the possible mainstream v hipster factor unlikely leaking into r/anime? Sure, not many people like it as much, but I’m certain only a tiny few hate… So then where is this backlash growing from?

I guess we can only speculate. But keep an open mind, because lately more and more Clannad posts and comments and being downvoted without giving reasons (that I’m curious to find out)

Bobduh:

I actually disagree with your “downvote without reason” claim here – in my experience, the votes and threads are normally in favor of Clannad, but the comments trend against it, at least outside of the (and I think we can both agree on this) circlejerk recommendation threads where Clannad still comes up with pretty overwhelming regularity. So if people are in the middle of a discussion unrelated to Clannad and it comes up, it might be viewed unfavorably – but if someone brings it up in a vacuum, or in the context of a circlejerky thread, it will receive all the upvotes.

-As a quick addendum, I do think part of the backlash is because so much of the support for Clannad exists in the form of either anonymous votes or swarms of people within recommendation threads – neither of which lend themselves to actual discussions of a show’s quality. But anyway…-

Personally, I think the idea of a hipster is kind of a fake one (at least outside of a tiny, statistically insignificant subset of super-self-conscious people), and this Clannad thing is far more fundamental than that. In my opinion, most of the very distinct pro/con divide comes down to these groups I was discussing. Clannad is a “feel-good” show, designed to evoke a fundamental, emotional resonance with the viewer – it attracts people who want to relate to shows emotionally, and these people often view online communities in a similar way, gravitating towards emotional confirmation (DAE Feel This Feeling, etc). In contrast to this, I think many of the people who find this situation aggravating do so because they take the show purely at face value, by surveying its objective merits without being swayed by its emotional intention. The way these people often view online communities is a reflection of their approach to media – they look to find new ideas and viewpoints, and to see their opinions either refined or challenged. From this perspective, the idea of a “DAE Feel This Feel” thread is a tedious waste of time, which results in no new perspectives of any kind, and basically clogs a center of discourse with intellectual static.

I think this fundamental disagreement on the essential point of media is the foundation of a lot of the arguments we run into in places like this.

On Art, Emotional Resonance, and Understanding Your Audience

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This was a discussion I had with Imperialx regarding his excellent blog post. The context is GJ-bu, but the discussion is really about the nature and purpose of art.

My (pithy, unnecessarily nasty) initial response:

So, GJ-Bu is a mathematically formulated printout of the variables required to make a successfully meaningless SoL/comedy?

Yeah, that’s something. I’m not sure “brilliant” is the word for it.

Imperialx (gamely):

Then what word would you use?

Bobduh (still in snarky asshole mode):

I’d say it’s a tossup between “cynical” and “inevitable”

Imperialx (with ungodly patience):

That doesn’t do the show enough justice though.

Bobduh (finally acting like an adult):

You’re right. I’m being glib and dismissive because your thesis represents what I find worst in anime, but clearly you’re just candidly talking about a show’s “effectiveness” and not really its merits in any way.

Fundamentally, I completely agree with you – the market for these “empty” SoL shows does not demand distinction or creativity, it really just demands the absence of variables that break their illusion of security within the world of the show, or their utter understanding of how that world will continue to act. This is why Tamako Market failed – it didn’t reign the camera into a “comfortable” safe space with the main characters, the prospect of romance represented the prospect of drama, change, or character maturation, all of which are death to that illusion, and the bird represented a glaring fantastical variable that intruded on the nostalgic dream shows like this are trying to manufacture.

But calling an understanding of this dynamic “brilliant” still seems kinda crazy to me – it’s really just knowing your audience, and the fact that this particular audience basically demands exactly what they’ve seen before, with no sharp edges, means works like this work best when they don’t even try. I guess sanding off all possible points of contention or illusion-breaking in a work is a kind of craftsmanship, but it’s just not something I find all that impressive or meritorious.

Imperialx:

This is easily the best counter-point I have read so far in this thread so far as well as one of the most intellectual comments I have ever read on /r/anime. Thank you for taking the time to put down your thoughts in your comment.

You’re right. I’m being glib and dismissive because your thesis represents what I find worst in anime, but clearly you’re just candidly talking about a show’s “effectiveness” and not really its merits in any way.

It’s interesting that you find the action of omitting subtle annoyances as something that hampers an anime’s effectiveness as an entertainment medium. Mind you, I was only talking about this action as part of the subset of Slice of Life where nothing happens only. I don’t believe that simply omitting bad things in other genres can warrant brilliance.

Fundamentally, I completely agree with you – the market for these “empty” SoL shows does not demand distinction or creativity, it really just demands the absence of variables that break their illusion of security within the world of the show, or their utter understanding of how that world will continue to act.

I don’t really like the use of the word “empty” due to its negative connotation, but I can’t say you’re wrong in the way you’ve used it, at least literally. These shows are not “empty” because for viewers that resonate with them, they are absorbed into the lives of the anime characters, filling the “emptiness”. That’s what I personally think are so attractive about “empty” Slice of Life shows that are done well.

This is why Tamako Market failed – it didn’t reign the camera into a “comfortable” safe space with the main characters, the prospect of romance represented the prospect of drama, change, or character maturation, all of which are death to that illusion, and the bird represented a glaring fantastical variable that intruded on the nostalgic dream shows like this are trying to manufacture.

I applaud you, dear sir. The most accurate deconstruction of Tamako Market’s failure I have read to date on the Internet. If I had spare money I’d buy you Reddit Gold for this.

But calling an understanding of this dynamic “brilliant” still seems kinda crazy to me – it’s really just knowing your audience, and the fact that this particular audience basically demands exactly what they’ve seen before, with no sharp edges, means works like this work best when they don’t even try. I guess sanding off all possible points of contention or illusion-breaking in a work is a kind of craftsmanship, but it’s just not something I find all that impressive or meritorious.

Indeed, all it takes for this dynamic to work is “knowing your audience”. However, is it really that simple? If it were truly as simple as doing exactly the same things they’ve seen before, then why did so many other SoLs fail? I used the Acchi Kocchi example, so something must have gone wrong.

People do get bored, and they get bored very, very easily when it comes to Slice of Life shows confined inside a club room. If someone makes another anime with characters with all of the same tropes as GJ-Bu, people will get bored and they won’t gobble it up in the same way again. That’s why Lucky Star sold so many units, and its copycats did not.

In conclusion I do believe the successful “sanding off all possibly points of contention” to require craftsmanship. It involves a deep understanding of statistics and your target audience. Otherwise it will just be another Acchi Kocchi or Ai Mai Mi.

Looking at GJ-Bu’s sales, I think we can safely say that it has passed the hurdle, getting a majority of the population to resonate with it. That is a “empty” Slice of Life which has achieved “brilliance” in my opinion.

Bobduh:

Jeez, thank you for that ridiculously generous complement! I actually think this article and the previous one from your blog have been two of the most incisive anime critiques I’ve seen here, so I very much appreciate it.

It’s interesting that you find the action of omitting subtle annoyances as something that hampers an anime’s effectiveness as an entertainment medium.

I think you’re misunderstanding my intention here – I’m not saying that the process you’re describing hampers a show’s “effectiveness” as a commercial success that this audience responds to (in fact I’d probably agree with you), I’m implying a show’s “effectiveness” is a value unrelated to its “merits,” which I am correlating with its artisticaccomplishments, not its commercial ones.

These shows are not “empty” because for viewers that resonate with them, they are absorbed into the lives of the anime characters, filling the “emptiness”.

This is a fair point, and making a story that can resonate with the widest possible variety of people is a noble goal, but I’d argue there are ways to do it outside of this process. Characters can be distinctive and unique, and their experiences can refuse to follow the generally accepted conventions of a genre, without losing the audience’s resonance – resonance can always be attained if the emotional states underlying these elements are still something the audience can understand and relate to. For instance, Evangelion is a show about a boy piloting a giant robot, which is a situation no-one can relate to. However, the topics the show is really interested in talking about are Shinji’s feelings of isolation, his desire to please the people who matter to him, and his inability to breach the emotional walls of the people around him. Those base emotional states are incredibly resonant, regardless of the surface details, because everyone can relate those feelings (which are, in my opinion, always enhanced by a thoughtfully crafted and distinctive set of surface details) to some elements of their own life.

Indeed, all it takes for this dynamic to work is “knowing your audience”. However, is it really that simple? If it were truly as simple as doing exactly the same things they’ve seen before, then why did so many other SoLs fail? I used the Acchi Kocchi example, so something must have gone wrong.

I haven’t seen Acchi Kocchi, but I assume it fails to resonate with the audience because it fails on both these possible approaches – it doesn’t go for the absolutely honed “empty” dynamics of GJ-bu, but it also doesn’t manage to present believable situations and emotional stakes that an audience could relate to in the tradition of conventional narrative.

Looking at GJ-Bu’s sales, I think we can safely say that it has passed the hurdle, getting a majority of the population to resonate with it. That is a “empty” Slice of Life which has achieved “brilliance” in my opinion.

This is the kind of reasoning that caused me to respond so viscerally to your post in the first place. I honestly find the conclusions of this results-based thinking kind of frightening, and the equating of “successfully caters to an audience we have an utter understanding of by never challenging their existing preferences” with “brilliant” is incredibly alien to my way of evaluating art, and feels almost Orwellian (keeping the proles happy and content with soma that never broadens their horizons, etc). Maybe I was just never the intended audience for so-called “healing-type” shows, but I feel the shows that solve this equation you’ve proposed are kind of fundamentally soulless, and that you can create works that appeal to this audience while still maintaining individual creativity, while still infusing your characters with distinct emotions and the capacity for emotional development, and while still giving your show some fundamental purpose or (fairly light and airy) themes.

And I don’t feel this is just a result of me overthinking a simple comedy – I think Chuunibyou succeeds as a simple comedy while still maintaining all these other narrative “merits” and appealing to this core crowd, for instance. Or, to pick a truly pure comedy, classically sitcom-y example, I think the show Community knocks this out of the park, existing perfectly well as a feel-good, “healing-type” half-hour dose of reliable comedy while also incorporating themes of trust and identity, while also regularly performing incredibly ambitious formal storytelling experiments that you don’t even have to understand to find the show funny. In fact, I think a strong emotional resonance with individual characters only improves the impact of humor, far from making it more difficult for a wide audience to relate to. And I think relegating the definition of “brilliant” to “was successfully embraced by its target audience” kind of devalues standards of criticism in general – I think we should always ask for more than that from our art, even if the audience doesn’t. If we don’t, who will?

Regardless, I totally respect your viewpoints here, and absolutely love these kinds of tough questions and discussions. I sincerely hope you guys keep writing and crossposting this stuff.

Little Witch Academia (plus added commentary)

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So! Studio Trigger. Gurren Lagann. First serious independent release. That’s all I’ve got, I’ve been waiting for months, let’s get this shit on.

Little Witch Academia

7:23 – Man, I’m really enjoying this, but I gotta pause or these thoughts are gonna vaporize.

First, I absolutely love this guy’s visual style and use of animation. Everything he creates feels like a living sketch, and the way he infuses a wide scattering of anime character designs (drawing back way further than the current standard of very similarly designed body types and faces) with divergences into Western-cartoonish exaggeration makes for an incredibly vivid visual feast. We need more stuff like this, or mainly things that simply diverge from the standard styles and embrace how anime can be wildly stylized and draw from a vast vocabulary of visual influences.

Second, the themes of this thing immediately remind me of Gurren Lagann, and paint a very strong picture of how this guy feels about art that is just so clear in the style of the things he creates. He revels in the absurd, the over-the-top, the gleefully melodramatic and the unabashedly pulpy. That first big line – “believing is magic” – says it all; he wants the viewer to embrace his vision without a hint of cynical doubt, loving it the way only a child can truly love a story. His art is an expression of that love of truly unquestioned, un-self-conscious, exaggerated storytelling. And the protagonist here clearly mirrors his own feelings, with her passionate defense of a showman widely considered gaudy and beneath serious magical (or, by proxy, artistic) consideration. Life is too short not to love what you love, or to start making apologies for it.

8:22 – Another point on that front – the value of childhood heroes in inspiring a lifetime of dedication and emulation. I think this is more than a little autobiographical.

13:04 – Normally it’s impossible to make an action story with a vaguely-defined magic system and still maintain actual stakes/tension in conflict (because the audience doesn’t know the actual extent of Our Heroes’ powers). This show neatly sidesteps that because it’s not at all interested in that kind of tension, and is just a visceral ride, so they can have fun giving the characters whatever vague, visually interesting powers they want.

20:08 – Sucy’s design is sweet. I love how her arms just fade into her wobbly profile when she isn’t using them, as well as the very tidy progression of her potion tricks.

22:55 – Dragon’s unhappy face is perfect.

And Done

Well! Not much to talk about in closing; that was just a really fun, well-constructed ride throughout. Trigger have successfully proven the world needs more of them; now please, fund yourself a full season of something. We’re all waiting.

That was my original post on the topic. However, an unrelated discussion brought the issue of this OVA’s “point” back into question, and so I clarified my positions there. I’m paraphrasing the person this discussion was with for clarity’s sake – I hope not to misrepresent anyone’s viewpoints, but this is primarily about explaining my own interpretation of the text, and nothing should be drawn from the prompts beyond their serving to prompt my explanations. Anyway.

Question:

Wasn’t Little Witch Academia just another cliched shonen success story? And why did all the other characters hate her idol, anyway?

Bobduh:

Regarding Little Witch Academia, I read that show as a direct defense of that kind of exuberant, obvious, elevated storytelling. The entire episode itself was a mirror of what the protagonist loved about her childhood hero, and the fact that both of the rivals were inspired by her to go into that field was, in my opinion, the director saying “the ultimate defense of the cliched, exuberant, and absurd is that it will inspire future generations to strive to create that same kind of connection – and I’m living proof.” The hate the community had for her inspiration isn’t really about magic, though I think the metaphor works – it’s about the disdain shown in the real world towards so-called “low art” like Little Witch Academia. The story was standard but well told, the craft was vivid and very unique (we need more experiments like that art style), but probably my favorite thing about it was its strength as a metaphor and a very personal statement of purpose from those creators.

Question:

How can a show have a point if the main character does undergo any kind of emotional journey? The heroine of this show didn’t grow up in any way, or learn anything about herself. The only reason she wins is because she randomly finds an overpowered wand – what is it promoting, materialism?

Bobduh:

I don’t think she actually learned anything within the actual adventure – there was no character arc there, you’re right. I think the point was that the spectacle of a crowd-pleasing entertainer inspired both her and Diana to follow that path, and the show as a whole is supposed to argue for the same thing regarding art and animation – that art as inspiring spectacle can be a noble goal on its own, and helps accomplish the critical task of inspiring the next generation of creators.

Her finding the actual wand of her role model seems like shorthand for “we are all held up and made greater by the passion of our influences” – it was discarded as junk (low art), but made priceless by the person it inspired to follow that path.

Question:

But how can this show say anything about the real world if it has no grounding? Everything in this show happens almost at random, or for plot convenience’s sake. Doesn’t the show need to have more believable stakes and narrative to actually say anything effective?

Bobduh:

The events are not given weight or tension because it’s irrelevant to the point they’re trying to make – in fact, if the show had been anything other than an unrealistic spectacle, it wouldn’t have mirrored the role her childhood idol fills in her world (flashy, but without substance), and thus would not actually work as a metaphor in the first place. I’m not sure what message you’re talking about them trying to convey here, but her “earning” some narrative victory is not the point of the show – the point of the show is made as soon as she transitions from a child idolizing a vapid entertainer to a mage in training still inspired by that entertainer. The rest is just a fun, flippant adventure that maintains that symbolism (like the thing with the wand – it’s useful as a thematic symbol of her relying on the inspiration of her childhood to forge her own path, not as a marker of emotional growth) while essentially acting as an animated form of the performance that inspired the protagonist.

You keep picking at the narrative flippancy of the adventure they go on, but I’m saying all that stuff is basically unrelated to the thematic point of the show in the first place, and is in fact perfect for the kind of art the show is arguing has the right to be respected.