A Discourse on One of the Most Obvious Truths of Animated Cinema

Now this is a pretty bold statement to make; to declare that an entire genre of animation is mostly trash. I'm certainly not attacking that there isn't any good anime. I'm simply stating that the majority of anime is worthless, and even further, that anime is not intrinsically good or worthwhile. It seems that the more I look at it the more obvious this conclusion becomes.

First, a little clarity is in order. What do I clasify [sic] as Anime, and what do I mean by s**ks? I don't think I have to define "Why" and "Mostly", even for Bill Clinton.

My definition of *Anime, I hope, is quite clear: Any form of animation done in the Japanese art styl [sic]. For the purposes of argument, I'm going to remove any anime outside of Asia, such as American and French animation that mimics the styl [sic] of anime. I ignore these since anime "purists" will argue that French and American animation that appears to be part of anime is in fact not. I tend to agree with them, but not for reasons they'll like.

By s**ks, in this case, I mean that the condition fails to meet the criteria for its existence. For example:

Condition: Uwe Boll is a good director.
Criteria: A good director makes films that are, at the very least, watchable.
Conclusion: Uwe Boll does not make films that are, at the very least, watchable. Uwe Boll s**ks as a director.
Logic: The Condition, when applied to the Criteria, reaches a conclusion that is negative.

My method of inquiry will be fairly straightforward. I'll specify an area of anime (Animation, Dialogue, Story), develop criteria for comparison, and proceed to beat it like Robert Blake's wife.

Animation

The distinguishing feature of any animated film be it anime, a Disney film, or a Saturday morning cartoon is it has hand-drawn characters and backgrounds. Anything that does not have hand drawn animation is not true animation (Machinimation, and CGI not withstanding). From this, we can argue that what "makes" anime, is the styl [sic] that it is drawn in. Remove the animation, and not only do you not have anime anymore, you have the world's only subtitled audio book.

Animation is described by Random House as "the act of animating". Animating is cited by the Dictionary as a verb meaning "to give motion to". Using logical induction we can conclude that any so-called animation that does indeed not have pieces that are in motion, they are indeed not animated, and therefore: not animation.

Most anime fans will see immediately where this is going and won't need further explanation. So for the rest of you, here's a bit of help. A lot of animation in anime is in fact not that. There are long scenes (usually accompanied by a lot of "Huh?" "uh!" and other guttural utterings) where a single picture is panned across from one corner to another, occasionally multiple times. This means that there are many sequences within many anime that are no more animation than the Windows Magnifier.

The other argument along these same lines deals with a motionless character plastered, usually with their mouth open for some reason, against a lined background that fluctuates slightly. While from a technical standpoint this is animation, as there is motion, it doesn't matter. This is one of the many features of anime "styl [sic]". Some may indeed call it styl [sic], but it comes off to anyone who's familiar with fluid animation as just lazy. It's far easier to show a still character against a streaked background yelling "AAAAHHHHHH!!!" than it is to actually animate the person running anywhere or, God forbid, actually moving.

Anime, to be considered worthwhile animation has to be argued to be full fluid animation. Fluid animation is used here to describe any animation that has over 10 frames of animation per second on average. If you factor in all the time that a single character is against a moving blur, the camera pans across a non-moving picture (which obviously counts for less than 1fps), looped video (where an action is repeated over and over using the same animation cells such as in flashbacks and unnecessary stare downs), and the generally low animation-cell count per second through the rest of the picture, you're left with a poorly animated, repetitious, borderline-slideshow animation feature. Most anime is outdone in the animation department by a second grader's art clas [sic] flipbook.

So in conclusion, a lot of anime is indeed not animated (as animation, by very definition must have motion), and most of that which is animated is either animated poorly and/or repetitious.

Dialogue

Dialogue is a difficult area to argue, but fairly easy to defend. Even though Japanese and other Eastern languages have some similarities with their Romantic language counterparts, they are indeed two very different beasts. Its easy to chalk up poor dialogue to the fact that most of us English speakers don't speak many, if any, Asian languages. I'm not so convinced that the sum of all the verbal atrocities in anime can be attributed to "translation dysfunction".

First of all, if you have a stupid story (I'll get into this later), you're only going to get so far, even with the best written dialogue. To test this, you can try an experiment. Go to anyone you know, and in the most functional and eloquent way possible, attempt to explain an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode with clarity. It was hilarious when you watched it, it's still funny in your head, but in words repeated to someone else, though carefully chosen, makes it painfully clear to them that you need psychiatric help.

Even if this is the case, and all the dialogue issues can be directly related to average or poor translation this doesn't excuse it getting into the film in such a state. At some point along the way some native English speaker had to have read or listened to the English translation of the dialogue and realized that this can be either clarified or redone so it doesn't read like stereo assembly instructions.

For giggles, I'm going to give you a bit of the beginning of a certain anime called "Voices of a Distant Star", which is an anime about cell phones. No really, it's about cell phones, look it up.

[There is a word, "world". Until about the time when I was in middle school, I vaguely thought the word meant the area where the signals from my cell would reach, but why is it my cell never reaches anyone. Hello? Say, isn't anyone there? How far should I go? I'm lonely. Noboru? I'm going home okay? Say, where am I? Oh, that's right, I'm not in that world anymore.]

Functionally there's nothing wrong with it, everything said has a point that's reiterated or explained to some extent throughout the film. But the question is; Is this the best way to word the dialogue? Or less than that; is this even just a GOOD way to word the dialogue? Go where? Who is Noboru? Where is home and why is that important?

Some may argue that the point of this intro was to introduce questions to the viewer, and that may be so. The argument I'm making doesn't require every piece of dialogue to be perfectly informative or in the BEST possible format. I'm simply stating, using this pretty tame example (there are far worse examples than this) that dialogue is either defunct to begin with, in its Japanese form, or that after translation no one bothered to make sure that it was as clear as needed to be to keep the English reader/listener focused on what is going on and not on trying to make sense out of a ridiculously convoluted set of sentences that's barely passable for an AOL chat room conversation.

Lastly, but certainly not least, speeches are a constant source of aggravation. This relates partially to the animation section as done above because in a lot of cases it's cheaper to have a character flap their mouth for a bit to kill some screen time than to animate anything interesting. While I certainly can't prove that this is the case, I can point out that most of what is said in these long winded speeches falls into one of three categories:

1) Information that we, the viewer (and probably the characters) already know.
2) A long "morale boosting" sequence in which the words "Human spirit", "determination", "for [some area like Earth or the Kingdom]" or the like are used.
3) A quick recap on what they are about to do. Usually includes a lot of Number 1.

In summary, while most would agree that the dialogue for anime is difficult at times to understand, the reasons are a bit more complicated than "because it used to be in [Insert Eastern Language Here]". That poor or mismanaged dialogue is finally brought to the person watching the film is unacceptable even if the dialogue was badly written to begin with. Even dialogue in anime which is well formed has a bad habit of being both repetitious and irrelevant to moving the film forward in a meaningful way.

Character Designs

This is going to be a relatively short section as there isn't a lot to put here, but I felt it deserved special consideration beyond the Animation section. While this is mostly opinion, generalization and conjecture (as what is "neat" or "cool" is rarely backed by any testable criteria), I wanted to make a singular point: Anime has probably the worst of all animation styls [sic] in making characters that look the same or nearly the same.

Males are generally white with big eyes, which is a curious state of affairs considering the makeup of the Asian facial features. They also generally have either a spiky or long and flowing hair. More often than not the weapon of choice, if there is a weapon at all, is a bladed weapon of some sort. Clothes are overly complicated, having straps and buttons that serve no useful purpose and involve far too many trench coats or trench coat-esque getups for my taste.

Females follow a similar pattern, excluding that they usually wear as little clothing as possible and have every hair color in the optical spectrum (Neon blue is apparently a natural hair color). And, this aggravates me to no end; every girl is hyper-skinny with a DD or better chest size. Even the ugly girls are hot white chicks. Now, being a straight male I've not ever taken issue with hot women or large breasts, but is it really necessary or realistic to have every girl built like a starving silicone strapped model? And if so, why?

Granted, I have no answers to the two previous questions, but I do have a theory as to why this is the case. The reasoning behind wild hair styls [sic] and color, and goofy-ly illogical clothing styls [sic] (and I base this on hundreds of hours of anime watching and observation, but nothing more) is that due to the anime styl [sic], characters are drawn so much alike that the only way to tell them apart by just looking at them is either their hair, clothing, or other accessories.

And thus, I want to return to my previous point and add on to it: Anime has probably the worst of all animation styls [sic] in making characters that look the same or nearly the same due to the nature of anime itself which makes it difficult to create genuinely unique characters based on look alone.

Storylines

When I argue this topic with others who are convinced that anime, by nature, is superior to all other forms of animation I am constantly told that yes, the animation may be sub par, the dialogue may be weak and the characters aren't particularly likeable or original, but it's worth it "for the story". I put "for the story" in quotes because I have heard that verbatim constantly. I have to say with a degree of certainty that most of the anime I've seen (not all of it mind you) has trite and two-dimensional storylines (pun intended) that follow predictable patterns.

Due to the differences between every storyline, even if they follow some common rules, I'm going to have to use more examples from individual anime than I did in previous sections. I chose shows/films that I felt reflected themes, patterns and conventions that could be attributed to the widest possible range of anime. So my basic word of warning is this: while I may make an example using Dragon Ball Z, I'm not arguing that every anime or even most anime follows DBZ's patterns to the letter. I'm simply pointing out a few conventions that can be applied to a substantial number of films.

The first pattern that I noticed almost immediately in anime is that ugly things are almost always evil, and as mentioned before attractive things with big boobs are almost always good. While examples of this are too numerous to mention (and anyone who's watched more than 2 hours of anime can attest to this) it bears pointing out because evil, if indeed you believe that such a thing exists, does not necessarily equate with ugliness. If that were indeed true construction workers everywhere would be jailed on suspicion alone. Looking at the flip side of this, one of my ex-girlfriends had big boobs and let me tell you, she was not one of the good guys.

Another problem with anime storylines and specifically character development is that females, even the super-hero types become stumbling idiots in a crisis. While this, in moderation, might be cute or funny, the constant repetition of the same system of events in many anime makes it not only aggravating, but almost insulting. The general theme of many films seems to be that women cannot take care of themselves, or at the very least, when it gets really tough they need a male counterpart to save them. There are few exceptions to this rule (Iria being one of them) but generally, you can count on the male, super-powered or not, to have to save the girl who suddenly becomes horribly inept at even the most basic skills such as punching or running. (1)

Inept might be the best way of explaining one of the overarching themes of anime, and cinematography in general; that love conquers all. Now this isn't a theme that is specific to anime, since many live action and other types of films constantly dabble in the love area**. But, anime has constantly pelted audiences with the idea that love can stop or prevent anything. Especially if that anything is an advancing alien armada, in which singing to the aliens will stop them from wanting to kill humans. We have love, and that makes us superior and unassailable. I haven't done the experiments, but I have it on good authority that you cannot stop a bullet with love. Feel free to get a gun and try it.

If you live through that, you might need a joke or two to cheer you up (bullet wounds can be a real downer), but don't look to anime for relief. I occasionally fancy myself a funny person. Sure I don't make any kind of living from it, but I think I have the ability to at least tell the difference between highbrow and lowbrow humor and that which isn't funny at all. I clasify [sic] Highbrow as being humor like "Eddie Izzard" and lowbrow being "The Three Stooges" and not funny being "Anything that Will Farrell was in". Using this as a tentative guide I think you'll find most anime that is considered "humorous" falls in the Three Stooges to Will Farrell range as most "funny" sequences resort to excessive amounts of physical humor that isn't near as good as anything done by Moe and the gang.

There are more conventions that I could go on and on about that are over used in anime, but I've hit on the main ones that bring down the quality of the story just by their mere existence in the genre. Love doesn't conquer all, females are, as far as I can tell, just as good as their male counterparts at defeating evil serpent kings, but most of all, the majority of anime isn't funny. At all.

Conclusion

Throughout this essay I've pointed out many of parts of anime that are weak or poorly delivered. Taken on its own with the criteria here, almost every other genre (even the bargain bin of animation, Saturday Morning Cartoons) beats out the majority of anime on several levels. As shown here Anime is not intrinsically good, and by its very nature should be considered, as a whole, bad. Poor animation, laughable dialogue from cookie cutter characters, and sloppily written storylines create an styl [sic] of animation that, on the whole, is not worth anyone's time. That's why anime (mostly) sucks.

I want to leave you with quick quote from an another anime fan describing Dragonball Z+

"Every episode was the same thing, constant and pointless fighting... [E]vil person comes to earth and we don't know why the heck he's evil to begin with > good guys get stronger > long, drawn-out, and boring battle ensues > enemy is defeated > new enemy comes, and the cycle repeats."



Endnotes

* You'll notice that I don't use the word "Japanime" in this article. This is directly related to my IQ being greater than 60.

** Almost every movie in existence has a love story behind it or in it somewhere. While I find this a very aggravating recurring theme, its in there for a reason. Love stories sell. My argument here is not that they shouldn't be included, since that would be futile claim to attempt to uphold, I'm simply pointing out how Anime constantly beats you over the head with this concept as a whole.

(1) As an endnote I'd like to inject a anime fan's description of Fushigi Yuugi which I feel clarifies the point I'm trying to make here in ways I cannot: "Fushigi Yuugi, the anime version of a soap opera. I LOVE YOU TAMAHOME, BUT I CANT LOVE YOU, OH NO IM BEING CAPTURED AHHHHHHHHH!!"

[sic] I also want to point out that Gamespot's posting system won't let me spell the words "clas sify" or "sty le" correctly due to a bug. This is because, well I'm not going to sugar coat it, it's because their posting system is terrible.

Sources

Comments obtained from thread at anipike:
http://forum.anipike.com/showthread.php?t=361
User cited:
Kenshin
Alaghelediel

Iria: Zeiram the Animation (1993)
Publisher: d-rights
Media Blasters
ISBN 1-58655-274-0

Voices of a Distant Star (2003)
Publsher: ADV Films
ADV Films
ASIN: B00008G8QC

Trascript of Voices of a Distant Star (2005)
http://www.silywily.com/voices.html
Director's Cut/English subtitles

"animation."
Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2005)
Publisher: Random House Reference Publishing
ISBN: 0375425993

"animating."
Dictionary.com Unabridged (2007).
Pulisher: Random House, Inc.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/animating

Dragonball Z (First Season Only)
Publisher: Funimation
Funimation Prod.
ASIN: B000KWZ1T1

Fushigi Yugi Perfect Collection
Publisher: Studio Pierrot
Studio Pierrot
ASIN: B000GVD17W