Japanese Animation

I’m taking a module that introduces me to Japanese studies and it requires IVLE forum participation. Someone wrote something about anime which I rebutted. Enjoy.

Originally Posted by Madhav Kapur:

Anime is a form of Japanese art that has caught the imagination of the world.

It refers to a style of animation started in Japan, greatly influenced by the manga, Japanese comics. Anime features characters with big eyes, big hair and stretched out limbs, exaggerated facial expressions, brush-stroked outlines, limited motion and other distinctive traits.

Anime is believed to have evolved in 1917, though the style we see today was first witnessed in the 1960s, notably with the work of Osamu Tezuka. Anime gained popularity in the western world in the 1980s.

Anime, like manga, has a large audience in Japan and high recognition throughout the world. Distributors can release anime via television broadcasts, directly to video, or theatrically, as well as online.

Both hand-drawn and computer-animated anime exist. It is used in television series, films, video, video games, commercials, and internet-based releases, and represents most, if not all, genres of fiction. Anime gained early popularity in East and Southeast Asia and has garnered more-recent popularity in the Western World.

In Japan, an anime is more than just a “cartoon”. Anime creates millions of jobs every year in the form of voice actors, animators, character designers, singers, composers, retailers, publishers, video game manufactures and designers, comic artists, magazine companies, and so much more. Every toy company making hundreds of millions of yen (millions of dollars) in sold merchandise every month. It is an industry like no other, singers and many others start their careers with anime. It greatly surpasses our live-action movies, television shows, and music put together in popularity. You could almost go as far as to say that Japanese business and society revolves around anime, and vice versa.

Also I’d like it to be known that unlike in America, anime is not just for kids. In fact they weren’t intended at first to be for kids but actually for teenagers and adults. Now a day’s Anime caters to all audiences from little children to the elderly and everyone in between.

Naruto, Pokemon and DragonballZ are some popular anime series.

Feel free to post your views on Anime and its great impact on modern day entertainment.

Have a nice day

Madhav

References:

http://anime.about.com/od/animeprimer/a/whatisanime.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime

Originally Posted by Chua Kian Wee:

“Anime” (アニメ) in Japanese simply means all kinds of animation in general. It is only outside of Japan where people refer to Japanese animation as anime. For strictly academic reasons, I think Japanese animation or animation that originated in Japan would be more appropriate as compared to simply anime.

I disagree with the paragraph that claims that “anime is more than a cartoon”. A lot of Western animation may be skewed towards children, but this doesn’t mean they do not create a wide range of jobs for many people. I do agree that unlike Japanese animation, people who sing songs in Western cartoons aimed at children will not get as much attention from the mainstream population as compared to singers in Japanese animation. However apart from singers and live-action adaptions, I believe that western cartoons provide as much employment opportunities as Japanese animation. This includes creation of toys that while most of which only children will buy, will still generate significant sales.

To emphasise the two unique qualities that Japanese animation has over Western animation, firstly we should look at the Japanese band that calls themselves Supercell. Supercell started out as a doujin music group, or group that originally created fan made music, that started creating music independently in 2007 using a software created by Yamaha that could emulate human vocals.

In 2009, Supercell released their first single Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari (君の知らない物語 in Japanese meaning “The story you would never know”) using actual human vocals instead of that from a computer emulation. Their song was featured in a popular television animation series named Bakemonogatari that sold the most blu-ray disc copies in Japan in 2009 for television animation. Following the single’s release, it immediately ranked #5 on the Oricon charts, a leading music ranking chart in Japan, even though no one had heard the human vocals of the band before. It can thus be deduced here that by featuring their first single on the popular television animation Bakemonogatari, Supercell’s first single gained much popularity in a very short amount of time that greatly helped the song’s initial rankings. This is one of the key differences between Western animation and Japanese animation in promoting industry singers and bands.

The second aspect would be live-action adaptions. Hardly any Western animation makes it over to live-action, but numerous Japanese animation have made the jump including Hana Yori Dango (Boys Over Flowers), Death Note, Nana, including many others.

Other than these two qualities of Japanese animation, I would say that Japanese animation is not too different from Western Animation, except the fact that much more Japanese animation is produced for adults as compared to the amount created for children. This is not to say that there are no quality Western animation created for adults, a poignant example being the Simpsons. And I do believe that there is much Simpsons merchandise out there for purchase.

References:

1. Supercell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercell_(band)
2. 2009’s top blu-ray sales in Japan http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-12-26/2009-top-selling-blu-ray-discs-in-japan-continued
3. Oricon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oricon
4. Yamaha’s Vocaloid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
5. Hana Yori Dango http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hana_yori_dango
6. Death Note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_note
7. Nana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_(manga)

Vivid Imagery is NOT ALLOWED!

I don’t know how many of you guys out there are victims of Vivid Imagery (VI), but I feel that you should prevent yourself from falling prey to VI whenever possible. Because most of the time, what you are thinking in the VI is a greatly exaggerated version of social reality.

I’ll give an example of VI using my sister. She was having a “romantic walk” with her boyfriend after dinner and she was in a rather whimsical mood and she asked him:

“What if a little cloud descended in front of us?”

To which he replied:

“That would be mist.”

That kind of spoiled the mood for her and when relating the story to me, she drew upon the time when I was having a walk with her after dinner and she said:

“The moon is so bright today!!!”

To which I replied:

“But its just a piece of rock.”

Afterwhich, she complained to me how people with engineer-rish brains were “pulling her balloon down from the sky and popping it with a needle“.

The part which I have bolded, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of VI.

The problem with VI is that the more you think about it, the more deluded you become about your social reality. For god’s sake, what the heck is wrong with pulling your leg once in a while about the scientific side of things!? When you look at it casually, it is a pretty trivial matter. But once you use symbolic imagery to etch it into your brain in the form of Vivid Imagery, it becomes difficult to forget and will impact your social reality.

Other forms of VI include:

If I do *[insert deviant behaviour here], I will be stepping out of a door that will close behind me and remain locked forever.

If he rejects me, my heart will be torn out and ripped into pieces.

*Replace [insert deviant behaviour here] with drinking beer or smoking etc. etc.

I believe you can think of some other examples yourself. The reality, excuse me, the SOCIAL REALITY is that what you are imagining in your head using symbolic images is often untrue and isn’t as jia lat as you think it is. I think its pretty obvious if you read my blogpost like this, but like my sister, I think many people out there have fallen prey to VI and I think it has to stop.

Freedom-tan will slay evil Feminists

Die you bitches.

Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 4 2009

I fucking put a car in the refrigerator! lol. Should have been milk eh.

That’s the good thing about taking exams. Now I’ll probably remember that “Reizouko” means refrigerator in Japanese for the rest of my life.

P.S.: I really thought it meant garage ok! GG no RE

Bakemonogatari blows my mind

Bakemonogatari blows my mind.

And it just might blow yours too.

Protip

Not everybody spends all of their time for rational gain, need it be materialistic or in terms of social status. Altruism and intangible goals play a part here.

Think again before you tell yourself someone is wasting their time doing something that isn’t rationally useful, if you ever had the urge to.

There ain’t no rest for the wicked…

…money don’t grow on trees.

I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed…

…you ain’t get nothing in this world for free.

I know I can’t slow down, I can’t hold back, you know I wish I could.

You know there ain’t no rest for the wicked… until we close our eyes for good.

My lvl 19 Vanquisher

Just showing off my gear and character. My belt and torso armour not too bad, but my bow kind of sucks. Hope to find a gd one.

For those who still don’t know what is Torchlight, its the closest bloody thing to d3 you’ll ever get right now.

I’m Officially Quitting Competitive TF2

It was a long and very fun journey but as they say, all good things have to come to an end. Kind of reminds me of the time I decided to stop animeblogging.

My forray into competitive TF2 began late last semester when I decided that the competitive side of TF2 was worth exploring after seeing how different it was from the mindless spam fest you found in public servers. During that time, the clans I joined were not very active in scrimming, or playing clan matches, and thus I didn’t improve that much. I guess I only really improved my knowledge of the role of the Scout in competitive TF2 during the 3-month University holidays from May to July this year.

What followed was two WCG matches where I got to play against the very best of the best tf2 players on this side of Asia. Needless to say we didn’t perform well, but it was during that time that I learned tremendously about the game flow and realised that competitive TF2 offered so much that I wanted to give back more and more.

The best memories I made during my journey was not when I trained with the first team that took me to WCG (s7n) but the second, a rag tag bunch of random players put together by Dejomel. The enterprising team leader who got us together decided that our first training match was to be against one of the best local TF2 clans in Singapore which is none other than H2H. During that time just before the competition, everyone was trying to guess who the members of the last team that entered (us) were and thus, we decided to carry out the match without using our real in-game aliases.

The map chosen was cp_well and on the first roll out H2H’s demoman can_lah_2 (who is only the best demoman in Singapore) decided to take the offensive and sticky jumped onto a trailer before the gates opened, where I took him out with a half-charged body shot from my sniper rifle. That was the single, most memorable shot in my entire life. We didn’t win that round, but we won the next one. Which was the round that none of my team members would forget ’till the day they died. Considering we never met to play a match together before, the timing of the final push for the last point was so flawless that ’till today I wonder how we actually pulled it off. H2H eventually did pull themselves together, and beat us soundly with a final score of 4-1. We were screaming so hard in the lan shop that an old man stopped by to watch us play.

During the WCG match itself, we faced off against the best team in Malaysia (who eventually got 2nd overall) who called themselves anomaly, and got thrashed soundly. Even though we lost, we still had smiles on our faces even as we parted ways. And btw, my scout partner was female, and she could easily give a majority of the guys out there a run for their money with her scout and spy play (especially the spah).

Given all that competitive tf2 has given me, why have I finally decided to stop? Well, Daniel Tan if you’re reading this, it is really not because I find that tf2 is a stupid game, and really not because I think the community is childish. The tf2 community is easily much better than the DOTA or CS community will ever be. Reality is harsh and I have come to realise that I can’t juggle even a weekly match in my schedule with what the professors are throwing at me. Competitive TF2 is very difficult to play, and nay sayers should try to join a clan, lose a few scrims and discuss on how to improve before saying that it is easy. If you find it easy, I seriously salute you as you would be up there with the likes of Cooty, who is not only one of the most feared Demomen on the match servers, but also currently in the Dean’s List in NUS’ faculty of Project and Facilities Management.

To summarise, yes. I am not good enough. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to completely stop playing FPS games competitively. I have already represented my school at playing Blackshot, and I find it very much more manageable than TF2. I’m sorry if any of my team members are reading this, but thats really how it is. And mind you, I’ve played many competitive TF2 games so I know what I’m saying.

Also, this blogpost is really more for those who stumble across my steam profile page and wonder why I’m not ever appearing in scrims anymore. For the rest, I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time. But if you do reach here, I do hope that you’ll realise that when I say that I’m not giving up competitive fps gaming ’till I’m 30, I’m really not joking.

As for now, I have my end of semester exams to attend to. It was a fun and sometimes rocky ride, but it was one of the most enjoyable rides I have ever had. For any clanned TF2 player who scrims (not the pub clans, lol) reading this, I wish you the best of luck for your clan and hope that the competitive tf2 scene will still be alive for many more years to come.

Real-life Horror Movie

I find the innate ability of most people to accept the various contradictions life throws at them without much need for analytical discourse or resolution, obeying the generally accepted but vague credo which dictates “Life is unfair, deal with it.” without engaging in deeper thought or even attempting to question it, frighteningly eerie.

Every day of my life is an exciting and amusing one.