My take on the whole “is anime good/deep?” thing.

Now, I’m no arts/literature/etc major, so my approach and background to this will be hardly academic, and so everything I’m going to say is just based on my own experiences. Hopefully what I have to say will be meaningful to the discussion regardless. :)

As others have said, it is quite obvious that it’s impossible to make any general, overarching statements concerning anime (or any other artistic/storytelling/entertainment medium) because there exists substantial variance within it. All of us have at least a some anime genres, or at least some specific shows, that we make fun of, look down upon, refuse to watch, and so forth– again, just as with any other medium of expression. While the nature of each medium - and thus the criteria by which certain works can be called “good” rather than other ones - differ from one to the next, there are certain storytelling elements that are necessary for something to be considered thus: a “deep” (using the definition Owen quotes, “not superficial, profound”), convincing and sympathetic characters, discussion-worthy themes, and others.

If discussion whether or not an anime is “good” or “deep” is the same as in anything else, then what is the point of this entire discussion? As I mentioned just a little while ago, every medium has its own criteria within itself that are usually used to judge the works within, usually based on the specific strengths and weaknesses of the medium itself. So what are some of the things that set anime apart?

Anime is a visual medium. I, and surely others, often become irritated when hearing people complain about “bad” adaptations of printed works, whether they be novels, comics, manga, or visual novels, into a a visual medium such as a movie, anime, or television series. Often, there is a failure to understand that printed media (referring mostly to purely-text printed works, but largely comics/manga too) and visual media have different capabilities and work in different ways.

Animation quality, voice acting, soundtrack, pacing, and other aspects of the presentation are important in anime storytelling, not just the script. Printed works simultaneously have more and less work to do than visual ones when it comes to painting a picture in the reader’s mind; while they don’t have to actually draw pictures, make noises, or a number of other physical tasks, they have to choose words and write descriptions carefully so that the reader can successfully create the mental image desired by the author in his/her own imagination. In visual media such as anime, however, these things must be actually presented to the viewer, so ensuring that these things are well-done is significant. Yes, the script is going to be the centerpiece and is (debatably) the most important thing to get right. However, no matter how good your script is, many viewers will be turned off if the presentation is in one or more ways sub-par. There are certain thresholds of quality in presentation aspects - and, perhaps above all, raw entertainment value - that must be met for it to be accepted as “good,” “quality,” “classic,” or whatever (taking into account the standards and capabilities of the time when the work was published, of course). An anime might have the best script in the universe, but it probably won’t gain much acceptance as a good anime if the animation is terrible and everyone wants to watch it with the volume muted.

I mentioned “pacing” above, and it deserves a little special attention because, while it’s an issue in both printed and visual works, it works a little differently in each case. In general, “bad pacing” is synonymous with either “so much stuff happened so quickly that I have no goddamn clue what just happened” or “there are lots of parts with nothing relevant happening that I just really want to skip.” Since printed works can generally be absorbed at whatever rate the reader wants, both issues are easily remedied by the reader: the reader may reread or read more meticulously something that was a little too hectic in order to make better sense of it, and may also skip long and boring paragraphs/pages/chapters that don’t add much to the big picture. A large part of this is because printed works are often published in wholes rather than a bit at a time.

When an anime or TV series is like this, the viewer has much less flexibility in coping. You can more or less skip the long boring parts of the Harry Potter novels, but that’s not an option when watching a series on a week-to-week basis. For example, I suspect that a lot of the negative feelings towards My-Otome came from that really boring two or three months of episodes in the middle in which not much relevant stuff happened; however, the show seems to be more highly-regarded among those I know who marathoned it, likely because they only had to be bored for two or three hours rather than months. Of course, in both cases, optimal pacing would be not having anything that goes by too quickly or too slowly, but more often than not that isn’t the case, and for the reasons just stated, it’s more of an issue for weekly visual works than printed ones. (side note: I can’t stand reading manga as it’s released, because so little new content is provided in each chapter that I begin to lose interest.)

Within the subcategory of visual works, anime has certain exclusive advantages and disadvantages. (I realize that parts of this are going to be pretty obvious, so bear with me.) Anime can often more easily, cost-efficiently, and convincingly pull off things like henshin transformations, chibi transformations, mecha, EPIC battles, and numerous other things that live-action TV shows and movies are only recently beginning to be able to pull off.

It also to a large extent suffers less from what I call the “performer problem” in live-action works (not sure if there is some other term you film buffs have for this) in which the viewer too easily associates an actor with, well, the actor, rather than the character the actor is attempting to portray; avoiding this can be difficult even for the more talented actors. Anime generally only has this problem in the form of typecast voice actors/actresses, and it’s usually less of a problem since the person’s face is not seen.

On the other hand, for the very same reason, characters in anime can be more difficult to associate with real people and be acceptably convincing because of the larger visual disparity between anime art and reality (perhaps explaining the ‘drawn = for children’ perception still common in the West). The presentation of an anime character thus needs to meet a higher standard of writing and overall presentation in order to receive the same level of convincingness and viewer sympathy/identification as a live-action work.

So, back to “deep.” What does anything I said have to do with anime being “deep,” you ask? Ummm… LOOK! A PIE CHART

Anyway, maybe I’ll add to this in the near future. Who knows.

Filed by jroxas at August 3rd, 2007 under Anime